The June 2001 disk update will be processed Monday, May 28th and Tuesday, May 29th. Disks will be shipped Wednesday, May 30th. You should have the June Update in your office Friday, June 1st. The Internet monthly update will be posted some time on Wednesday, May 30th to our three monthly update websites.
Unless you have made arrangements to purchase your diskettes, please return your "April disks" ONLY AFTER you have successfully installed the May 2001 Update. May disks are your backup in case you should have problems installing the April edition.
For those not wanting to return disks there are two ways to eliminate the problem.
1. Internet Monthly Updates
Switch over to obtaining monthly updates by Internet. Not only will you eliminate the expense and hassle of returning disks, you will save $50 per year in subscription fees.
Before you switch to updates by Internet we require that you complete a special addendum to the license agreement called the "Internet Update Endorsement". Once you have returned that to us we will send you the "Internet Master Disk". You will need that to be able to process the "MONTHLY.CMP" file that you will be downloading each month.
If you want to switch over to Internet monthly updates, please call our office at (800) 567-8376. Our staff will send you the Internet Update Endorsement. Please read it, particularly the part which has you agreeing that you have successfully downloaded and processed our "mid- month updates". If you haven't done that before, you can call the office and we'll be happy to talk you through the procedure.
2. Disk Purchase Program
The other way to avoid returning the disks and the disk box each month is to pre-purchase them for $21 per year ($1.75 per month). If you do you can keep them for future reference, throw them away or return them for a credit (once each year) when you are invoiced for the next year. The $21 costs you less than mailing back disks each month.
Please be advised that on January 1, 2002 Compulife will increase prices for software which is updated monthly by disk. As longtime subscribers know, we have been lowering our prices for the past 5 years. During that time shipping costs have been increasing.
Now that our monthly updates though the Internet are working quite well, we prefer that our subscribers use that method of obtaining updates. Once again, prices for Internet subscriptions are not changing and we do not expect them to change in the near future. The new prices will be as follows:
| Agency Use | Updates by Disk | Updates by Internet |
| One Year Subscription | $379 ($349 prior to 2002) | $299 |
| Two Year Subscription | $659 ($599 prior to 2002) | $499 |
| Personal Use | Updates by Disk | Updates by Internet |
| One Year Subscription | $279 ($249 prior to 2002) | $199 |
| Two Year Subscription | $459 ($399 prior to 2002) | $299 |
| Compulife Lite ** | Updates by Disk | Updates by Internet |
| One Year Subscription | $139 (was $99) | $99 |
** NOTE re: Lite subscriptions
Sometime this summer Lite monthly updates will be made available through the Internet. Once Compulife makes Lite updates available through the Internet, the price for Lite updates by disk will increase to the above mentioned $139 per year. The $40 additional fee, versus the $90 additional fee for the regular and personal use system, reflects the fact that Lite software is shipped by regular mail as opposed to Priority Post.
Once Compulife's Lite subscriptions are available through the Internet, the above prices for Lite will take immediate affect. Those with a current Lite subscription will continue to receive disks at the old prices. There will be no change in service or price until the Lite subscription renews.
For agency and personal use subscribers who want to continue to receive updates by disk there will be a special standing offer until December 15, 2001. You can "top up" existing subscriptions at the old price. If you act before December 15, 2001, you can add another one or two years to your subscription at the old prices.
Having said that, we suggest you act now, before the deadline as it is our experience that most people forget there is a deadline and then want Compulife to extend it. In this case, that will not be done.
Here is an example of the top-up opportunity:
If your personal use subscription is paid to May 31, 2002, and you act now you can add one more year for $249 or two more years for $399. If you didn't act by December 15th then you will receive your normal invoice in April 2002 for the new price of $279. You could elect at that time to pay a total of two years for $459.
If you receive that new invoice, at the higher price, don't forget that you can still elect at that time to switch over to Internet monthly updates and save $80 per year. The price for a personal use Internet subscription remains only $199.
Subscribers who are part way through a disk update subscription can switch to Internet and have their existing subscription extended based upon the time left and the price difference. Call Compulife at (800) 798-3488 for more specific information about your account.
Bulk buyers of Compulife Lite will still be able to buy Lite at $89 per year. Those will be shipped by disk to the bulk buyer. There are three additional benefits that bulk buyers might wish to consider:
1. Customized Lites For Internet - You Can Add Windows software
Those buying Lite for their brokers, and planning to deliver it to their brokers by Internet have Compulife's permission to add the Windows software at NO ADDITIONAL charge.
To accomplish this you take the GOWIN.EXE file from your main \COMPLIFE folder, add it to the Lite folder that contains your brokers' copy of lite, then use "WINZIP" or another popular compression program to compress the whole package for shipment to those brokers sub-licensed to use the Compulife Lite system.
2. Compulife's Internet Engine includes 20 Lites
Those subscribers who purchase Compulife's Internet comparison engine are offered with 20 copies of Compulife Lite at no additional charge. The initial price of the engine is $1,995 plus $1,495 per year. Compare that to $89 times 20, which is $1,780, and there is a second way to look at this attractive deal. If you purchase 20 Lites from Compulife, you might as well buy the Internet engine because it will save you money after the first year.
3. Customized web comparison pages for your brokers - NO CHARGE
If you have purchased the Compulife Internet engine, and your broker is purchasing a copy of Compulife, either directly or through you, you can provide you broker with access to the Compulife internet engine for NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE. What this means is that your broker can have a customized web page for his clients and prospects, which permits him to assert his own identity and provide his own personalized on-line comparison service.
Compulife has recently enhanced the Internet comparison engine to permit multiple USERS to be maintained on a single web site. This means that each Internet user relies upon the same rate data files that you update yourself. In other words, when you update your copy of the Internet program, you are updating all your brokers version at the very same time. Even so, each of your own brokers will have their own customized lists of companies and products, while all sharing the same common rate tables. Maximum flexibility with minimum service work required.
Every month we get at least one call (that's an understatement) from a subscriber who says they went to our www.term4sale.com website and the rates at the website were different than those in their Compulife program. 95% of the time it's because we have updated the www.term4sale.com with the latest rate changes and the subscriber has not updated using our mid-month update service found at www.compulife.com.
April was a very heavy month for product changes and a number of subscribers called to complain that we did not have new Banner or First-Penn Life rates. The fact was they were already available at our mid-month website. The number of calls confirms that too few of our subscribers are aware of this valuable service which is provided at no charge.
We therefore again underline the importance of using the mid-month update service. Companies are changing rates faster and faster all the time and so monthly updates are increasingly becoming stale shortly after they are issued.
Regardless of how you are obtaining your monthly updates, you need to carefully monitor our mid-month update service at www.compulife.com. This is a free service.
We recommend that you check in at least once a week to see if there have been important changes. Each change made to the database during the month is itemized, documented and dated in the Mid-month update news.
Compulife has made great progress in the U.S. converting our U.S. data files to record the company category titles for each life company that uses unique terminology to describe their categories. A number of the most popular U.S. companies have been completed but there is much left to do.
April was a heavy month for rate changes in both the U.S. and Canada and so we did not complete converting the entire U.S. database as hoped. We will continue that work during May and we are hoping for a June 1st completion. Once that work is complete, we will turn our attention to converting the Canadian data files. The U.S. conversion project will test most of the software changes that we are making and so when this is introduced in Canada there should be no problems.
Currently Compulife is working on the Windows version of the software to allow it to display the new category descriptions. The DOS version does and has done in the U.S. since the April update.
Our second programmer is busy working on the joint life module for the Windows program. It is our hope to introduce that to our customers in June of July.
The Windows version permitting company category description to be displayed was completed just before the U.S. monthly update and we did not have adequate time to fully test it. The reason for the delay versus our DOS program was that our programmers found it easier to combine the company category changes together with the work being done on the new combined category feature. We expect the combined category feature to be introduced into the Windows software before the DOS software.
Once again, one of our programmers is working on this area of the software while the other is working on joint life.
To review, Compulife's existing database, our 3rd major revision, was designed and implemented in the early 1990's. At that time we did not envision the explosion of rate categories that has followed. Our existing database permits 4 categories per product, which are:
Because of more recent changes any of these categories can be flagged as Plus but that still means that a company with a Preferred Plus and Preferred category, needs two separate product entries. That is why you currently find, when you press F2 and display a list of company's products, there may be two or even three different listings for the same product. That is so we can include all the extra categories. It is also why we have added the category descriptions to some of those category titles to ensure that you can tell which product entries are which.
The upcoming change that we are working on will greatly simplify the whole business. Instead of our system displaying all of those different product entries for the same product, we will only display one. The system will determine that the additional product entries are part of the same product group or "product family". The additional listing will be hidden except to the program.
When you enter your client information and press F2 to display the product, the system will automatically search for the lowest rate that meets your client entry information for that product family. If the client has been entered as Preferred Plus Non-Smoker, then the very best Preferred Plus non-smoker will be displayed.
If the company has more than one Preferred Plus category, the only way to display the second, more expensive Preferred Plus product will be to press the letter R which is the option for Rate Category.
In the previous versions of the DOS program the "R" key switched between preferred and regular rates. The function has been expanded to display a list of all available categories in that product entry, and that list now displays the company category description.
Further, in the newest Windows program we have also added a "Rate Category" button in the header. We suspect that most subscribers didn't even know a rate category option existed (it's listed in the "Options" selection at the top). The new button makes it a little harder to miss.
Once again, the GOWIN.EXE Windows program provided with the May monthly update does not have these features. You can obtain those features by going to our www.compulife.com website, and use the mid-month update service.
For those who update by Internet, Compulife has gone to great lengths to provide you with redundancy in our websites. Our main website is:
However, we keep another completely separate website, on a completely different server, in a completely different country, at:
Whatever we update to compulife.com, we also update to compulife.cc. If one website goes down, for whatever reason, the other is ready to serve you. That includes both monthly and mid-month updates.
For those doing monthly updates by Internet, we have a third website standing at ready with the monthly updates ready. If you cannot obtain your monthly update from either compulife.com or compulife.cc, call our office at (800) 567-8376 and we'll tell you where the third site is.
No one, I mean NO ONE, called Compulife expressing interest in a Historical Data CD Rom. Therefore, that will not be made available. Those wanting historical copies of Compulife will have to continue to pay $10 per set for as many as they need.