Life Insurance Architecture for Complex Wealth

Jeffrey P Reid

Founder & CEO

For more than 30 years, Jeffrey Reid has built his career at the center of the nation's most sophisticated life insurance planning — placing more than $100 billion of death benefit over a career that includes co-founding and leading The Producers Group, a national life insurance brokerage firm, as Managing Partner.

Jeff founded LifeRisk Architects to work directly with the ultra-high-net-worth client — alongside, not in place of, the wealth advisor, estate attorney, CPA, and family office already serving the family — across domestic and cross-border wealth planning.

His team specializes in estate and income tax mitigation, wealth transfer, multi-generational and charitable planning, Private Placement Life Insurance (PPLI) planning, Private Placement Variable Annuities (PPVA) planning, and Premium Financing, along with institutional underwriting and the design of diversified, multi-carrier portfolios for the largest and most complex cases.

Jeff earned his B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California. He lives with his wife, Yvonne, and their son, North — a third-generation Trojan who also works at LifeRisk Architects — in Del Mar, California.

Nick Costello

Managing Partner, Underwriting & Portfolio Strategy

For more than two decades, Nick and Jeffrey Reid, Founder of LifeRisk Architects, have worked side by side, collaborating and executing advanced estate planning, tax mitigation, and legacy planning strategies.

“Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.”— Warren Buffett

For more than twenty years, Nick Costello has operated at the point where large, complex insurance risk gets solved — not processed. He began his career at The Producers Group, a national life insurance brokerage firm, in 2004, rising to Senior Case Manager. He is widely respected throughout the industry for his work on large-scale capacity cases and impaired-risk underwriting involving challenging medical profiles, working intensely to find the medical and financial evidence that gives an underwriter genuine grounds to reconsider a risk classification — and structuring lines of coverage that achieve the best possible pricing and terms the case will bear.

Nick's specialty is architecture at scale. He has assembled portfolios of $300–500 million in coverage for individual high-net-worth clients, coordinating as many as twenty-five separate policies across multiple carriers to meet a single client's total need — engaging the reinsurance marketplace, rather than any one underwriting opinion, to reach capacity no single company could retain alone. It is a discipline that goes well past medical review: financial underwriting, business valuation, liquidity and net worth analysis, and insurable interest all factor into how a case of this size is built, priced, and placed. Few practitioners understand the reinsurance nuances and carrier appetites well enough to piece together lines of this magnitude — Nick is one of them.

He brings the same command to product selection — matching the competitive strengths of individual life insurance products, carrier by carrier, to the specific design and planning objective at hand — and to premium financing strategy, where structure and underwriting decisions carry equal weight.

For more than two decades, Nick and Jeffrey Reid, Founder of LifeRisk Architects, have worked side by side, collaborating and executing advanced estate planning, tax mitigation, and legacy planning strategies for some of the industry's most complex client situations. Nick advocates relentlessly for every client and advisor relationship, always in service of the best possible outcome. Nick holds a Bachelor of Arts from San Diego State University. He lives with his wife, Joanna, in Fallbrook, California.

Ted N. Griffin

Partner, Market Growth & Relationships

For decades, Ted Griffin has built enduring, trusted relationships with the banking, wealth management, and legal institutions that serve the nation's most affluent families — including a partnership of more than two decades with Jeffrey Reid, Founder of LifeRisk Architects, implementing estate and tax planning strategies for affluent families and businesses.

His practice centers on four planning disciplines — estate tax mitigation, income tax mitigation, risk management mitigation, and charitable acceleration — each built to preserve generational wealth and strengthen the assets under management his institutional partners hold on behalf of their clients.

Ted works directly with established banking and investment wealth management firms, as well as well-known estate and tax planning law firms, to deploy sophisticated asset preservation strategies that enhance client portfolios and deepen private client retention.

He is a former member of the NC State Banking Commission. He has been a speaker at various insurance and banking association conferences and has spoken at the Southern Federal Tax Institute.

His practice is built on relationships earned rather than credentials advertised — a reputation among the institutions he serves rather than a list of affiliations.

Ted holds a bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MBA from Wake Forest University's Babcock School of Management.