Life Insurance Architecture for Complex Wealth

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

Jeff founded LifeRisk Architects in 2020 on a simple conviction: life insurance, expertly designed, is a planning asset, not a product. The firm works directly with ultra-high-net-worth families, in coordination with the wealth advisor, estate attorney, CPA, and family office already serving them, across domestic and cross-border wealth planning. The firm also works within major U.S. banks and financial institutions as a specialist, supporting their advisors with planning, design, and underwriting for their most complex clients. Drawing on that experience, it developed FamilyOne™, an integrated framework for income tax mitigation, estate tax mitigation, risk management, and charitable acceleration.

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

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 in 2004, rising to Senior Case Manager, and is widely respected for his work on large-scale cases and impaired-risk underwriting involving challenging medical profiles.

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 and engaging the reinsurance marketplace to reach capacity no single company could retain alone. Few practitioners understand the reinsurance nuances and carrier appetites well enough to piece together lines of this magnitude. Nick is one of them.

For more than two decades, Nick has worked side by side with Jeffrey Reid on advanced estate planning, tax mitigation, and legacy planning for some of the industry's most complex client situations. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from San Diego State University and lives in Fallbrook, California, with his wife, Joanna.

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. A former member of the NC State Banking Commission, he has spoken at insurance and banking association conferences and at the Southern Federal Tax Institute.

In a partnership with Jeffrey Reid spanning more than two decades, Ted has implemented estate tax mitigation, income tax mitigation, risk management, and charitable acceleration strategies for affluent families and businesses. He works directly with established banking and wealth management firms, and with well-known estate and tax planning law firms, to deploy asset preservation strategies that strengthen client portfolios and deepen private client retention.

His practice is built on relationships earned rather than credentials advertised. 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.