American Income Life is a controversial company that has been in existence for a long period of time. Are they as good as you think? Do they do what they claim to do? Or are they as bad as some people say? In this review, we’ll find out more about American Income Life and tell you all that you need to know about it.
Summary of American Income Life
Here is a summary that tells you a few things about American Income Life
Product Name: American Income Life
Official Website: https://www.ailife.com
Founders: Harold Goodman and Bernard Rapoport
Type: Insurance
Cost to Join: Free
Best For: People who can handle door-to-door sales & cold-calling
Recommended? No
Overall Rating: 3 out of 10
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American Income Life is one of those insurance companies that could get attention of many people with its insurance plans in a short time. They also done a good job in online marketing and you have probably seen one of their ads in your mailbox.
Since some of my audiences requested me to tell my opinion about this company, I decided to review it and share it here so hope my answer will be helpful for you too.
Like many other insurance company, American Income Life works based on MLM (aka Multi-Level Marketing) business model but as you asked, the main questions are:
- Is american income life a scam?
- Can you really make money with that?
- Is it a pyramid scheme?
- Is it a company which you can totally trust?
Let’s find out!
To answer above questions (which are probably your questions too) I’ve done a deep research about this company to find all significant aspects and facts and I’m going to share it with you here. So please be some patience and read answer completely because there is not a Yes/No answer for your question in my opinion.
That’s good to see that you want to know if American Income Life is a scam because this is the best question you should ask before making any decision about joining a making money opportunity.
I make you sure that you’ll find the right answer for your question if you read my review completely but before that let me give you a short background of American Income Life insurance company.
What is American Income Life All About?
Selling insurance policies is the main thing this company is doing but this is not the only way they use to make profit. Encouraging people to recruit new members into program and making money from this is another method American Income Life uses to make more sales. This makes a circle from people who are currently a member of program and who want to join it soon.
What about Their Multi-Level Marketing Model?
The fact is that agents play an important role in insurance business so it’s clear that insurance companies should always support their agents by ways for their success and in this situation, nothing acts better than a Multi-Level Marketing business model.
You can make profit by recruiting new people into program and this is a win-win game for both insurance company and agents. The same as anything else in business world, there are some tricks has been used by agents sometimes to recruit more people into a program/company.
For example while there is not any limit or interview if you want to join American Income Life but I’ve seen some recruiters make fake interview process and request people to pass it to join the company. Unfortunately these agents use fake identity as well so that’s not easy for American Income Life or other insurance companies to catch them.
But why those agents make fake interview process? Answer is simple, when people see there’s such an interview to joining a company, they believe that there’s something valuable behind it and this simply creates a demand for that company. Who makes profit from this? Yes, agents and company!
Background- What is American Income Life?
American Income Life is a network marketing company that makes use of insurance products as a front for operation. It was founded by Harold Goodman and Bernard Rapoport,who is the nephew of Harold Goodman.
It was founded in 1951, and they have their headquarters in Texas. When you join the company to sell financial products, what you actually sell are products for a subsidiary company called National Income Life Insurance Company.
National Income Life Insurance Company is a company that is licensed to sell financial products in New York. So, you get compensated by American Income Life for selling products for its subsidiary company called National Income Life Insurance Company.
Here’s What You Need to Understand about the American Income Life’s “Job Opportunity”…
American Income Life tells you that they are giving you a job opportunity and offering you a chance to have a good career. But this isn’t the case. All they are doing is offering you a chance to become a sales agent for the company. They tell you to work on a strict commission basis. Here is their recruitment process.
First, you’ll be asked to send your contact details before you go for an interview with American Income Life. You will be allowed to ask questions about the job during the interview session. But they will focus on telling you the benefits of the job instead of telling you about the job itself.

American Income Life – Is It a Job or Not?
They try to hoodwink you in by telling you various things you stand to gain from their program. They tell you about how flexible the program is and the lucrative compensation packages on offer. A real job interview will tell you about what the job demands of you and you will be asked about how capable of working on the job. But that is not what you will hear during this interview.
What they are offering you is a job opportunity and not a business opportunity.
Is it really a Business Opportunity where you will be a Business Owner?
They may tell you that you are starting your own business. They play on words and tell you things on the surface level. They won’t tell you that there are restrictions and it is an agency relationship.
How many business owners need permission from others to do things with their business? How many business owners are limited by others?
These are the things that you need to know if you want to join American Income Life.
4 Things (Facts) You Need to Know Before Joining American Income Life
1- You will pay a fee to join
American Income Life comes with a fee like several other business opportunities. You will be charged a fee of $490. Why will you be charged a fee if they were interviewing you like it was a job opportunity? You’re supposed to be paid and not you paying a fee.
So, you need to invest some money of your own before you can have a go at this ‘business opportunity.’ This is the reason why a lot of people see this as a scam.
- A shift from the employee mindset to an entrepreneur mindset
If you want to join this program and succeed, you must have the mentality of an entrepreneur and not an employee. So, you must understand that you won’t make money right from the onset. In a business, you need to build and grow your business from the ground up, and you may not even make any profit in the process. You must also put in a lot of effort to succeed.
- There are prerequisites before you can start selling for American Income Life
One major thing I don’t like is that they never tell you a lot of things from the onset. They won’t tell you that the United States financial industry is strictly regulated, and you must have a license if you want to sell any financial product. You must pay an administrative fee for examination and course materials before you can acquire a license.
Not everyone passes the exam, and you need to pay money every time you retake the exam. After you acquire the license, you will see that the knowledge that you acquire isn’t necessary to sell the product. You need some info to sell the products, but selling the products is more about how good you’re at selling and how good you are at relating with others.
2- Compulsory training sessions
You will be assigned a manager when you join. This manager may be the person that recruited you to the company or a total stranger. They’re to mentor you and monitor you. Each mentor is different from another, and there is little or no regulation. How your mentor deals with you is crucial to how you succeed at the company.
And you will need to attend compulsory training sessions.This may sound good, but this is different from the total freedom they told you at the beginning. The training sessions are designed to help you become better at selling. They’ll teach you how to sell financial products and how to recruit more people to the program.
3- Are you a door-to-door salesman/woman?
Finally it must be said that this is all about sales. Are you comfortable with doing door-to-door sales or cold calling for a long time? If not, you should stay away from this job. It seems simple but don’t forget you’re going to sell insurance and 80% of people will hang up your call or close the door to you.
If you can’t accept it,don’t start it. You do not have to enter into a field which you are not comfortable with, especially when there are better ways like affiliate marketing (see my recommendation at bottom line) which will bring you financial freedom.
4- Conventions
Conventions is something American Income Life hides from customers and I really don’t know why. This is the part which will be organized on a regular basis and you should join too. It may looks good at the beginning because you may thing that you’ll improved your skills during these meetings but the problem is trip’s cost is not covered by company which means you have to pay by yourself.
Although there are loans which you can take advantage of sometimes but keep in mind that it’s something you should always pay back one day.
If you think, it’s a risk-free opportunity which you can give it a try and leave it anytime you like, you’re wrong! It’s like a joke but the truth is that it can destroy your personal life if you don’t know what you’re doing. Believe me! You hear this from a person who worked with different insurance companies and the fact is that I really don’t want to have that unpleasant experience again.
What Would be Your Potential Income?
Ok, let’s say you’re still want to try it and want to know how much you can make from American Income Life. Let’s see how you’ll get paid first then go for potential income.
According to what they’ve written on their website, every member can earn up to 50% commission for making successful sales for policies. It’s like a good commission right? But wait… what if I tell you won’t get that 50% commission completely? Yes, they have a rule which clearly says that 35% of your commission will be held for 6 months always. I couldn’t find why they’redoing this but it seems that some insurance policies are long-term so they want to make sure that their customers stay with them for a long time.
Now imagine you can sell an insurance policy in $500 after hard work so you should receive $250 commission right? But you’ll only receive $162 and that $88 remain commission will be held in your account for six months.

Complaints of Customers
It seems that American Income Life could not exceed expectations of its customers because with a quick research, you’ll see many complaints from customers who are not happy with support and service quality of this company after purchasing policies.
Of course AIL (American Income Life) is not the only company which made customers angry with poor support and it must be said that this is a common issue for many other insurance companies. Researches shows that this problem comes from agents because when customers buy policies, agents receive commission for a limited time (not life time) and that’s why service quality and support drops when agents don’t receive commission anymore.
But the worst part is when customers have to face with a new agent. This happens when insurance company stops working with an agent and you can guess there won’t be any incentive for agent to continue provide service for clients after that.

Verdict – Is American Income Life a Scam?
After all information I gave, you can be sure that American Income Life is completely a legit insurance company, it’s not even considered as a pyramid scheme or something like that.
But as always, not all legitimate earning online opportunities is worth to try. For some big negative points like low potential income, hard work involved and difficult process of recruitment, I’m not going to recommend you it.
Unfortunately most people see just positive points about opportunities like this and that’s why I tried to give you a clear overview of what’s going on inside an insurance company with telling you about those six facts. And if I want to add one more fact, I should tell that agents change a lot during a short period of time and this not good at all for a well-known insurance company.
Finally, if you don’t have any problem with accepting risk involved in this type of work as well as door-to-door or cold calling which are the main tasks of this business then you can go ahead and start your journey with American Income Life.
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