Bob Graham, Executive Editor

A financial service firm has found a big, wide-open, no-one-seems-to-notice market for its long-term care insurance products. That new market for New Jersey-based Prudential Financial is the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender community, according to an article at IFAwebnews.com.

Oh, sure Prudential runs the risk of either torquing its current client base when they get wind of the new marketing push for LTC products or enraging the GLBT community if it has any missteps along the way. “Marketplace,” the public radio program, did a news report July 7 about how car companies are treading lightly for fear of one of those possible outcomes. One error and either the general public or the GLBT community is up in arms, and if you really strike out, both are mad.

So why bother trying to sell to the GLBT community? Simple economics. There’s probably no bigger untapped market for insurance products, heck, most products, than the GLBT crowd. The GLBT community, according to Gay.com and several other Web sites, had an estimated annual value of $515 billion in 2006. It is expected to reach more than $800 billion in the next three years, according to Marketplace. With an estimated 26 million members, it accounts for about 10% of the estimated U.S. population of about 260 million.

More importantly, about 21% of gay and lesbian households have income greater than $100,000 per year. These households are twice as likely as the general U.S. population to have more than $60,000 in household income and twice as likely to have more than $250,000 in household income. Members of the GLBT also are twice as likely to have graduated from college, Gay.com said.

In other words, people in the GLBT community are also in the important community of HNWIs  (high net worth individuals), and that is what Prudential – and no doubt others in the insurance industry in the coming months or years – is hoping to cash in on with this new outreach.