Our Story
From boots on the ground to building generational wealth.
VeraLife wasn't built in a boardroom. It was built at a kitchen table in Albany, working out the actual numbers for a wife and kids — and realizing that most families never get handed the same math.
Founder
Kerlan Lovell
U.S. Army veteran. Husband. Father. Agency principal.
Meet the founder
Meet Kerlan Lovell.
Kerlan spent ten years in the U.S. Army. The Army doesn't teach you insurance. What it teaches you is that someone is always counting on you to do your job — and that the people depending on you don't care about your excuses when something goes wrong. You either prepared, or you didn't. That mindset never left him.
When he transitioned out and started paying attention to how families in his own community were being handled by the financial industry, the picture got clear fast. Black and Brown households were being sold expensive whole life policies on toddlers while the breadwinner walked around with $25,000 in coverage from work — or nothing at all. Agents were quoting $1M permanent policies to people who needed a 20-year term and a Roth IRA. The information asymmetry wasn't an accident. It was the business model.
The decision to start VeraLife came out of a personal moment, not a business plan. Kerlan sat down to size coverage for his own household — wife, kids, mortgage, the math of what would actually have to happen if he didn't come home one day. He ran the numbers honestly. Then he realized that in every meeting he'd ever sat in as a client, nobody had ever shown him that math. They'd shown him a product.
He built VeraLife to be the agency he wished his own family had walked into twenty years ago. Independent, so the recommendation isn't locked to one carrier's shelf. Education-first, because a client who understands the tradeoffs makes better decisions and stays longer. Family-focused, because the policyholder is never really one person — it's a household, and the household is what we're actually protecting.
Today he's a licensed agent and the principal of a growing independent agency headquartered in Albany. He's active in the Capital Region — showing up for veteran groups, financial-literacy sessions, youth sports, the small civic stuff that builds a community over time. The long game is bigger than his family. It's every family that walks through the door leaving with a real plan and one less thing to worry about.
The why
Why generational wealth?
The wealth gap in this country isn't mostly an income gap. It's a transfer gap. Wealthy families move money down the generations on purpose, with tools that have been around for a hundred years. Most families never get introduced to those tools, or they get introduced to the wrong version at the wrong price.
Black and Brown households have been simultaneously underinsured and oversold — pitched whole life policies on children while the actual breadwinner walks around without enough term coverage to pay off the mortgage. That's not a coincidence. It's what happens when an industry sells products instead of outcomes.
Life insurance, sized correctly, is the cheapest tool a family has to start a wealth transfer. A healthy 35-year-old can lock in $750,000 of 20-year term for roughly the price of a streaming bundle. That's a down payment on a house, paid for college, or a debt-free start for the next generation — protected for two decades on autopilot. The information has always been there. Most families just never had someone hand it to them.
This isn't charity. It's correction. We're not handing anything out — we're handing the same math to everybody.
What we stand on
Our values.
Four commitments that are easy to put on a website and hard to actually run a business by. We try to do both.
Service over sales
We close because we educated, not because we pressured. If the math doesn't work for your household, we'll tell you — even when it costs us the policy.
Family-first
Every recommendation passes the "would I sell this to my own wife?" test. If the answer is no, it doesn't leave the office.
Community accountability
We live here. We see our clients in the grocery store, at the barbershop, on the sidelines at youth football. We plan to be here in thirty years.
Education over advice
We hand over the math, the tradeoffs, and the real options. You decide what fits your family — not us.
Who we serve
Where we work and who we work for.
VeraLife is headquartered in Albany, New York with a Capital Region focus and growing license footprint across multiple states. We're an independent agency, which means we shop A-rated carriers on your behalf instead of pushing whatever one company has on the shelf.
Most of our work clusters around four kinds of households — the people we spend the most time helping and the ones we know best.
- Families with young kids
- Veterans and military households
- Small business owners
- Pre-retirees and legacy planners
Headquarters
1 Northwestern Blvd, Albany, NY 12211
Capital Region of New York
Agency NPN
21426840
Structure
Independent
Every quote includes a written walkthrough of the math. You leave with the numbers, not just a price.
On the record
A founder's promise.
Every family that walks through our door gets the same math, the same options, and the same honesty I'd give my own. If we ever stop operating that way, we don't deserve to be in business.
Kerlan Lovell, Founder
In the community
Find us in the room.
We show up where the conversations actually happen — financial-literacy workshops, veteran resource events, small-business meetups, and youth-focused programs across the Capital Region. If you're organizing something and you want a straight-talking agent in the room, ask.
Reach Kerlan and the team.
- Workshops & speaking — financial-literacy sessions for community groups, churches, and employers.
- Veteran outreach — SGLI/VGLI transitions, MOS-aware underwriting, survivor benefit planning.
- One-on-one consults — bring your numbers, leave with a plan. No pressure, no hard close.
Ready to start?
Let's plan together.
Bring what you have — even if that's just a salary number and a couple of questions. We'll do the rest of the math with you.
VeraLife Insurance Group is a licensed independent insurance agency. We are not connected with or endorsed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs or any government entity. Educational only — not financial advice.