It is generally understood that these corporations combine the
functions of the savings bank and life insurance company, and it is
only by separating the two in our minds as far as possible that we can
obtain a clear conception of the laws that should govern the
apportionment of the expenses among the great variety of policies.
While it is a comparatively simple matter to state the amount of
either the insurance or savings bank element in a single policy, it is
by no means easy, as things go, to classify the company's actual
expenses on this basis.
Fortunately, we can pretty accurately determine what these amounts
should be in any particular case.
In the first place, there are institutions in our midst devoted solely
to receiving and conserving small sums of money; doing, in fact,
exactly what our insurance companies are undertaking to do with the
reserve and contributions thereto. These savings banks are required by
law to make returns to the State commissioner, from whose official
report we can get a very good idea of the expense attendant on doing
this business.
Confining ourselves to the city banks, where the conditions more
nearly resemble those of the insurance companies, we find in
thirty-eight combined institutions for saving in the State of
Massachusetts a deposit in 1888 of $192,174,566, taken care of at an
aggregate cost of $455,387, or about 24-100 of one per cent.
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