Tom Kalmbach
Chief Financial Officer at Globe Life
Thanks Frank. First, I want to spend a few minutes discussing our share repurchase program, available liquidity and capital position. The parent began the year with liquid assets of $91 million, and ended the second quarter with liquid assets of approximately $74 million. In the second quarter, the company repurchased approximately 780,000 shares of Globe Life, Inc. common stock for a total cost of $84 million. The average share price for these repurchases was $107.26, and to date in the third quarter, we purchased 133,000 shares for a total cost of $50 million at an average share price of $111.01 resulting in repurchases year-to-date of 2.1 million shares for a total cost of #234 million at an average share price of $111.88.
In addition to the liquid assets held by the parent, the parent company generated excess cash flows during the second-quarter, and will continue to do so through the second half of 2023. Parent company's excess cash-flow, as we define it, primarily results from dividends received by the parent from its subsidiaries, less the interest paid on debt. We anticipate the parent company's excess cash-flow for the full-year will be approximately $420 million to $440 million, and will be available to return to its shareholders in the form of dividends through share repurchases.
As noted in previous calls, this amount is higher than 2022. As previously noted, we had approximately $74 million of liquid assets at the end of the quarter, as compared to the $50 million to $60 million of liquid assets we have historically targeted. In addition to the $74 million of liquid assets, we expect to generate $140 million to $160 million of excess cash flows for the second-half of 2023, providing us with approximately $200 million to $220 million of assets available to the parent for the remainder of 2023, and this is after taking into consideration the approximately $15 million of share repurchases to date in the third quarter. We anticipate distributing approximately $40 million to $45 million to our shareholders in the form of dividend payments for the remainder of 2023.
As noted in previous calls, we will use our cash as efficiently as possible. We still believe that share repurchases provide the best return or yield to our shareholders over other available alternatives. Thus, we anticipate share repurchases will continue to be the primary use of parent's excess cash flows after the payment of shareholder dividends. It should be noted that cash received by the parent company from our insurance operations is after our subsidiaries have made substantial investments during the year to generate new sales, expand and modernize our information technology and other operational capabilities as well as to acquire new, long-duration assets to fund future cash needs.
The remaining amount is sufficient to support the targeted capital levels within our insurance operations and maintain the share repurchase program in 2023. In our earnings guidance, we anticipate between $370 million and $390 million of share repurchases will occur during the year.
With regard to capital levels at our insurance subsidiaries, our goal is to maintain our capital levels necessary to support our current ratings. Globe Life targets a consolidated company action level RBC ratio in the range of 300% to 320%. At the end of 2022, our consolidated RBC ratio was 321%. At this RBC ratio, our subsidiaries had at that time approximately $125 million of capital over the amount required to meet the low-end of our consolidated RBC target of 300%. When adjusted for credit losses on fixed maturities incurred in the first-half of the year, the RBC ratio is reduced slightly below the midpoint of our targeted RBC range of 300% to 320%. We are well-positioned to address any additional capital needed by our insurance subsidiaries due to potential downgrades and additional defaults that may occur due to the recession or other economic factors.
As Frank mentioned, we routinely perform stress tests on our investment portfolio under multiple scenarios. Under the stress tests, we anticipate various levels of downgrades and defaults in our fixed maturity portfolio and include a provision for losses in our CML portfolio that reflect loss ratios in excess of those of the Federal Reserve's severely adverse scenario. Under our scenarios, we do not anticipate that all of the downgrades defaults and losses in our investment portfolio would occur in 2023, but rather anticipate they would merge over an extended period of time, which could be as long as 24 months.
Even if these losses under our interim stresses occurred before the end of the year, we estimate only $25 million to $50 million of additional capital will be needed to maintain the low-end of our consolidated RBC target of 300%. The parent company has sufficient resources of liquidity to fund this capital if it is needed to maintain our consolidated RBC ratio within our target range, while continuing our dividend and share repurchase program as planned.
With regards to policy obligations in the second quarter, as we've discussed on prior calls, we have included this historical operating summer results under LDTI for each of the quarters in 2022 within the supplemental financial information available on our website.
In the third quarter of 2022, we updated both our life and health assumptions, lapse mortality and morbidity. The life assumption updates reflected our current estimates of continued excess mortality, particularly in the near-term. For the second-quarter, life obligations were slightly favorable when compared to our assumptions of mortality and persistency. This resulted in a life remeasurement gain for the quarter. The supplemental financial information available on our website provides an exhibit which shows the re-measurement gain or loss by distribution channel. The re-measurement gain or loss shows the current period fluctuations in experience from those expected, and the impact of assumption changes, if any, which are allocated to the current quarter in past periods.
In the absence of assumption changes, the re-measurement gain or loss is indicative of experienced fluctuations. The remeasurement gain for the Life segment resulted in $24 million lower life policy obligations and $2.6 million lower health policy obligations. Sorry, sorry -- $2.4 million lower life policy obligations and $2.6 million lower health policy obligations, and slightly lower claims than anticipated.
And in the second quarter, we had no changes to-long-term assumptions. We are currently in the process of finalizing our review of long-term assumptions, and we will make updates if needed in the third quarter. We do not expect these updates to be significant overall.
Finally, with respect to our earnings guidance for 2023, we are projecting net operating income per share will be in the range of $10.37 to $10.57 per diluted common share for the year ending December 31st, 2023. At $10.47 midpoint of our guidance is higher than what we had indicated last quarter, and is largely due to higher investment income from our commercial mortgage loans and limited partnership investments.
For the full year 2023, we anticipate life underwriting margins to be in the range of 37% to 39%, slightly higher than the 2022 life underwriting margin percentage when restated for the full-year. Life underwriting margins, health underwriting margins to be in the range of 28% to 30%. The life and health anticipated underwriting margins are unchanged from last quarter's guidance. We believe the year-to-date obligation ratios are indicative of emerging policy obligations over the remainder of the year. As previously noted, we will be reviewing assumptions and anticipate making updates next quarter. Again, we do not expect these updates to be significant overall.
Total acquisition costs in the second-quarter as a percent of premium are 21% including both amortization and non-deferred acquisition costs and commissions. We expect the full year to be consistent with this 21%. Those are my comments. I will now turn it over to Matt.
