Choosing a Life Insurance Policy
Just like anything else you buy, insurance is a product that varies widely from company to company. Like shopping around for stereos or computers, finding a life insurance policy that provides everything you need – and nothing you don’t – requires taking the time to make good comparisons.
Taking time to compare life insurance policies, however, can be a hassle. Most life insurance companies may want to collect a bunch of information from you up front so that they can build a customized policy that suits your request. This certainly isn’t a bad thing, but it does make looking for life insurance quotes a time-consuming process. As a result, most consumers looking to compare life insurance quotes give up after the second or third company they contact, simply because they don’t want to fill out any more forms.
USInsuranceOnline saves you headaches by connecting you with a wide variety of life insurance quotes from a large selection of local insurance companies in the same amount of time it would normally take to get a single quote from one life insurance provider.
Having a larger selection means you can make more comparisons, and making more comparisons means you’re more likely to find life insurance coverage that provides everything you need – and nothing you don’t.
Types of Life Insurance
The three most common categories of life insurance are as follows:
Term life policies offer no integrated investment, which means they may not pass on any assets to your estate other than the benefits expressly stated in the policy, but the advantage of term life insurance is that overall premiums are much smaller.
If purchased at a young age, term life insurance policies that include automatic renewal can be structured to provide high value in the long run. A young person can enjoy low premiums that are unchanging over the life of the policy, and coverage benefits are quite high.
- Whole Life Insurance
Whole life insurance includes a financial investment element in addition to the standard death benefit and coverage of term life.
A whole life policy may mature over time, and pay money back to the insured at a later time. This means that a whole life insurance policy has a cash value that can be used as a financial leveraging tool while a term life policy cannot.
- Variable Life Insurance
Variable life is similar to whole life, but grants the insured more freedom in handling the investment portion of the policy.
Where a standard whole life policy pays out in a way determined by the carrier agency, variable life allows the insured to move the profit realized by the policy into investments of their choice.
However, the flexibility of variable life insurance comes with an element of risk. Since the insured is making the investment decisions, returns are not guaranteed, and poor investment choices or market disruptions might decrease the value of the policy over time.
