Next week, my husband and I are going back to visit with our insurance agent. When we visited her before, we renewed our car insurance, and figured out what we needed to do in order to correctly document our property for our homeowners insurance. We talked with her about health insurance options, and were disappointed to learn, after we “crunched the numbers” that what they could offer was too expensive for us to afford. The next thing to sort out would be life insurance.
Life insurance is important because it gives financial assistance to the beneficiary after a loved one has passed away. It is a way to provide help with the cost of burial, funeral expenses, death taxes, and more. In our case, my husband and I want to ensure that, if one of us outlives the other, that the remaining portion of our mortgage would be paid off. On our first visit with our insurance agent, she printed out several sheets of paper that described in great detail what we could expect from the life insurance polices that this insurance company could offer to us.
They have three different tiers of life insurance. The least expensive one is called “super preferred non-tobacco”. This is available to people who do not currently use tobacco or nicotine products, and have not used them for at least 36 months prior to applying for life insurance. The paperwork says that the we would have to meet the underwriting requirements for this policy, which are more stringent than the policy on the next tier. The next one is slightly more expensive, and is called “preferred non-tobacco”. Again, a person applying for this tier of life insurance also cannot be a current user of tobacco or other nicotine products, and cannot have used those kinds of things for at least 36 months before they came in to fill out the policy. I have never been a smoker or tobacco user, and neither has my husband. It seems that we might qualify for at least one of these kinds of life insurance.
We learned that each of us would have to get a separate, individual, life insurance policy. This is not the kind of insurance that can be shared, like homeowners, or health insurance, for example. Together, our two life insurance policies would cost us around $60.00 a month, which we believe we can afford. The life insurance is “term to age 95”. The death benefit is “level”, which means the beneficiary gets the full amount of the policy, and nothing more.
We still have to fill out the paperwork, and apply for the life insurance, which means there is potential that we could be turned down. If we are approved, we need to learn what to do with our current life insurance policies. My parents started one for me when I was an infant, and my husband’s parents did the same for him. It will be interesting to see how this all works out.
Image by Dieter Heiss on Flickr