Term insurance is simply the right choice for most of us average folks. The truth is that if I want to make sure my family is taken care while my children are still dependent on me, a 20 year term is the perfect choice. If I am thinking there might be more children in the near future, maybe a 30 year term is the best idea. Why term and not whole life for family protection??

Let’s say we determine that $500,000 is the right amount of coverage during those family years. Just for the sake of this model we’ll say the parents are 35 and very healthy. They make about $40,000 a year. The mom would pay about $235 a year for a 20 year term insurance policy and $370 a year for a 30 year guaranteed level premium term insurance policy. The dad would pay $255 and $475 respectively. I should note that getting these prices will require going through an independent life insurance agent who has access to the lowest life insurance quotes. Also keep in mind that those rates are guaranteed to remain level for the full 20 or 30 years.

Now, in walks Mr Whole Life agent.  He knows they only make $40,000, so today he is going to cut them some slack and suggest that they go with a universal life policy with a no lapse guarantee. With his insurance quotes the dad would be looking at a level rate until age 100 of $2225 a year and the mom at $1765 a year. Round figures they are looking at $4000 a year. That is one tenth of their pretax income for life insurance. A 30 year term would have been about 1/50th of their pretax income.

 Oh, I almost forgot to tell you why Mr Whole Life sells whole life and universal life. A conservative guess is that he will make a 75% commission on the first year and about a 5% renewal every year after that. So if he doesn’t sell you term insurance, which really is the more appropriate product, he will make $3000 the first year and $200 a year each year you renew.

Term insurance is a little different.  In round figures, a 30 year term on Mom and Dad would run about $850 a year. The life insurance agent would make about 75% of the first year premium, or $612.50. He doesn’t get any renewals after that. Do you suppose Mr Whole Life’s opinion on the appropriate product is influenced by his bottom line??

Final expenses can be anything from a simple burial to hospital bills, attorney’s costs to administer a will, or gifts left to children or grandchildren. Depending on your personal desires, a burial or final expense policy might be as small as $5000-$10,000 or as large as $50,000-$100,000.

Most folks don’t really put a lot of thought into this kind of  life insurance until they start to see “final” kind of off in the distance. Generally at that point most of us don’t want to be bothered with exams and people poking around our medical history so we opt for a guaranteed issue life insurance. We just want to sign up without any hassle. There are some good and some not so good products out there for those who want to  take the easy route.

If you are in good health and just don’t want to take an exam, ask your independent life insurance agent about simplified issue life insurance. There will be a few health questions, but it is generally very easy to qualify for, comes in both term insurance and whole life, and is usually less expensive than guaranteed issue.

If you have some fairly serious health problems, guaranteed issue life insurance is a good option. Again, employ an independent life insurance agent to do the shopping for you. They will be able to get through the fine print and find a good match for you.

Are these types of policies a good idea? You know, they really are unless you have $10,000 in a box marked final expenses.

Bottom line for life insurance underwriters, whether you are applying for term insurance, whole life or universal life is YMCA! Actually it really ends up being YMCCARF, but it’s my blog and close counts. The acronym stands for YOU MONITOR, CONTROL AND ARE COMPLIANT WITH ALL RISK FACTORS.

You monitor your glucose frequently, preferably more than once a day. If you have hypertension (one of the risk factors) you check it frequently. If you are overweight (another risk factor) you work on changing eating habits and beginning an exercise program. And you monitor the overall effect by seeing your doctor at least 4 times a year and discussing your lab results, specifically your A1C. If you are diabetic and don’t know what your A1C is, time to wake up and do some study.

A definition from www.metrika.com is “A1C, also known as glycated hemoglobin or glycosylated hemoglobin, indicates a patient’s blood sugar control over the last 2-3 months. A1C is formed when glucose in the blood binds irreversibly to hemoglobin to form a stable glycated hemoglobin complex. Since the normal life span of red blood cells is 90-120 days, the A1C will only be eliminated when the red cells are replaced; A1C values are directly proportional to the concentration of glucose in the blood over the full life span of the red blood cells. A1C values are not subject to the fluctuations that are seen with daily blood glucose monitoring.” The A1C is the benchmark of control that an independent life insurance agent will need to know to be able to find you the lowest rates.

Compliance with your treatment is critical, not only to your health, but to competitive life insurance quotes. Taking medication occasionally or only when you feel like you need it isn’t what your doctor prescribed. Eating a more healthy diet except on weekends isn’t what your doctor prescribed.

Compliance and control!!! You can negate the impact of the diabetes on your physical life and you can also negate the impact on your life insurance rates. Compliance and control!!

First and foremost is earlier diagnosis and better treatment than we have seen in the past. When diabetes is recognized before it causes any collateral damage and a patient is educated in all of the aspects of good control, the chances are that a person can live their life with minimal impact. Doctors and life insurance underwriters understand that managing build (weight), hypertension, and glucose levels, along with consistently taking the prescribed medication, and getting regular checkups can lead to a long healthy life and, in the case of life insurance, lower life insurance quotes.

Key to low life insurance quotes and approved rates, is the A1C level that your doctor tests each time you see him. Unlike a glucose reading, a snapshot of the moment, an A1C tells you what your glucose average has been over the past 3 months or so. This is important, as there are diabetics that will fool themselves into believing they have good control because when they check their glucose every morning it is good and low. The A1C changes the snapshot to a photo album of the past three months and catches all of the good readings and all of the readings you might not take.

If you don’t know, ask your doctor today what your A1C is. If it is below 7, congratulations, good life insurance rates, whether you want term insurance, universal life or whole life, are within your grasp. Below 6.5 is better yet and below 6 is awesome. Above 7 is still very doable as long as you remember that the other risk factors need to be just as well controlled. So, bottom line is if you are diabetic and you take it seriously and take care of yourself, an independent life insurance agent is going to be able to get you good quotes that you earned through your hard work.

Whether you are in business for yourself, or work for someone, your future can be in jeopardy if you, or they, have not adequately protected the business with business life insurance. The untimely death of an owner, partner, or key person in a business when there is no business life insurance such as a buy/sell insurance policy or key man insurance in place can be the beginning of quick end.

We often think of life insurance just in terms of protecting our family from the loss of income if a parent should die, or in terms of final expense or burial life insurance. The unexpected death of a business owner or key person can have a dramatic impact, not only on their family, but on the employees of the business and their families.

If you own a business and don’t currently have business life insurance, meet with an independent life insurance agent soon and review the structure and financials of your business. The agent can then make recommendations and provide insurance quotes that help your business become a legacy to your family and your partner(s) and employees, rather than a loss to them all.

In most cases you will want to look at term insurance or possibly return of premium term insurance rather than universal life or whole life. Why term insurance? The truth is that most businesses change too rapidly to make locking in even the longer terms or permanent insurance. A more prudent approach is to look at each aspect of your business and consider the proper term length. It may take more than one life insurance policy, but with term insurance being as affordable as it is, you should certainly be able to protect your business without significant impact on your budget.

So, mind your own business! A good steward of a business will ensure that the business will survive them.

Type 1 or type 2 diabetes can both have severe collateral effects on the body if not well controlled. Type 1 diabetes always concerned underwriters more because with more years to work on the body and cause collateral issues, the chances seemed greater that the disease could have a negative impact on mortality, the very basis for life insurance quotes.

The shift in underwriting has come with the realization that well controlled type 1 diabetes has a much lower chance of causing collateral health issues and therefore has a very small impact on mortality expectations. That leads to lower life insurance rates.

 What do underwriters look for? An A1C of under 7, under 6.5 would be optimal. A person who takes their diabetes management seriously, checking glucose frequently and having a review with their doctor at least every 3 months is a positive thing. Bottom line, a diabetic who cares enough to take care of themselves, has a great chance of getting great life insurance quotes.

Well, allow me to throw a rock in that placid pool of thought and cause a few waves. Changing jobs is statistically happening more frequently. It’s not like our parent’s day when you got a job and worked it from then until you retired or died. I think I read somewhere that the average working person who has a job that would be eligible for group benefits, changes employment 7 times over their working lifespan.

Two things can happen to your group life insurance when you change jobs. Most group life insurance policies, which are term insurance, are convertible to either whole life or universal life policies if you leave employment. Very few of these conversion options would fall into the category of what would be called an attractive offer. Generally they are overpriced and under guaranteed. So your choice becomes either accepting a bad deal, quickly finding another job with a comparable group life plan, or buying a personal policy.

The other thing that can happen with group coverage if you leave employment is that it simply ceases. Most are kind enough to give you 30 days, a grace period of sorts, but then it simply goes away.

Especially in today’s market when an independent life insurance agent can find you term life insurance at extremely competitive prices, a prudent and reasonable thing to do is to carry a personal policy all of the time and consider group benefits to be the frosting on the cake, not the cake itself. Then, if you change employment you have ongoing coverage. Your family is never put in a position of being left with nothing if you pass away unexpectedly.

Please don’t misunderstand. I advocate gobbling up all the the cheap group benefits that are offered. Just remember they aren’t guaranteed. Your employer could decide to cut benefits. You could quit or be fired and be forced into a bad conversion option or be left with no option at all.

The good news from a life insurance standpoint is that prostate cancer in most cases is very insurable after a minimal post treatment waiting period. I say most cases and not all, because obviously some incidents of prostate cancer are more severe than others. Most prostate cancer falls into the less severe category. If you meet the criteria outlined below and use an independent life insurance agent who understands the challenge, your quotes for term insurance, universal life or whole life insurance should be a pleasant surprise.

There are three indicators that life nsurance underwriters look at when determining the insurability of a prostate cancer survivor. The first is the PSA (prostate specific antigen) at the time of diagnosis. Prostate cancer is often detected because the PSA is above normal, above 4.0, or if the PSA is gradually elevating on subsequent exams. For the purpose of life insurance quotes, a PSA of 10 or less at the time of diagnosis is best. The lower the better.

Once a troublesome PSA is observed, it is usually followed with a biopsy. This will determine if there is cancer or if the elevated PSA has been caused by something else, like prostatitis (an infection of the prostate). If cancer is found it is assigned a grade based on the biopsy. This is called a Gleason score. A Gleason score of 4 or less (on a scale to 10) would be considered a very non aggressive cancer. A Gleason of 5 or 6 would be only moderately aggressive. At a Gleason of 7, insurance becomes trickier, although still insurable.  A Gleason of 8-10 is a tough sell for most underwriters. Don’t throw in the towel until your independent life insurance agent has thoroughly shopped it though!

Treatment options include everything from leaving it alone if it is a very low grade cancer to a radical prostatectomy (removal of the prostate) if the risk is higher. At this point it is also assigned a stage of 1, 2, 3 or 4, depending on how much the cancer has spread. An encapsalated cancer for instance would likely be a stage 1. Cancer that has metastatized to the bone or other organs would probably be a 4.

To summarize, an independent insurance agent can generally get quotes that are better than standard rates if their prostate cancer surviving client had a PSA of less than 10, a Gleason score of 6 or less and a stage of 1 or a low 2. The PSA after treatment has to be 0 if they had a prostatectomy or .5 or less if they used some other form of treatment. Those criteria would qualify most prostate cancer survivors for better than standard rates.

So, the good news is that prostate cancer generally doesn’t mean the end to your ability to purchase affordable life insurance. If you need life insurance and have survived prostate cancer, contact an independent life insurance agent today and provide them with all of the information cited above. Get them a copy of your original pathology report and if you had surgery, a post surgical pathology report. Give them all of the information and you will be pleased with the results.

This doesn’t create any problems with term life insurance. With term there aren’t really any options in the way it is presented or sold. It is what it is. Usually a 10, 15, 20 or 30 years guaranteed level premium term, or perhaps a return of premium term policy. Bottom line is term life insurance is a hard product to misrepresent. I’m not saying it can’t happen, it is just harder.

MISREPRESENT? Why would a life insurance agent misrepresent something. Well, life insurance is a very competitive business and with the internet, and independent life insurance agents competing with captive career agents, it often comes down to who presents the best price. Now, I heard someone shout, “hey stupid, what’s wrong with the best price?”

Ok, before I get booed off of my own blog, let me explain. We are now going to shift to universal life and whole life policies. Now we have products that are more complex. There are guarantees, but there are also assumptions. If I base the life insurance quote I present you on assumptions, something that may or may not happen, the price is lower than if I base the life insurance quote on guarantees, something that will absolutely happen. A lot of times the price difference isn’t huge, but when a client doesn’t understand all of that insurance mumbo jumbo, they trust the agent selling the assumptions and ask for the lowest price.

The guy that was desperate for the sale wins. He gets his commission and buys his food. The customer, on the other hand, is left with a policy that is not guaranteed, and statistics would show that the policy sold in that way is more likely than not to fall apart, become extinct, lapse, fail, etc. The customer loses the money he has put in and is left without the life insurance he was told he would have. This happens so often that it is no wonder some people aren’t real fond of life insurance companies or agents.

How to avoid it? When you sit down with your independent life insurance agent to get your universal life or whole  life insurance quotes, insist on seeing the guarantees. If the agent starts trying to get you to focus on the current assumptions (also known as non guarantees), bring them back to the guarantees. If they try to go back to the assumptions, walk out. DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH THEM!!!!!

 If you already have a universal life or whole life policy and don’t know what the guarantees are, go to an independent agent other than the one you bought it from and have it reviewed. Why, you ask, should you go to another agent? Because if you don’t know what the guarantees are, you were more than likely sold assumptions. Agents that sell guarantees drive the point home. We’re proud of it. And, if the person did it to you once, they will try to do it again and that means they could potentially get paid twice for the same wrong thing.