The Truth About Guaranteed Issue Life Policies
Have you ever watched your TV set or surfed around the internet? Sure you have! Have you seen ads for guaranteed issue life insurance that promises not to turn anybody down? I would be that you have seen those ads while you were watching TV or on the net. But have you ever wondered if those ads were true or to good to be true?
What you may not know, from watching a quick advertisement, is that insurers are still protecting themself. If they just issued life insurance to everybody without any health underwriting, and they still paid out huge death benefits, they would go broke very fast. You know that insurers are very good at making a profit.
You may have noticed that these guaranteed issue policies have small death benefits. They may top out at 10 or 20 thousand dollars. So one way that insurers protect themselves is by only selling small death benefit policies this way.
But if the insurers sell a lot of policies, even ten or twenty thousand dollars is risky. If they attract clients who are less healthy, they could still lose millions when they spread it out over all of their customers. They prevent this by having a waiting period on the policy. The beneficiary will not collect the whole death benefit if the insured person dies before this term is up.
This does not mean that these policies are useless. Many insurers offer to refund premiums if the insured person does not survive the waiting period. Others may pay out a fraction of the death benefit. Some policices may have a combination of payouts, depending upon how long the insured person does live.
The terms could be complicated. For example, they may pay half the death benefit if the person survives 24 months, but not 36 months. They may refund premiums, with interest, if the insured person survives 12 months. They could have a variety of terms like this, but you get the idea. This is called a graded death benefit. In other words, the death benefit rises as more time elapses after the policy has been issued.
In order to get the best life insurance policy for you, if it is guaranteed issue or not, it is important to shop around for the best rates and deals.
Learn more about no health questions life insurance. You can also find guaranteed senior life insurance. This article, The Truth About Guaranteed Issue Life Policies has free reprint rights.