Term life is a whole different animal than most products you will purchase in your life.  This even applies to other financial products and even insurance.  The actual term life insurance product itself is pretty simple and straight forward which is partially why it's so attractive (the very inexpensive cost doesn't hurt either).   The tricky part comes down to comparing costs and quotes for term life insurance as you'll see in this article.  We'll get into how the term life quoting part and more importantly, term life underwriting work but more importantly, how to use this information to your advantage.

It's very easy to run a term life quote.  At our site, www.etermlifeinsurancequote.com and many others online, you can have an instant quote within 30 seconds.  That's the easy part.  Many people will run these quotes, see the numbers and then go apply for coverage not realizing that the term life quote online (or in person for that matter) is just a guesstimate.  Why is this so?  After all, they have your age, zip code, and even some generic health information.  The quote you have is very black and white.  It assumes you exactly fit within the parameters of what drives that quote.  Age and zip code are black and white but everything else in the above equation is shades of grade.  We all have health histories and issues or at least, most of us do.  There are a few pristine pictures of health out there but they're few and far between, especially at the age that most people start to looking into term life insurance.  There's almost no way a website term life quote engine can take into account all the variables that go into your health situation.  So how valid are those quotes you see online?

Extremely valid if your in perfect health.  Probably off 20-50% if you have minor, ongoing health issues.  Probably off 100% plus if you more serious issues.  That's a wide range when you're trying to choose a plan that fits within your budget but unlike many websites, we want to be upfront so you can plan accordingly.  Those other term life quote engines will work the exact same way...they just want to try to get you to apply and give you the bad news later.   So what do we do if we need term life insurance but we're concerned about the "gray area" mentioned above.

Our recommendation is this.  Run your online quote or contact us with your particular health situation so we can give you guidance on what to actually expect.  Except for a few odd cases, most people are suffering from the same health issues...cholesterol, blood pressure, pre-diabetes, etc.  We've seen all the different situations and we know which carriers or types of term life insurance plans are going to be more flexible with your given health make-up.  Whether you contact us for more exact information or just go based on the online quote, we also recommend the following.  Apply for the plan and rate you ideally want.  When the carrier comes back with the offer, we can reduce the amount of term life coverage or the length of time to meet your original budget.   Any of the other carriers would also increase the rate so there's no reason to price shop outside of the original quote and if we know of a specific carrier/plan that will treat your health status better, we'll bring it up during the process.  Otherwise, go in with the best rate (you can adjust the health status in the system to get a more realistic quote) and we'll tailor it to your budget once they make an offer.  We know this isn't an exact science and you may not be familiar with the "gray area" inherent in this approach, but it's term life insurance.  Anyone that tells you differently probably isn't being forthcoming on the process.