There are two main criteria for life insurance agents...that they are knowledgeable and impartial.  The first is self-explanatory while the second really should be.  You need to know that you're getting the absolute best information when running your insurance quotes.   Let's go through the advantages of having an impartial life insurance agent on your side and how to make sure you have found one.

There are hundreds of life insurance plans out there on the market with every possible option, name, and ideal use.  The number of legit and competitive life insurance companies are in the double digits.  Let's also mention the 10's of thousands of life insurance agents and brokers out there.  How do you know you're getting the best deal?  You need to have an impartial agent or broker who also knows the life insurance market.  Impartial basically means that the agent is looking out for your best interest when quoting and choosing a plan.  Like with any profession, there are good and bad agents out there.  Some are captive agents which means they work for just one company to sell their products.  This may be okay if the company is competitive and if, they have a range of life insurance products.  That's a lot of if's and with the nature of life insurance these days, you can have a superior rate for a given age band or geographic region or amount of term that specific to your situation.  They just happen to be more competitive in just that specific area.  It's hard to know for sure if you're dealing with a captive life agent since you're only seeing one company's products. 

You may also have brokers that narrow their offerings significantly for a variety of reasons.  Maybe they still quote and operate pre-internet which means they have to manually quote with reams of paper, a calculator, and a lot of time (not to mention a lot of coffee).  This how it used to be done and it's easy to understand why an agent might quote a few carriers at best.  It was time-consuming and tedious work.  Websites like etermlifeinsurancequote.com with our instant term life quote across multiple carriers side by side have made that virtually non-existent.  You can quickly run a quote across dozens of plans in a few seconds.  I'm not sure if there are still agents out there that work the old fashion way but I would seriously question if that method is thorough enough to provide a prospective customer with a wide enough breadth of options.  I personally wouldn't want the results of that method for my own purchase. 

The next issue is when a broker is just plain impartial.  An obvious example of this is if an agent "sells" whole life insurance due to the big commission associated with this type of product.   There may be situations where whole life insurance MIGHT fit but we're still looking for it.  If an agent seems pushy about a particular life insurance plan or if you really don't feel comfortable about a particular purchase... STOP!!  Don't feel you have to sign the contract.  It's better to stop now then pay the policy for years and decide that it's not the right protection for you (which is very common by the way).

Hopefully, you can judge by our website with over 170 articles explaining in clear and impartial (there's that word again) language how to evaluate and choose life insurance coverage.  We've gone out of our way to put the information and power in your hands.  Our instant term life insurance quote engine is a great place to start and if questions up, a licensed and impartial insurance agent on the phone is a great place to end up!