Each
year at your term life insurance's
anniversary time, it's a smart move to
re-evaluate your policy's provisions and
costs. This period of time is
called renewal and we can help you
almost as much as when you first
purchased your
original life insurance
policy. Let's look at how to
successfully navigate your life
insurance's renewal.
There
are a few key items to re-evaluate
during the renewal process. You
can do this during any time of the year
but renewal (anniversary of the original
effective date)
is usually a good time to dust off the
old policy and make sure it still
adequately protects you at the best
possible rate. If it's been a few
years (or more), then we recommend doing
it now. On a practical note, there
may be updates that are needed and more
importantly, you may be paying too much.
The latter has a better chance of
actually motivating most people to find
the policy and go through it. If
we are your
licensed life
insurance agents,
we can help you go through this
comparison and/or request information
from the carrier. Of course, we
can help any one evaluate their current
policy and whether it affordably
addresses their life insurance needs.
Let's
first look at the practical
house-keeping items that are needed.
The big one is
life insurance
beneficiary designation.
It's extremely important to keep this
information current. Things change
and people tend to forget to update
their life policy details to reflect
these changes. It can be divorce,
a marriage, children, changes in policy
settlement (pay out) structure. If
this information is not updated and the
policy holder passes away, there is
little if any recourse to address the
misstep. It can also lead to
painful and expensive legal battles
between the parties involved. For
example, let's say that a policy holder
did not update the beneficiary from a
first spouse to a recently married
spouse. Can you imagine the
fireworks that will result from such a
mistake! The purpose of life
insurance is to make it easier for your
loved ones...not harder. Anytime,
there is big life change, it's good to
take a look at the life policies to make
sure these changes are correctly
reflected.
There
may be other basic information that
needs addressing at renewal.
Payment options or address can be
critical since you do not want your
policy to lapse. We see this
issue when people are set up for an
annual automatic payment. A lot of
time passes between each payment and it
can be easy to forget to update the
life policy
information since twelve months may
pass.
Once
we have the housekeeping information in
order, life insurance renewal is a good
time to make your you have adequate
coverage at the best rate. You can
quickly run your instant
term life
insurance quote to check out
what's on the market. Your age is
higher so that will be factored into the
rate but many people still have old and
very expensive policies that do not make
sense. This can include whole life
policies or older term life policies.
It just takes a few seconds to review
and we are happy to help you with this
analysis. Keep in mind that it's
best to use our guidance when
considering
replacing existing
life insurance
policies. That's what we're
here for!
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