This may be a good time to rethink the types of life insurance policies you should buy. Until the market settles down many people don’t want to be spending a lot of money. Everyone is looking for a safe place to put their money. We see some stocks, like Wachovia, slide then rise again. Others may take a longer time before they are again viable.
What of life insurance though? Which types of life insurance policies should we buy?
Term life insurance requires very little premium outlay and, for some, may be a good idea. Why would one want to put out money for the higher premium permanent policies at this time. You get the same death benefit with term insurance as as you would with the more costly universal life, variable universal life and whole life policies. You have a variety of term policies to choose from.
Yearly Renewable Term
This policy has a premium that increases every year so you would likely want to keep it for a very short period of time. The premium is very low, initially. The death benefit is level throughout.
Decreasing Term
This is a policy that is more often than not used to pay off a mortgage balance upon the death of the insured. The death benefit decreases with the mortgage balance and the premium is level throughout.
5 Year Term
If you are uncertain what type of life insurance policy you should buy you probably should take out a 5 year term policy now and convert to a permanent policy later on.
Other Level Term Policies
The 10 year term, 15 year term, 20 year term, 25 year term or 30 year term may be best for you now. You will have quite a while to think where you go from here. Your family, or business, will be protected meanwhile.
Permanent Policies
During a past recession I saw something I considered quite strange at the time. People were putting large sums of money in annuities but they also put considerable sums in single premium, limited payment and regular whole life policies. At that time I was with the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Now Northwestern Mutual Financial Network. When I asked why they said that they were not looking to make any big profit. They wanted safety and they knew the reputation of that company. They felt they would not loose their money. They were right.
There are other companies that you can feel safe with. Check out their performance with the A. M. Best company. There are also what may be arguably better types of life insurance policies to safely put your money in. I refer to the universal and the variable universal life policies. If you choose to do this, however, you should make it your responsibility to check out the performance history of the company and how well they do with these policies.
When everything settles down again some people will choose to switch to a term policy and invest your money in mutual funds or probably a money market plan.
