Posted on Thu, Jan 31, 2013
If you’re young and just starting a family, it might feel like you still have your whole life ahead of you. Sure, things are speeding up, and maybe you never thought life would throw so much responsibility in your lap so fast, but surely there is plenty of time to catch up.
Not to mention that every time you turn around there’s another “life reality” to face. Another obligation. Another bill. It can be tempting to keep putting off the obligation of life insurance, telling yourself you’ll get it another day.
Big mistake.
Don’t Underestimate Your Insurance Needs
Here’s the main problem. Even if it seems like you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, young families have more life insurance need than anyone else. Consider that if you passed away in an accident today, your family is far more vulnerable than an older couple with a children entering or already in adulthood, even though the older policyholders face a higher risk of death.
If you pass away, your family still has a whole lifetime to live without you. Your spouse may struggle to raise the kids, put them through college, and give them a fair shot at life, all in your absence. So much could go wrong for them in this scenario.
Add all that on top of the fact that your spouse probably does not yet earn enough money to raise a family on his or her own, and you’re talking about a significant need for protection.
Here’s the Catch 22
Even though your family needs life insurance more than other families do, you are most likely still in the lowest earning years of your life. With little experience and little time with your company, you have a long way to go to reach your full earning potential.
For this reason, it can be extremely hard to afford a permanent life insurance policy, which is often cost prohibitive.
This is why term life is often the best choice.
What is a Term Life Insurance Policy?
A term life insurance policy is set for a predetermined number of years, and when that term is up, you may be able to renew (if this option is included in your policy) or apply for a new one. There’s no cash value built into the policy.
Term life is a good way to find affordable coverage for your family while their needs for life insurance are greater than ever.
Also, you might consider a term policy with a conversion option, so if you or your spouse starts seeing chronic health problems at a young age, you can get into a permanent policy without worrying about the risk of being deemed uninsurable at a later date.
Find out more about getting a term policy to protect your family. Just click here and speak with one of our licensed agents today.
To get a
Term Life Insurance Quote or Research how to
Buy Life Insurance Online visit
Efinancial.com
Posted on Fri, Jan 18, 2013
Perhaps you already own a life insurance policy to protect your family and your assets after you’re gone. But if you’re self-employed or running a business, it’s important to realize that life insurance is a flexible product with many different uses. It can do much more than take care of your personal affairs. Let’s have a quick look at some simple options, aside from basic protection, for using life insurance for business purposes
1. Leverage a Buy/Sell Agreement
If your business is co-owned, a buy/sell agreement is a great way to relinquish your interest in the company while making sure your family still benefits. In a scenario like this, the life insurance policy can be used to buy out your share of the company at a predetermined price point, leaving full ownership in the hands of the other shareholders or partners.
No need for your family to get involved in a business they do not understand.
How the buy/sell agreement functions relies a great deal on the structure of your company and how the policy is set up. Speak with a licensed professional for more information.
2. Settle All Your Business Debts
Most businesses are not 100% cash-financed, and upon your death any debts you leave behind will be due, especially if you’re operating as a sole proprietorship. If you don’t have the means to settle these debts with your passing, the responsibility may fall upon your family – at the very least, any other personal assets or savings will be drained to settle, leaving them to fend for themselves.
Fortunately, you can buy life insurance to handle these debts for you.
3. “Key Person” Insurance
If you sit down and think about it for a minute, you’ll likely realize that there are one or two individuals – maybe even a few – whose sudden and unexpected absence would absolutely cripple your company.
Specialized knowledge, for instance, can have a huge impact on profits in an instant. One of the founders may be closely intertwined with the company structure. A truly creative thinker may carry a lot of weight when it comes to generating new ideas, and a high-powered salesperson might make up the bulk of sales.
Also, consider the time it takes to train a new employee to take their place, even if the role can be filled from outside the company.
With key-person insurance, the beneficiary is the company that depends on that person; this is one of the few instances in which a policy can be taken out by a party other than the insured or the insured’s family. “Key-person” insurance also goes a long way towards reminding an important individual of their value to the company.
Some other things to keep in mind: if your policy comes with a cash value, it might be possible for the business to use it as a way to access loans, and in some cases, the key individual can draw upon the policy or take over ownership when they retire from the company.
These are just some of the ways life insurance can work for your business. Get in touch with an Efinancial professional to discus the details and find out what else is possible.
To get a
Term Life Insurance Quote or Research how to
Buy Life Insurance Online visit
Efinancial.com
Posted on Fri, Jan 11, 2013
If you’re unmarried and without dependents, you may have the impression that life insurance is a luxury rather than a necessity. In your situation, it simply doesn’t take precedence in your life.
Not everyone needs life insurance – sure. But one thing is for certain: everyone should at least be thinking about life insurance early on in life. Because if you don’t know the facts and the possibilities, you cannot make educated decisions about your long-term financial plan, and that can be downright dangerous.
Let’s look at some tips and points of interest when shopping for life insurance as a single adult.
1. Protect Your Insurability
It’s important to mention one of the greatest incentives for purchasing life insurance when you are young and single; simply put, life insurance is cheaper when you still have your health and vitality. As you age and health declines, the ability to get these cheap rates disappears – get a head-start and lock in your rates, especially if you plan on getting married and think you’ll have dependents later on.
2. Term Life – Always a Good Buy for Young People
Term life insurance is typically the best buy for young people who haven’t yet reached the peak of their earning power. It’s enough to solve any immediate needs should something sudden and tragic occur, and it is very affordable – term comes with no cash value but is guaranteed for the life of the term stated, whether that be three or 30 years.
Note that it can become more expensive if you renew as you age, but your rate will be locked in until the term is up.
3. Consider Term Life with a Conversion Option
Here’s a hot tip: get the best of both worlds by purchasing term insurance with a conversion option. This allows you to access a dependable term plan now at affordable rates, and then later on when you’re making more money you can convert to a permanent insurance policy.
4. “Insure” Your Debts
One neat use of a life insurance policy for a single person is to “insure” your debts. For instance, if someone close to you has co-signed on a house or car for you or is tied to your debts in some other way, the last thing you want to do is leave that hanging over their head when you go.
Life insurance can be a way to wipe the slate clean should an accident happen.
5. Behavior is Your High-Leverage Variable
This is an extremely important point for young people.
The most easily-controlled variable concerning the cost of your insurance policy is your lifestyle and consistent behavior. For most of us, basic good health comes along naturally with youth, but if you drink to excess, smoke on a regular basis, drive irresponsibly, and engage in dangerous avocations (sky-diving, stock racing, rock climbing, etc), you can expect to pay higher premiums.
All are high-risk variables that make it more costly to insure your life. The most obvious way, therefore, to get a cheaper policy is to change these behaviors.
Just something to keep in mind.
6. Single Parents and Older Singles
Do you have children? If so, life insurance may be even more important for you than it is for a married couple, as an unexpected tragedy could leave your child on his or her own. Life insurance can provide a future even if you’re gone.
As far as older singles go, insurance money can help to leave something behind for grandchildren or provide for long-term care. Many choose to start an education fund for their grandchildren.
Want to learn more about how life insurance can come in handy even if you’re unmarried and/or have no children? It’s best to just get on the phone with an Efinancial professional and explain your unique situation, as everyone’s needs are different.
Get in touch one of our licensed agents now.
To get a
Term Life Insurance Quote or Research how to
Buy Life Insurance Online visit
Efinancial.com
Posted on Wed, Oct 10, 2012
When analyzing a specific life insurance option, the reputation of the insurer is often a great way to figure out what you can really expect. For your security and peace of mind, third-party companies exist to rate insurers based on predetermined standards of creditworthiness and financial stability.
The good news – it doesn’t cost you anything. Life insurance companies themselves cover the costs of being rated. They do pay a hefty fee for this, but the rating companies also live and die on reputation, so favoritism is virtually unheard of in the industry.
There are four major rating organizations for you to choose from, and each utilizes their own unique system based on their own idea of what variables paint the picture of a healthy insurance organization. While exact criteria differ from rating system to rating system, the overall aim is essentially the same – to determine the financial strength of an insurance company and its financial instruments.
Specific variables used to draw conclusions about financial strength may include diversification, performance, competition, management, and financial soundness – of course, it differs depending on the system being used.
At the end of the day, ratings communicate how likely the company will be able to pay claims on the policies they issue. Getting paid is obviously crucial if you want your policy to fulfill its role in the event of your early demise, so ratings are a great start for doing your own research.
Where to Start Searching for Third-Party Insurance Company Rating Services
A good place to start is A.M. Best Company. Founded in 1899, they are the oldest insurance rating company in the business. Not only have they been around for awhile but they have a strong reputation for getting it right as well and have a stellar record when it comes to forecasting financial problems in a specific company’s future.
In fact, Best’s Financial Strength Rating is considered by experts from all around the planet to be the “benchmark” rating system.
How Do Third-Party Insurance Company Rating Services Work?
To give you an idea of how rating systems work, Best’s Financial Strength Rating, like all others, relies on a sequence of letter grades. In this particular system, a company in liquidation is notated by an “F” and a “Superior” Company is notated with an A++. The grades of financial stability closely correlate with what you remember from your report card days, making if fairly intuitive, and the use of -, +, and ++ are implemented to communicate variances among the different grades.
The other major ratings companies are The Fitch Group, Moody’s Investors Services, and Standard & Poor’s (S&P) – otherwise known as the “”Big Three,” or the Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations observed by the SEC (A.M. Best is not one of the Big Three because they are primarily focused on the insurance industry).
Note again that ranking systems differ between the different companies – all communicate their appraisal of a company’s stability through letter grades, and the levels are somewhat transferable from system to system, but the specifics pertaining to how they use these annotations and the relative worth of each letter varies according to the particular grading system.
To get a
Term Life Insurance Quote or Research how to
Buy Life Insurance Online visit
Efinancial.com
Posted on Mon, May 10, 2010
T
here are as many pieces of advice about
how to save money on life insurance as there are best friends and brother-in-laws. But considering that one of the first rules of making smarter financial choices is not to listen to best friends and brother-in-laws, let’s get right to the point. Here’s the number one way to save money on term life insurance and get the coverage you want to protect your family at the best possible price.
The #1 Tip: Shop Online!
Whether it’s Zillow for house values, Ebay for consumer goods, Hotels.com for overnight stays, or Priceline for airfare bargains, to name but a few, the Internet is the greatest price shopper the world has ever seen. Where else can you compare dozens of companies with just a mouse click and make a stress-free, common sense decision without any arm-twisting or double-talk?
This tip is not only about WHERE to shop for life insurance, but WHEN! Statistics show that people today are living longer lives than ever before. Chances are good that the last rate quote you got from a life insurance company (maybe even the one you are now paying) is not only out of date, but also out of step with today’s global electronic marketplace. The time to compare your current policy is now!
Yes, Efinancial is all about comparing insurance rates from America’s top insurance companies. If we can save you money on something as important as life insurance, we are glad we took this friendly little blog post to do it! See what clicking and picking the best value in life insurance can do for you! After all, if you’re reading this, you are already ONLINE and just one click away from a free life insurance rate quote!
To get a
Term Life Insurance Quote or Research how to
Buy Life Insurance Online visit
Efinancial.com
Posted on Tue, Mar 17, 2009
“In hard economic times, investors look for ways to lighten their financial load,” writes life insurance advisor Peter C. Kat in this month’s
Journal of Financial Planning.
Affordable life insurance can have a decisive role to play. Instead of buying higher-cost permanent policies that generate cash value, policy buyers can look to much lower-cost term insurance for savings while protecting their families against catastrophic loss. If cash value policies are acquired make sure they are low expense so you can have immediate liquidity if and when you need funds. When savings have amassed in a policy and cash is needed, investors may be able to withdraw or borrow from cash values of permanent policies.
Financial decisions can come under stress in difficult economic times. Yet, decisions about life insurance during such periods are vital to your family’s future. So keep these guidelines in mind. Term life insurance is much more relevant because of its simple, low costs. Low-expense survivorship universal life should be used for term insurance when estate tax liquidity is the problem. Static-priced universal life insurance with low to zero cash values shows its significant weakness when liquidity is needed, and is often rejected for that reason alone. Finally, the amount of early whole life and conventional universal life cash values can be improved by buying low-cost versions.
The Journal of Financial Planning is the official publication of the Financial Planning AssociationTo get a
Term Life Insurance Quote or Research how to
Buy Life Insurance Online visit
Efinancial.com
Posted on Wed, Oct 29, 2008
Times are tough, we all know this. There is an obvious incentive to save every penny that you can. It is easy to concentrate on your family and friends and their survival. It is easy to forget that there are others struggling as well. Charities, when the economy is doing poorly, tend to suffer even more than the average person. Compounded with more people needing charity during hard times, this can cause a lot of struggle for me people.
Life insurance can be part of a solution to helping charities in these times. For people who want to give to charity, but cannot afford the loss of money, can cash out life insurance policies or donate the whole policy to a charity. The cash value can be used by these organization to aid more people than they currently are able to.
Another possibility is to change the recipient of your life insurance policy to a charitable organization. If you are confident in your finances and perhaps have excess life insurance, then you can donate that money to a charitable organization, just like willing money to charity.
These actions can have the same tax benefits that donation in general has. If you are looking for tax relief, then donating a life insurance policy can have the same benefits.
To get a
Term Life Insurance Quote or Research how to
Buy Life Insurance Online visit
Efinancial.com
Posted on Sun, Sep 09, 2007
Death comes uninvited. The initial shock and the sorrow of a sudden loss can make even the simplest, most straightforward steps, like filing a life insurance claim, seem overwhelming and complex. All too often, the spouse of a family breadwinner does not have the details about how to go about claiming life insurance.
While procedures, conditions and requirements may vary, common sense and full disclosure of information typically represent the simplest path to filing a life insurance claim.
Filing A Life Insurance Claim
If the the original policy is on file or in hand, the claims process is considerably easier. If the policy is missing, or out of reach, the details should be gathered and made available to to the insurance company, including the name of the policyholder, the policy number and the date of issuance of the policy.
Completing a Life Insurance Claims Form
After the policy has been found, the next thing to do is to locate the agent who sold your spouse the policy. If the agent cannot be found, the insurance company can be approached directly and the life insurance claimant or “nominee” can fill out the claims form. When completing the claims form, the nominee has to specify the date, place and cause of death. Along with this, details of the insurance policy also need to be filled in.
The claims form needs to be accompanied by a set of documents. The most important of the lot is the death certificate, issued by the municipality where the person was buried or cremated. This has to be accompanied by a statement by the doctor(s) who treated the policyholder before death.
Life Insurance Claims In Case of Accident
In case the death was due to an accident, then a first information report needs to be filed with the police, a copy of which has to be filed along with the claims form. Along with this, a police report, which has details of the circumstances of the death, and a post-mortem report (if at all it was carried out) also need to be filed.
Also, the nominee needs to prove that he or she is the nominee mentioned in the policy. In this a case, a copy of any photo identity card suffices.
There is no fixed timeframe within which the claim needs to be filed. The only thing that the nominee needs to prove is that the policy was in force when the policyholder died.
What if the premiums haven’t been paid?
If a term insurance policy has lapsed, because the policyholder has not paid the premiums, the insurance company does not process the claim.
Term insurance is pure insurance. In term plans, in case of death of the policyholder during the period of the policy, his nominee gets the sum assured (commonly known as the cover age amount). Of course, if the policyholder survives the period of the policy, he does not get anything.
In case of insurance policies other than term plan, however, a more lenient view is taken, provided the policyholder has paid premiums for three consecutive years before defaulting. After deducting for the premium due and other charges, the proportionate sum assured is paid out.
Find more information in the EFinancial Insurance E-Learning Center.
To get a
Term Life Insurance Quote or Research how to
Buy Life Insurance Online visit
Efinancial.com
Posted on Wed, Aug 22, 2007
Articles in newspapers across America are trumpeting the latest movement in life insurance shopping. The place to look…and to buy… is online!
With an ever-widening range of life insurance policies and products available online, you most economical insurance policy deal could be just a click away.
Why is insurance moving online? Traditionally, most insurance products have been transacted through an individual agent or a bank. But when it comes down to choices, the traditonal model offers close to none. Most of these historical entities normally deal with the products of just one company. You can’t choose the right policy if you don’t have a choice.
Insurance shopping websites like Efinancial provide a different service altogether. Online insurance comparison Websites act as online brokers letting consumers compare the product features and benefits of several different companies. Insurance brokers in the brick and mortar world serve partly the same purpose, but most brokers focus on high volumes corporate accounts and large organizations, not individual policies.
Just a click or two will do it! Shopping and buying life insurance online is as easy as a couple of clicks of your computer mouse. A small amount of information is all that is required to initiate the quoting process. Life insurance answers can be returned in some cases in as litle as five minutes time. Of course, details on each of the policies are also available. Shoppers are well advised to read the fine print and only go with an online insurance broker they can trust!
To get a
Term Life Insurance Quote or Research how to
Buy Life Insurance Online visit
Efinancial.com