01/06/2014
Two Term Life Insurance Products That Aren’t Worth Your Money
Posted on January 6, 2014 ·
Not all life insurance is created equal. With a market awash with various products, finding life insurance that truly protects you and is worth your investment can be difficult. For those looking to buy term life insurance, rest assured that are some products you don’t need to think about. Here are two life products you should ignore, and why buying them is definitely a bad investment.
Mortgage Life Insurance Doesn’t Protect You
Mortgage life insurance is a form of term life insurance, and is one of the most widely issued forms of term life in Canada.
Protecting your home with mortgage life insurance
Mortgage life insurance may protect your home, but so does term; and it does it better.
Mortgage insurance provides protection against your home should you die while a mortgage is in force, and returns the remaining value or an agreed value as a death benefit to your lending company or bank.
The flaws in mortgage insurance are apparent right away. Unlike other forms of term life insurance, mortgage insurance doesn’t pay you or your family anything at all. Your death benefit is paid in full to your lending company. In addition, your coverage amount will decrease as your mortgage is paid down, and you’ll get less and less value out of your insurance as time goes on.
Consequently, mortgage insurance is a term life product that offers less, doesn’t provide for your loved ones, and is tied to a debt you’re already paying down.
It begs the question: who really benefits from mortgage insurance? Controversies arise from the practice of so-called “post-claims underwriting”. Under this practice, insured may be accepted with no or little medical underwriting at the time of application. On death, the policy is then underwritten in full.
What this has resulted in is a trend of mortgage insurance owners being rejected for claims they never should have qualified for, or being rated unfairly under a process they originally weren’t aware of. This could be disastrous for a family depending on the deceased’s income, and has more than once led to foreclosure on homes in Canada.
Protecting your home, especially with a large mortgage, is definitely a worthy reason to get insured. That being said, there is nothing that mortgage insurance offers that gives it an edge over a term life insurance policy. Rather than seek insurance from your lender, get life insurance that will protect you, for your needs, payable to those you care about.
Decreasing Term Life Insurance Looks Like a Good Deal, But it Doesn’t Make Sense
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Renewing your term on a plan you decide on will provide you with insurance that always protects you.
Term life insurance is intended to protect against large temporary debt. So while you’re paying down debt, you need for insurance will decrease. While it’s very uncommon in Canada, decreasing term life insurance does exist. The theory is that you pre-agree to lower your benefit amount over time in order to pay a lower premium through the life of your term.
While the concept does lend itself nicely to providing insurance that matches paying down your debt; it just doesn’t make sense for most people to buy decreasing term life insurance. Like mortgage insurance, it loses value the longer you hold the policy. While mortgage are budgeted for a certain period of time, other forms of debt may not be paid off as cleanly and as smoothly as your life insurance declines. As a result, you could be under covered, or paying for a policy you don’t need anymore.
Additionally, the prices just don’t justify having your term benefits decrease. Compared to traditional, or level term life insurance, the costs of decreasing term are about 15% less than that of traditional term. What you gain is minor savings on your life insurance, with the assurance that your policy will be worthless by the end of it’s lifetime.
The benefit of term is that it can be bought in long or short terms, and you can often renew with no underwriting. These benefits alone make decreasing term life insurance a piece of confusing nonsense. Renewing your term at rates that reflect your current needs is more sensible for protecting against debt, rather than guessing exactly how much your needs will be 20 years down the road.
Term life insurance gets the label as the “simplest” life insurance for a number of reasons. It’s cheap, it’s easy to apply, and there’s little being done with your money other than paying for your insurance. These two types of products complicate, obscure, an
and ultimately disenfranchise the insurance process by offering incentives that, on closer inspection, just don’t make sense. If you’re looking to buy term life insurance, just buy term life insurance.