Insurance World

If you’re shopping for an affordable life insurance rate, you’re going to need to look at several different kinds of life insurance policies available.

Term life insurance policies are usually the least expensive of all the life insurance policies available. A term life insurance policy will fit your budget, but will only insure you for a certain time period. A term life insurance policy is ideal for people who can not afford a more expensive life insurance rate and those who are not looking for permanent life insurance coverage. Most people who choose to purchase term life insurance policies are just starting out in the workforce, do not have the funds to pay high life insurance rates, and foresee their life insurance coverage needs changing in the future. With a term life insurance policy, you know exactly what you are getting – life insurance.

Universal life insurance policies are pretty much right in the middle of term life insurance policies and whole life insurance policies. They are more affordable than whole life insurance policies, but they offer investment components and cash value accruement that is not always guaranteed. You may earn some cash, but you may not. With whole life insurance policies, your cash accruement is guaranteed.

Whole life insurance policies are more expensive that term life insurance policies and universal life insurance policies. These policies cover you for life, and offer an investment component. However, you may not be interested in the investment component, or you may already have another, more efficient, way of investing your money. Many people find a whole life insurance policy’s lack of flexibility a turn-off. Most people who choose to purchase whole life insurance policies are wealthy and looking for extra investment components.

Be sure to take the time to shop for the life insurance rate you need. Talk with a life insurance agent about your life insurance needs and the price you can afford.

It’s simple, always have your Life Insurance policy “Written in Trust”. This may sound technical but it is easy to understand and it’s so easy to organise.

“Written in Trust” ensures that in the event of a claim, the policy will pay directly to the beneficiaries you name on the policy when you first take it out. If you do not do this, the policy will payout to your legal estate and this inevitably means that the money stays in your solicitor’s hands for some time.

Yes, that implies legal delays and, of course, your solicitor takes a small cut!

Then, if the value of your taxable estate exceeds Ј275,000, and remember your home can easily account for the lion’s share of the Ј275,000 limit without much difficulty, your estate will have to pay Inheritance Tax. This represents 40% of the estate’s taxable value in excess of Ј275,000. So, if your estate has to pay Inheritance Tax and the proceeds of your life policy go to your estate, the taxman gets his hands on 40% of your life policy!

But it’s so easy to avoid all these problems.

Simply get your policy “Written in Trust”. Then the life insurance company pays out immediately, directly, and totally tax-free, to the persons you have named on your policy. All you have to do is tell the online brokerage organising your policy that you want your policy “Written in Trust” and they will automatically sort it out for you.

This advice remains sound even if the policy is designed to pay off your mortgage. Rather than your estate using the insurance payout to pay off your mortgage, the policy can be written in trust and paid to your partner and then he or she can use that money to pay of the mortgage. The benefit? Well if your taxable estate exceeds the IHT threshold the mortgage is effectively paid off tax-free.

The extra good news is that all the brokers we’ve met will arrange for your policy to be “Written in Trust” as a free of charge service. So it’s a win win situation and there aren’t many of those around these days!