July 29th, 2010
It can be very difficult to decide if you need life insurance. Life insurance can be an extremely onerous financial commitment and investment, and it will also last for a considerable period of time, so you should take careful consideration in deciding if it is the best way of achieving the financial and other goals you and your loved ones may have.
Life Insurance Policy
Basically, a life insurance policy will cause a sum to be paid to the named beneficiary upon the death of the insured. This sum will generally be paid to the beneficiary, free of income tax. So in which instances is life insurance generally used above its alternatives? Well its primary function is to provide death benefit protection in a tax efficient way. For example, if you would like to transfer wealth from your estate to your beneficiaries you can do it through life insurance.
You should now that it may still be liable to federal estate taxes. It can also be used to ensure the continuation or protection of a business and to provide financial benefits to your partners or employees who may otherwise be at risk financially. It may also be used to support your family or other dependents that rely on your income during life. It can replace this income and support them in your place for a period. It can also be used to supplement retirement income in various instances when other contributions are not possible.
Be Aware
You can access the money in your policy unless it is a Modified Endowment Contract. Whats more, it will be federal income tax free so long as you make the withdrawal by borrowing against the policy and do not exceed what you have paid into the policy. Withdrawals from an MEC are subject to federal income tax on the gains they have made. There is an additional 10% tax in certain situations.
You should be aware that all withdrawals and loans against a permanent life insurance policy would reduce the policys value and the amount of any pay out upon death of the insured. There may also be various fees and penalties associated with accessing the money early so you should be aware of these and if they are very onerous, you may wish to look for an alternative source of funds so that you dont have to fall prey to these. Also, if your policy is invested on your behalf, the amount available for withdrawal or loans may be less or more than what you have paid in, depending on how your investments perform.
Categories: Life Insurance UK
July 22nd, 2010
It can be very difficult to decide if you need life insurance. Life insurance can be an extremely onerous financial commitment and investment, and it will also last for a considerable period of time, so you should take careful consideration in deciding if it is the best way of achieving the financial and other goals you and your loved ones may have.
Life Insurance Policy
Basically, a life insurance policy will cause a sum to be paid to the named beneficiary upon the death of the insured. This sum will generally be paid to the beneficiary, free of income tax. So in which instances is life insurance generally used above its alternatives? Well its primary function is to provide death benefit protection in a tax efficient way. For example, if you would like to transfer wealth from your estate to your beneficiaries you can do it through life insurance.
You should now that it may still be liable to federal estate taxes. It can also be used to ensure the continuation or protection of a business and to provide financial benefits to your partners or employees who may otherwise be at risk financially. It may also be used to support your family or other dependents that rely on your income during life. It can replace this income and support them in your place for a period. It can also be used to supplement retirement income in various instances when other contributions are not possible.
Be Aware
You can access the money in your policy unless it is a Modified Endowment Contract. Whats more, it will be federal income tax free so long as you make the withdrawal by borrowing against the policy and do not exceed what you have paid into the policy. Withdrawals from an MEC are subject to federal income tax on the gains they have made. There is an additional 10% tax in certain situations.
You should be aware that all withdrawals and loans against a permanent life insurance policy would reduce the policys value and the amount of any pay out upon death of the insured. There may also be various fees and penalties associated with accessing the money early so you should be aware of these and if they are very onerous, you may wish to look for an alternative source of funds so that you dont have to fall prey to these. Also, if your policy is invested on your behalf, the amount available for withdrawal or loans may be less or more than what you have paid in, depending on how your investments perform.
Categories: Life Insurance UK
July 15th, 2010
Term life insurance provides you with a more affordable opportunity to ensure you mortgage payments in the unfortunate event of your death. Even though they are offered for a limited time-period, but you can always match them up with your mortgage payment cycles of 10 or 20-year contracts. For the budget conscious, this definitely seems to be a smarter alternative for a low cost death benefit.
Insurance companies offer cheap term life insurance policies with different contract time periods, conversion credit during the first five years and transferable waiver of premium.
Affordable alternatives are available through comparison-shopping at various online insurance intermediaries websites. Other than being a cheaper option, term life insurance is better in other aspects when compared to a mortgage life insurance. There are much personalization options available for a term life insurance policy. The proceeds from a term life insurance go directly to the beneficiaries instead of the lender, so the money can be used by your dependents as desired which could be even to pay off other debts. Term life insurance also pays a death benefit. According to NAIC (National Association of Insurance Commissioners), the companies pay almost 90 cents to the pound in benefits for term life insurance policies. Typically the whole life insurance will be 2 to 3 times costlier than a term life insurance.
Term life insurance offers the cheapest alternative to provide insurance coverage for your dependents. It has allowed individuals under budget-crunch situations to buy policies with larger payout amounts due to the limited term of the coverage. So, if you can renew your term life insurance regularly during your lifetime, you have actually found an affordable alternative to expensive whole life insurance.
Categories: Life Insurance UK
July 8th, 2010
Life insurance is a type of insurance policy that provides financial security and peace of mind for you, your family and dependants. It is based on the simple principle that should you die during the term of the life insurance policy, the person(s) named in the insurance policy will receive a lump sum or series of payments for the insured amount. If you have a mortgage andor are the main income producer in the family, a life insurance policy will ensure your family’s future is secure as the payment can be configured to pay off all outstanding debts and provide a substantial income for the ones that you leave behind.
Buying life insurance
When buying life insurance it is advisable to shop around for the best discount. Life insurance premiums can vary significantly between life insurance providers, while some providers will even offer discount life insurance, guaranteeing their premiums to be the lowest available on a like-for-like basis. If you want the best discount on your life insurance policy you’ll need to look out for special discount offers run by the insurance providers. This may take some time however, and you’re not guaranteed that the next discount offer that becomes available will be the right type of life insurance policy for your circumstances.
Alternatively, you should instead conduct your search for discount life insurance online.
Online = discount life insurance
Why is it important to look online for discount life insurance you may ask? Well, the reasons are numerous! It’s quick, it’s easy and there is a huge amount of choice available on life insurance policies at the click of your mouse. Best of all though, life insurance policies found online are generally cheaper than those found offline. This is because there are fewer overheads involved in processing an online application form for life insurance than there is when a life insurance company processes a paper-based application. The costs incurred by the life insurance company when they advertise on the Internet are also lower than say if they were to advertise on the TV, radio or via newspapers.
Additionally, portals and web sites that provide a comparison between different life insurance policies, some of which will be discount polices, are certainly worth a visit, especially if they provide access to online application forms. Why are they worth a visit? Well, not only will these portals offer you a selection of the lowest priced discount policies available, but you may also be able to pick up a further discount when buying the life insurance policy through the portal.
Categories: Life Insurance UK
July 1st, 2010
A Free Term Life Insurance Quote Is Only Easy To Obtain
By searching online for life insurance, you can get a free term life insurance quote with no obligation to buy. In order to get the free term life insurance quote, you fill in the form on the appropriate page of the life insurance company website. You do have to make sure you provide honest answers to all the questions in order to get the life insurance you need.
Once the company receives your request for a free term life insurance quote, then an agent will carefully review the application and email a quote to you based on the term of the policy and the amount of the death benefit. You should not base the quote you receive on that of a friend or another family member because every individual is different in hisher needs. Because you are shopping for low cost term life insurance, you do need to request free quotes from at least three companies.
Term life insurance is only good for the life of the term. At the end of the term, you have the option to renew the policy, but you may not get it for the same free term life insurance quote as you started with. This is because your age has certainly changed and your needs in terms of a settlement have also changed. However, you still want to get the best rates possible for low cost term life insurance.
You do not have to be in perfect health to get a free term life insurance quote. In fact, you can get low cost life insurance without even having a medical exam. Even if you do have life-threatening diseases, you can get a free quote for term life insurance but it may not be the low cost term life insurance you are hoping for. This is because you are in a higher risk category because your chances of dying within the term are much greater. Even if the premiums are a little higher, you are still leaving something for your family and to pay for your funeral.
Categories: Life Insurance UK
June 24th, 2010
When considering life insurance, youre planning and preparing for an event most of us would rather not think about. But life insurance represents a critical step in managing your personal finances and ensuring your familys well-being.
The Two Approaches to Life Insurance
You can use one of two approaches to estimate how much life insurance you should buy: the needs approach or the replacement-income approach. Using the needs approach, you calculate the amount of life insurance necessary to cover your familys financial needs if you die. Using the replacement-income approach, you calculate the amount of life insurance you need to equal the income your family will lose. Lets look briefly at each approach.
You need how much?
Using the needs approach, you add up the amounts that represent all the needs your family will have after your death, including funeral and burial costs, uninsured medical expenses, and estate taxes. However, your family depends on you to pay for other needs, such as your childs college tuition, business or personal debts, and food and housing expenses over time.
The needs approach is somewhat limiting. The task of identifying and tallying family needs is difficult, and separating the true needs of your family from what you want for them is often impossible.
Replacing Income
Using the replacement-income approach for estimating life insurance requirements, you calculate the life insurance proceeds that would replace your earnings over a specified number of years after your death.
Life insurance companies sometimes approximate your replacement income at four or five times your annual income. A more precise estimation considers the actual amount your family members need annually, the number of years for which they will need this amount, and the interest rate your family will earn on the life insurance proceeds, as well as inflation over the years during which your family draws on the life insurance proceeds.
Note: Do remember as you quantify the income you want to replace that Social Security provides generous survivors benefits if youve qualified. These benefits can easily total 2,000 a month or more.
Calculating Replacement-Income Amounts with Excel
If youve got access to a computer running Microsoft Excel, the popular spreadsheet program, you can use your computer to calculate the amount of insurance you need to replace a specified number of years of income. Suppose, for example, that you want to buy enough life insurance to replace the income from a 50,000-a-year job for 15 years. If you figure your family will earn 5% on the life insurance proceeds should the worst case scenario occur, you enter the following formula into a cell in an Excel workbook to calculate the replacement income life insurance amount:
=-PV(5%,15,50000)
Excel returns the formula result 518,982.90 indicating that you would need roughly 520,000 of life insurance, invested at 5%, to payout 50,000 a year for 15 years.
Two Calculation Tips
If you want to factor in inflation because youre trying to replace income over a long period of time, you should use a real rate of return rather a regular, or nominal, rate of return.
To calculate a real rate of return, subtract the inflation rate from the interest rate in the formula. For example, if you expect 2% inflation, you could replace the formula shown earlier with this formula:
=-PV(5%-2%,15,50000)
Heres a final calculation tip: You probably want to round up your number. For example, if the formula provided earlier returns the value 518982.90, you might want to round up this value to 600,000. Or 750,000.
Categories: Life Insurance UK
June 17th, 2010
Not everyone needs life insurance. The first thing to do is make sure you need it. Life insurance is really meant for your family members or other dependents who rely on your earnings.
Why You Buy Life Insurance
You buy life insurance so that, if you die, your dependents can live the same kind of life they live now. Strictly speaking, then, life insurance is only a means of replacing your earnings in your absence. If you dont have dependents (say, because youre single) or you dont have earnings (say, because youre retired), you dont need life insurance. Note that children rarely need life insurance because they almost never have dependents and other people dont rely on their earnings.
Life Insurance Comes in Two Flavors
If you do need life insurance, you should know that it comes in two basic flavors: term insurance and cash-value insurance (also called whole life insurance). Ninety-nine times out of 100, what you want is term insurance.
Term Life is Simple to Buy and Understand
Term life insurance is simple, straightforward life insurance. You pay an annual premium, and if you die, a lump sum is paid to your beneficiaries. Term life insurance gets its name because you buy the insurance for a specific term, such as 5, 10, or 15 years (and sometimes longer). At the end of the term, you can renew your policy or get a different one. The big benefits of term insurance are that its cheap and its simple.
Cash Value is Trickier
The other flavor of life insurance is cash-value insurance. Many people are attracted to cash-value insurance because it supposedly lets them keep some of the premiums they pay over the years. After all, the reasoning goes, you pay for life insurance for 20, 30, or 40 years, so you might as well get some of the money back. With cash-value insurance, some of the premium money is kept in an account that is yours to keep or borrow against.
This sounds great. The only problem is that cash-value insurance usually isnt a very good investment, even if you hold the policy for years and years. And its a terrible investment if you keep the policy for only a year or two. Whats more, to really analyze a cash-value insurance policy, you need to perform a very sophisticated financial analysis. And this is, in fact, the major problem with cash-value life insurance.
While perhaps a handful of good cash-value insurance policies are available, many perhaps mostare terrible investments. And to tell the good from the bad, you need a computer and the financial skills to perform something called discounted cash-flow analysis. If you do think you need cash-value insurance, it probably makes sense to have a financial planner perform this analysis for you. Obviously, this financial planner should be a different person from the insurance agent selling you the policy.
Whats the bottom line? Cash-value insurance is much too complex a financial product for most people to deal with. Note, too, that any investment option thats tax-deductiblesuch as a 401(k), a 401(b), a deductible IRA, a SEPIRA, or a Keogh planis always a better investment than the investment portion of a cash-value policy. For these two reasons, I strongly encourage you to simplify your financial affairs and increase your net worth by sticking with tax-deductible investments.
If you do decide to follow my advice and choose a term life insurance policy, be sure that your policy is non-cancelable and renewable. You want a policy that cannot be canceled under any circumstances, including poor health. (You have no way of knowing what your health will be like ten years from now.) And you want to be able to renew the policy even if your health deteriorates. (You dont want to go through a medical review each time a term is up and you need to renew.)
Categories: Life Insurance UK
June 10th, 2010
Whole life insurance, also known as cash-value insurance is a basic and consistent type of permanent life insurance which remains in effect your entire life at a level premium. This life insurance is a good choice got you if you do not expect your life insurance needs to diminish over time. A portion of your premium goes into a reserve fund called cash value that builds up over the years your policy is in affect. Your reserve fund is tax-deferred and you can borrow against it, until you withdraw it.
The premiums must generally remain constant over the life of the policy and must be paid periodically according to the amount indicated in the policy. You may also have the option of a single premium — paying all of the premiums at once with a single lump sum. Your cash values will grow to equal the amount of the death benefit when you turn to age 100.
Although, whole life insurance is very expensive, and if you’re on a limited budget, you may not be able to afford all the insurance coverage you actually need. But the plus point is that the death
benefit is guaranteed as long as premiums are met. Also death benefit will never decrease if you don’t borrow against it.
Whole life insurance policy’s returns will fluctuate with the markets and will usually follow returns
available from other investments like equity mutual funds. However, if you decide to quit your policy, your cash value can be paid in cash or paid-up insurance.
Whole life insurance is most suitable for you, if you want to:
use it as a tax and estate planning vehicle,
accumulate cash value for a child’s education or retirement,
pay final expenses,
provide money for a favorite charity,
fund a business buysell agreement,
provide key person protection.
Before buying the whole life insurance, you need to think carefully about choosing your level of
coverage. Too often people make the mistake of insufficiently covering or even worse, financially
overextending themselves. This would be a tragic error with whole life insurance policy because
defaulting on premium payments can mean policy cancellation and the loss of your entire investment. So be careful and make sure you:
pick a life insurance policy that has a guaranteed cash value starting at the very first year,
choose the one with the highest cash value in the very first year,
consider “participating” insurance policies which can pay dividends, increasing your policy’s value by boosting both the total cash value and the death benefits,
beware of any insurance policy that levies “surrender charges” when you cancel.
if you ever need to stop paying premiums, your policy lets you use the accumulated cash value of the life insurance policy to pay the premiums, thus keeping your coverage current.
Categories: Life Insurance UK
June 3rd, 2010
Most people are aware of how life insurance works and what are the events and dangers that it is designed to protect against. They may also have family commitments and people who they provide for and know that some sort of life insurance would protect their family financially, if something were to happen to them. However, it is still often a very difficult decision to make if you are trying to decide whether or not you need life insurance.
Life insurance is a big commitment financially speaking. The premium can vary in cost but can be considerable, then there is also the issue that life insurance often extends over many years, even decades. This means that not only are you committing to pay the premium for this year, but also for many years into the future. There are not many people who can say with certainty what their earnings will be in ten or fifteen or twenty years time.
There are also early termination penalties, which means if you want to end the policy before the expiration of the entire term, you will be financially penalised. This is generally more relevant for life assurance but can also apply to life insurance if your rate has been calculated on the condition that you remain insured for so many years into the future.
If you have life assurance, then it will also be a method of saving for the future. This is a very popular concept, especially these days with the growing concern about the state of pension funds, but it again deserves careful consideration. There are many ways to save for the future, and by deciding to do so by way of a life assurance policy still entails deciding that life insurance is something that you want and are willing to pay for. If you do not need life insurance, then there are probably more efficient ways of saving for retirement than with life assurance, which places a proportion of your savings against the insurance aspect of the policy.
In general, most people will really only be considering life insurance if they have a family to support. This can be a spouse and generally children. However, situations frequently change, people get divorced, and children always grow up and become independent. If your family situation is likely to change, you should familiarise yourself with the ways you can end the policy early and what penalties would apply. However, if you have a young family and are concerned about their financial security for the future, then life insurance will be a great opportunity for you to provide for these concerns.
Categories: Life Insurance UK
May 27th, 2010
Making the decision to buy life insurance can have a lasting effect. Without a life insurance policy your family could suffer great financial hardship when you die. Life insurance is a way to ensure that you can still take care of your family after you are gone. Knowing what considerations you should make when choosing a life insurance policy can help make the process easier.
Determining the amount of life insurance really depends on your personal situation. Consider what would happen to your family without your income. If it would cause financial problems then you should take that into account when choosing the amount of our policy. You should also consider factors like health insurance that could increase the needed income.
The cost of life insurance policies also varies depending on many factors. Company life insurance policies are usually always going to be the cheapest. Most often, though, you are only covered for the period of time you work for the employer. Also you usually have to be with an employer for a certain amount of time before you are eligible to receive life insurance benefits. Private life insurance polices can range in costs depending on the agents fees, types of coverage and limits. Other factors that effect costs are high risk factors, like someone who smokes, is overweight or has a preexisting medical condition.
The best way to choose a life insurance policy is to consider all the factors and take time to compare different policies. This is an important decision and should not be rushed. Discuss the policy with you spouse to ensure you have covered everything and havent forgot any important details. Once you have chosen a policy be sure to review it often, especially after any significant life change. The importance of life insurance is often underestimated until the need for it arises, so planning ahead and purchasing a policy will ensure a stable future for your family.
Categories: Life Insurance UK
