A common way that people search online
when purchasing life insurance is
"affordable" term life insurance.
What exactly does that mean...the term
affordable? We all have a sense of
the word but let's see exactly how it
applies to the decision of what term
life plan is best for you. We'll
also look at how to get the best rate
and most importantly, not pay for
coverage that you do not need. So
let's look a little closer at securing
affordable term life insurance.
Back
to the term affordable. According
to Merriam-Webster's dictionary, the
definition of
afford
is:
1 a:
to manage to bear without serious
detriment <you can't
afford to neglect your health>
b:
to be able to bear the cost of
<can't afford
to be out of work long>
This
doesn't really help us much.
Affordable in terms of life insurance
definitely points towards term life as
oppose to whole life. Whole life
can be considerably more expensive and
as we discussed in our
Term life versus
whole life article, the
benefits seem to be more for the carrier
and whole life agent than you. In
fact, term life is probably the only
kind of life coverage that falls under
the heading of "affordable".
Further more, you are looking at having
this coverage for years if not decades.
This means you need to be able to afford
it...to manage to bear without serious
detriment. A 40 year old can get
100's of thousands of life coverage for
$30-40 monthly. That's affordable.
More importantly, it's much more likely
to be affordable 10 or 20 years from now
if things change in your life
financially. You don't want to be
locked into $100-200 monthly if things
change. The danger is that if your
income decreases or worse yet, you
suffer a layoff, one of the first things
you'll look at cutting is that big life
insurance premium. That
defeats the purpose of buying life
insurance in the first place. We
want affordable term life insurance so
that we can feel we can comfortably
manage the premium over the long haul.
Once
we've realized that term life is the
more affordable path to take, we need to
then address the the critical decision
of how much and how long. We have
written many articles on
how much term life
is adequate and for what
length of time.
With our quoting engine, we've made it
easy to quickly compare different
combinations of amount and time.
You want to again make sure that the
combination results in an amount that
you will be able to afford even between
jobs or during lapses or decreases of
income. Ideally, keep
the premium amount below 5% of your
income.
That
being said, we give you all the tools
you need. The engine will
automatically give you the best priced
plans across multiple carriers to
compare. This ability to quote
multiple plans and multiple carriers
with their various life
insurance price
points is single handedly the
best approach to find affordable life
insurance regardless of age, health, or
amount.
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