Here’s the simple, maybe too simple, explanation of the types of life insurance: There’s term life insurance and permanent life insurance. Term means for a period of time. Permanent means for your whole life.
Since term life insurance insures you for a period of time (1 year, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years etc.) the insurance company’s risk is limited to that period of time. Since their risk is limited so is your cost (premium). Simply stated, you can outlive term life insurance and if you’re healthy, you’re likely to do so.
Some term policies are renewable which means you can continue the policy after the term is up but at the price for your then older age. Permanent life insurance goes by a variety of names but the most common types are whole life insurance and universal life insurance. Whole life is built to last the rest of your life and guarantees a premium. Your outlay will never increase.
Universal life is also permanent life insurance but has flexibility in premium where you can pay less than whole life but take a risk that you may have to pay more later. (I’ll go into more detail on universal life in a later post on the blog.)
Interestingly, some universal life policies now guarantee the premium. The experts at lifeinsure.com can explain all this thoroughly or get you quotes for all the types of life insurance.
You can also directly quote term life insurance or return of premium life insurance on that site instantly and anonymously to do some comparison shoppping before you talk to anyone.