Senior Life Insurance
We get a lot of inquiries for senior life insurance, even for life insurance for age 85 and older. Does it make sense? Obviously, the older one gets the higher the premium (price) for life insurance. Is it a good idea? You should look at it as an economic decision.
There are several reasons to get life insurance over age 65. Your net worth may have grown to the point where there will be estate and inheritance taxes that will cut down what is passed to the next generation. A solution can be life insurance placed in an irrevocable life insurance trust (ILIT) that would create funds to pay taxes and if done right, those funds would go to the next generation free of any estate or income taxes.
If both husband and wife are still living, a type of insurance policy one could use for this purpose would be survivorship life insurance (this kind of life insurance policy also goes by other names such as Joint and Survivor life, Second to Die life insurance, Survivor Life Insurance even Joint Life Insurance). A survivorship life insurance policy pays the insurance amount after both wife and husband have passed away. This makes it less expensive than an individual policy that insures one person.
By the way this kind of plan is also used for parents of children with special needs. Read about joint and survivor life insurance at http://www.lifeinsure.com/lifeinsurance/survivorship.asp.
You might want to leave funds to children or to your spouse to help them financially. In that case you should look at getting a permanent life insurance policy such as whole life insurance or universal life insurance. Term life insurance does not make as much sense at older ages. The decision for you to make is whether the amount that it will cost you each year is worth the benefit. You can look at the cost of life insurance as a discounted amount paid each year.
For example if the premium for a $1 million policy is $50,000 per year at age 70 then the “discounted cost†is 5% of the benefit per year. In that example you’d pay 5 cents per year for each dollar of eventual benefit. With a guaranteed whole life policy or guaranteed universal life that $1,000,000 of eventual is guaranteed to be paid at death and will be paid free of income tax when left to a named beneficiary.
To get more information or get personalized life insurance quotes for permanent life insurance such as whole life or universal life go to Lifeinsure.com.
