According to a new Hartford Life survey, just 29% of full-time workers making less than $50,000 said they “completely understand” life insurance. And less than two-thirds of those workers had life insurance through their employers.
The survey showed that Gen Y workers and less educated workers also showed a lower understanding along with less ownership of life insurance products. Just 30% of workers with a high school education said they completely understood life insurance, compared with almost two-thirds of workers with a college education.
These numbers are very distressing, but there is hope. In 2010, 69% of working women took advantage of employer-sponsored life insurance benefits, compared with 64% in 2009. Seventy percent of men enrolled in life insurance benefits at work in 2010, up from 67% in 2009.
While a recent LIMRA study tells us that individual ownership of life insurance is at a 50-year low, people are taking advantage of employer-offered benefit programs. This is an area where the LIFE Foundation is working diligently to increase its educational resources to assist these employees in understanding what insurance does, and not just life insurance, but disability, long-term care and in the near future, critical illness insurance.
Our NextGen3 high-school education program is designed to help young consumers and tomorrow’s workers better understand what these insurance tools do and the importance of owning insurance for self-reliance.
Our mission is to educate the American consumer, and during September we are doing this through Life Insurance Awareness Month, a program endorsed by over 100 companies and the leading industry associations to educate today’s consumers about life insurance.
Not many people are interested in plain vanilla, when triple-fudge bomb is available. Let me explain. The promise of big, even huge, returns on investments during the halcyon days of the market drew many people’s eyes off a financial-planning fundamental: life insurance. Who wanted to talk about death and 3 or 4 percent returns on the cash accumulation feature in a permanent life insurance policy when the promise of double-digit returns in the market lay glittering on the horizon?
Then the market tanked, taking with it 20 or 30 percent of many people’s portfolios “sometimes even more. That has lead to a renewed interest in the “plain vanilla” of the financial planning world. September is Life Insurance Awareness Month, the perfect time to explore why proper amounts of life insurance should be the foundation of your personal and business financial plan.
People are facing an entrenched “recession,” collapsing job security, depleted retirement accounts and an unstable investment environment. The beauty of life insurance is that it offers guarantees in a world that suddenly seems void of them. Life insurance provides guaranteed death benefits that keep your family secure in the world they know and the lifestyle they are used to, should the worst happen to you.
Used as a planning tool for small-business owners or partners, those same guaranteed death benefits can help keep your business from dying along with you. What other kind of financial product allows you to pay a such a small amount to ultimately receive such a large, guaranteed benefit?
It’s also good to keep in mind that permanent life insurance policies offer you a guaranteed accumulation feature. As the cash value of the policy grows, it offers you another, not often talked about, feature: the ability to take out a loan against that amount, guaranteed. No bank or savings and loan is going to offer you that promise. What a blessing that guaranteed loan might be if a family or business emergency came along and you needed to tap that money, no questions asked.
It seems to me that you owe it your family and business to take a look at how the guarantees of life insurance can secure their world. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that you had a life insurance policy that promised to pay when your loved ones or business partners needed it most?
If you don’t currently own life insurance, or feel that you don’t have enough to meet your personal and business needs, I encourage you to begin by using LIFE’s free, online Life Insurance Needs Calculator to get a better idea of what amount of life insurance you might need. Then contact your agent or advisor to help you get the coverage you need, or if you need to find an advisor, use the Agent Locator here.
Today marks the beginning of a month when the focus turns to a topic that most people don’t want to talk about or even think about: life insurance. But they do so at their own, and their family’s peril. September is Life Insurance Awareness Month (LIAM). It’s a national campaign designed to draw attention to the fact that many people have no or inadequate amounts of life insurance, which, if not remedied, could have serious and long-lasting consequences for their families.
It’s not about scare tactics. It’s not about getting you to do something you don’t want to. It’s about staring reality in the face. LIMRA just published a study with some shocking numbers. But there is just one number that I want to focus on here: 11 million. Eleven million American families with children under 18 have no life insurance. 11. Million.
Numbers that big can often make your eyes glaze over; a thousand, a million lots, right? Well, let’s make it individual. Let’s take a look at one girl, Tracy Basden, who found herself in financially dire straits because her parents had no life insurance. I’ve watched her video at least a dozen times, and it never fails to make me cry. Please watch it now.
Imagine your children without parents and without money. How does that feel?
Now here is an example of a family that had proper life insurance in place. Actress Leslie Bibb is the spokesperson for LIAM, and says that she was fortunate to have a father “that loved his family enough to expect the unexpected. His life insurance was his legacy of love to our family, allowing us to carry on with our lives and to continue living.†While also heart-wrenching, her story has a very different ending. You can watch it here.
Life Insurance Awareness Month is not a really a national campaign, it’s a personal campaign. What are you going to do today to ensure that your family is taken care of if you die prematurely? You can come up with a thousand excuses for not getting the life insurance you need,11 million families have. I urge you to spend a few minutes with LIFE’s online Life Insurance Needs Calculator to see what amount of insurance you may need. And keep in mind that buying life insurance may be much more reasonable than you expect. For example, a healthy 35-year-old male can get a $250,000, 20-year level term policy for about $170 a year.
Make today the day that you stop being part of the 11-million-family statistic.
How much life insurance do you need?
Most people have too much. This 5-step process can help pinpoint your needs.
These were the headlines for an article in The Chicago Tribune on Aug. 12, 2010. While the article itself is relatively reasonable, the headlines are misleading. Most people do not own too much life insurance. In fact, a LIMRA International report, which was released Aug. 27, 2010, shows that only 44% of Americans own individual life insurance, and 30% own no life insurance at all. Eleven million households with children under the age of 18 own no life insurance. Zero, zip, nada, none.
While the article does a fair explanation of how to determine the appropriate amount of life insurance you might need, I think it is reasonable to assume, based on the LIMRA statistics, that most people are, in fact, under insured, not over insured when it comes to life insurance.
The LIFE Foundation is dedicated to educating these consumers on the importance of life insurance and making sure they understand not just what it is, but what it does. This is our goal for September, which is Life Insurance Awareness Month (LIAM). LIMRA’s statistics make it all the more imperative for us to achieve this goal.
When Congress was debating health-care reform, prior to passage of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, there were what I considered inflated examples of individuals denied insurance, and claims not paid by insurers. These examples ignored the fact that historically insurers have paid 99.5% of all claims.
In many states, group plans, which are defined as employer-sponsored plans with two or more employees, offer guaranteed insurance coverage with no waiting period for preexisting conditions. Individuals with complicated medical histories can also obtain coverage, but at rates which are higher, in order to cover the risk.
One of unintended consequences of the new law, however, is that many carriers will withdraw coverage for individuals, as has already happened in Florida. Because the law permits anybody to get insurance at any time, companies fear that people, especially parents of children, will wait until they are sick and then seek coverage. This places the companies in danger of facing highly unpredictable costs, which there is no way to control.
As a financial consultant who sells and advises business owners and individuals about life and health insurance, I would like to share with you a real-life experience. I was referred to a young hairdresser who owned her own shop and employed two additional people. She was six months pregnant with her fourth child, and was estranged from the father of this baby. Her other three children were covered by her ex-husband. She had no health insurance.
Since she had a business and employees, we were able to establish a small group plan, which insured herimmediately. Her premium was $300 a month. Two months later, complications occurred, and the baby was delivered early by cesarean section. (All her previous prior pregnancies were normal, and this pregnancy was as well, up until this point.)
Since the new baby girl was premature, it was necessary for her to remain in the hospital for over a month. Today, mom and daughter are healthy and doing well. Our client is back at work with the comfort of knowing her medical bills, in excess of $20,000, have been fully paid, no hassles, no questions asked. That’s what good insurance companies do: protect individuals and families at the time an unexpected life event occurs.
The new regulations are the wrong prescription for what ails health care. Free markets and less regulation, not more, is what is needed.
