The best life insurance for you will depend on your financial goals, budget and how much cash value you want to build within a policy. Life insurance is a contract between you and an insurance company. Essentially, in exchange for your premium payments, the insurance company will pay a lump sum known as a death benefit to your beneficiaries after your death.
Your beneficiaries can use the money for whatever purpose they choose. Often this includes paying everyday bills, paying a mortgage or putting a child through college. Having the safety net of life insurance can ensure that your family can stay in their home and pay for the things that you planned for.
Mutual of Omaha
Mutual of Omaha offers the best combination of high ratings for financial strength, competitive internal policy costs for indexed universal life insurance policies, and higher interest rate gains from their portfolio of bonds and mortgages.
Pacific Life
Cash value life insurance can be used to supplement retirement income, especially for those who have maxed out their 401(k) contributions. If you want to use life insurance for retirement planning, you’re generally looking for a policy that will be good at building cash value. You can access the money through a policy loan or withdrawal.
Low internal costs also help because your cash value won’t be eaten up by policy expenses.
Pacific Life provides a crucial combination of competitive pricing and reliable illustrations for policies that can maximize cash value accumulation for most of its life insurance types. The company has also shown good performance of the invested assets that fuel cash value growth.
Equitable
Equitable (formerly AXA Equitable) offers buyers of variable universal life (VUL) insurance a superior combination of competitive pricing for many ages and health risks, generally good access to cash value within VUL policies and a wide selection of mutual fund-like accounts among its investment choices.
Lincoln Financial
Life insurance buyers ages 57 to 72 have more time to build cash value than senior buyers, but not the decades of growth that younger buyers can enjoy. Lincoln Financial offers a wide range of competitive products that Boomers can choose from depending on whether they’re looking for low risk policies or more aggressive investments for cash value accumulation. Lincoln Financial policies also generally offer competitive costs and options that will build cash value well in the early policy years. Lincoln’s financial strength is another advantage.
John Hancock
John Hancock offers a superior option for many types of nicotine users.
Many life insurance companies offer only smoker’s rates for regular users of tobacco products. Premiums and internal policy costs for these “smokers” are generally twice as much (or more) as the costs for non-tobacco users. However, some insurers will consider infrequent or occasional “celebratory” cigar users for their best rates under certain circumstances. If you use nicotine in any form (cigarettes, edibles, patches, vaping, etc.) it can really pay off to shop around for life insurance.
John Hancock offers relatively friendly underwriting for celebratory cigar users:
Super Preferred Non-Smoker: No more than 12 cigars per year, no nicotine in past 5 years, and no nicotine in microurinalysis Preferred Non-Smoker: No more than 12 cigars per year, no nicotine in past 2 years, and no nicotine in microurinalysis Standard Plus Non-Smoker: No more than 24 cigars per year, no nicotine in past year, and no nicotine in microurinalysis
