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Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Life Insurance Briefly Explained

By Rodney Daniel Bolton

The term Life Insurance refers to an agreement between an insurance provider and the policy holder whereby the policy holder pays a certain amount of money at regular intervals and the insurance provider agrees to pay out an agreed sum of money to the policy holders dependents (usually family) upon the death of the policy holder.

Some countries tend to have funeral costs covered in most of their life insurance policies. In the UK however the general protocol for life insurance is to just have a lump sum paid out to the family of the deceased.

Life insurance policies are legal contracts and the terms mentioned in those contracts describe the events that the insured person will be covered for. There are often circumstances of death that are not covered in a life insurance contract such as war, suicide, riot or civil commotion.

Life contracts usually come in one of two forms, either a protection policy or an investment policy. Protection policies will be fairly standard life insurance policies in that they will require a benefit to be paid to the contracts beneficiaries (usually a lump sum) in the occurrence of an event described in the contract. Investment policies however are used for the growth of capital by regular premiums (payments). Common types are variable life policies, whole life policies and universal life policies.

The term beneficiary refers to the person who will receive the lump sum upon the death of the insured person. Usually the beneficiary can be changed at any time unless an irrevocable beneficiary is appointed. In this case, the beneficiary must grant their permission regarding any changes relating to the beneficiary.

The policy holder and the insured are not necessarily the same person (although they usually are) but someone can take out a policy to cover someone else's life, for example, a wife could take out a policy on her husbands life, making her the policy holder and him the insured.

Insurance companies do however want to put restraints on who can take out policies for someone else's life. This is because if anyone can take out a policy for anyone else's life, then there is a good chance that people will start taking out policies for people who they know will die soon or worse still, people who they intend to kill. So insurance companies sought to limit the people who can take out insurance policies on someone else's life to only those who will suffer a genuine loss if the insured were to die, i.e. family members or those who can prove that they are close friends.

Life insurance is essentially, as with most insurance contracts, a contract between the insured and the provider whereby a payment is made on a regular basis to the insurance provider by the policy holder, and upon the occurrence of one of the terms described in the contract, a lump sum (or another predetermined form of proceed) is paid out to beneficiaries defined in the contract. - 23211

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