A Brief Explanation Of Life Insurance

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.

In some countries it is normal to have funeral expenses covered in a insurance policy, but in the UK, companies tend to simply pay out a lump sum to the beneficiaries of the insured upon his/her demise.

A life insurance contract consists of terms and these terms describe the events that the person will be covered for should they happen. There will usually be certain circumstances of death that insurance companies will not cover like riots, suicide or war.

There are two main types of life contracts; protection policies and investment policies. Protection policies will be beneficial to pre-specified parties (usually in the form of a lump sum) in the event of a scenario mentioned in the contract. Investment policies use regular premiums (payments) in order for capital to grow, some common forms are universal life, whole life and variable life policies.

The beneficiary refers to the person who will receive the policy proceeds (usually a lump sum) upon the death of the insured. The beneficiary can be changed at any time by the policy owner unless an irrevocable beneficiary is designated, in which case permission must be gained from the beneficiary regarding any beneficiary changes.

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.

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For more information about life insurance, visit forlifeinsurancequotes.com, an information service for life insurance

Published by: Rodney Daniel Bolton on July 29th, 2009 | Filed under Legal



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