Term Life Insurance Rates Going Up Due to Credit Crunch
The premiums for new term life insurance policies are on the rise. Texas Life broker is encouraging consumers to make sure that they have taken advantage of todays’s low rates before they increase.
When you purchase a term life insurance policy for 10, 20 or 30 years, you are guaranteed that your premiums will not change for the amount of death benefit that you have purchased. Cosumers can cancel their coverage at any time, but the insurance carrier cannot change the premium amount for the policy term.
Nothing stops a carrier from increasing premiums on new policies, which is what is happening now. Given these increases, consumers need to make sure that they have all the term life insurance coverage that they will need for the forseeable future. Regardless of price increases or decreases, premiums vary significantly from company to company, so it pays to compare prices.
The credit crunch affects companies acquiring new life insurance customers because new life insurance policies are never profitable in te short run. It can take companies a number of years to earn back their initial costs of adding new customers due to sales, marketing and underwriting costs that the company must pay upfront. In effect, the company borrows money from itself or someone else to cover those early costs, then they get the money back over time as they collect premiums ofr the new policy. Therefore, as the ability to obtain credit tightens, it results in a cost increase for the company, or it may limit the number of new policies a company can issue.
A further problem exsists for those life companies that depend on reinsurance companies in order to acquire larger policies. Reinsurance companies act as wholesalers to smaller individual life insurance companies who need to spread the risk on larger amounts of coverage for any one person. We suspect that reisnurance companies are being hard hit by the credit crunch and are raising premiums in response.
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