Term Life Insurance Rates Can Be Affected By Your Family's Health History

To get the lowest rates for term life insurance some companies will consider your immediate family health history. Some companies will consider cancer history within your family and some companies will consider heart disease history. So you may be in excellent health but still not be able to get the lowest rate from the insurance company. The experienced insurance agent will know which companies are looking for what type of specific family history. An independent insurance agent should be able to use different companies depending on your health situation. Agents that work for or represent only one "main" company may not have the latitude to use different companies, which may be to your disadvantage in getting the lowest, competitive rate.

Term Life Insurance Gets Better

Term life insurance which is the low cost form of life insurance has been getting better over the last few years. Some insurance companies are using newer mortality tables which shows longer life expectancies which can result in lower term insurance rates. Some insurance companies seem to want to sell a lot of term insurance and will have very competitive term rates. Some plans will even have a feature to take money out of the policy while you are still living but have been diagnosed with a terminal illness and you need money for medical expenses. Now is a good time to check out the rates from different companies even if you already have a term life insurance policy. Term life is usually the best choice when the need is for a large amount of life insurance for a short or limited time frame.

Medicare Website Assists in Long Term Care Planning

If you are considering long term care insurance and want to compare it to other ways to pay for long term care, the Medicare website can be a somewhat unbiased resource. Located there is a long term care planning tool that will generate reports on an individualized projection of long term care costs, long term care services available to you and different means of covering the expense. The tool will compare your personal answers to several questions on health, your geographic location, and personal profile to responses from other individuals with similar profiles. This is a very useful tool to give you an idea of how much the possible total costs for long term care may be.

Long Term Care Planning Tool

Long Term Care

My experience with caring for my father for seven years left a deep impression on what I would not want my daughters to go through. Getting him up in morning and the the lifting from the bed to the wheelchair, dressing him, bathing, toileting, along with cleaning the occasional incontinence was the normal routine when he first came back home from the rehabilitation hospital. Over the seven years he needed more and more care and 3a.m. cleanings because of his incontinence became the norm. He finally ended up in the nursing home with Medicaid, or welfare, paying for his one year confinement. I learned a lot about long term care and because of that, learned all I could about long term care insurance. I bought my first long term care insurance policy when I was about age 41, well below the average buying age at that time. Long term care insurance has changed quite bit since then and I have changed my policy and increased the benefits and premium to keep it updated with the expense and breadth of long term care services available now.

I have found that those who have experienced long term care up close and personal are the strongest believers and purchasers of long term care insurance. Those without the experience will tend to procrastinate and focus on the policy premium cost rather than the benefit of the coverage. The believers in the insurance focus on not being a burden on the family for care and financial support and purchase what they can afford believing that some amount of insurance coverage is better than nothing. Those that buy the insurance know that Medicare and medical insurance will not cover long term care expenses and the only government program for long term care is Medicaid, or welfare, which requires that you spend down your assets to $2,000 to qualify.

I believe long term care insurance gives the family more options to consider without the expense of the care determining if my daughter would provide more home care to conserve my savings. The insurance will allow her (if I need long term care I would probably not be capable of making my care decisions) to bring in home care service providers so she won't be burdened with my care. This reminds me of a sticker I bought in a store that reads: "Be Kind to Your Kids, They Choose Your Nursing Home".

If you don't have long term care insurance, you should look into it. I believe it's a worthwhile purchase.