Last weekend I was at a seminar and met a lovely woman named Lisa, who owns a PR firm and is getting married soon. We were talking about our businesses, I told her about my blog and that I was looking for questions. She had a question about Life Insurance.
She wanted to know what changes she might need to make on her existing life insurance policy. Here are some things you need to consider:
- Changing the beneficiary. Depending on what you had the policy for before, you will probably want to change the beneficiary to your new spouse. If you had kids from a prior marriage/relationship, and the policy was intended to take care of them, you need to either keep them as beneficiary (depending on their age) or whomever would be the guardian if something happened to you.
- Do you need more coverage? If your policy was intended to take care of you and your assets, reassess where you stand now financially. If you are buying a bigger house, or moving into theirs and the expenses are going up, you might need more coverage. Depending on cost and your health situation, you might do a whole new policy or just add a second to what you already have.
- If your needs have decreased, lots of people forget to re-evaluate their life insurance coverage. You might be able to lower your costs with a new policy for a lower face value.
- If your policy was covering business needs, and those have changed, you might be able to make the business and your spouse co-beneficiaries and eliminate the need for buying new coverage.
So in short, add up the annual cost of keeping your honey’s life style at the same level it is now, figure out what your financial contribution to that is, and look into the cost of a new policy. Life insurance in general is for income replacement, so see what is affordable without making you “insurance poor.” For help, call your friendly local insurance agent.
Be Well!
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.