Seniors Life Insurance

Seniors life insurance is presently a changing market. Some top life insurance companies are doing their best to incorporate new medical and health knowledge into their underwriting practices so that they can get better premiums on seniors life insurance for senior citizens. There are some things that are now being taken more lightly about senior citizens' health status for those who are at least 65 or 70 years old, such as height and weight, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and family medical history. While these things still matter, some argue that they cannot be as important for seniors as they are for younger people--because the seniors have lived this long already, so for them in particular those things must not be as much of a potential risk factor as they are for the average person. Also, some health professionals point at that some of these things get "worse" naturally with age just due to the aging process--such as cholesterol levels--so they should not be considered as seriously as age itself.

Smoking and chronic medical conditions are still taken as seriously as ever, however. And, the biggest factor of all in life insurance underwriting is still age--and that cannot be avoided by senior citizens!

Also, while premiums are sometimes being lowered by some companies with respect to the factors mentioned above, if you have waited until you are over 60 or 65 to get life insurance, you still won't find it cheap, and there will be restrictions placed upon how much death benefit you can buy and how long you can buy a policy for. You will also find it very difficult to find a cash-building life insurance policy at a senior citizen age; you will probably need to take a term policy--but that's okay, because at that age you shouldn't be buying any "permanent" life insurance anyway.

Sometimes, there will also be an unavoidable delay in actual coverage, even though you must start paying the high premiums right away. This is to protect the insurance company against "adverse selection". This delay in coverage clause acts in a similar way to the "suicide clause" of younger peoples' life insurance. Typically this clause states that if the insured senior dies within 24 or 36 months of the policy going into force, their beneficiaries receive no death benefit--only a return of the premiums paid and perhaps some interest on them.

So, you have to know what to expect, and be read to pay high premiums for a limited amount of death benefit. Due to this fact, it's important to ask yourself if you really need life insurance at this point in your life if you are a senior citizen. If you've gotten by without it this far, then hopefully you did the rest of your financial planning right and have a nice retirement nest egg full of money. If that's the case, you should only take seniors life insurance if you have none at all and have a special need for it, such as if you're a key man in a business partnership or don't want to burden your children/grandchildren with having to take care of your final expenses including paying off any debts you owe. Life insurance is normally for the younger people, so seniors life insurance may not be in your best interests.

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