Term Insurance Fire Sale!

With the latest news coming today it is no longer conjecture on my part. The downward trend of the past 15 years in life insurance has hit bottom.

ING Reliastar today announced increases in their term insurance rates. I guess the only good news coming from them is that since their permanent products kind of stunk anyway, they’ve decided to leave that pricing along for now.

This comes on the heals of rate increases in Prudential’s no lapse guarantee universal life, Protective Life’s term rate increases and change in conversion options and John Hancock’s term rate increase. This is just the last two weeks. None of these companies has done anything but lower rates for the past 15 years.

Wake up you insured wannabe’s!!! The best rates that have ever existed are going up and if you don’t act quickly, you will miss the bus. If you are considering life insurance for the first time, wake up. If you have a term that is growing short and you want to get a longer term, wake up. Looking for additional life insurance, wake up. If you need permanent insurance in your portfolio and don’t want to pay whole life prices, wake up.

I’m not saying the products are going away, although a few companies have indicated they might go in that direction, but if you need life insurance why would you pay more than you need to. Wake up!

The insurance companies aren’t going to advertise a fire sale on rates they want to phase out. They probably would rather you missed this sale and paid the higher rates. And to ensure that is the likely income they are doing historically fast product changes. The norm used to be 6-8 weeks to phase one product out and a new one in. That’s when they were lowering rates and wanted to capture as much of the higher rate as possible. Now the window of opportunity is only a few weeks. They want to capture as little of the lower rates as possible.

Bottom line. Wake up!