A Brief Explanation Of Life Insurance
Life insurance (or assurance) is and agreement between an insurance providing company and the individual that takes out a policy with them. The agreement is based idea that for a recurring fee, the insurance company will payout an agreed sum to the beneficiaries of the insured (most of the time this will be family) upon the insureds death.
In some countries, insurance companies have been known to include catering costs for the funeral in their policy agreement, but in the UK the main form of life insurance agreement is to simply have a lump sum paid to the specified party upon the demise of the insured person.
A life insurance contract consists of terms and these terms describe the events that the person will be covered for should they happen. There will usually be certain circumstances of death that insurance companies will not cover like riots, suicide or war.
Life based contracts will usually fall into two different categories, protection policies and investment policies. Protection policies are those that provide a benefit to those parties specified in the contract, usually a lump sum, in the event of a specified scenario. Investment policies are where the main objective is to facilitate the growth of capital by regular or single premiums. Common forms (in the US anyway) are whole life, universal life and variable life policies.
The beneficiary is the person(s) who will receive the payout upon the death of the insured person and can be changed at any time by the policy holder unless the beneficiary is irrevocable in which case the policy holder must have express permission from the beneficiary in order to make any changes regarding the beneficiary.
There is a difference between the policy owner and the insured, although they are usually the same person. Say a man takes out an insurance policy on his own life; he is then the policy holder and the insured. However if his wife takes out a policy for his life, then she is the policy holder and he is still the insured.
Insurance companies do however want to put restraints on who can take out policies for someone else’s life. This is because if anyone can take out a policy for anyone else’s life, then there is a good chance that people will start taking out policies for people who they know will die soon or worse still, people who they intend to kill. So insurance companies sought to limit the people who can take out insurance policies on someone else’s life to only those who will suffer a genuine loss if the insured were to die, i.e. family members or those who can prove that they are close friends.
Life insurance is essentially, as with most insurance contracts, a contract between the insured and the provider whereby a payment is made on a regular basis to the insurance provider by the policy holder, and upon the occurrence of one of the terms described in the contract, a lump sum (or another predetermined form of proceed) is paid out to beneficiaries defined in the contract.
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