Term Life Insurance Riders Create Delays by Prahlad Kumar
Life insurance riders allow you to bring your policy to a custom-fit, adding whatever provisions and exclusions you require. There is a downside to making your policy non-standard, however, and that is that it can slow down your shopping process considerably, especially if you are shopping for an otherwise easy type of coverage, like term life insurance.
Riders are most commonly used to expand a policy's coverage. For example, a child rider extends coverage to the offspring of the primary insured, and a spouse rider extends coverage to the spouse of the primary insured. Riders may even reduce the coverage a policy provides (and likewise reduce the cost of coverage). The important point, though, is that riders generally change the price of a policy in some way. And therein lies the difficulty.
Because standard life insurance products (that is, policies with no riders) are drawn up in advance, the actuaries (mathematicians) at the insurance company have already determined how much those policies should cost for any sort of insurable person. With the number-crunching already completed, you can instantly compare term life insurance quotes from a multiplicity of insurance companies: a shopper can visit an independent life insurance agency online, enter his or her health information, and in the blink of an eye, compare quoted prices from dozens of insurers.
If that same shopper wishes to attach a rider to his/her policy, however, there's no way to instantly compare life insurance quotes from the comfort of his/her own personal computer. You'll have to speak with a human life insurance agent. Fortunately, some riders are common enough that a life insurance quotes comparison can be effected in a rather timely fashion, even when working through an agent. Among standard riders are the child rider, spouse rider, and accidental death rider. With more eccentric riders, however, a shopper may find his/her experience severely retarded or even find insurers unwilling to create the requested provision.
When the task of comparing quotes can be done in an instant, and when a shopper can apply for term life insurance online in only a handful of minutes, the delay which riders can cause makes a considerable difference. However, in the case of whole life insurance, obtaining and comparing life insurance quotes takes considerably more work anyway—yes, this holds true for standard whole life policies. Therefore, the inconvenience of considering the financial impact of a rider to the policy is greatly lessened, and the buyer may find it well worthwhile to customize his/her coverage with whatever riders will do.
Copyright (c) 2010 Prahlad kumar
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