Life Insurance Quotes Comparison

A life insurance quote is calculated just like an actual offer is. The difference between the two is that for a quote, you have to indicate your own rate class; for an offer, the life insurance company spends a few weeks investigating your background to determine your rate class for itself.

Yes, this creates some room for error. You are not sufficiently versed with the insurer's underwriting policies (or maybe even your own circumstances) to be certain of selecting the same rate class for yourself that the insurer would select after is month-long investigation of your medical records, family history, and any other information it chooses to scrutinize. If it turns out that the company decides you belong in a different rate class than you chose for yourself, the price they offer you after you apply to them will differ from the price that you were quoted.

When you work with a life insurance agency, go to an agency website for a life insurance quote, or even consult with an actual life insurance carrier (that's the industry term for the company that actually insures you), you should find some guidelines to help you choose your rate class. Rate classes usually share a common nomenclature from one insurer to the next: Best, Plus, Preferred, and Standard, followed by ten "Tables" which are sub-standard rates (for applicants who have greater-than-standard mortality risk).

Perhaps you've seen the sticky wicket here: since underwriting practices can differ from one company to the next, you may not be in the same rate class for each insurer. That means that even if you select exactly the right rate class for quoting from one particular insurer, that might be the wrong rate class for the next insurer.

The short answer to this quandary is that that's just a hardship you'll have to accept. The long answer is that if you're working with a life insurance agent (and you should be) and if that agent is knowledgeable in the underwriting practices of each of the insurers that he/she quotes to you (and he/she should be) then that agent can give you a leg up. Your agent will probably expect you to be a run-of-the mill applicant, but you can prove otherwise by making a full disclosure of your mortality risk. Then the agent can accurately evaluate what your rate class will really be with each life insurance carrier. And then you can make an accurate life insurance quotes comparison.

Well, even if you don't want to work through an independent life insurance agency (where agents are not employed by any single insurer and therefore are presumably unbiased), you will be working through an agent because even if you go right to an insurer to buy your insurance, you'll be working with one of their agents ("captive" agents). However, you can avoid working with another human being in your life insurance quotes comparison.

If you're shopping for term life insurance you can get instant life insurance quotes online. (You can also request whole life insurance quotes online, but currently, you're not likely to get them instantly. You may find instant universal life insurance quotes online, but these are considerably rarer than instant term life insurance quotes.) Still, I recommend going to the website of an independent agency because if you go to the site of a life insurance carrier, you'll probably only get to view quotes from that single insurer. An independent agency will give you quotes from multiple carriers.

Look for a website whose agency boasts a long history and contracts with many insurers (50 or more is a good sign). Look for reputable names among the contracted insurers, names like Genworth, John Hancock, and MetLife.

If you're ready to being your life insurance quotes comparison, start looking for a good agency website now. If you need a suggestion, try www.wholesaleinsurance.net.

For another lens on life insurance, check out Compare Life Insurance.