Life insurance has two primary attributes – the premium and the death benefit. If we strip away the marketing aspects from life insurance those are the two base attributes we should be concerned about. If we die, how much do our beneficiaries receive? And how much does it cost to receive those benefits?
Death Benefit
Let’s look at the death benefit first. If person A has $100,000 of one type of life insurance and person B has $100,000 of another type of life insurance and the both die, how much do the beneficiaries receive? In both cases, the beneficiaries receive $100,000. The beneficiaries can’t tell what type of insurance they had! The point here is that the death benefit is the same for all the various types of life insurance. It’s the premium that differentiates the different types of life insurance.
Premium
It’s the premium that differentiates the various types of life insurance available to us. How are the premiums different? Let’s first look at the basic underlying ‘cost’ of insurance.
Life insurance premiums, like all insurance, are based on the concept of risk. Higher risk means higher claims and that dictates higher premiums. For car insurance, drivers that get into accidents tend to be poorer risks and that leads to higher insurance premiums. But what makes us a poorer risk with life insurance?
For most of us, it’s our age. Younger people generally don’t die as often. Claims are less, so costs – and therefore premiums are lower. Larger numbers of people tend to die as we age, so therefore costs are higher. This is intuitive for most of us – life insurance is cheaper when we’re younger and gets more expensive as we get older.
If the insurance company was to directly charge us the direct cost of insurance based on our age then, our premiums would go up every year and would look something like the graph below.
This type of life insurance, where the costs are directly charged by age, is called one year term life insurance. It’s term life insurance because there’s no cash values and the premiums correlate directly with your age. It’s specifically “one year” term life insurance because the premiums increase every year (every ‘one’ year).
One year term insurance isn’t palatable to most consumers. Consumers would rather not pay premiums that they know are going to increase every year.
Term Life Insurance
(Term Life Insurance, first of two types of life insurance. Sub-types: 10 year term, 20 year term, 30 year term)
Now the underlying cost of insurance shown in the above graph must be paid for all types of life insurance. But because one year term insurance isn’t a well liked product (due to the constant premium increases) the insurance companies smooth out these costs over periods of time or ‘terms’. Lets say they take the premiums in the above graph for a period of 5 years. Now rather than charging you the increasing premiums every year, instead they charge you the average premium over that 5 year term. You pay the same total costs, but now your premiums are level for 5 years. At the end of 5 years, your premiums increase and the company charges you the average premium over the next 5 year time period. The costs are the same, but now you’re premiums are level for 5 year increments. This type of insurance is called 5 year term.
If the company takes those underlying costs that increase every year and averages them out over 10 years (so your premiums are now level for 10 years), that is called 10 year term insurance.
And that’s term life insurance in a nutshell. Rather than paying the direct cost every year, your premiums are smoothed out or averaged over terms. 10 year term insurance, 20 year term insurance and 30 year term insurance are all common life insurance products in Canada today.
Continue reading the second half of this article: Permanent life insurance.