Life Insurance Policy
Examining the trade-in value and options for trading policies to maximum value.
It’s easy to forget that your life insurance policy is a remarkably long-term commitment: usually ten years or more. But circumstances can change; and as well as flexible products being on offer which allow (for example) conversion to different types of policy, there is now a flourishing market in traded life policies.
To paraphrase the old saying… “A life insurance policy is for life, not just for Christmas!”. In all seriousness, taking out life cover isn’t to be undertaken lightly- because whole of life policies are usually for ten or more years. That means you have to be fairly committed to seeing it through.
However, while term insurance policies have no trade-in value, a whole of life insurance policy, because it contains an investment component, does. There are two ways to redeem a life insurance policy if you just don’t want it any more. The first option is to beg, beseech and pray with your life office. They will usually give you something back, particularly in the later years of a policy; but you certainly won’t get value for money.
In the past fifteen years, though, a market has sprung up for traded endowment policies- where you can sell your life insurance policy on to a third party via a broker (the same sort of middleman as an estate agent really). The third party buys it because he’s getting an investment product, already partly topped up, at a lower price than he could get from scratch. Many third parties are also buyers who would otherwise not find cover elsewhere.
If you’re interested in trading in a life insurance policy, or buying a traded-in policy, take a look at the Association of Policy Market Makers (www.apmm.org).
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