Instant Life Insurance Quotes: Where to Find Them
Obtaining instant life insurance quotes can help you to shop around for a policy and find out your available coverage options. However, instant quotes are usually available only for a limited number of policies, including guaranteed issue policies.
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When buying life insurance, it’s important to understand how much you’ll have to pay to get the coverage amount your family needs. Unfortunately, shopping for life insurance can be a time-consuming and complicated process.
When you need answers right away because you want to get your family protected ASAP, it’s understandable to seek out instant life insurance quotes.
On this page:
- Where Can I Find Instant Life Insurance Quotes?
- How Do Life Insurance Companies Determine the Cost of a Policy?
- What are the Most Common Types of Life Insurance Available?
Where Can I Find Instant Life Insurance Quotes?
The good news is that you can get instant life insurance quotes online without first speaking to an insurance agent. You should carefully consider what kind of life insurance coverage you want to make sure your family is covered if something happens to you. Also, you shouldn’t shop based on price or convenience alone.
Shopping Online
You can find instant life insurance quotes online from certain insurers if you visit their websites directly.
You can also find instant quotes using various comparison-shopping websites designed to allow you to submit one application with some personal information to get multiple quotes from different companies about different insurance products. These options don’t require you to speak with life insurance agents personally; at least not initially.
If this interests you, check out our review of Sproutt Life Insurance.
Policies You Can Take Out With Instant Quotes
In most cases, instant quotes are available only for simple policies. This could include guaranteed issue life insurance policies that offer a small amount of coverage that virtually everyone can get approved for. With these simple policies, it is possible for insurers to provide an instant price for you based on a little bit of information you can provide via online forms.
Policies That May Not Be Available
Most people don’t want these simple types of guaranteed issue policies. Instead, you may want a term life insurance policy that offers a more substantial amount of coverage than is available through a guaranteed issue policy. You may also be interested in whole life insurance, which is much more complicated because there’s an investment component to these policies.
When you’re interested in a more complicated policy, you may not be able to find an instant life insurance quote. Some companies will give rough estimates based on the info you give them online, but this will just be a guess or range. When you actually submit your full application and undergo a medical exam, if necessary, your price may change.
How Do Life Insurance Companies Determine the Cost of a Policy?
One reason it is so difficult—or even impossible—to get an instant life insurance quote is because of the way most insurers price their policies.
Underwriting Process Explained
While guaranteed issue policies are open to everyone and don’t require you to answer many health questions, most other term life and whole life policies are underwritten. The life insurance underwriting process means that an assessment of risk is done by professionals to determine the likelihood that you will die while you’re covered meaning the policy will have to pay out the death benefit.
Underwriters look at as much information as they can to try to predict if the insurer is going to have to pay out while you’re covered. If the chances that you’ll die while covered are too great, you could be denied coverage entirely. Otherwise, your premium price will be based on the likelihood of the insurer paying out.
What Underwriters Look At
Some of the factors underwriters typically consider include your age, your gender, whether you smoke or not, and your general health status, including whether you have any preexisting conditions.
Underwriters can’t obtain and assess all of this information instantaneously online. In fact, to give underwriters the information they need, you will usually need to complete a detailed questionnaire and will need to undergo a medical exam. No exam life insurance policies are fairly hard to come by and have limitations.
What This Mean for Instant Life Insurance Quotes
Since all of this takes time and requires much more than just an algorithm processing your info, an instant life insurance quote will likely be impossible. And if you’re given an estimate, it could change dramatically depending upon what your health exam and the application process reveal about you.
What are the Most Common Types of Life Insurance Available?
You may have noticed a few words being used throughout this article to describe the types of insurance policies you can and can’t price online instantly. It’s important to know the difference between these kinds of insurance so you can decide what type of coverage you want to price out. There will be big differences in prices and you need to know why.
- Guaranteed issue policies aren’t underwritten. Anyone can get them and instant quotes can be obtained because your health status doesn’t have as big an impact. However, the death benefit is usually pretty small, the policies may be more expensive depending upon your health, and the policy may pay only a portion of the death benefit if you die before the policy has been in effect for a set length of time.
- Term life policies are policies that provide you with protection for a limited duration of time, such as 20 or 30 years. Standard term life policies are generally underwritten, and you can get as much coverage as you can afford to buy. You could even purchase a policy with a death benefit in the millions, although premiums will be high. Getting an instant quote is difficult because your health condition determines coverage costs, but these policies are simpler than whole life policies, so you may be able to get a reasonable term life insurance quote online pretty quickly.
- Whole life policies provide protection for the rest of your life as long as you don’t let the policy lapse. Your premiums will be higher on these policies, both because the insurer should always have to pay out the death benefit eventually and because there’s an investment component. Some of your premiums are invested and your policy accrues cash value. You can then sell or borrow against the policy. Whole life policies are underwritten and are the most complicated type of insurance, so getting an instant price quote is very difficult or impossible. When you do eventually get a whole life quote, you can also expect it to be more expensive than a term life policy.
Bottom Line
Now you know it is possible to get instant life insurance quotes, especially for certain kinds of coverage. However, if you want a standard term life or whole life policy, be prepared to only receive an estimate and know that premium prices can vary once the underwriting process is complete.