Standard Life and Their Insurance
I would like to present to you the life insurance policies of Standard Life, which I will follow up by several additional articles about life insurance offers of other insurers. So let us examine the Term and Universal Life policies which Standard Life is offering.
Universal Life:
You may apply for the Universal Life up until your 81st birthday. The policy is called Perspecta and offers you multiple death benefit, cost of insurance options and flexible monthly premiums.
The Perspecta investment account is a well-diversified one, including mainly indexed accounts, active (managed) accounts and mutual funds, term deposit accounts and a daily compounded account. Moreover, Perspecta includes a Shelter Optimizer and Account Optimizer, which boost the return from premium investments by ensuring their tax-exempt status. When the policy matures, client bonus payments kick in to augment value accumulation even more.
To enhance the policy, you can choose from plenty of optional riders, such as: 10 and 20-year renewable and convertible term riders, critical illness riders for children and adults, accidental death benefit, the benefit of guaranteed insurability, term riders for children and a disability waiver benefit which relieves you from paying premiums in case of a disability.
To be fair, Standard Life insurance (which used to have industry-leading rates on their Universal Life policy) has been charging markedly more on the policies since 2005. Now, some age groups may be inclined to go to other options because of this rate increase. On the plus side, Standard Life is one of the handful insurance companies in Canada to allow preferred rates on both their Term and Universal Life policy.
To illustrate, a 45-year-old non-smoking male applicant who applies for $250~000 of Universal Life coverage will pay a minimum premium (i.e., the premium to keep the plan in force) of $211.95 monthly.
Now, Term Life plans:
Standard Life, like many competitors, offers the standard 10- and 20-year term policies called Term 10 and Term 20 respectively. Both policies can be applied for from age 18, and the client can take on the Term 10 plan up to 70 years of age. For Term 20, the maximum starting age is 65 years of age. Both policies are renewable up to age 85 and they can be converted up to age 65. Just as the Universal Life policy, the Term policies allow one to customize it with a variety of extra riders.
A prospective applicant can also decide to sign up for an individual or first-to-die benefit (e.g. with a spouse).
As in Universal Life, if you and your family are lucky enough to have a good health history, you may qualify for preferred rates for the Term policies. What is more, if your health happens to be really very good, you might be eligible for a super preferred rate. On the downside, these term life policies are not available at face amounts lower than $100~000. Some groups of clients may be repelled by this if affordability is a critical criterion.