subject: Riders Slow Down Life Insurance Shopping [print this page] Life insurance riders allow you to bring your policy to a custom-fit, adding whatever provisions and exclusions you require. There is a downside to making your policy non-standard, however, and that is that it can slow down your shopping process considerably, especially if you are shopping for an otherwise easy type of coverage, like term life insurance.
Riders are most commonly used to expand a policy's coverage. E.g. coverage can be extended to cover both you and your spouse or child by means of a spouse rider or a child rider. Riders can also be used to add exclusions to a policy, decreasing its coverage in order to decrease its price. The important point, though, is that riders generally change the price of a policy in some way. And therein lies the difficulty.
With standard policies, the price of coverage has already been calculated in advance, for applicants of every health class and age. With the number-crunching already completed, you can instantly compare term life insurance quotes from a multiplicity of insurance companies: a shopper can visit an independent life insurance agency online, enter his or her health information, and in the blink of an eye, compare quoted prices from dozens of insurers.
If that same shopper wishes to attach a rider to his/her policy, however, there's no way to instantly compare life insurance quotes from the comfort of his/her own personal computer. You'll have to speak with a human life insurance agent. Fortunately, some riders are common enough that a life insurance quotes comparison can be effected in a rather timely fashion, even when working through an agent. Some common riders include the spouse rider, child rider, and accidental death rider. With more eccentric riders, however, a shopper may find his/her experience severely retarded or even find insurers unwilling to create the requested provision.
Because term life insurance ordinarily makes it possible to compare rates in an instance and even apply for coverage online with the investment of only a few minutes, the inconvenience of being individually considered for a rider is a considerable one. Requests for whole life insurance quotes, on the other hand, are considered individually anywayyes, this holds true for standard whole life policies. Ergo, the delay which a rider imposes on one's application is proportionally less. It may be worth the time, then to request whatever riders you may want.
by: Mark Manderson
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