How to Ensure Your Beneficiaries Receive the Benefits of Your Life Insurance Policies
There is one thing in life you can count on – unexpected things happen. When they do, our lives and the lives of our loved ones can get hectic. Fortunately, you have taken the step to protect your family by investing in life insurance. However, how do you know that your policy will work as expected?
Does anyone but you know about your insurance policies?
It is important to organize your policies for your family. We have run into many cases where people have innocently ignored their insurance policies, not making their executor aware of them or losing paperwork. When no one knows of the opportunity to make a claim, it is not processed, and beneficiaries do not receive their benefits.
Why pay for protection that will end up going to waste?
A recent experience of one of our clients provides a clear case for why organization is necessary. Our client’s health has been in decline over the past few years due to MS. His daughter has been trying to organize and understand the benefits of a Life Insurance policy that he purchased over 40 years ago while finishing his residency in medical school, but has been running into a lot of complexities because the policy has been ignored. While working through this issue, she found the “Policyholder Service Checklist” we had sent her father about his life insurance policy. If she had not found our notice, she would have had no idea that he had a policy in effect and potentially would not have filed a claim when the time came. Fortunately, she reached out to us and we are helping her sort through all of the policies her father put in place to help her. If her father had organized his policies and we had been given her contact information in the first place, there would have been little chance that his polices would have become so hard to locate and understand.
Adding a secondary contact person to your accounts will help ensure the goals of your insurance vehicles are achieved.
We recommend that you contact your servicing provider on your life insurance policies, and provide them with the contact information for your designated secondary contact person. Creating a relationship with your provider will allow them to help when the ultimate need of the policy arises – such as paying for a nursing home or processing a death benefit claim. At WIFSInc we routinely work with designated power of attorneys, lawyers and family members to ensure our clients’ wishes are fulfilled. For more information on setting up a secondary contact person for your life insurance policies, please send us an email at info@wifsinc.com or give us a call at 317.663.4138.
