Guaranteed Insurability
Guaranteed insurability is provided when you take out a life insurance policy requiring the company that issues the policy to sustain the policy for a specified amount of time regardless of changes to the health of the person being insured. These policies often enables the insured to add coverage in the future at a pre-determined fixed cost without any wellness checks. If you need to ask how this relates to diabetes, then maybe I didn’t explain it clear enough. Here’s how I got “lucky” with a life insurance policy featuring guaranteed insurability. First, though, I want to make it clear that I am not an expert in insurance, estate planning, financial planning, or any related field. These are my experiences and opinions only.
Some people look at life insurance as if it were betting on death, but the truth is that there are good reasons to take out a life insurance policy. In any case where one person is (even somewhat) dependent on another individual, it’s worth considering insuring the “other individual.” Take, for example, a household consisting of a working father, a stay-at-home mother, and their kids. If the father were to pass away, the mother and kids would be well served by an infusion of funds to help out while the family regains their footing. Of course, the mother could find a job and place the kids in day-care, but setting this up and finding a suitable job takes time, and time probably isn’t plentiful right after there has been such a major loss in the family. This can go the other way, too. If the mother were to pass away, I would guess that the father would have trouble coping at first and need to take time away from his job. The absence of either parent will negatively affect the children and put extra strain on their upbringing. Life insurance can’t solve this, but it can help to reduce some of the stresses.
Now, what about the kids? Do they need to be insured? Well, I mentioned that (in my opinion) people that have dependents would want to consider life insurance. Under this plan, the children shouldn’t need insurance, right? Well, what about when one of your sons grows up to be a father? Then, perhaps he would require life insurance. Now, consider if, somewhere along the journey from childhood to fatherhood, he was diagnosed with diabetes. Do you think any life insurance companies would want to issue a reasonably-priced life insurance policy for such a high-risk individual? It seems doubtful. What if there were a way to guarantee his insurability no matter if he developed diabetes or any other life-threatening disease?
My grandfather bought whole life insurance from Lutheran Brotherhood for all of his grandchildren when I was about ten years old. When I was younger, he would tell me that he bought the policies because you never know if you are going to be eligible to buy life insurance when you are older. This happened to be a few years before I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus. Sure enough, I would not be able to buy that policy with my current condition. It turned out to be a wise investment for me and one of my cousins who would also be unisurable for whole life now. Time will tell if it was a good investment for the other eleven grandchildren.
So, you can get reasonably priced life insurance for a person with diabetes. The trick is that you just have to get it before they are diabetic. Now that you’ve heard my story and thoughts on the subject, you’ll have to decide if life insurance is right for you or your kids. I’m in no way claiming that this is or is not a good deal. I’m just presenting the topic for you to consider, so go research life insurance on your own, and look further into policies offering guaranteed insurability.