Just as there are many a life insurance company there are a large number of types of life insurances.  I covered life insurers and their standard methods of saying they sell cheap insurance or enticing you with a way to compare insurance in a previous article.  In his book “Qusetions and Answers on Life insurance Anthony Steuer states “With over 1,500 life insurance companies active in the business and with each company usually offering several different types of policies / contracts, — you can see that there are many thousands of different contracts available.”

There are two major categories of life insurance, term insurance and permanent insurance.  The insurance term life has sub categories of annual renewable term, level premium term and decreasing term.  If you thought this is getting complicated, permanent life insurance has at least nine types: 1. Endowment, 2. variable life 3. variable universal life, 4.  whole life, ordinary or straight life 5. Adjustable life 6. limited pay  7.adaptable life, 8. Universal life and 9. Joint or survivorship life.

Each have their place and are intended to meet particular needs of life insurance customers.  When you go to buy life insurance keep in mind the variety of options and provide the insurance broker as much information about what you would like to accomplish as possible.

Indeed insurance brokers who will quote life insurance have the expertise to help you make a sound financial decision and help you compare insurance offerings.  Many of you may have limited trust in insurance companies and would like to be more knowledgeable before contacting life insurers.  For them I recommend Anthony Steuer book I sited above.