Life Insurance

Making a Life Insurance Claim

To make a claim on someone’s life insurance policy is very simple. All you have to do is provide the death certificate, the funeral certificate and the claim form, and several days or weeks later you will be paid a claim.

A lot of my client ask me about this, some of them are concerned that come claim time, there would be problems in collecting the life insurance proceeds. That is a valid concern, we’ve all heard one horror story or another of how some poor sap didn’t get paid by an insurance company. Heck, John Grisham made a carrier out of writing novels about insurance companies trying to get out of paying claims, and screwing people out of benefits.

I am here to tell you that you have nothing to worry about. First of all, most of the problems about claiming insurance benefits come from other types of insurances, not life insurance. It is usually a health related claim, disability, sickness, or car insurance.... Those areas are a lot greyer, and to be fair to the insurance companies, a lot of people try to defraud them out of money, so they have to be careful. The whole problem lies in the fact that there is so much grey area is health insurance, and a lot of it is hard to prove. I’ll give you a few examples; take someone that wants to take some time off because of depression or stress. That is a very hard thing to prove, and very easy to fake, so there will be some scrutiny by the claims adjuster, since he wants to make sure that you really are sick.

With life insurance claims, it’s much more black & white. Let’s face it, you are either dead or you are alive. There is no in between. When it comes to life insurance claims, there is much less chance that someone would defraud the insurer, so there is much less scrutiny at the time of a life insurance claim.
That doesn’t mean that it can’t happen, you still want to be careful, here are a few things you want to pay attention to:

• When applying for life insurance, make sure that you disclose all about your health history, hold nothing back
• Always try to apply for a policy that requires a full nurse’s medical, urine and blood sample. This way the insurer has all the info on you right up front, and once he approves you based on that, there should not be any problems later, at the time of claim.
• Buy a policy from a Canadian Company, and make sure that their rating is at least “A” or better
• Consult with a good life insurance broker, at the time of application, throughout the contract, and even at the time of claim, you need him to be on your side.

The only complaint I ever received from a widow is that why didn’t they buy more life insurance.