January 5, 2022
While securing your financial future is important, sometimes you find yourself in a situation where you need to leverage your life insurance policy to cover expenses, or to pay for assisted living or in-home care. Your life insurance policy may be an option to help cover those expenses in several ways.
Your options will vary depending on your specific situation.
Before you decide on the right path for you, review the advantages and disadvantages of selling and cashing out life insurance policies.
The cash value of life insurance policies varies between types of insurance (more details). Your insurance company and specific insurance type will determine how your cash value grows, but the value will depend on a few different factors.
Your insurance policy’s cash value is based on:
Because your cash value increases over time, if you cash in after you’ve only had the policy for a couple of years, you won’t see the same benefit as if you’re a decade into your policy.
Depending on the type of insurance and the amount of accumulated cash value in your policy, you may be able to take a loan out using the cash value as collateral. This type of loan may have better interest rates than other personal loans, but it's not always true, so you'll need to shop around a bit to find the right loan based on your individual needs. But keep in mind, failure to repay the loan before you pass away will likely mean that the remaining money and fees will be deducted from the policy's death benefit. In addition, you won't be able to use the cash value of the policy.
Selling your life insurance policy is an option, but it’s quite a bit different than cashing in a policy. First, if you cash out a policy, you still have death benefits in most cases. However, once you sell your life insurance policy, that’s it.
The value of selling your life insurance policy is based on a few things, like:
You may have seen ads on television regarding selling your policy for a "life settlement." The first step to understanding whether this is an option for you is to get the policy appraised.
The decision to sell or cash out an insurance policy is a big one — in one case, you lose death benefits for your loved ones and, in the other case, you have the potential to seriously impact your death benefits.
There are three things you should consider when deciding to use your life insurance as a a way to access extra cash before you die: :
The right option for you will depend on whether you need to keep your death benefits or you’re comfortable losing them because the life situation you insured when you bought the policy has changed, requiring less insurance.
Worthright was founded with a simple goal: to help families plan and pay for the care of their loved ones. However, that goal is everything but simple to achieve.
For many families, the topic of wealth management is extremely foreign - something reserved for anyone but themselves. As such, Worthright endeavored to support the 50 million families who are financially responsible for an older adult by taking the guesswork out of senior care finances.
By empowering families to organize their financials, evaluate payment options and financially contribute to a loved one's care, we sought to reduce the stress a family felt, and return attention back to what mattered.
Sadly, after working with over 50 care agencies and hundreds of families, we were unable to find a model to sustain the business. As a result, Worthright has ceased operations. Thank you to our customers, partners, investors and families who believed in our vision for a better future.
Warmly,
Aaron, Christian & the team at Worthright
Made with Empathy ❤
