Buying Life Insurance For Elderly People: 3 Questions To Consider Before You Buy

If you’re retired and above the age of 60 you may have been considering the idea of buying life insurance at a time in your life you thought you would never need it.  However before you do consider this you may want to ask yourself these three questions to see if it really is necessary for you to do so, because if you don’t need it you could be saving yourself a bundle of money.

Can You Cover Your Funeral Expenses?

The first question you need to ask yourself is can you cover your funeral expenses in the event of your death?  What I mean is could you go to the bank pull at least $15,000 cash to pay for you or your spouses funeral right now?  The truth is most people can’t do this, in fact with an economy of increasing debt and less people saving it’s likely most people don’t have this kind of money in place to take care of an issue like this.

To boot you also have to consider the cost of a funeral these days.  Today’s average funeral cost run between $10,000 to $15,000.  This could leave your living spouse with a huge financial burden if you don’t have a life insurance policy in place to cover these expenses.

Do You Have A Large Amount Of Debt?

Next when your considering life insurance for elderly people you need to consider what kind of debt you still carry.  If you still have a mortgage your still paying off, a car loan, or even a large sum of credit card debt, you may want to have a life insurance policy to protect you from passing on this debt to others.

If you don’t have life insurance the burden of your debt could be passed on to your spouse, family members, or even those that cosigned on a loan for you.  Not protecting yourself could leave you very vulnerable to financial risk like this.

Are You Passing On An Inheritance?

Finally the last question you need to ask yourself is are you planning passing on an inheritance to your family and friends?  Life insurance can protect people from financial disasters like the first two situations I’ve mentioned above but it can also be used to help pass money to others.

The reason life insurance makes a great tool for passing on wealth is because when you pass away the money passed on to your beneficiary tax free.   This could help you avoid probate court and estate taxes all together.  In fact when it comes to estate planning seniors will use second to die policies pass the money on.  However, if you don’t have at least $200,000 or more this kind of option isn’t necessary.

In the end if you can answer yes to an any one of the three questions I’ve just shown you a life insurance policy may be needed but if you can’t then save yourself the time and money.