Four more benefits of cash-value life insurance

Last month I shared four valuable benefits of life insurance. Here are four more reasons to own cash- value life insurance:

1. It’s discounted estate tax insurance. Federal estate tax returns on Jan. 1, 2011, because of sunset provisions in previous legislation. The exclusion returns to $1 million, and the maximum rate increases to 55 percent. Americans who were not subject to the tax now could be. Do you want to pay these taxes with whole dollars, or would you prefer a discount instead, using pennies to buy dollars? The answer is obvious: Life insurance provides that discount.

2. It’s a fully funded contractual will. Regular wills have many inadequacies. Even when they work, they proceed through probate, incurring costs and opening your affairs to the scrutiny of the public. When wills don’t work, your desires can be contested, at great cost, and can even be declared invalid. Life insurance “wills” have none of these problems and even fully fund your estate for the determined value at the precise time it is needed.

3. Life insurance pays what someone else would have to pay. Someone always pays for life insurance. The head of the family, if insurable, pays for their life insurance with a few dollars from their income. If they do not, and they die too soon, then someone else — a widow, an orphan or a business — inevitably ends up paying costs that would have been covered by life insurance. Ask your clients, “Do you want to make a big mistake or a little mistake?” The premium is the little mistake. Putting your family or business in jeopardy by dying without life insurance is the big mistake.