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Life Health > Life Insurance > Permanent Life Insurance

Life Application Activity Levels Off

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What You Need to Know

  • Application activity rose for all age groups other than the 30-and-under age group.
  • Activity for applicants ages 71 and older stayed strong.
  • Permanent life continued to perform better than term life.

In April, application activity climbed 10.7%.

MIB helps life insurers in the United States and Canada share some of the resources used to vet applications for life insurance and related products.

The Braintree, Massachusetts-based group uses its own application-checking activity data to compile the application activity reports. The statistics reflect the number of applications sent through MIB verification systems, not the number of final sales.

Younger Applicants Slink Away

MIB publishes separate life application activity figures for consumers in five different age groups.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began to lead to intense social distancing rules, in March 2020, application activity for older consumers fell sharply. That drop may have been due partly to a shift to web-based sales systems and partly due to changes in life insurers’ underwriting rules.

Since March, year-over-year comparisons for the oldest age group, for consumers ages 71 and older, have been strong.

Activity figures for the youngest consumers – those ages 30 and younger – also soared. Some hoped that increased use of fast, online life insurance underwriting programs would lead to steadily increasing young adult life insurance application activity.

This month, activity levels for consumers in both the youngest and oldest age groups fell sharply. Activity for the oldest consumers was still higher than it was a year earlier, but activity for the youngest consumers was down slightly.

Here are the age-group activity figures for May:

  • Ages 0-30: Down 1.3%
  • Ages 31-50: Up 2.6%
  • Ages 51-60: Up 1.9%
  • Ages 61-70: Up 4.1%
  • Ages 71 and Older: Up 5.2%

Application activity for term life fell 4.7%. Application activity for universal life increased 9.5%.

Policygenius Price Index

Policygenius recently started using the term life information that life insurers feed into its website to prepare  monthly term life price index reports.

The company bases the index on prices for coverage with a 20-year level-premium term.

The lowest price shown is for coverage for a 25-year-old female nonsmoker who wants $250,000 in death benefits.

The highest price is for a 55-year-old male smoker who wants $1 million in death benefits.

This month, the lowest price in the tables held steady, at $14.23 per month.

The highest price also held steady, at $1,043.16.

The ratio between the highest premium and the lowest continued to be 73.2 to 1.

(Photo: Blue Planet Studio/Shutterstock)


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