Life Insurance Policies For Long-Term Care

You might find that your life insurance policy is no longer really needed. In present times, due to increased life expectancies, most children are out of the home and are supporting themselves by the time a parent passes, and spouses are usually capable of using inheritances and retirement planning investments to maintain their costs of living. However, your life insurance policy is not completely useless.

If you or your spouse were diagnosed with a terminal illness requiring long-term care, what would you do? This is an important question to consider because rising life expectancies are making this scenario more and more common. While you might have long-term care insurance, chances are that you do not: such policies are expensive and full of holes.

Your life insurance policy may be able to take over where Medicaid and out-of-pocket, personal expenses cannot. In the case of a long-term illness requiring extensive medical care, you may be able to cash out a life insurance policy to cover the costs.

By cashing out on your life insurance policy, you would be taking advantage of what is know as the Accelerated Death Benefit. This benefit states that if certain conditions are met (say, a life expectancy due to terminal illness of less than 12 months), the life insurance provider will pay a percentage of the life insurance policy's face value to the insured in order to pay for medical costs or long-term care.