Over at Bargaineering, Jim recently discussed an relatively new insurance instrument called “Return of Premium Insurance.” This is a type of term life policy whose issuers promise to return your money after the policy expires.
In term insurance, you pay a specific monthly or annual premium so that the company will pay a benefit to your survivors should you die an untimely death. Unlike whole life insurance, which builds something like equity at a very low return, term does not pretend to be any sort of “investment.” It exists simply to protect a spouse or children from the loss of your income. A policy normally has a beginning and an end (typically ten to thirty years), after which it expires and, if you still need coverage, you have to buy a new one.
Return of premium (ROP) insurance offers to return your premiums after the policy expires. In other words, if you paid a total of, say, $15,000 over the term of the policy, at the end of the term you get the 15 grand back. Thus you appear to be getting something for nothing: the insurance coverage works like any term policy, but the amount you pay for it is returned to you if you outlive the policy.
This, we’re told, amounts to a kind of “investment,” and oh, joy, the money you get after 30 years is tax-free! (It’s really not income: it’s a refund.) This strategy supposedly has the advantage, in addition to providing “free” insurance coverage, of forcing you to save over a long period.
Let’s think about that.
ROP insurance costs significantly more than ordinary term insurance, and the costs are going up in 2010 because regulatory agencies now require companies to return a significant portion of your premiums should you cancel the policy before the end of the term. These policies can cost as much as 50% more than a plain term policy. If you can afford to pay that much for life insurance premiums, it stands to reason that you can afford to pay the cheaper amount for the same coverage with a term policy and put the difference away in a mutual fund.
A few insurance premium calculators that don’t make you a target for insurance salesmen reside on the Web. According to this one, an ordinary 30-year term policy for a 30-year-old man ranges from about $620 to $825 a year. A middling premium for term insurance, then, would be about $720. A similar calculator for ROP shows him paying $2,270.50 a year for a 30-year ROP policy.
The difference between $2,271 and $720 is $1,551 a year, or $129.25 a month.
At the end of his 30-year policy, our ROP buyer, who by then is 60 years old and contemplating retirement, gets $68,130 back. At that time, an average 4 percent inflation rate has reduced the buying power of this amount to $21,005.75, in 2010 dollars.
What happens if our consumer buys the old-fashioned, plain-vanilla term policy and stashes the extra $129 a month in savings?
Let’s say he starts with nothing but invests the $129, faithfully, month after month, in a mutual fund returning a fairly typical 6 percent. In 30 years his fund is worth $129,582.44. The corrosive effect of inflation erodes the purchasing power of this amount, over 30 years, to $39,952.69. But even this pallid value is almost twice as much as he would have had were his premiums simply refunded to him.
Meanwhile, however, the insurance company is not hiding our consumer’s premiums under a mattress. It also is investing the money, but instead of a mere $129, the company has his entire ROP premium to invest: $189.25 a month. In 30 years at 6 percent, the policy earns $190,104.47 for the insurance company. After the company returns $68,130 to the customer, it sees a profit of $121,975.
That’s assuming the company stays in business for 30 years. We’ve seen what “too big to fail” means…who would have thought, just five years ago, that major banks would go down in the dust? An insurance company is just another financial institution, no more nor less vulnerable to the vagaries of future recessions than any other corporation. If the company folds before the 30-year policy expires, our consumer could very well lose all of his “investment,” since a bankrupt company is unlikely to honor a contract to return money it doesn’t have.
Pretty clearly ROP life insurance is a great idea…for the insurance companies!
😀
I always figure that anything the companies are eager to sell you…is good for them. Hence I stay away from the credit cards hawked in airports, the packages offered by ATT (they even sent two human beings to my door!), and so forth.
Wait! What? ATT employs human beings???
Who knew?