What it is: Term to 100 life insurance is a form of permanent life insurance. It’s easily understood to be whole life insurance but without cash surrender values. In other words, term to 100 life insurance is a policy that has level premiums for life, guaranteed level coverage for life, and no cash surrender values if you cancel.

Because term to 100 is permanent life insurance, it’s suitable for people looking for final expense life insurance or a policy to gift an amount to your beneficiaries upon your passing.

 Because there are no cash surrender values upon cancellation, the premiums are generally lower than whole life insurance policies (that do have a cash surrender value). As a result, it is often a better choice than whole life insurance for these types of permanent life insurance needs.

Who Offers This?

Very few companies today offer term to 100 life insurance policies, only one or two remain on the market. Please contact us if you’d like a quote. This type of life insurance depends heavily on the company having access to long term interest earning investments and in the current low interest rate environment companies have simply found this type of life insurance to be not profitable. And as a result, many companies have stopped offering it in their life insurance policy choices. 

When Term to 100 was first introduced in the 1990’s, there is commonly considered to have been a mistake in the pricing assumptions. This resulted in term to 100 life insurance that was too cheap for the coverage provided. That’s not great for life insurance companies, but it’s outstanding for consumers. If you have an older term to 100 life insurance policy, we recommend that you attempt to keep the policy in force. The premiums make these older policies an exceptional financial deal, and one that can’t be repeated or purchased today.

Alternatives

There’s one other alternative to Term to 100, and that’s Universal Life Insurance with a guaranteed term to 100 cost of insurance. This is a specific type of universal life insurance that when stripped down, closely mimics a term to 100 policy with both the guarantees and premium costs. See our article on Universal Life insurance for more information.