Afraid the coronavirus will kill you?
Many are.
Applications for life insurance rose 4 percent year on year in 2020, insurance industry consulting firm MIB Group reported. It was the largest one-year jump since 2001 when MIB began tracking the number.
Younger applicants led the increase, with 7.8 percent more people under age 45 seeking coverage, compared to a 3.8-percent rise among people 45 to 59. There was a slight drop in applications among people 60 and older.
Buyers age 40 and under were 25 percent more numerous at Lincoln National Insurance, a leading provider of term life policies.
The typical customer was a 40-year-old man buying a 20-year, $500,000 policy, the company said in a statement quoted by the Wall Street Journal.
Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance saw new-policy sales top $1 billion last year for the first time, an 8-percent rise over 2019.
Sales expanded even though many companies discontinued some lines of coverage.
Insurance companies typically invest customers’ premiums in bonds and profit from the interest, which shrank close to zero during the pandemic. As a result, companies trimmed their catalog of available policies.
The ever-present COVID virus inspired the suddenly-discovered need for coverage.
“You may catch COVID-19 on the way to the grocery store,” one buyer said to the Journal. She has life insurance as an employee benefit but “if I were laid off, I wouldn’t have it.”
The pandemic made customers “realize that having life insurance is more of an urgent need than an item on a to-do list to take care of later,” Rene Turner, a veteran sales agent with Primerica, told the Journal.
TRENDPOST: The denial of death is pervasive throughout western culture. As we have detailed since the COVID War began last year, week after week, those who are dying from the virus are predominantly senior citizens and residents in elder care homes… plus those having 2.6 pre-existing chronic conditions.
Yet, these facts are essentially ignored by the mass media (which most of the population tunes into), and instead of the general population doing what they can to build their immune systems and stay healthy, they live in fear… and fear death.
