What to do When You’ve Lost Your Life Insurance Policy
November 8, 2009 |
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When you have a loved one pass away there are a lot of different things that need to be taken care of, everything from the funeral to the will. Most of these things cost money. That is why life insurance is so helpful to loved ones and family members of a deceased individual. Life insurance can help to pay for funeral costs, death taxes, or to help a family with starting over if there is any money left after all necessities have been paid for. Sometimes it isn’t enough just knowing that an insurance policy exists.
There are times when the policy isn’t where you thought it was. It may have been taken from the files or misplaced. Whatever may have happened, you can’t find the actual policy. This isn’t always a big problem provided you have some additional information. Hopefully you know the insurance company name. If so it will be fairly easy getting in contact with the insurance company to verify that an insurance policy did exist. The agents will help you receive the needed funds. If you don’t know which insurance company it is, there are ways for you to still find out and be able to collect.
One thing you can do is see if you can find any canceled checks that have the name of an insurance company on them to help you know which insurance company to file a claim with to collect on. Or look for automatic withdrawals coming out of the deceased individual’s checking account or bills for insurance in the mail. Call the number that is on the bill or look up the insurance company’s phone number. The insurance company will confirm for you if the insurance policy does exist and this will enable you to collect.
There are some insurance companies that specialize in certain types of insurance. However, other insure for multiple purposes. If you find home or auto insurance policies you can call these insurance companies to find out if there were any additional policies. It could be that the deceased individual had multiple policies that were purchased through a single life insurance company. If you still can’t find the insurance company, you can just try to cold call the major life insurance companies to see if the deceased person had an insurance policy with them.
If you still can’t locate the right insurance company you can always hire a private detective. There are actually detectives who specialize in locating lost documents such as life insurance policies. When calling detectives, find out if they have any specialties and what steps they take to locate insurance policies. If these are already steps you have taken, you may want to ask if there are any additional sources that they have.
Hopefully one of these many different methods will help you and enable you to collect on the death benefit provided by the insurance policy that your loved one purchased and allow you to proceed with your mourning.
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