What is the Difference between Life Insurance and ULIP?
"I would refer you to this question and answers. Here in the US we have two basic types of life insurance: term and whole life.  Universal life is a marketing response to whole life being such a bad deal, and is whole life just not quite as bad. I am not familiar with the products in India, but given the acronym (ULIP), it is probably universal life, and as you describe is variable universal life.   Likely Description ""Under the hood"", or in effect, you are purchasing a term life policy and investing excess premiums in a collection of stock mutual funds.  This is a bad deal for a few reasons: A much better option is to buy ""level term insurance"" and invest on your own. You won't necessarily lose money, but you can make better financial decisions.  It is good to invest, it is good to have life.  A better decision would not to combine the two into a single product." ULIP insurance plan ULIP is Unit Linked Insurance Plan. The premium you pay, a small part goes towards covering life insurance. The Balance is invested into Stock Markets. Most ULIP would give you an option to choose from Debt Funds [100% safe buy low returns 5-7%] or Equity [High Risks, Returns can be around 15%]. Or a mix of both. ULIP are not a good way to save money. There are quite a few hidden fees that actually reduce the return. So notionally even if returns shown are great, in effect it is quite less. For example the premium you pay in first year, say Rs 10,000/- Rs 2,500/- goes towards commission. And say Rs 100 goes towards insurance. Balance Rs 7,400/- units are purchased in your account. Even if these grow by 20%, you are still in loss. Ofcousre, the commissions go down year after year and stop at 5%. Then there is fund management fees that you don't get to see. There is maintenance fee that is deduced from your balance.  Thus the entire method of charging is not transparent. Life insurance from LIC There are broadly 2 types of Life Insurance plans Money Back / Endowment Plan. The concept here is again same, you pay a premium and part of it goes toward Insurance. The balance LIC invests in safe bonds. Every year a bonus is declared; generally less than Bank rate. At the end of the plan you get more than what you paid in premium. However if you had kept the same in Bank FD, you would have got more money back. So if you die, your nominee would get Insurance plus bonus. If you survive you get all the accumulated bonus. Pure Term Plan. Here the premium is quite less for the sum insured. Here if you die, your nominee would get insurance. If you survive you don't get anything.
After some thought, I follow Dave Ramsey's advice because it's simple and I can do the math in my head - no online calculator needed. :) You need Life Insurance if someone depends on your income.   You can replace your income with a single lump sum of 8-10 times your current income where those who need your income, can get roughly your salary each year from the life insurance proceeds. I would like to add to the answer provided by Dheer. I think under some ULIPs you need not pay premium after 3 years and you can take the money back after 5 years (something like that, read your policy statement of course). Since the money is invested in Stock markets and since generally people say the longer money stays in stocks, the better; you can keep the money with them without taking it back and without paying any further premium. That way, whatever you paid will be invested and you can get it back later when you feel you will make a profit. "There is an economic, a social and a psychological side to the decision whether to buy insurance or not, and if yes, which one. Economically, as you say already in your question, an insurance is on average  a net loss for the insured.  The key word here is ""average"". If you know that there are many cancer cases in your family buy health insurance by all means; it's a sound investment. If you are a reckless driver make sure you have extensive coverage on your liability insurance. But absent such extra risks: Independently of somebody's wealth insurance should be limited to covering catastrophic events.  What is often overlooked is that the insurance by all means should really cover those catastrophic events. For example the car liability minimums in many states are not sufficient. The typical upper middle class person could probably pay the 15k/30k/10k required in Arizona with a loan on their house; but a really catastrophic accident is simply not covered and would totally ruin that person and their family.  Insuring petty damage is a common mistake: economically speaking, all insurances should have deductibles which are as high as one could afford to pay without feeling too much pain.  That ""pain"" qualification has an economical and a social aspect. Of course any risk which materialized is an economical damage of some kind; perhaps now I can't buy the PS4, or the diamond ring, or the car, or the house, or the island which had caught my eye. I could probably do all these things, just perhaps without some extras, even if I had paid for insurance; so if I don't want to live with the risk to lose that possibility I better buy insurance. Another economical aspect is that the money may not be available without selling assets, possibly on short notice and hence not for the best price. Then an insurance fee takes the role of paying for a permanent  backup credit line (and should not be more expensive than that).  The social aspect is that even events which wouldn't strictly ruin a person might still force them to, say, sell their Manhattan penthouse (no more parties!) or cancel their country club membership. That is a social pain which is probably to be avoided. Another socioeconomic aspect is that you may have a relationship to the person selling you the insurance. Perhaps he buys his car at your dealership? Perhaps he is your golf buddy? Then the insurance may be a good investment. It is only borderline bad to begin with; any benefits move the line into the profit zone. The psychological aspect is that an insurance buys peace of mind, and that often seems to be the most important benefit. A dart hits the flat screen? Hey, it was insured.  Junior totals the Ferrari? Hey, it was insured. Even if the house burns down having fire insurance will be a consolation." "Does your new job include life insurance?  Most ""professional"" positions *will*, making your old insurance a moot point.   That said, even if the answer is ""no"", **and** you really, really need to maintain some level of term life (ie, newborn kid and unemployed spouse)... You would **still** want to shop around rather than just automatically converting your former employer's plan.  ""Group"" is a nice-sounding way of saying ""the young and healthy subsidize the premiums of the old and sick""; if you're not old and/or chronically unhealthy... You can probably do better on your own." Best is indeed subjective. You could for example, get a Universal Life Policy that pays a guaranteed interest on all monies (even those in excess of what you need to pay to cover the policy). Most people will tell you (probably correctly) that using life insurance as an investment vehicle is a bad idea, however.  The growth of the money in a UL policy, however, is usually tax deductible and grows at a guaranteed rate. NWML here in the U.S. pays a guaranteed (unless they go broke I suppose) 4% per year; historically, however, they've been paying 6% per year. That's pretty good, except a lot of your money goes into buying the policy the first few years. This is snarky, but I really consider life insurance only to be an investment for THE INSURANCE COMPANY, if you don't have dependents who will need the insurance in case you are hurt or die. This greatly depends on the local laws and the insurance contract terms. If I remember correctly, my own life insurance policy does also have special terms in case I die within a year of applying, so it doesn't sound totally bogus. For car loan insurance, the amount of coverage and premiums were probably low enough for the insurer not to want to spend the money upfront on the thorough investigation, but they probably do have a clause that covers them in case the insured passes away unreasonably quickly (unreasonably for a healthy person of the given age, that is). Here's the issue with LTC and, really, underwritten insurance in general; no one has a crystal ball.   Based on today's available rates where's the sweet spot to buy LTC? Probably right around the mid-60s, because you probably won't pay much in before you start gutting the carrier (assuming you can make it through underwriting in your mid-60s). The issue is, what happens when some life event changes your underwriting status?  Would you rather buy prematurely or be excluded entirely?  Those are generally your two options when it comes to individual LTC.  The underwriting eligibility window on LTC is very  narrow.  There's a very very small space between the best possible underwriting and being flatly declined.   Look for an LTC agent in your area.  Likely someone in your circle of friends and family will know a reputable/knowledgeable insurance agent who can run up some quotes at various underwriting classes.  Try to avoid looking at quotes for your age + 10 years to see what the quote will look like 10 years from now.  10 years from now the rate tables will be significantly different. Whether or not you should buy LTC now rather than waiting will depend on a whole host of other criteria.  Personally, if I was 50 and my biggest health concern was improving my run time and LTC is on my mind, I'd just pick up a policy now while I will likely be in a preferred underwriting class rather than waiting and hoping my health doesn't betray me. Obviously I'm a stranger on the internet and none of this is actual advice.  You should find an agent local to you and talk about your options and situation. In the context of this article, it's millions of dollars.   But you're right, all life insurance is a scam, even if it's not always millions of dollars.  My wife will not suffer financially if I die. She's a strong independent woman. She has a good career. I am of the strong opinion that life insurance should be purchased as a term product and nothing more. The internal expense is usually high, the returns, poor and the product disclosure is often incomprehensible. The only purpose Cash Value Life Insurance serves, in my opinion, is to fund the retirement and college educations of those selling it. A Certified Financial Planner has passed a licensing exam and will advise you and help you reach your financial goals. A good CFP can help you a lot, especially if you are unsure how to set up your insurance, investment, savings, and financial plans on your own. You do not need a CFP to get a life insurance policy. If you do get a CFP, he or she should help you above and beyond life insurance -- i.e. retirement planning, investment advice, education planning, etc. It's advantageous to you to pay a fixed price for services instead of a percentage or commission. Negotiate fees up front. For life insurance, in most cases a term policy will fit your needs. Whole life, universal life, etc., combine investments and life insurance into a single product and are big commission makers for the salesman. They make it sound like the best thing ever, so be aware. One of my rules of thumb is that, generally speaking, the larger the commission is for the salesperson, the worse the product is for the consumer. Welcome to life insurance pitches. Term life is far less expensive and provides a death benefit and nothing else. If you just had a baby and need to protect your family, for example, term life is often a good solution, easy to buy, and inexpensive. As you stated, any of the major providers will do just fine. Some countries don't have robust life insurance markets.  Some countries have horrible travel fatality statistics.  Some countries don't have very good liability law enforcement.   Is $2 on top of a train ticket in the US to send your family a $20,000 payment if you die on the train worth it, probably not.  The fatality rate is pretty low here, lots of people have their own life insurance, and the US justice system carries a big liability stick. If you're moving around on trains a lot in other countries where the fatality rate is much higher, you can't buy life insurance on your own, and the legal system doesn't punish negligent operators it might be meaningful, especially for frequent travelers who have dependents. Is buying this coverage a reasonable and cost effective way to insure a person's life, no, clearly not.  You're buying a policy to insure your life against being mauled by tiger in New York on a Tuesday, when you've never seen a tiger and don't live in New York.  Obviously, if you want life insurance you would not buy coverage this narrow. Personally, I think this is really akin to an impulse buy candy bar at a checkout line of a market.  They're dangling this in front of you for an amount of money that's insignificant because some people will pick it up without thinking about it.  They're tickling your fear of death just enough to get a dollar from you, but not enough to keep you off the train.  And obviously the math works out for the insurer or it would not be offered. Separately, regarding probability, it's not about an incident occurring in a train, it's an incident occurring in this particular train on this particular day/time.  If there's a 1 in 10,000 chance of dying on a train in a year the chance of dying on a particular train on a particular day is likely to be one in billions or more.  This really isn't about whether or not this coverage is valuable given the risk, it's about whether or not they can get you to impulsively spend a dollar. "If I read your figures correctly, then the cost difference is negligible. ($1.84 difference) The main determining factor, I'd think, would be the coverage.  Do you get more, or less, coverage now than you would if you went together on the same plan?  You'd both be covered, but what is the cap? Plans, and employer contributions, change all the time.  How is business in both of your companies?  Are you likely to get cut? Are you able to get back into a plan at each of your employers if you quit the plan for a while?  These rules may be unpleasant surprises if, say, your wife cancels her plan, goes on yours, and you lose your job.  She may not be able to get back into her insurance immediately, or possibly not at all.  A spouse losing a job isn't a ""qualifying life event"" the way marriage, birth of a child, divorce, etc., is." "In the United States if the person insures an article and then claims a loss of that article, the insurance replaces the missing/destroyed article. If later on the item is found the original is owned by the insurance company. The person who purchased the policy doesn't get to keep both.  Of course if the item was so valuable to be priceless the insurance company would be open to an exchange of items or money.  But if they suspect fraud...then it becomes a legal matter. Even when a life isn't involved it can be a source of dispute: http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/news/spencer/spencers-art-law-journal5-7-10.asp INSURED V. INSURER: WHEN STOLEN ART IS RECOVERED, WHO OWNS IT? Kenneth S. Levine  This essay is about the word ""subrogation,"" which frequently appears   in insurance policies. An insured painting is stolen and the insurance   company pays the owner’s claim for the value of the painting. Many   years later, when the painting is recovered, its value is many times   what it was when the insurance claim was paid. The insurance company   takes the position that it owns the painting, while the owner says I   own the painting, less the value of the insurance proceeds received.   The resolution of this dispute depends on the meaning of the word   ""subrogation"" in the insurance policy. When life insurance is involved, the item being replace is the lost stream of income. The question of returning money and how much would be a legal issue. They would also want to know if there was fraud, and who was involved." Both are incorrect. What it says is if your fund value is 25,000 in first year; then this will earn 19.4% compound for 5 years. This is same as 142.5 absolute. The money invested in second year, will only earn for 4 years, compound interest of 19.4%. so on ... The 25000 invested last year only 19.4 for a year. The other aspect you are missing is when you pay 25,000; 4% goes towards charges. So you are only investing 24,000. Plus there is an amount towards life cover. Depending on age, around 1000 for one lacs. This means the investment is only 23000 or 23500. Generally it is not advised to buy ULIP. It is cheaper to buy term insurance plus mutual fund.