All Life Insurance Tips

how to find a dead relative's life insurance company without papers? Read details please?

Here is my situation My mother just died and I don't have the money to pay for a funeral right now. My mother has life insurance but I don't know where the papers with the information is. I don't know what the company's name is and I don't know how to contact them to report the death. Is there a way for me, her child, to get that information without the documents?

Public Comments

1. Try going through her checkbook and see if she was paying regular premiums to an insurance company. Keep in mind that she may have let the insurance lapse, or she may have named someone other than you as the beneficiary. You need to start thinking about how you can pay for the funeral without insurance money. If you are the administrator of her estate, you are legally allowed to access her bank accounts for legitimate purposes such as funeral expenses. If there are other close relatives, they might be willing to contribute as well. Talk this over with the funeral parlor. They'll explain what your payment options are. Remember, you do NOT have to choose anything but the least expensive option. Sorry for your loss.
2. Finding a life insurance policy Those who want to find out if they are life insurance beneficiaries have limited options. They can go to MIB Group, which searches for life insurance applications made. It costs $75 to use its Policy Locator Service. But MIB marketing director David Aronson admits that the service has its limitations and can only tell you if an MIB member company took a policy application within the last seven years. "Unfortunately it is not comprehensive enough, nor does it point to whether a policy exists and is in force," says Aronson. "In terms of finding out if someone has passed away, I would think the Social Security Administration is your best bet." Michael Hartmann's FindYourPolicy.com is another service which tries to solve the problem of life insurance policies gone missing. Hartmann offers anyone with a life insurance policy the opportunity to enter it into a database, which beneficiaries can search after a policyholder's death. The search fee is under $10 and requires four digits of the deceased's Social Security number. But Hartmann admits that his service hasn't garnered the attention of life insurers, whose support he needs to make it work. "Insurers are not proactive," he says. Here are more tips for finding lost life insurance policies. http://www.insure.com/articles/lifeinsurance/lost-policies.html?WT.qs_osrc=fxb Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2011/06/20/hide-and-seek-why-theres-no-national-database-life-insurance-policies/#ixzz1iQYdeCPi
3. There is no central data base that keeps tracks of insurance policies. I'm sorry, but it's up to the policyholder to make sure the policy is someplace where it can be found by his/her survivors. If you have all of her other financial records, you may find records of payments made. If she purchased a whole life policy years ago, she could have finished paying for it and no payments have been made in several years. So you may have to go back quite a long time. Most people keep their policies wherever they keep their permanent, long term records - often in a safe deposit box at their bank. When my grandmother passed away, we knew she had a policy, but none of us were ever able to find it. So her children were never able to receive the death benefit.
4. If you're asking, is there a database where you can plug their name in, the answer is no. 70% of Americans die without active life insurance in force, so the easiest place to start, is with whatever it is that makes you think they even HAVE life insurance. The second easiest, is to go through the banking records. If they had insurance, they'd be paying for it, at least once a year, but usually once a month. You should see a cancelled check. If you're executor/administrator of the estate, you can get copies of all their cancelled checks for the past year, from their bank, and go through them. Be sure to check the safety deposit box at their bank, too. Obviously, you need to check through their valuable papers at their home. If they were employed at the time of death, call the HR department at their employer's, to see if there was any group life insurance. If you suspect they had a prepaid policy, just change the mailing address to yours - if they DID have a paid up policy, once a year they'd be receiving a statement from the insurance company. Again, if you're executor of the estate, you can pay $75 to http://www.mib.com/html/lost-life-insurance.html and they will tell you if any applications have been received on their lives, in the past 13 years. It only goes back 13 years, and you'll need to send them proof that you are administrator or executor of the estate. Don't be worried about someone else "intercepting" your life insurance money. If you are the beneficiary of the policy, the insurance money gets mailed directly to you. If you're not administrator or executor of the estate, AND a check doesn't show up to your mail one day, then legally you don't have access to the information - it's protected by the privacy laws. But you can always ASK the administrator/executor if there is life insurance, and who the beneficiary is. Life insurance tends to run in families. Do you have life insurance? Your sibs? Your parents? Most people TELL family members, if there is life insurance. If none of the surviving family members have any life insurance, odds are, the deceased doesn't, either. That's your PERSONAL reminder. Go buy life insurance, and tell at least two different family members that you have it, and where you keep your valuable papers.
5. The information existed in only three places: 1) The company 2) Her brain 3) The documents or papers There only way for anyone to get that information without documents or papers is to contact different insurance companies and ask each of them, one at a time, if they are the right one. You should start by paying money to the medical information bureau (MIB) to learn where she applied for life insurance during the time period for which they have records. There is no guarantee that her life insurance was from one of those companies, but it is relatively likely. You should start by contacting each of those companies, first. If none of them is right, then move on to other companies..
6. There is no data base from where you can check out your mother name directly. You must know about company name. You can make contact with an consultant.