Unclaimed Life Insurance Benefits - Here's How


It can be easy to take too lightly the amount of vital paperwork and documentation that accumulates in the course of a person's life. However, when you lose someone close to you, such as a parent or spouse, and you face the emotional, legal and financial aftermath of the final affairs of you deceased, this reality becomes clear. An important document to that can often be overlooked or lost is life insurance. People mostly use life insurance to leave behind to their loved ones inheritance, but it is not uncommon for old people to forget about life insurance that they got in their lifetime.

Until the beneficiaries make a claim, life insurers are unlikely to give out death benefits. It's a very common phenomenon for the bereaved family to forget about their status as the sole beneficiaries to the departed. In most cases, the policyholder fails to communicate to their beneficiaries about their policy facts or the due process required for claiming death benefits. Similarly, searching the life insurance's documents for a relative who has passed on can be a daunting task because, at the moment, there is no national database of the life insurance policies. Below are some strategies that would help simplify the search.

Look for Insurance Related Documents

Carefully search through files, deposit boxes of the bank, and any other storage places to verify whether there are any documents related to insurance. You can also check for the names of insurance professionals or companies in address books. A company or agent who sold the deceased their home insurance may have knowledge of the existence of a life insurance.

Contact Financial Advisors

Present or prior attorneys, investment advisors, accountants, business insurance brokers/ agents, bankers and other professionals in the financial field might have the information regarding life insurance of the deceased.

Review Life Insurance applications

The application for every policy is normally attached to that policy. So if for instance in your search you can find any life insurance policies of the deceased, look on the application which will have a long list of any other life insurance that might have been owned at the time of the application.

Contact Previous Employers

You might as well decide to contact the former employers who maintain records of the past group policies.

Check Banks Books, Statements, and Canceled Checks

Search to see if there are any checks that have been made out over the years to life insurance companies.

Search the Mail for a year Following the Death of the Policyholder

Look for either dividend notices or premium notices. There will be no notice of due premium payments if the policy has been paid up; however, an annual notice with information about the policy's status or notice of a dividend may still be sent by the company.

Review the Income tax returns of the deceased for the past two years

Search for interest expenses and interest income paid to life insurance companies, because life insurance companies usually pay on permanent policies accumulations and usually charge interest on policy loans.

Contact State Insurance Departments

There're 29 state departments of insurance that help in free search services to people looking for lost policies. For instance, there's an agency known as National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), which usually has a system that would help you find officials from the state insurance department who might help in identification of companies that might have written the deceased's life insurance

Check with the State's Unclaimed Property Office

If a company of life insurance finds out that an insured client has died, but there is no beneficiary who has come forward to claim the policy, it forwards the death benefit to the state which labels the policy as "unclaimed property." If you can guess, or you know where the policy was obtained from, you can go further to contact the state comptrollers to verify whether they may have any unclaimed money from the deceased's life insurance company.

Contact a Private Service that will search for "Lost Life Insurance"

For a certain fee amount, many private companies will contact insurance companies on your behalf to ascertain if the deceased was insured. This kind of services is often provided on their websites.

Search the MIB database

As mentioned earlier, there is no database of policy documents, but instead, there is a database that you can search all applications for personal life insurance processed since 1st January 1996 and which occurs at a certain fee. More information can be found on MIB's Consumer Protection page.

These tips will help you be able to follow the unclaimed life insurance benefits of your deceased person.