Life Insurance Underwriting Factors

	LIFE INSURANCE UNDERWRITING GUIDE
Underwriting Study - Life Insurance Companies - About Us - Questions - Further Study

Underwriting factors...
...determine your life insurance premium. The table at the right shows the factors used for our study profile. Yours will of course be different.

Health and Lifestyle
We studied the cost impact of the major health and lifestyle factors: cholesterol, blood pressure, build (height and weight), family history of cancer and heart disease, and driving record.

Other factors, such as hazardous occupations and hobbies, citizenship, and international travel, are also considered by the insurance companies but are out of scope for this study.

Methodology
We chose the companies which appear most often on Internet quote sites. We used the field underwriting guides supplied directly to agents by the life insurance companies. These guides specify the premium classification for each underwriting factor.

Underwriting Factor	Average Profile	Comparison Profile
Face Amount	$ 500,000	$ 500,000
Policy Type	20 Year Term	20 Year Term
Age	45	45
Sex	Male	Male
Tobacco Use	None	None
Height	5' 10"	5' 10"
State of Residence	California	California
Total Cholesterol	See Graph	See Graph
Cholesterol Ratio	See Graph	See Graph
Systolic Pressure	See Graph	See Graph
Diastolic Pressure	See Graph	See Graph
Weight	See Graph	See Graph
Family Diagnosis	See Graph	See Graph
Family Death	See Graph	See Graph
Driving Record	See Graph	See Graph

We obtained life insurance quotes from the Term4Sale.com database. We plot average profile underwriting factors versus average premium to illustrate the cost of poor underwriting factors. We plot comparison profile underwriting factors versus comparison premiums to illustrate the cost of choosing the wrong company.

LIFE INSURANCE UNDERWRITING GUIDE