Mortgage Protection Life Insurance.
Decreasing Term
Many different policies can be used to
protect your family
in the event of your death. By far the most popular for mortgage protection insurance is the
decreasing term life insurance
policy. The premiums are level throughout the life of the policy. The beauty about this policy is that the face amount decreases similarly to the way the mortgage balance decreases...how close depends on the mortgage interest rate. The
insurance company
builds the policy in such a way that the amount payable at death will be about the same or more than the mortgage balance. This is basic mortgage protection life insurance.
Level Term
In some cases
level term life insurance
policies are used as mortgage protection insurance. If, for example, you have 20 years of mortgage payments ahead of you a
20 year term policy
may be a good choice. As this is level term insurance...in the event of your death the insurance company will pay off your balance due the bank or mortgage company...but they will do considerably more, depending on when you die...
This is mortgage protection life insurance plus... Let us suppose you are ten years into paying off your 20 year mortgage and you die. The life insurance company will pay the balance owed but there will be an additional amount payable to your
beneficiaries.
This amount is the difference between the balance owed and the face amount of the policy. This policy is a little more costly than the decreasing term policy. This is considered a good choice for mortgage protection insurance.
Whole Life, Universal Life, Variable Life or Variable Universal Life
People even choose to use
permanent life insurance
policies as mortgage protection insurance. The big advantage is that they can use the
cash value
built up over the years to pay off the mortgage balance while they are still alive. This is sometimes referred to as mortgage protection insurance as well as mortgage redemption insurance. If they do not choose to use it in that manner there a myriad of other uses for the extra available cash.. The disadvantage to using
whole life
,
universal life
,
variable life
or
variable universal life
is that your premium payments are much higher than the premiums for
term policies.