Losing it all on Life Insurance
What may not be obvious with a life insruance policy is that when the insured person dies, and the policy therefore matures and can pay out to relatives – they may not even know that they are beneficiaries!
What to do?! If you are a relative of the deceased, you might do well to look through the papers and the standing orders that may give you a clue. Regular payments as premiums to a life insurance company will be a great place to start – but you might not be able to tell the difference between premiums for an endowment, a home insurance policy or a life insurance policy.
You should check with your family solicitor to see if they are aware of any arrangements, and there may be mention in any will that is left that gives you a clue. The Life Insurance Company themselves should notify the beneficiaries (of course) but it may be that, over a period of time, people have moved, maybe even abroad, changed their names and become hard to trace.
The long-lost uncle may yet be your unexpected benevolent uncle; further, if your relative was still working at the time of their death, there may be corporate or company life insurance that as an employer means that your relative was covered for.
If the relative had a
term life insurance policy and died during the term, and had paid their premiums, the identified beneficiary or beneficiaries should be notified. If you’re looking for the information some time after the death, you are back to looking through papers and talking to solicitors.
Of course, if the deceased died outside of the term of the policy, then nothing will be payable.
Insurance organisations do try to locate the beneficiaries so they can close their books and move on ; unclaimed benefits can’t be paid to anyone else and just create an asset burden for the company to manage.
So if Aunt Flo died twenty years ago, and you think she was the kind of person to have life insurance, it might be worth checking it out.
