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Cheap term coverage: Banner Life Insurance Company is our pick for the cheapest term life insurance. The company tied with Protective as the cheapest term insurance among the 90 life insurance companies we surveyed.
Very generous term conversion privilege: Banner allows you to coverge your term policy to permanent life insurance up to the last day of the term you chose or up to age 70, whichever comes first. That’s a very generous conversion privilege since some life insurance companies cap the conversion privilege at only the first 10 policy years or less.
Up to $1 million in no-medical-exam life insurance: health. If you’re under 40, you could qualify for up to $1 million of coverage without taking a medical exam for life insurance.
Stack, baby, stack: Coverage can be ‘stacked’ via term riders as coverage needs change over the policy’s term. That is, you can have more than one coverage length with more than one death benefit amount as part of one policy. For instance, you could have a $250,000 death benefit for 40 years and another $1 million death benefit for 20.
Longevity terms available up to 40 years: Most term policies available are only up to 30 years; we found only three companies (out of 91 we reviewed) that offer policies that cover you up to 40 years.
Cons Explained
Types of life insurance available: Banner Life Insurance Company only sells term life insurance policies and universal life insurance policies. It does not sell variable universal life (VUL), indexed universal (IUL) or whole life insurance policies.
Limited rider options: Banner writes traditional, unduplicated term policies, and your choices for rider add-on coverage are negligible – yes, you heard me right: negligible! Banner offers a child rider, terminal illness accelerated benefit rider and waiver of premium rider. Some companies include three accelerated benefit riders (Children’s Term, Chronic Illness and Terminal Illness) on their term policies alone.
Complaint Index
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) publishes this information in a report. The NAIC also calculates an index based on the complaints that are filed, which can help consumers compare how many complaints a company gets. The index shows the number of complaints that a company has received, relative to how many they would be expected to receive based on the size of the company. If an insurance company’s complaint index is over 1.0, that means it received more complaints than they expected to receive. If an insurance company’s complaint index is under 1.0, it received fewer complaints than they expected to receive.
We calculated three year averages of company complaint indexes. Banner’s is 0.247 (that is, it receives fewer complaints that would be expected for its size); so too Nationwide (0.263), New York Life (0.279), and State Farm (0.295).
Third-Party Ratings
The other factor is financial stability — one of the primary reasons to do a 30-year long-term financial contract is because, if the company goes down the drain, you’re screwed. Banner Life is an extremely stable company; the AM Best rating the company received was A+. They explained that this means that ‘with regard to its ongoing insurance obligations, [the company] possesses an excellent ability to meet its policy and contract obligations.’ Only about one in three of the companies we reviewed wound up with this score.
Competition
Here’s how Banner stacks up against a few of its competitors:
| Banner Life Insurance Company | USAA | |
|---|---|---|
| Types of Coverage | Term life, universal life | Whole life, term life, universal life |
| Online Application | Available | Available |
| AM Best Rating | A+ | A++ |
| Price for Term Policies | Excellent | Worse than average |
| NAIC Complaint Index (3-year average) | 0.247 | 0.177 |
The larger a company’s relative size, the more complaints a company will receive as a proportion of its total policies. The NAIC complaint index shows the number of complaints for each company relative to its size. A score lower than 1.0 means fewer customer complaints than expected; a score greater than 1.0 means more complaints than expected. The closer the figure is to 0, the better.
Policies Available
Term Life Insurance
Term life insurance is applied for a fixed period (some like 10 years and others 30 years etc).That’s why this kind of coverage is more inexpensive in contrast with permanent life policy. From its website, Banner call its term life policies OPTerm.
OPTerm: Banner has term conversion riders available with 10-, 15-, 20-, 25-, 30-, 35- and 40- year terms that can convert into permanent insurance, depending on the length of term selected, which can be renewed annually once that term ends. You may convert term life coverage to permanent life insurance from in force through the end of the term you’ve selected or until you reach age 70, whichever happens first. All are available to applicants up to age 75, which is high for term options, and have a terminal illness accelerated benefit rider added by default.
Banner’s term policies are renewable. Except that, unlike some other companies’ term policies, if you renew past the term you originally selected, you’ll be covering less.
Universal Life Insurance
With universal life policies, you have lifetime coverage that doesn’t expire at the end of a term like a term policy. You might have a cash-value savings element associated with a universal life policy, but there’s a ‘catch’: unless you also have a no-lapse guarantee, it’s more expensive than term coverage.
Life Step UL: This is a universal life policy that offers all the benefits of Banner’s term product (accelerated death benefit for terminal illness and flexible payment, to name a couple), with the added advantage that the policy is now permanent (it can’t “expire” as a term policy can; it can be “reduced” though, if you exhaust the cash value or make premium payments that are too low). If your term policy is with Banner, this is the permanent product to which you can convert it.
Available Riders
Child Rider
Banner’s child rider is available to all policyholders and offers life insurance coverage for children of the named insured. It costs extra but covers eligible children up to the age of 25 should the child pass away. In New York and Maryland, child riders are not available.
Waiver of Premium
For an additional premium, you can add a premium waiver rider to your OPTerm policy that suspends premium payments if you suffer a total disability (that lasts for six months or longer), and continues until you hit 65 years old.
ADB: Terminal Illness Rider
You won’t have to pay extra for Banner’s accelerated death benefit rider, which provides for up to 75 per cent (or $500,000, whichever is less) of your death benefit to be advanced if you are diagnosed with a terminal illness and want to have it available to care for your family while you make arrangements for your passing.
Customer Service
There are two ways you can connect with customer service support with Banner Life Insurance Company. One is that you can call them to connect with service team. Second is that you can send them a detailed mail , describing about the problem your have. Also you may receive a response from customer service through fax machine. Customer service phone support is availalble Monday to Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. ET.
Toll-Free Phone: 800-638-8428
Direct Phone: 301-279-4800
Fax: 301-294-6960
Email: [email protected]
Price
Life Insurance policies from Banner Life Insurance Company for instance start at $7 a month for a Term life insurance policy. The longer the term, the more you will pay. For example, a 10 year Term policy might cost $10.62 a month whereas 40 years might require a monthly premium of $24.85, depending again on variables such as how old you are, and whether you are in good health or not.
We collected quotes for healthy male and female 25, 40 and 55 year olds for 30 year $250,000 term policies for a glimpse into term life insurance costs. Banner and Protective offered the most inexpensive term coverage amongst all of the companies we cover.
Final Verdict
Banner Life Insurance has great, cheap term life insurance with generous conversion options and death benefit (stacking), plus a universal life policy you can convert your term policy into or buy from scratch. Great for no-frills term life insurance with wide coverage and easy purchase. If you prefer a policy with more benefits such as multiple accelerated benefit riders, want anything besides term or universal life insurance, you also need to shop elsewhere.
Methodology
We developed a rating process based on what consumers care about and what makes a company excellent based on life insurance company fundamentals to assign a grade to more than 90 insurers in five broad categories: financial strength, customer satisfaction, product and features, purchasing process, and cost.
To conduct this analysis we collected more than 5,000 data points and scored each insurer across 55 metrics. We organised metrics into five categories showing how insurers faired in each; we adjusted the relative weighting of category scores to reflect how the companies performed overall.
