Healthy Living Can Save You on Life Insurance- But Beware!

Healthy Living Can Save You on Life Insurance- But Beware!

Living a healthy lifestyle has all sorts of obvious benefits, such as admiration from your friends and family to a safer lifestyle, but being in shape also has significant side benefits. One of those useful financial side benefits is the ability to save when purchasing level term life insurance. Insurers prefer to write insurance on people who are unlikely to die and consumers that take good care of themselves fit that bill.

In Doctor’s Care:

Have a primary care physician of your own? You might be surprised by how many Americans do not. Just having a primary care physician can say a lot about your lifestyle (in a good way.) People that see doctors for physicals are closely correlated with a higher level of health. Many insurance companies are more willing to write life insurance on an issue that is being treated than a condition that is not known, ignored. or just loosely controlled.

Low BMI:

The more you work out, the lower your body fat should become. Life Insurance companies love height and weight charts and can be notorious for sticking to them. For the body builders in the group, this may force you to reach out a life specialist that can assist you in finding an insurance company that takes muscular mass into consideration.

Low Cholesterol:

The funny thing about selling life insurance is that you often learn to read people while speaking to them on the phone. High cholesterol should be a problem only for the people that do not exercise, unfortunately that are not necessarily the case. In my years providing life insurance I have found that thin people often don't get tested for it. But as a general rule a healthy lifestyle with no cholesterol issues should allow you to save big.

A Vegan Value:

Vegans and Vegetarians may be able to secure lower life insurance rates as it may often mean that a combination of factors and test scores are better than the general population, such as lower BMIs, lower cholesterol, and obviously lower blood pressure scores. Of course just like the regular population we are referring to healthy vegetarians.

Not Smoking:

There really is no bigger way to save on life insurance than by not smoking, period. In fact smoking makes term life insurance so much more expensive that there is a special categorization for smokers. Don't bother lying about smoking on your life insurance as that could have dramatically poor consequences, plus many life insurers have a blood test to see if you are being honest.

Low Blood Pressure:

In shape American consumers are much less likley to suffer from high blood pressure and with that often many of the medical conditions that can accompany that.

But Beware!

However there can be some Issues. Just because you are healthy and care for yourself does not mean that can not run into some problems when applying for low cost term life insurance.

Lower Breast Cancer Rates:

Pharmaceuticals:

Some physician prescribe drugs are expected for many Americans, sad as it may sound. However others can be a real issue. Whatever it is you are taking you will want to discuss with a life insurance specialist.

Nutriceuticals:

If you take various non FDA approved medicines and herbs it is probably in your best interest to discuss this with your life insurance agent. These can be everything from a simple vitamin to the more complex and complicated products that people use such as St John's Wort. There are definitely a few netriceuticals that are close to impossible to find an insurer for.

The Right BMI Balance:

As discussed some people can get into such great shape that it starts to become a problem from the standpoint of height and weight.  For example some muscular people can run into this specific issue.

Dangerous Activities:

Feeling so healthy you want to go base jumping? Obviously this could have a serious issue with qualifying for life insurance. But it is not limited to Base Jumping, think Rock Climbing, Scuba Diving, really anything extreme in nature. Insurance companies prefer boring healthy people as opposed to the adventurous cousins.
On the very bright side, living and eating a healthy lifestyle has so many positive sides to it - it can be hard to keep track of it all. Just because you are healthy though does not mean that you are invincible.
Scott W Johnson is the owner of Whole Vs Term Life Inurance.com