X-Message-Number: 11437
From: 
Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 08:42:43 EST
Subject: life insurance refund?

"hawkeye" (#11432) asks what happens if he buys life insurance to pay his
suspension fee and then, before he dies, a cure for senescence is
discovered--can he get a refund?

Possibly I have misinterpreted the question, or possibly he (she?) has not yet
carefully read the information on the various organizations' sites. Anyway,
the answers are:

1. If you don't die, you won't get a refund of premiums from the insurance
company, assuming term life; but if you have another form of life insurance,
such as whole life, you can cash in the policy for its cash surrender value
and get some (even most) of your money back. 

2. You may still want to keep the policy in force, because you could still die
of other causes--and the premiums will become much smaller after there is no
more death from old age.

3. Your cryonics organization of course cannot give you a refund, because it
hasn't collected your life insurance death benefit. However, suppose you are
funded in some other way--say using Cryonics Institute's approved Revocable
Living Trust. This allows you to put any appropriate assets into the trust and
still maintain full ownership and control while you live, ownership passing to
CI only if you die. In this case, you never did pay anything to anyone, only a
legal pledge, so you have your "refund" already in hand. And you can leave it
like that, to cover the possibility of accidental death or death from still
incurable disease etc. (Of course, if you lack enough assets initially to
fully fund your suspension fee through the Trust, you would need life
insurance for a while.)

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

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