X-Message-Number: 6316
Date: Tue, 4 Jun 1996 21:34:11 -0700
From: Tim Freeman <>
Subject: Life insurance sales techniques

Will Dye <> said:
>I am particularly interested in any hitch that may arise 
>from the idea I have to later commit some of my policy 
>towards cryosuspension.  If that's untenable, then I'll 
>need to make other arrangements.  

I can't address the merits of various life insurance companies.  I
have run into insurance agents, though.  I use New York Life, and they
have paid to Alcor a number of times without a hitch.  I didn't shop
very carefully, so I cannot say I got the right company.  There are
services frequently advertised that will search for cheap life
insurance policies for you.  Consumer Reports has somd good back
issues about life insurance; they point to policies that are so
low-overhead that the companies don't bother to promote them.

Some life insurance companies won't accept a cryonics provider as a
beneficiary.  All verbal statements from your insurance agent are true
only by coincidence, so you must get some sort of written promise from
the company (*not* the agent) that you can change the beneficiary to a
cryonics company later when you want to, or you need a cryonics
company as one of the beneficiaries from the beginning.  

A typical sales technique is to delay giving you the written promise
you want, hoping that you'll forget about it or give up on it.  The
counter is to insist on receiving the written promise before writing
any checks.  Another counter is to have multiple companies and
multiple agents in your mind as long as possible, so nobody thinks
they can jerk you around too much.

I presume you have a dependent you are providing money for with your
insurance policy.  The agent may try to persuade you that people who
are perfectly self-supporting will need to become parasites once
someone dies, and thus give you a bigger policy.  They may also
conveniently ignore the fact that the cost of supporting a group of
people decreases when one of them dies.  Be sure to take social
security benefits into account when deciding the size of policy to
get; your dependent may need less income from the insurance than you
think.  Children under 16 with one or more dead parents get social
security benefits.  Social security may be bankrupt someday, but the
same holds for your life insurance company, so I see no obvious reason
to disregard social security.

A neurosuspension would cost somewhere around 1/8 of your $400K
insurance benefit.  It seems that the additional cost of setting it up
now would make a negligible impact on your lifestyle, and it would
allow you to negotiate with the insurance company before you have
comitted to the policy, instead of afterward when they don't give a
damn.  But you said you didn't want to talk about this now, and I
should respect that.

Tim Freeman


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