Life insurance policy types

Would your family be able to cope financially if you passed away? It's not something that any of us like to think about; but childcare, mortgage repayments and household bills could make a difficult time even worse for your loved ones.

Life insurance and critical illness cover can be used to help protect your dependants financially if you or your partner were to die or become seriously ill. You could choose a level of cover to allow your family to pay off debts or the mortgage, cover funeral costs or pay for your children's further education.

At Compare Cover we make it easy to compare quotes from leading insurance providers. Insurance comparison is our speciality, and our objective is to give you the tools and information you need to help you make an informed decision. In this article we'll outline some of the different term life insurance policy types available.

What are the different life insurance policy types?

Life insurance cover comes in a number of forms and it's important to choose the right policy to suit your specific needs and circumstances. When comparing life insurance quotes, you can choose to cover either single or joint lives (with joint life policies only paying out for the first claim) and compare the following types of life insurance policy:

Level term life insurance

Perhaps the simplest type of policy, level term cover pays out an agreed amount if you die within the term of the policy. This amount is chosen by you when you set up the policy and will not change over . This means your beneficiaries will receive the same amount should you pass away nearer the beginning or the end of the selected term.

You can find out more by visiting our level term life insurance page or you can get quotes by selecting 'Level cover' under 'What type of cover do you need?' when comparing quotes with our life insurance comparison tool.

Mortgage protection life insurance

Also known as decreasing term cover, with this type of policy the amount of cover reduces over time, usually in line with a standard repayment mortgage. If you die within the term of the policy, the pay-out is designed to roughly cover the outstanding balance of your mortgage, allowing your family to stay in the property without having to worry about how they'll cover the mortgage repayments.

You can find out more on our mortgage protection life insurance page or you can get quotes by selecting 'Decreasing cover' under 'What type of cover do you need?' when comparing quotes with our life insurance comparison tool.

Critical illness cover

If you became seriously ill and couldn't work, would your family be able to cope financially? It's not a nice thing to think about, but if the answer is no, critical illness cover is another important type of insurance to consider. The policy would pay out in the event of you (or, in the case of a joint policy, your partner) being diagnosed with one of the policy's named critical illness during the policy term, helping your family to cope at a difficult time.

Critical illness cover can be added to your life insurance policy at an additional cost. You can choose integrated critical illness cover where the amount of critical illness cover is the same as your life cover or independent critical illness cover where you can specify an amount of critical illness cover which can be different from the amount of life cover you have selected.

You can find out more on our what is critical illness cover page or you can get quotes by selecting 'Yes - integrated critical illness' or 'Yes - independent critical illness' under 'Would you like cover which pays out in the event of diagnosis of specified critical illness?' when comparing quotes with our life insurance comparison tool.

Make sure your family is protected if the worst happens and compare life insurance quotes today.