Can You Collect on a Missing Life Insurance Policy?
You have a relative who recently passed away. You know this relative had a life insurance policy, and you know that you were named as a beneficiary. But what you don’t know is where the policy is. If you can’t find the policy and you don’t even know what insurer issued it, how can you collect on the proceeds? Though it may take some digging, there are ways to collect on a missing life insurance policy. We’ll tell you how here.
Finding Lost Life Insurance Policies
Finding a missing life insurance policy is not easy, but it can be done. To locate a lost policy, you might try the following:
- Examine the insured’s canceled checks for clues. Look at the decedent’s canceled checks for any checks that were written to life insurance companies. If you can’t find canceled checks, order them from the insured’s bank.
- Ask the insured’s financial professionals. Try talking to anyone who might have known about your relative’s finances. You could try his/her lawyer, banker, or accountant for starters. If your relative had other insurance policies, try talking to an agent from those companies. The agent might know where the decedent bought life insurance.
- Talk to past employers. If your relative had a policy through his or her job, then old employers might be able to give you some clues. Employers that offered group insurance would be able to tell you the company with which they did business.
- Go through the mail for a year. Look for premium bills or notices of policy status. Both of these usually come annually.
- Check out tax returns for the past two years. Look for any life insurance expenses or interest income from policies.
- Get in touch with the Medical Information Bureau. If the missing policy was purchased fairly recently, then you might be able to find a list of the companies to which your relative applied. The Medical Information Bureau, or MIB, keeps a database dating to 1996 that will show if any insurers requested your relative’s medical records. Searches through MIB cost $75 and about 30% of them turn up leads.
- Look into organizational memberships. Did your relative belong to any clubs or associations that might have offered life insurance programs? For instance, the Knights of Columbus, AARP, Rotary, and other groups offer discounted life insurance programs. You might contact any such organization to ask what life insurance companies they use.
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