Before I worked for Haven Life, my husband and I were both customers, two of the first dozen or so customers in fact. I was working at MassMutual, the issuer of the Haven Term policy, and I had been following what Haven Life was building and when they opened sales up to a limited group of friends and family, we jumped right on it. That’s right, a customer turned employee (high five).
Rewind 4-ish years, my husband Jake and I were teetering between our 20s and 30s, we were newly married, looking to start a family soon and had a dream of building our forever house. There were a couple of things that drove us to buy term life insurance:
First, we knew our future family would be toast if something happened to either of our incomes. Even though we both had some insurance through our employers, it wouldn’t be enough to maintain our lifestyle or even enough to afford our house if the unthinkable were to happen to one of us. The idea of one of us not being around and the family being forced to move and lose our dream home drove us to want to buy life insurance.
Second, we also knew that the earlier you buy term life insurance, the cheaper it is. This is because life insurance premiums are based off things like your age and your health. Because health generally decreases as you age, the likelihood of a company having to pay out a death claim increases, so the same policy is more expensive if you buy it when you’re 40 versus if you buy it when you’re 30. Since your premiums are locked in as soon as you purchase the policy, the sooner (or younger) you buy, the less you’ll pay in premium and the more coverage you can afford.
Why we bought term insurance
We’re all going to die someday, but most of us won’t die anytime soon. That’s why term insurance, which covers you for a set term (like 20 or 30 years), is much cheaper than a policy that provides a death benefit for your entire life. We bought it hoping we will never actually use it, and we consider the premium we pay each month as peace of mind.
We found term life insurance to be relatively inexpensive compared to our other monthly bills and used Haven Life’s quote feature to play around, balancing what we want to spend each month and how much coverage we wanted. For example, a 30-year-old woman in excellent health could buy a 20-year, $500,000 Haven Term policy issued by MassMutual for under $25 a month.
We decided for us to feel comfortably covered, we would each want to have coverage totaling at least the anticipated cost of our mortgage and some for our son’s college.
Why we chose Haven Life
We didn’t want a big complex financial plan, we wanted simple, inexpensive term life insurance. We decided on a 30-year term and to buy it a little ahead of when we would have actually needed it so we could lock in the price. If we waited until we had the children and the house we would have been older and the cost of our premium would have been higher. Plus it’s just nice to check the box done versus always having an important to-do on your shoulders. Despite working in financial services, understanding the products and the process, my preference was to buy completely digitally, all online.
Haven Life was just launching at this time with a truly innovative online buying experience. It was a very simple online application process and then I received an immediate decision on coverage because of its algorithmic underwriting platform. I was able to have temporary coverage in place within 15 minutes of starting the application. The experience really appealed to me because I didn’t know of anything else out there that could offer anything like that. We completed the digital application, got immediate coverage, then had a medical rep come to our house to confirm our health info and collect fluids.
Now that we’ve had our policies for about 4 years we are still happy to have the peace of mind. I’m confident our pricing would be different now that we are a little older and have worked hard to achieve our mom and dad bods. The coverage amount we bought then with the future in mind is exactly what we ended up needing.
Cheri Kevane is a working mom, by day she works as a business consultant at Haven Life, by night she’s a mom and enjoys her creative outlet of home decor blogging on Instagram. You can find her @StrangeFarmhouse. (Photo credit: Wild Lemon Photography)
