Life Insurance for Early Stagers

If you are looking for life insurance to strictly to provide money for your children, my husband and I just bought something that might interest you and for which you might qualify. It is called an Individual Survivorship Whole Life Policy with Additional Protection Insurance Payable on Second Death. It requires  health exams for both of you.  It only pays out when both are dead so won't help if the goal is to help the widow or widower!! We had each had whole life policies and cashed them out because we had originally been told that based on then current predictions our policies would be paid up in like 11 years, well 15 years later we were still paying, we stopped paying (just refused to pay!) annually for a number of years and our "dividends" paid for the premiums until this year when the company said that our dividends no longer funded the premiums 100% (their bad investments) so we pulled our money out and will use it to pay for a policy equal to what we had formerly with a company in which we have more confidence. In addition to DCIS - less than 5 years out, but almost 5 years, I was recently diagnosed with endometrial cancer and was still recovering from a hysterectomy when we had our health exams (health history, height, weight and blood work). Looking back on it, my husband was actually suffering from then-undiagnosed Lyme Disease at the time, but otherwise is in excellent health - however he had not seen a doctor in more than 6 years, didn't even have a doctor - has not had any of the tests like a colonoscopy he should have had by our age (63) . We passed the health exam and are paying the lowest premiums for our age. 

I think however that you need to really think through why you even want health insurance. For me, my investing skills are such that I want to leave something to the kids. I doubt it is necessarily the best strategy to do so.

I'm ten years out and have yet to find an insurance company that will increase my coverage. It all ends when you are asked if you are still receiving care for your cancer. I see my Oncologist yearly, so it automatically marks me as a risk. Very frustrating. Would they like it better if we weren't seeing our doctor?

I asked our New York Life agent (my husband has some annuities with her) about buying a life insurance policy for myself. She said that they won't consider insuring me until 5 years have passed without a recurrence. She indicated that all insurance companies have this rule for breast cancer. It's only been 2 years this month so I will have to wait 3 more years.