Life insurance policies are complicated things. They use terms and provisions, that are nothing more than legalistic mumbo-jumbo to most of us. Added to this is the fact that there seem to be countless types and varieties of these policies.
The materials that follow present a summary comparison of the most common forms of term, cash value, and specialized and hybrid policies in a tabular format. Although we have tried to hit the high points of the most common types of in use, please note that various insurance companies — primarily for marketing reasons — create their own names for specific variations of the general insurance types noted here. If you have such a policy, you should be able to find somewhere in the first couple of pages a description of what type of policy it is.
Here is a listing of the policy types that we compare:
Term policies
Cash value policies
Selected specialized/hybrid policies