How to find out if someone has a life insurance policy

How to locate a life insurance policy

There are certain people you should ask and places you should look when searching for a life insurance policy.

Ask their employer

Many businesses offer Death in Service cover for employees, which is a little different to life insurance. We have another article on how the two compare.

However, some businesses offer a form of life insurance as part of their employee package. You can contact the HR department of your loved one’s place of work, and they’ll be able to confirm if anything was in place.

Even if they had retired or moved on from that company, they may have set up a policy while working there, so it’s still worth investigating.

Ask their insurer or bank

If you know they used a particular provider for other types of insurance, like home insurance for example, you could check with the insurer if they also had a life insurance policy. Insurers can connect beneficiaries to policies, but they can only do this if they’re contacted and told that the policy holder has passed away.

You should also check with their bank as banks are common providers of insurance policies. If you’re the executor of their will, you may need to contact your loved one’s bank to close their account. When you do this, the bank will be able to tell you if a life insurance policy had been taken out with them.

Advisors and documents

Lawyers, accountants and financial advisors all keep their clients’ personal information safely stored. If you know that your loved one used any of these services, you can reach out to them to check their life insurance status.

If you have access to their bank statements, these can reveal payments to an insurer. You can then contact that insurer, explain the situation and see if they need any further information to disclose the policy details.

Beneficiary information is normally requested when someone takes out a policy, but sometimes people make mistakes and put down the wrong details. Or, the beneficiary’s details may have changed since then and important information about the policy is being sent to the wrong place. This is why it’s always worth checking if you think that you might be a beneficiary of a life insurance policy.

What happens to the funds if a claim isn’t made?

If an insurer is alerted that a claim needs to be paid but isn’t able to reach the beneficiary, it will hold the funds and wait to be contacted. After a certain period (usually between one and five years) it will transfer the funds to the government’s Dormant Assets Scheme.

This Scheme’s primary aim is to reunite people with their financial assets. It will hold funds for a longer period, so even if it’s been over five years since your loved one passed away, you can still make a claim providing you can prove that you’re the beneficiary. It also handles financial products like pensions and old bank accounts.

When funds have lain dormant for a considerable amount of time, the Scheme invests them in social and charitable causes, so the money doesn’t go to waste.

How do I make it easy for my loved ones to find my life insurance policy?

Life insurance is something that people don’t always want to hear about, as they understandably don’t want to imagine life without you. But you take out a life insurance policy because you want to help the people you care about. Making them aware of how to make a claim is part of that care.

Here’s a checklist of useful steps you could take to make it as easy as possible for your loved ones to make a claim.

• Share your policy number and insurance provider with them in multiple formats: You might want to send the most key information in an email, a Whatsapp message and give them a good old-fashioned bit of paper. They might lose access to one, but losing all three is less likely
• Update your beneficiary information: If your loved one moves house, changes their email address or gets a new phone number, remember to update their information on your policy. This will help the insurer get in touch with them if they forget to reach out themselves
• Tell multiple people: If you’re planning for your life insurance payout to go to an individual person, such as a child, it makes sense to tell a close friend that the policy is in place. When people are experiencing grief, they may not be thinking as clearly as usual, which is why life insurance policies become forgotten about. By telling more than one person, you increase the likelihood that claims are made and the support you set up reaches the beneficiary
• Keep all relevant documentation somewhere safe and accessible: To make things as easy as possible for your beneficiary, keep your policy details somewhere they can easily find it, like the top drawer of a desk. You may want to keep it in an envelope with ‘important documents’ on the front so it won’t be overlooked.