If you already have life insurance coverage, smart move! An even wiser one is to have your policy reviewed regularly by your insurance professional, who can help make sure your coverage is keeping up with any significant life changes. Ideally, this review would happen annually or after you experience a major life event. Some of the events that should trigger a life insurance policy review include:

• Getting married or divorced
• Buying a home
• Having or adopting children
• Landing a new job or a substantial promotion or raise
• Buying or selling a business
• Receiving an inheritance
• Losing a loved one
• Becoming an empty nester
• Retiring
• Experiencing a change in health

The Bearingstar team is happy to provide you with a complimentary review of any existing life insurance policies you may have. We can help determine if you still have the proper level of coverage or if you may want to consider increasing your coverage or exploring additional life insurance coverage options.

A stay-at-home parent may not bring home a six-figure salary, but given all the time, work, and effort they put in every day, they probably should earn that—and more. From providing childcare, dog walking, and transportation services to taking care of housecleaning, laundry, and meal prep, there is no end to the work a stay-at-home parent does, and the value they contribute, to keep their household running smoothly. If a family had to hire someone, or more likely many people, to handle all of these responsibilities, it could cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Getting life insurance for a stay-at-home parent may help pay for all the high-dollar services this parent has provided so their loved ones’ lives can continue with as little disruption as possible after they are gone.

Regardless of whether you’re the sole provider in your family, you and your partner both contribute to savings and expenses, or you perform the important role of household CEO, a Bearingstar professional can assist you in understanding the value of your individual contribution and what type of life insurance policy may provide the right coverage for your situation.

At Bearingstar, we help our customers plan out their life insurance solution so that it helps replace their earnings potential and pay down their debts and expenses should something unexpected happen to them. But we also assist them in taking a more holistic perspective of what life insurance can do as part of their overall financial plan.

For example, a whole life insurance policy can be a great complement to your retirement plan and provide you with additional income when you eventually determine it’s time to stop working. As we described earlier, this type of policy has an investment component, which means when you pay your premium, part of that payment is put into a savings account and is known as the policy’s “cash value.” The money in this savings account can grow over time, tax-deferred, at a predetermined interest rate, and can be used to supplement retirement income or for other financial purposes, like paying your life insurance policy premium, funding a large purchase, helping pay for a grandchild’s college tuition, and more. Also, because the cash value is not dependent on market investment returns or a market interest rate, it is not subject to the volatility and fluctuating earnings of some other accounts.

You can learn more about a wide variety of strategic life insurance options from your local Bearingstar professional.

Regardless of the setup or size of a company, there are many ways a business owner may want to use life insurance to protect their business, family, partners, and employees. If you work with the Bearingstar team, we will focus on building the right plan to fit the unique needs of your company and ownership structure, which may include setting up a life insurance policy that helps:

• Fund a buy-sell agreement so that if something happens to one of the business partners, the life insurance policy death benefit is paid out to the company’s remaining partners, who then use the funds to purchase the deceased’s shares from their estate.
• Provide a death benefit to family members who are not involved in the company that is equal to the value of the business being left to family members who are involved in the business and in line to take it over.
• Replace lost revenues due to the death of a key employee, such as a high-level executive or a subject matter expert, and help pay administrative costs associated with filling their role.