Bestow Life Insurance Review: Term Life Insurance in Minutes?
If you’ve ever gone through the traditional route for finding life insurance, you know the headaches built into the process. Things like high-pressure sales, struggling to compare apples to apples among products, a mandatory physical exam, and excessive paperwork.
Online life insurance brokers have made it easier to shop for quotes, compare rates, and avoid hard-selling insurance agents. But they haven’t been able to entirely nix the doctor’s appointment and paperwork–until now.
Bestow is a new online life insurance provider that uses proprietary algorithms to provide you with a quote, application, and approval process that takes just a few minutes.
No lengthy underwriting, no physical exams, and term policies starting under $8/month. It really is one of the easiest ways to apply for life insurance quickly, painlessly, and inexpensively.
Here’s what you need to know about what Bestow Life Insurance offers:
How Bestow Works
Bestow’s promise of getting a life insurance policy quote, application, and decision completed in minutes may sound too good to be true. But you absolutely can apply for a term life policy in just a few minutes from Bestow. That’s because of how they handle their underwriting.
Bestow is unlike other online life insurance providers because they underwrite the policies they offer in-house with their own technology. That technology is called “accelerated underwriting.”
This process is unlike manual underwriting, which requires in-person interviews, a medical exam, lab tests, and paperwork. Instead, accelerated underwriting asks you basic questions about your lifestyle and health, then uses data and technology to verify that information.
You should be prepared to answer questions about your health and lifestyle. This will include things like your height and weight, tobacco usage, extreme hobbies, future travel plans, and medical history.
The application process and website are both easy to navigate, beautifully designed, and dare-I-say even a little fun to go through.
Once you’ve completed your application, Bestow then uses data vendors to verify your identity and check your prescription history, motor vehicle reports, and financial data.
Between your self-reported information and the data verification, Bestow decides if you are super healthy, above average, average, or below average. That will determine whether and for how much Bestow can offer you a policy. And all this takes just a few minutes.
Get a quote from Bestow today!
Bestow’s Life Insurance Offerings
To be able to offer such a quick decision, Bestow has more limited offerings than other online life insurance sites. Specifically, they have a 10 or 20-year coverage plan.
Their plans are backed by Bestow’s partnership with Munich Re Group and North American Company for Life and Health®. Each of these insurers has an A+ financial rating. Here’s what you can expect from their coverage plan:
- 10 or 20-Year Coverage These plans have a minimum coverage of $50,000 and maximum coverage of $1 million. Their starting premium price is $8 per month. This is a more typical life insurance product that will help protect young families or others who need longer-term life coverage.
Get a quote from Bestow today!
Payment Flexibility
In addition to keeping premiums low, Bestow also wants to make sure the purchasing process and payment process are painless. According to the site, each policy has a 30-day Free Look period. During the Free Look period, you can get a full refund if you cancel within 30 days after making your purchase.
Also, there’s some remarkable leeway in your payments. If you happen to miss a single payment, your insurance coverage remains in force for the next 30 days.
As long as you pay your premium the following month, your insurance will stay in place and in good standing. (However, any missed premiums throughout the term are deducted from the death benefit in the event of a claim.)
You have 60 days to pay a past-due premium to keep your coverage in effect. On the 61st day your coverage will be terminated.
Bestow also offers automatic billing to make sure you don’t ever miss a payment. But the fact that they offer some payment flexibility and leniency is an unusual benefit.
Restrictions
Not everyone is eligible to purchase life insurance through Bestow. To start, Bestow policies are not available to residents of Georgia, New York, and Puerto Rico. (However, Georgia may be added soon to their list of eligible states.)
In addition, Bestow limits life insurance purchases to consumers over the age of 21 and under the age of 55. To qualify for a 20-year life insurance policy, you must be 45 years old or younger.
Finally, certain health conditions, such as heart disease, cancer, or kidney disease, or risky hobbies, like roller derby, scuba diving, or piloting non-commercial aircraft, could keep you from qualifying for a Bestow policy.
Deciding if Bestow is Right for You
One of the great parts of interacting with the Bestow site is the fact that you can get an excellent sense of how a policy will work for you without providing your email address.
The quote form (test it for yourself) asks you for basic data: age, height, weight, state of residence. From there, you get a rough price range estimate for the coverage options available to you.
This estimator includes a pretty nifty slide tool that lets you see how premiums and policies change as coverage increases and decreases.
The fact that you can access all of this information without having to provide an email address or other contact information is pretty exciting. It puts the control in your hands, which is exactly where it belongs.
Get a quote from Bestow today!
More to Consider with Bestow Life Insurance
That said, Bestow may not be the right choice for every life insurance shopper. If you have health or lifestyle risks, you’ll be better served by a traditional life insurance shopping experience.
In that case, a licensed insurance agent can bring the human nuance necessary to find the policy that will cover your needs.
In addition, if you have special needs children or another need for a long policy timeline, Bestow’s options may not serve you well. One benefit of purchasing a life insurance policy when you are younger is locking in lower premiums.
If you need more than 20 years worth of coverage, you may find that a new policy has become too expensive (or you have become more difficult to insure) by the time your 20-year Bestow policy expires.
See also: Buy the Best Life Insurance in 7 Easy Steps [The Ultimate Guide]
The Bottom Line on Bestow Life Insurance
Bestow is modernizing the realm of life insurance. And like any new technology, it’s not going to work for everyone right out of the gate.
But for life insurance shoppers between the ages of 21 and 55 who want a fast, easy, and inexpensive option for their life insurance needs, Bestow can be a great fit.
Add in their payment flexibility, their customizable payouts, and their different coverage options, it can be hard to beat Bestow’s offerings for eligible customers.
