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Globe Life Insurance Policy Help

Beneficiary changes, billing and failed drafts, lapse notices, and reviews of coverage bought by mail

Globe Life coverage is usually bought without anyone visiting the house. An offer arrives in the mail or plays during a TV show, a short form gets filled out and mailed back, and a small amount starts leaving the bank account every month. The paperwork then sits in a drawer, and the person who signed it never had the chance to ask a human being what it actually does. That is why most calls about these policies open with a question about the contract itself rather than a complaint about the company.

Common reasons people call about a Globe Life policy

• Figuring out what the policy actually pays. The amount of coverage is stated on the policy schedule, and it is not always the figure people remember from the advertisement. Reading the schedule is the way to settle it.
• Beneficiary changes. A divorce, a death in the family, a new grandchild, or a designation filled in decades ago and never looked at since. A change only counts once the insurance company has recorded it on its own form.
• Billing and drafts that failed. Changing banks, replacing a lost card, or one thin month can stop a premium going through, and the notice that follows is easy to mistake for junk mail.
• A lapse notice. A letter saying the policy has lapsed or is close to it. Many contracts allow a lapsed policy to be put back in force under stated conditions, and what that takes depends on the contract and on how much time has passed.
• A policy that belonged to a parent. Figuring out whether it still exists, and what someone named as beneficiary is meant to do next.
• Coverage that no longer matches why it was bought. The mortgage is gone, or the household has changed, or the monthly amount feels heavier than it used to.

What to have ready before you call

• The full legal name of the person insured, including any name used earlier in life
• The approximate year the policy was bought, even if that is only a rough guess
• Any letter, statement or notice you have kept, unopened ones included
• The name of the bank the premium is drafted from, not the account number
• Who you believe is named as beneficiary, and your relationship to the person insured

If you have almost none of that, call anyway. A name and a rough year is often enough to figure out what to ask for and in what order. Nobody needs a Social Security number to answer a general question about how something works.

The name on your paperwork may not say Globe Life

Older certificates sometimes carry the name of a company that later became part of the same group, so the name on your paperwork may not match the name on the website you found. That is worth knowing before you call anyone, because it saves a wasted call and it does not mean the coverage is any less real.

Globe Life Inc., formerly named Torchmark Corporation, writes coverage through affiliated insurance companies that continue to exist as separate legal entities, including Globe Life And Accident Insurance Company, Liberty National Life Insurance Company, Family Heritage Life Insurance Company of America, American Income Life Insurance Company, National Income Life Insurance Company, United American Insurance Company and Globe Life Insurance Company of New York.

Before you cancel or replace anything

Canceling takes a phone call and it is permanent. A new policy is priced on today's age and today's health, so the same coverage nearly always costs more to buy a second time, and if health has changed it may not be available at any price. That arithmetic gets skipped when a monthly premium starts to look like a bill worth cutting.

Something else changes when one policy is swapped for another. A new contract generally starts a fresh period during which the insurer can go back and review the application if a claim comes early. An older contract may also contain terms the company no longer writes. Neither point means an ill-fitting policy has to be kept. They mean the comparison should be made on more than monthly cost.

There is often a middle path people do not know to ask about. Depending on the contract, coverage can sometimes be reduced to a smaller amount for a smaller premium, or the billing schedule changed. Whether any of it applies to your policy is a question for the licensed independent agent, who can look at the real contract rather than reason from the general case. Sometimes the honest answer is that what you already have is the better deal, and an independent agent has no reason to avoid saying so.

Questions people ask