Is life insurance good or bad?

Life insurance is inherently good. It allows people to pool the risk of premature death and to save for their future needs.

It becomes bad when insurance companies and agents takes away too much of the accumulated savings (i.e. as much as 50%) to pay for expenses and the cost of insurance and gives a poor deal to the consumer. The actual cost of insurance in most cases is less than 10%. It becomes worse, when the insurance agent tells lies and half truths to mislead the consumer into investing their hard earned savings in a poor yielding product.

In the old days (i.e. prior to this century), most life insurance companies and agents acted honorably and deliver fair value to the consumers. Today, the situation is quite bad, and it seemed that many products are designed to rip off the unsuspecting consumers.

I wish to educate consumers and the practitioners, so that the practitioners realize that they are not doing the right thing, and will change their practice and make life insurance a good product for the consumers.

Tan Kin Lian