Shopping for life insurance by its very nature involves some significant unpleasantness. Very few of us, I imagine, get up one morning and think, “This is a great day to contemplate my own demise!” Still, there comes a time when you can no longer put it off and you find yourself on the phone discussing your monetary worth with a total stranger.
That day recently occurred in my family, when Chip and I decided that it would be irresponsible not to get some additional life insurance. We each bought policies after we first got married and got additional insurance through Chip's employer as well, but now that we’re parents of two, we knew we needed more.
Being a rabid comparison shopper, I have sought out quotes from more than one company. That means we have endured multiple probing interviews, sometimes involving questions that would have made me blush and/or sweat in a doctor’s office, never mind over the phone with someone I’ve never met.
One Friday evening, I spent a wholly unpleasant hour being interrogated by a women whose sense of humor had been surgically removed or perhaps just lost in a tragic accident. When I told her that my last medical appointment had been a six-week post-partum checkup, she asked me if my “health problem” had been resolved by the visit. “Well,” I said, “if by resolved you mean that the baby was totally out, then, yes.” Crickets.
When she asked if I had lost or gained more than ten pounds in the past year, I said that I had been pregnant—a condition known in most circles to cause weight gain and, occasionally, subsequent loss. I explained that I had gained 15 pounds and then lost those 15 pounds within a few weeks of giving birth. “Which was it?” she wanted to know. “Did you gain or lose weight?” It didn’t seem a hard concept to me that I could have done both, but that clearly did not fit into whatever box it was that she was supposed to be checking. Doesn’t it seem like there should be a choice for that, or a variation on the question?
No matter, we were off and running again, right up until she demanded my bank details for automatic withdrawal of my premiums. Since I was only in the research phase, I refused and then wondered if I could have said no to other of her requests. Her demands for the health histories of my second cousins, for example. Or her nagging insistence that I cough up the dates of that time I was hospitalized for bronchitis when I was a toddler.
By the time she was finished with me and the phone was safely back on its cradle, I was a crabby mess, ranting and raving about underwriting and privacy and anything else that came to mind. It took two episodes of “Weeds” to calm me down, and any insurance agent reading this should not infer anything based on that viewing choice.
The most unnerving thing is that the real unpleasantness is yet to come, when a paramedic is dispatched to my home to take my blood and make me pee in a cup and otherwise weigh and measure me up—and, presumably, get me to answer another round of questioning. I can hardly wait. The end result, I hope, will all be worth it—assuming that the companies decide that Chip and I are worthy.
In the meantime, we’ll be the ones driving very slowly, consuming mostly veggies and generally trying to stay alive and well.
NB: A version of this appeared in today's Business to Business journal, a publication of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.