With over 850 life insurance companies selling life insurance policies, many consumers find it challenging to find the best companies for their particular needs.
One of the most common approaches many consumers take is to run a Google search to find the top companies. They might employ search terms using something like “Top 10 Life Insurance Companies” or “best Life Insurance Companies”, for example.
But are the search results reliable and do they tell the whole story?
The answer is no.
The reason I say this is because the results you will find tend to be very biased and inaccurate.
For example, let’s say you visited a financial planning site and all they tried to do was sell everyone annuities…. Wouldn’t that be suspicious? Certainly, there are other products (stocks, mutual funds, bonds, ETF’s) that are better in some situations than annuities.
You’d feel like the site is being one sided, wouldn’t you?
That’s the problem with the current tools online that compare the best life insurance companies.
Mostly, the results you find only show the companies that these agents work with and exclude many of the top life insurers in the business. Life insurance consumers deserve better information so they can properly learn which companies really rank as the best company. We will show you a better approach later on in this article.
When you check these sites for the top 10 results, you will often find that some of the biggest companies are missing in these searches. Companies such as New York Life, Mass Mutual, Guardian, State Farm and Northwestern Mutual are completely excluded in these best life insurer site lists.
The reason for this is twofold because there are 2 types of life insurance agents.
There are independent life insurance agents who represent dozens of companies and captive agents which only represent single companies.
My view is generally that independent agents are the best agents to use simply because they represent dozens of companies. However, when these same agents tout the top 10 life insurers on their sites, they are only including those companies which they use. This list likely does not include some of those insurers like State Farm, New York Life, and Northwestern Mutual that are some of the oldest, strongest companies in America.
And while I feel that agents who are captive to these companies should generally be avoided, because they only represent single companies, there may be some instances when their one company may be the best choice.
In most cases, I say independent life insurance agents are a better way to go simply because they can find a broader range of life insurance policies because not all companies feature the same type of pricing, benefits, and leniency toward certain health conditions.
For example, a good independent agent might be able to find “non tobacco rates” for a pot smoking client because of the various companies available to him/her. A captive agent will be stuck with their ONE company, even if they rate the client as a smoker.
The same phenomenon happens to people who try to get life insurance after a heart attack, stroke, or cancer. Some carriers will simply be more lenient than others so it’s best if you have many options.
Still, there may be better options simply because these independent agents don’t deal with every single company out there.
But here’s where it gets tricky when it comes to finding the top life insurance companies. The reason is because some of these top companies are also ones which are only represented by captive agents, but since captive agents aren’t the ones posting “best company comparison tools” online (independent agents are), we never see them in the so called “top 10 lists”.
It wouldn’t make sense for many independent agents to include some of the big companies like New York Life or Northwestern Mutual in their top 10 list, since they can’t sell them, but that’s where I disagree. Because of this simple disparity, it becomes virtually impossible to discern which life insurers actually rank as the top 10 life insurers.
We finally became tired of these inaccurate shenanigans employed by many agents. Our goal became to create a better and much accurate representation of which insurers really are the best companies in the life insurance industry.
So we ended up creating the Sweet Rates Sorter tool at: https://www.insuranceblogbychris.com/best-life-insurance-companies/. Although we are independent agents, we are featuring all the companies who we do not represent.
Our tool allows you to sort companies by the best price, best service (according to JD Power), and strongest financials (according to their Comdex rating).
In addition, the tool offers guidance for the best companies for various situations such as the fastest company, the best company if you’re paying off a mortgage, the best companies with pre-existing conditions.
Finally – don’t be sucked in by “top 10 lists”. They’re biased and don’t show the whole picture. Even if you don’t reference our tool (which is fine) just be sure to get multiple quotes from various agents and ask about the companies rates, how they are at dealing with YOUR particular health issues, how they view your lifestyle and how highly they’re rated for financial strength and service.
Once you start asking around, you’ll get a better sense for which company is best for your situation and what’s most important to you!