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Home » Inheritance Law » How to Find Lost Life Insur­ance Benefits

How to Find Lost Life Insur­ance Benefits

September 11, 2019 by Liza Hanks

Photo of woman searching with binocularsCon­sumer Reports esti­mated that at least $1 bil­lion in ben­e­fits from for­got­ten life insur­ance poli­cies are wait­ing to be claimed. Often, when I meet with adult chil­dren wrap­ping up a par­en­t’s estate, they don’t know whether that par­ent had life insur­ance poli­cies. For exam­ple, many vet­er­ans of WWII, the Korean War, and the Viet­nam War left behind poli­cies that they pur­chased while on active duty through the Vet­er­ans Admin­is­tra­tion. And they may have for­got­ten to tell their inher­i­tors about these plans.

I real­ize that I’m stat­ing the obvi­ous here, but you can’t make a claim on poli­cies that you don’t know exist. And gen­er­ally speak­ing, life insur­ance com­pa­nies aren’t going to go out of their way to notify folks of poli­cies wait­ing to be claimed, although sev­eral of the largest ones—IG, Fore­thought, John Han­cock, MetLife, Nation­wide, and Prudential—have agreed to search more dili­gently for deceased pol­icy holders.

Unfor­tu­nately, only ten states have cen­tral­ized data­bases of insur­ance poli­cies issued in their state: Alabama, Louisiana, Mis­souri, New York, North Car­olina, Ohio, Okla­homa, Ore­gon, Texas, and Ver­mont. If your state isn’t on this list, you do have other options for your search:

Find­ing Life Insur­ance Poli­cies Held by Veterans

If a per­son who died was a vet­eran, there’s an easy way to search for life insur­ance poli­cies. Use this quick link to the Vet­er­ans Admin­is­tra­tion web­site, where you can use the vet­er­an’s  name to search for unclaimed funds.

Find­ing Non-​Military Life Insur­ance Policies

For most other life insur­ance poli­cies, you’ll have to do some sleuthing. If you’re will­ing to pay for help, you can use MIB, a com­pany that main­tains a large data­bases on poli­cies issues since the early 1990s. The search will cost you $75.

Or you can do home-​grown detec­tive work for free:

  • look through check­books for pre­mium payments
  • look through mail for annual bills
  • check old tax returns (peo­ple have to report poli­cies that pay interest)
  • check safe deposit boxes, where peo­ple often stash policies
  • con­tact­ing employ­ers and unions to find out if they offered life insurance
  • con­tact with finan­cial advi­sors who may have sold a par­ent an annu­ity or other insur­ance product

If the per­son died more than two years ago, you can also look for poli­cies that insur­ance com­pa­nies have turned over to the state. The web­site Miss­ing Money gath­ers unclaimed prop­erty records from 38 states, Canada, Puerto Rico, and the Dis­trict of Columbia.

You Found a Pol­icy — Now What?

If you find a pol­icy and want to con­tact an insurer, you should have some basic infor­ma­tion ready: a death cer­tifi­cate, date of birth, full name, and pos­si­bly the per­son’s last known address. The com­pany may not want to speak to you unless you are an execu­tor or imme­di­ate fam­ily. But if you are the ben­e­fi­ciary, they’ll send you forms and tell you how to claim the money.

More Infor­ma­tion

Liza Han­ks’s most recent book is Every Cal­i­for­ni­an’s Guide to Estate Plan­ning. To con­nect with her directly visit www​.liza​hanks​.com, where a ver­sion of this post orig­i­nally appeared on her blog.

To get more answers to com­mon ques­tions about inher­i­tance law, see Legal Con­sumer’s Inher­i­tance Law learn­ing cen­ter.

Filed Under: Inheritance Law Tagged With: life insurance, unclaimed property

About Liza Hanks

Liza Hanks is a partner at GCA Law Partners LLP in Mountain View, California, where she practices estate planning, trust administration, and probate law. She’s the author of Every Californian’s Guide to Estate Planning: Wills, Trusts & Everything Else and The Trustee’s Legal Companion (with Attorney Carol Zolla) and she writes about estate planning and inheritance law here at Legal Consumer. Liza is a graduate of Stanford Law School, a former magazine editor, and the mother of two children (neither of whom show any desire to become attorneys).

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