Locating A Life Insurance Policy for a Deceased Loved One

I recently had to play detective to find details on a life insurance policy my mom had after her passing. In times of chaos, like after the loss of a loved one, it can be hard to think straight and figure out what to do next. I thought it would be helpful to document exactly how I went about finding the details I needed with little to go on. For context, my dad had no idea where any of the paperwork was or who held the policy, and the paperwork was an enormous mess and took hours and hours to dig through. 

Here’s a summary of what you should know if you find yourself in this unfortunate situation.

We all know how life insurance works - you pay in (or your employer pays on your behalf) and upon death your survivors receive benefits. Depending on the size of the policy this might mean enough to cover funeral expenses or it could be enough for survivors to live off for many years into the future.

I’ll spare you all the details of life insurance and who needs it and cut to the chase on how to dig up policies and some tips and tricks I learned along the way.

Your loved one probably got insurance one of two ways: 

1. Bought it directly themselves (paid premiums to the company who issued the policy)
2. Bought through an employer (paid premiums via payroll deductions)

You may not know which option they had - but there are a few ways you can track down this information. I’m assuming here that you can’t find the policy docs - obviously if you have those then the redemption information, policy value and contact information are all at your fingertips.

If you aren’t that lucky, here are a few scenarios and where I would start: 

Scenario 1: You have access to their bank account

If they bought insurance directly, then it’s highly likely there are recurring payments tied to the policy coming out of one of their bank accounts. If you have access to those transactions you can search for premium payments. Here are a few ways to do that, assuming you don’t know the amount or provider.

• Export the past year’s worth of transactions into Excel. 
• Use the Filter function to search the descriptions for anything that contains the following phrases: insurance, premium, policy. 
• If nothing comes up, try sorting the sheet by amount and using conditional formatting to highlight duplicate values, which would be recurring payments. Look at who these are being paid to and see if you can find one that looks like an insurance company.
• It’s possible they paid annually, which would be a larger transaction so you could sort by amount and look through the higher value transactions (I’d assume $1200+ for an annual policy at minimum) to see if any look to be insurance premiums.
• If none of the above brings anything up, look for transaction descriptions that have numbers in them. Often this is the policy number. 

If you find what looks like an insurance premium payment, you now (hopefully) also have the name of the company so you can call in to start the process of redeeming the policy.

Helpful Tip: In my case there was a long number in the transaction description in the bank account. I made an assumption that this could be the policy number and was right. That made it super easy for the representative to look up the policy when I called. 

Scenario 2: You have a recent pay stub

If you think they have insurance via an employer, then you may need to go a different route because the premiums were coming directly out of payroll deduction and wouldn’t show up in their bank account. If you have a recent pay stub, look through every line on the pay stub to see if anything that looks like an insurance premium is included. You might see the following: 

• GTL (Group Term Life)
• ADD (Accidental Death & Dismemberment)
• Critical Illness
• Supp Life (Supplemental Life)

If you see a line item that you’re not sure about, Google it to see what the abbreviation stands for - every company names things a little bit differently.

If you see that there is an insurance line item on the pay stub, you can call their employer and ask who to contact for information on redeeming the policy. 

Note that most employer-offered life insurance policies are term (not whole), and they expire when you leave. You generally have the option to keep the policy, but you have to make the payment directly when you’re no longer an employee. If you think your loved one may have done that, then use the above method to look for premium payments in their bank account.

Scenario 3: They are part of a workplace union or credit union

Unions and Credit Unions often offer their members insurance policies at a discounted rate. If your family member was part of either a worker’s union or a Credit Union you could call and ask them if they promoted insurance to their members, and if so, which company they used. If you have the deceased’s social security number, you could then call the issuing company and ask if they held a policy for them.

Scenario 4: They were employed

You’ll need to get into contact with their current employer anyway, and when you do that you can ask about who the insurance provider is. Not sure who to call (this can be an issue with very small companies)? Do you have contact information for a coworker or friend who might know?

Helpful Tip: If you’re able to speak to someone in HR, you should ask a lot of other questions to help with things unrelated to insurance: 

• Confirm the address they will send COBRA notifications to (if there are survivors who want to continue on the deceased person’s health insurance)
• Were they due any bonuses or commissions that should be paid out in a pro-rated fashion? 
• Who handles their health insurance? Was there a high deductible/HRA plan available and are they able to tell you which plan your family member was on? 
• Who is the administrator for their workplace retirement programs?

Scenario 5: You have literally no details to start with

There’s a national database where you can look up life insurance policies. Unfortunately it’s not great. Here’s how it works: 

• Go to the NAIC Insurance Policy Locator
• Fill in the information about your loved one
• They’ll search across their database of life insurance policies and see if there's a match.

There are three major flaws in this system: 

1. You have to know the beneficiary of the policy. If you enter the right person but the wrong beneficiary, they can’t locate the policy.
2. There’s no proactive communication. Once you submit, your request goes into the ether and you don’t get any status updates, even to say they didn’t find a policy. So you are left hanging.
3. Not all policies are in the database

There are lots of other ways to piece together whether or not there was a policy and the above is really the worst case scenario, but should you need to pursue any of these routes, this should be a useful start.