Term Life Insurance Ontario: Should You Insure Your Mortgage with Life and Disability Insurance?
Homeowner’s insurance usually means fire or damage insurance to the majority of homeowner’s. These policies, known as hazard policies, cover some real tragedies that may happen to your home, but they do not cover one of the most likely: that you will not be able to pay your mortgage for reasons beyond your control, such as disability or death.
Home life or disability insurance is the kind of policy that protects against this occurrence. When you think about it, there is probably a greater eventuality that likely you cannot pay your mortgage because you are laid up for a while than that your home is lost in a fire.
Most lenders will offer a plan to insure your house under a lenders group policy. But you can also contact your own or other insurance companies to find out about this kind of insurance. Shopping around for a policy, instead of just taking the cookie cutter one your lender offers, is probably a good idea.
Individual policies can offer a wider range of choices that the lender’s policy probably will not be able to. The lender’s policy will be a “boiler plate” policy, with only the principal amount (the amount of your mortgage or mortgage payments) differing. You cannot alter it in any way to your own needs.
For example, if you want the policy to be for more than the amount of the mortgage to allow for contingencies, you cannot do this. If you wanted to add kind of comfort margins, this would not be permitted.
This is one of the important reasons to shop for your own policy: the amount of control you have over it. You can change the amount, or have it remain stable or go down. (Most bank’s insurance policies go down in coverage amount). Since the lender is in control of the policy, he can cancel it if the mortgage is paid off or assumed or if the group policy terminates. You can carry the policy from home to home when it is your own policy; the lender’s policy is tied to the mortgage.
There is no convertibility factor in a lender’s mortgage insurance policy, while an individual policy can be converted, and cash values will not accrue with group policies whereas an individual policy can provide a return of premiums over time.
A final caveat is that lenders are not in the business of insuring, they are in the business of lending. The expert in the area of insurance is an insurance company, not a bank, so for the best choice and quality of product, you should work with an insurance company.