If you’ve been following this site, you know that I may be the perfect person to offer an unbiased review of Farmers Life Insurance for two reasons.
First, I have been a licensed life insurance agent for over 7 years, primarily selling insurance for Prudential, Genworth, and Ohio National. Read our other life insurance reviews here. We specialize in helping individuals with medical impairments.
To be clear, I am not a Farmers agent. I am an independent agent.
My Personal Experience with Farmers
Second, I own a Farmers Life Insurance policy on myself, as well as my wife. In fact, we have nearly all our insurance with Farmers, including our home and auto, my business policy, and an umbrella policy. So I have experienced Farmers from an insider’s perspective, as well as from a competitor’s stance.
Multi-Policy Discount for Life Insurance
To be honest, when I was sitting in our Farmers agent’s office to sign up for auto and home coverage, having switched from Allstate Insurance, I never expected to purchase a 10 year term life insurance policy for my wife and myself.
But when our agent quoted us a total of $278 per month for our property & casualty coverage, or we could add $50,000 of life insurance each for the same monthly premium, I was shocked. Our agent explained that by adding the life policies, we would qualify for a discount on our home and auto, essentially making it free to add our life insurance policies.
So the first lesson when considering whether to add or drop a life insurance policy with Farmers is to inquire if you’ll be able to qualify for a multi-policy discount by adding “life” coverage, or if you’ll potentially lose a multi-policy discount by dropping a life policy.
Their History and Ratings
Farmers has been in business for over 80 years, as it was founded in 1928. They do business in 41 states. It’s a bit odd that I could not find Farmer’s ratings on their site, but was able to find them at ambest.com.
A.M. Best rates Farmers New World Life Insurance Company at “A”, which is assigned to companies that have an “excellent ability to meet their ongoing insurance obligations”, in the opinion of A.M. Best. It is the 3rd best of 16 ratings given by A.M. Best.
Only the strongest companies in the world, such as State Farm Insurance and GEICO Indemnity Company earn better ratings.
Types of Policies Available
Farmers offers your typical term policies, 10, 20 and 30 year, which have guaranteed level premiums throughout the initial term period. They also offer whole life and universal life insurance, known as “Farmers Essential Life”, which offers the advantage of a permanent plan and cash accumulation, but with the flexibility to adjust when you pay premiums and the amount you pay.
They offer a traditional term policy (Level Term), which requires a medical exam, and also the “Farmers Simple Term Life Insurance”, which simplifies the underwriting process and does not require a medical exam.
They also offer a couple valuable riders, such as the waiver of premium rider and accidental death benefit rider, as well as the accelerated death benefit rider, which pays up to 50% of the death benefit while you are still living if a physician diagnoses you with a terminal illness.
One unique thing about their term policies is their minimum face value is $150,000 for their Level Term product ($75,000 for the Simple Term), whereas most life insurance carriers have just a $100,000 minimum. From an agent’s perspective, I can tell you this can make it a bit tricky when all a client wants is $50,000 or $100,000 of coverage, but the minimum for the Level Term policy is $150,000.
Decreasing Term
My clients occasionally ask me if there’s a type of policy with a decreasing death benefit. In this case, they are usually interested in covering a mortgage, or similar amortized loan, which makes complete sense, because as your loan balance decreases, some people don’t want to continue paying for the same amount of insurance, when it’s no longer needed.
Farmers is one of the only companies who offers this. I know none of my carriers offer it, so they get a big star in this part of their review for being a trendsetter.
Low Maximum Ages for Term
See the max ages who can qualify for their term. If I can say one negative thing about Farmers, their max ages are really low to be able to qualify for term insurance. You can see their max age is 50 for their 30 year term, where most companies will issue it to age 60, and a couple carriers will even issue it to age 65.
30-Year:
18-45 Nicotine Class
21-50 Non-nicotine Classes
20-Year:
18-60 Nicotine Class
21-60 Non-nicotine Classes
10-Year:
18-65 Nicotine Class
21-65 Non-nicotine Classes
Customer service
Their customer service is ranked highly, and I find few complaints in other reviews that Farmers Life Insurance is a scam or ripped people off. You can always find people complaining on the internet, but I find that only the unhappy clients go off venting on the computer, where you never hear from the millions of happy clients.
The cool thing about their agents is they themselves do the selling AND the customer service, which is really hard to find in the life insurance industry. For example if you were to buy life insurance from Select Quote, you’d probably never speak to the agent again after he sold your policy to you.
Come on, people. Farmers Life Insurance is highly reputable company with over $2 Billion in assets. Do you really think they’re in business to rip people off?