Getting life insurance quotes is not too tough if you know what you want and have a plan. Even if you are not sure what you are looking to buy, most agents will be glad to educate you on your life insurance options. If you want, nearly all of the information is available online. However, this is one instance where being able to have a dialogue with a live person may have its advantages.
You need to decide what type of life insurance that you want to buy.
The two primary types of life insurance have not changed significantly for decades. You can buy term insurance which is the cheaper form of insurance for most people. Term life insurance will give you several times the amount of cash value as whole life for the same premium or less. However, it does not build cash value like whole life insurance does. If you want to be sure to have some value in you life insurance in case you need to borrow against it or want to cash it out before you die, whole life insurance is the way to go. It is more expensive, but the premiums are the same throughout the life of the policy.
Term life insurance can have increasing premiums every few years and may have an expiration date.
Most term life policies are intended to be purchased by younger people. Senior adults pay a lot more for all types of insurance than young people. With term life insurance, by the time a person is 65 or so, a term policy will cost more than the whole life policy with the same death benefit would have cost 30 years earlier. So, sometimes one type of insurance is preferable to the other. You just have to evaluate your need and situation.
If you look for quotes online, there are companies that will quote several types of insurance and possibly for several providers.
This is a sort of insurance buffet. It gives you the opportunity to see a lot of options without spending much time and money. If you know enough about life insurance to choose what you need and want from the selections, this is a great way to shop for insurance. For life insurance shoppers with plenty of time to investigate the options, there are other options that may be better.
Contact 3 or 4 local agents to get quotes.
These agents will only supply quotes from what they deem the best company that they represent for your need. Ask for the name of the company because this may not be supplied along with the quote. You can pester the agents for several days with questions as they arise. You may be able to learn about minor differences between the policies that are important to you.
Be upfront with the agents about how much you want to spend and what amount of life insurance you would like to have.
These two items may not be compatible. That is to say, you may have to spend more or buy less. You may even choose to buy a term life insurance policy that has a savings account attached. This makes the term policy work more like the whole life. The hope is that by the time the term policy is too expensive to afford, you will have enough money in the savings side of the account to cover your end-of-life expenses. You can stop paying the premium and deposit the amount in savings with a bank for your death benefit later on.