When Life Insurance Is More Valuable as Cash

THE children are grown. Each spouse — or a surviving spouse — has enough assets to last a lifetime. Yet a life insurance policy is still in force. It could be used to make gifts to those children now, a down payment on an inheritance, in effect.

Or, in another case, an older person with such a policy needs the money it represents not for heirs but for personal needs — perhaps to pay for long-term health care, to travel or just to make ends meet.

A life insurance policy is a financial instrument, an asset. Like all other assets, it has a value. There is not just the face value — what it will pay at the owner’s death — but some lesser amount that a buyer may pay in order to collect the face value when the insured person dies...

NYT: When Life Insurance Is More Valuable as Cash