Editorial policy
This site exists to answer one question accurately: what will a life insurance underwriter do with a file like mine? Everything below is how we try to get that right, and what we do when we can't.
Where the information comes from
Underwriting detail on this site is drawn from three kinds of source, in this order of preference.
Carriers' own published underwriting guides. Where a carrier publishes its manual or a field guide, that is the source, and we link to it.
State insurance department filings. Rate and form filings are public records in most states, and they document what a carrier actually filed rather than what its marketing says.
Named industry practitioners. Where a question cannot be answered from documents — how a rule gets applied in practice — we attribute the answer to a named person and say what they do.
What we do when a source is not public
Many carriers treat their underwriting manual as confidential. When that is the case we say so on the page rather than presenting an inference as a fact, and any figure we give is marked as an estimate with the basis stated.
We would rather publish "this is not public, and here is what practitioners report" than publish a confident number we cannot stand behind.
How estimates are marked
A figure that is not sourced to a document is labelled as an estimate at the point it appears, not in a footnote. If we cannot mark it clearly, we leave it out.
Review dates
Every page carries the date it was last reviewed, not just the date it was written. Underwriting guidance changes without notice, and a page that has not been checked in a year should be read with that in mind.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to fix it and say that we did.
Corrections that change the substance of a page are noted on the page itself with the date and what changed. Typographical and formatting fixes are made silently.
To report an error, use the contact page. Sourced corrections — a link to the carrier guide, the filing, the regulation — get handled fastest.
What we do not do
We are a publisher. We are not an insurance carrier, not an agency, and not licensed to give advice about your individual circumstances.
We do not sell policies. Nothing on this site is an offer of insurance or a solicitation. No editorial content sits behind a form — everything we publish is readable without giving us anything.
Readers who want their situation priced can send an enquiry, and we pass it to a single licensed agent. We do not distribute enquiries to a panel of lead buyers, and we do not sell, rent or share reader data with anyone. Any commercial relationship that could affect what we publish is disclosed on the page it affects.
Where a page could be mistaken for advice, it carries a disclaimer saying it is not, because the difference matters: general information about how underwriting works is not the same as a recommendation about what you personally should buy.
Use of automated tools
See the AI content policy for how automated tools are and are not used in producing this material.