Pregnant & Thinking About Applying for Life Insurance? What You Need to Know
Congratulations! Starting a family is a wonderful decision and one that will forever change your life. Now, instead of thinking only about yourself and your spouse, you have a lot more responsibility and others who will depend on you.
Deciding to buy life insurance when starting a family is a very wise decision and, typically speaking, not very difficult to do. If you’re young and healthy, the application process for life insurance is straightforward and, best yet, inexpensive. But can pregnancy affect a women’s ability to get life insurance? The answer is ‘yes,’ depending on when it is that she applies for insurance and her pregnancy.
If you’re like the majority of women and you enjoy a relatively risk-free pregnancy, finding, applying and getting approved with a preferred rating for life insurance likely won’t be an issue. With that being said, pregnant women are advised to apply for insurance policies sometime during their first two trimesters, when their likelihood of pregnancy-related complications is lower.
Pregnant and life insurance.
It’s during the third trimester that the majority of women who are going to have complications will experience them. While the percentage of the population who will get gestational diabetes is relatively small, this is one pregnancy-related condition that could arise during the later months of pregnancy and that could affect a woman’s life insurance application. Other conditions, such as preeclampsia, are also more likely to come about later in pregnancy than they are during the first few months. While these conditions may not automatically make you ineligible for insurance, it may make buying the insurance policy more costly.
The best course of action, then, is to apply for life insurance as soon after you find out you’re pregnant, as possible. If you’ve been denied or found that your pregnancy has made the cost of a policy expensive, all is not lost.
Simply wait a month and a half to two months after your little one arrives and then reapply. By that point, most of the conditions that were brought about by your pregnancy will have passed.