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5 Prob. & Prop. 28 (1991)
An Introduction to Survivorship Insurance

handle is hein.journals/probpro5 and id is 350 raw text is: By Burke A. Christensen r raditional life insurance policies (including universal, variable, whole life and term) insure only one life. When that insured dies, the insurer pays the death benefit to the beneficiary designated in the policy contract. Joint last survivor, joint life insur- ance, survivorship life and last-to- die insurance are names for a life insurance product that insures two people under the same policy but pays a death benefit only when the second insured dies. The acronym JLS will be used in this article for all these products. viving spouse. JLS policies avoid the problem of trying to guess which spouse is likely to be the survivor, as well as the extra cost of separately insuring both spouses. When there is a choice as to whether taxes ought to be paid at the first or second death, most often the decision is made to defer the tax. To fund this tax, JLS policies are usually purchased by the more affluent clients and tend to be very large. JLS policy death benefits in excess of $5 million are common. Many compa- nies have minimum size limitations; $100,000 is the most common mini- First-to-die policies are not usually relevant to an estate planning prac- tice. For more information on this product, see Sacks, Insurance Trends & Topics, Estate Planning (May/June 1991) at 182. Since there are two insureds in a JLS policy, the premiums are much smaller than the premiums on a simi- lar size policy covering only one insured. This is because two events (the death of both insureds) must occur before the insurance company is required to pay the death benefit. Since it is likely that two people will

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