Insurers, Agents Speak Up for Life Insurance Awareness Month

Life Happens and its supporters are spreading the message that responsible adults need life insurance to protect their loved ones and pay their final expenses.

The National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors affiliate will run its 21st Life Insurance Awareness Month campaign in September.

Life insurance industry marketers began developing the awareness month program as the deaths caused by the Sept. 11, 2021, terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon were fresh in everyone’s mind.

Now, the campaign benefits from the new awareness of mortality created by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it competes for industry attention with the new excitement about the annuity market.

What it means: This is the month to ask whether your clients, employees, colleagues and relatives have life insurance, or if their funerals and the wellbeing of their loved ones will depend on crowdfunding campaign contributions.

The awareness efforts: Companies like Colonial Life, Corebridge Financial, Country Life, Erie Insurance, MassMutual, Pacific Life, Protective, Sammons and State Farm continue to support Life Happens.

The new awareness campaign is also getting support from distributors like New Horizons and individual industry particpants like Casey Friedberg, the manager of Comparion Insurance Agency.

Corebridge, for example, sponsored a new online survey of 2,204 U.S. adults to find out what they knew about life insurance.

About 80% of the survey participants knew that young, healthy people have an easier time buying life insurance, but 60% said incorrectly that a term life insurance policy builds cash value.