# Question about term insurance

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-term-insurance/826906>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [December 30, 2018, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-term-insurance/826906 "2018-12-30T04:43:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2019, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-term-insurance/826906/41 "2019-01-07T19:44:18Z")

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> [@Riemann](#):
>
> Time value only adds about 40% to the premiums.
> 
> Quite honestly, I have no good explanation for why your premiums are so cheap, other than those actuarial tables just being inaccurate. 6% does seem intuitively rather high, even averaging across smokers etc.

Yeah, I agree it seems kinda high.

I do remember that among my options available for basically the same coverage but from other insurers, the premiums ranged by a factor of like 3. I didn’t choose the very cheapest one, but pretty close to the cheapest. My insurer had a good bond rating and also I’d heard of them, so it’s not like I chose a fly-by-night insurance company. But clearly experts disagree on how expensive my life should be to insure. The high end of options + 40% certainly gets us into the range of the actuarial charts.

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