Life insurance is considered an important cornerstone in any personal or family's financial planning. For most families and individuals, life insurance is an extremely important way to safeguard their family in case of an accidental death. Individuals that take out life insurance policies have added peace of mine that if death occurs - their family will be financially secure. There are a few different types of life insurance products on the market; the most popular are Term Life, Whole Life (sometimes called Permanent) and variations of the two.

Term Life

Term life insurance is an insurance product that covers you for a specific term (time period). You usually pay the same rate over the life of the term and you are guaranteed a benefit of a specific amount in the case of death. Most term life insurance policies are from one year to thirty years. There are two types of term life; level term and decreasing term. The vast majority of consumers choose level term. Level term has the same cost from year to year, decreasing term means that the death benefit decreases from year to year or other schedule. There is also renewable term life insurance. With renewable term life, you can renew your life insurance once the term is up, even if you would normally not be able to qualify for term life due to health problems.

Whole Life/ Permanent

Whole life insurance pays a death benefit, whether you die in one year or at the age of 90. The benefit always stays the same and with most policies the payments also always stay the same. Some whole life insurance policies have an added feature that you can withdraw a cash value of the policy after a specific amount of time. For instance, a person that no longer needs to care for a family with a whole life policy can withdraw a cash value of the policy in order to live more comfortably.

Universal Life Insurance

This type of life insurance gives you more options than whole life. For instance, you can increase the benefit and you can withdraw money from the policy if it has a cash value.

Variable Life

Similar to Universal Life Insurance, however you usually get a savings account that earns interest. You can also invest money that is in your savings account via stocks, bonds and other monetary instruments..