How Do You Use Whole Life Insurance In Retirement? 
A whole life insurance policy is an extremely flexible product that can meet many needs in retirement . The most obvious need is death . It is obvious that retirement always ends in death . Death is not inexpensive . The proceeds of a whole life insurance policy can pay off some or all of those expenses . After a certain age term policies can not be written at any price . I recently had a client who forgot that there was a life policy on her husband . She was paying his funeral expenses on an installment plan . I discovered the policy and brought it to her attention . She was delighted . Another use of a whole life policy is to transfer property to heirs . Often a person will want to leave money to children , grandchildren or a favorite charity . They will then try to conserve their retirement assets so that money will be available when the die . Unfortunately they often rob themselves of lifes simple pleasures in their drive to provide that inheritance . A life insurance policy can do that at the beginning of retirement leaving the person the balance of assets to spend as they wish . Some people have estates that are subject to estate tax . The problem with estate tax is that if there isnt cash to pay the taxes , assets are often sold at below market value to pay the tax . Having cash can make the difference of keeping the family business going , maintaining the family farm or closing them up for taxes . Since that can happen at any time , a whole life policy is particularly flexible in that regard . Whole life insurance is often used when a person wants to leave a specific valuable asset to one child but wants to treat all the children in the same manner . The heirs that are not going to get that valuable asset could receive equivalent proceeds from a whole life policy and everyone would be happy . A whole life policy is often used to purchase the interest of another party in a business . In this case the surviving partners dont particularly want to share everything with a widow who may not be acquainted with the business . A whole life policy can provide the cash to take care of that situation by giving the survivors the funds they need to purchase the widows interests . Sometimes whole life insurance is used to fund day to day living expenses in retirement . I just finished a comparison that showed that a whole life policy performed as well as a fixed annuity in accumulating money for retirement and that it did that with the promise to pay the full benefit should the person die before retiring . The whole life policy has non-forfeiture provisions which can pay a lifetime stream of income if desired or the policy would also give the person the flexibility to use the policy in other ways depending upon future , unforeseen events . This may sound strange but I often get requests for whole life insurance from older individuals . They seem to appreciate the value of lasting protection at a fixed price . 