Life Tracing Old Life Assurance Policies

Hi,

Can anyone inform me how to go about finding old life assurance policys for my elderly relatives. They know they payed into policys in Royal Liver and they think Irish Life going back over 40 years, but have no documents to prove it. Do I just ring the companys concerned, do they keep a list of old policies going back that far. We have no paperwork but they say they paid weekly into such policies to cover their funeral costs etc.

Thank you very much for any help you can offer.

Many years ago when my mother died I needed to do the same thing, I typed up one letter with names, all possible address, date of birth etc and then went through golden pages and sent copy to every insurance company I could find. Got replies from them all but no policies held, have to say I was surprised at the time as my mother had a business and had bank loans and back in those days the bank manager usually held an agency for insurance companies so I was astonished that somehow she had not been sold a life policy as they were usually required as security for the loan. My point being I dont know how hard the companies looked to see if there were any old policies or how good the records held are.

Thank you for the reply. There must be hundreds of people in this situation, I would of thought a register of some kind could be set up for this kind of thing? Is this another scandal now waiting to hit, old people who do have policies but no will on the behalf of insurance companies to sort this out, its easy to say theres no policies how do you prove there is or isnt?

Are they still paying into the policies? If not, there may be no cover at the moment.

There is no life assurance equivalent of the "dormant accounts" legislation, so life assurance companies do keep records of policies that are still live. Live would include policies that have a surrender ("cash-in") value even if premiums haven't been paid for years. Name and date of birth should be sufficient to locate a person, being careful if there are possible alternate spellings of the name (Brigid, Bridget etc.) and trying maiden names if applicable.

If, as Complainer suggests, a policy was for cover only (and had no surrender value), the cover will lapse after a period of non-payment of premiums. A life assurance company will not keep records of such a policy beyond a certain number of years, as it has no value to anyone.

Hi I think these polices are the ones that I believe a lot of people took out to cover their own funeral expenses etc when they died, my elderly relatives believe all this is covered if they die as they feel they paid into policies for years for such things, they just cant find the documents. One relative told me a man called every Friday night from the Royal Liver and another relative told me he paid each month into Irish Life (he thinks it was Irish Life). When I asked some of my friends about this they say their parents did the same, a man came each week and they paid him for a policy and they all believe their funeral expenses etc to be paid in full and covered under these polices. Its just that their does not seem to be much documentation to prove all this.

If those policies were term policies then the benefits would surely have ended when the payments did, they were just fortunate enough not to have died by that time.

I'm only speculating here but the old "funeral expenses" policies sold door to door tended to be a form of endowment policy, that would in time acquire a value.

As it happens, Royal Liver also took over the door-to-door collection business of Irish Life back in 2001 so any of these door-to-door collection Irish Life policies (known as "industrial branch") would all be administered by Royal Liver now.

Definitely worth a call to Royal Liver with names and dates of birth.

The biggest problem in tracing a policy is when a person was known by a pet or nickname name. Sometines people take out policies where they signed and were always known as 'Jack' when their birth cert says 'John'. There is a high probability that an insurance search for Jack using the correct date of birth may not click that John (the name on the death cert) and Jack are one and the same person hence perhaps no record found.

Carols,
Try ringing Royal Liver on 1850 201351. They took over Irish Life's book of business in the 90's. There is a small chance that there is still a value as some policies were changed to free paid up status when the premiums were very small and not worth the company paying someone to collect. You'll need the names and dates of birth.