Reclaiming Old Life Insurance Policies

Every year, thousands of policyholders in Canada pass away. However, not all of their beneficiaries receive the death benefit they are entitled to.

Since some beneficiaries don’t claim their rightful payout after the life insured’s death has occured, the insurance company has no way of knowing the insured has passed away.

Some insurance companies assign a time limit for any claim to be made. If you are unable to discover your policy and claim it within a year, then you might not be able to get your share of the money.

Discover your policy

If you believe that there is insurance money, waiting out there for you then you should visit the policy search service offered by the Canadian Life and Health Insurance OmbudService and ask for assistance.

OmbudService for Life and Health Insurance (OLHI) is an organization that assists and helps Canadians to find an old or lost insurance policy of a family member that died recently. OLHI will then contact its insurance company members and will request them to carry out a policy search.

If there is a lost policy death benefit out there for you, they will possibly track it down and find it. The Canadian Life and Health Insurance OmbudService requires two basic and important confirmations before it can proceed with a search:

1. There should reasonable evidence that there in fact is existing unlocated coverage.
2. There should be evidence to support the facts around the insured person’s death.

Time Constraints

The good news is that the OmbudService search is absolutely free of cost, however, as mentioned earlier, there are time limits for the search to be conducted. The search will not be completed until three months have gone from the date when the policyholder died. Also, the search will not continue for more than 2 years after the death of the deceased. Make sure to carry out the search around that time.

Claim the policy

If you are finally sure that your deceased family member has left you money out there with your name on it then you will have to prove your claim to owning it. Firstly, search for some insurance related documents that belonged to the deceased policyholder.

You will then have to track down the deceased’s insurance company and ideally the agent who delivered that policy. Also, contact any of their financial advisors who might have relevant information about the deceased’s insurance policies.

You will have to attain necessary forms from the insurance company, in order to fill the required information and claim your unclaimed monies.

Later on, you will be required to provide further proof such as the death certificate of the deceased and the physician’s final report. For this report, you will need to contact the doctor who attended to the deceased at the hospital where he or she expired.

Reclaiming other financial instruments

There are other types of financial products that forgotten and unclaimed, which are worth mentioning:

1. Other than insurance money, you can also reclaim money from your long-lost and old bank accounts. Sometimes when you switch your bank, without properly shutting down your old account, you tend to forget that there might be some lost funds left in there, that you can still claim.
2. You can also reclaim a forgotten pension fund that you might not have collected but are entitled to. You will need to contact your previous employer and the pension administrator. To get your rightful share, simply contact provincial pension regulator to find out about your funds.
3. If one day, you came across an old stock certificate that belonged to your grandparents or a deceased family member, you can find out its possible worth by consulting an online dealer or an evaluator and claim it too.