Individuals can write the names of their children, spouses or other relatives as beneficiaries for their life insurance policies. There are times when relatives have no idea who was named as a beneficiary or even if a person had a life insurance policy at all. Are there ways of how to find out if a deceased person had life insurance? And if you are named as a beneficiary, how do you get to know if you were named as one? Here are a few ways you can find out if you have been named as a beneficiary.
1. Collect Every Important Document
First and foremost, gather all the documents for the deceased person. These documents include all their bank, work, and medical documents. Collect the deceased will if in case they had written one, their death certificate and others related to the person’s death. The will may have a lot of information including the names of life insurance beneficiaries. A court of law usually probates the deceased person’s assets to ensure that they are distributed according to that person’s wishes. It is important that you look through this process to see if life insurance was part of the assets.
2. Look for The Policy Document
Among the documents you gather, you can start by trying to find any insurance document before taking any other measure. If you are lucky enough to identify this document, then you will not need to go through the cumbersome process of going through the other documents. This document will contain all the information including the name of the beneficiary and the amount to be claimed.
3. Check Through Accounts for Payments
If the deceased had an insurance policy, they obviously were making premium payments. Checking through their accounts will show you what kind of payments they were making. Go through their bank statement, cheques, and other bank documents. Any sign on insurance premiums payments can direct you to that individual’s policies.
4. Check-in Digital Storage
Apart from the physical documents, you can check for evidence on an individual’s email, Dropbox or any other cloud storage. Some individuals store their sensitive documents in their hard drives and encrypt them. You may need to find their passwords or have a computer company retrieve the data. Information stored in cloud storage can be retrieved by issuing a court order to such companies to avail the required data.
5. Ask the Company
If you are unable to find the insurance document, but you know the name of the company the deceased was insured with, then go directly to the company and ask. The company will have the policy among their files. You will need some basic information and some identifying documents to get through this process. It is important, therefore, that you have the deceased identification documents, as well as their death certificate for the company to verify and process your claim. With these documents, the company will easily take you through the process.
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