If you read The Wall Street Journal, perhaps an article titled "Surprise: Your Life Insurance Rates Are Going Up," published on December 4th caught your eye. The article reports that some major life insurance providers are raising premiums of existing universal life insurance policies. Universal life insurance polices are extremely popular whole-life products, combining a death benefit with a tax-advantaged savings account. Over the last decade, universal life insurance policies actually account for more than one-third of all new individual life insurance sales. This means that there are a lot of policyholders right now that are unexpectedly paying higher annual rates. If you are a universal life insurance policyholder, we recommend that you take a look at your statement.

And, unfortunately, these premium increases are legal. These companies are able to charge higher premiums due to carefully-worded fine print on the contract you signed when you first bought your policy, no matter what price you were initially paying.

Good news for AAFMAA members, though. We have never and will never raise premiums on existing Value-Added Whole Life policies. Similar to universal-life policies, AAFMAA's Value-Added Whole Life builds cash value and the death benefit never decreases. And, another big feature of our Value-Added Whole Life policy is that premiums will NEVER increase on an existing policy.

So, if you have policies from providers outside of AAFMAA, this is an important trend to monitor, as insurance industry experts predict that these sneaky insurance premium hikes will become more and more common.

If you opt for Value-Added Whole Life, however, it is guaranteed you will never see such increases.

For more information, visit the product page here: http://www.aafmaa.com/BrowseProducts/LifeInsurance/ValueAddedWholeLife.aspx.