If you’ve ever bought life insurance before, you know that it can be a long and frustrating process. You have to call the different insurance companies, get the paperwork, send it back, wait for quotes, and much more. Thanks to the Internet, the days of waiting for quotes are long gone. Life insurance is one of the most important things that you’ll ever buy, but it doesn’t have to be a painful experience.

Do you need an instant life insurance quote? These days, Starbucks coffee shops are everywhere, amazingly, so are instant life insurance quotes. One way to find inexpensive instant life insurance quotes is by checking out many of the online insurance sites.

A Quote isn’t a Quote: Just because you find instant life insurance quotes doesn’t ensure the best deal. You need to be cautious, there is always a company out there that seems upstanding and legitimate, but sadly, may not be.  How do you avoid these kinds of companies?  Well, one way is to read as many online reviews as you can find.  As an example I offer my clients a free forum to leave sincere feedback on my site. Learn from other buyers’ experiences – get as many points of view as possible. It doesn’t matter whether the company is well known or not, read as many online reviews about the company that you see.  If you read a bunch of reviews, then the odds are you’ll be able to easily ignore the one angry, irrational customer, as well as the one overly positive review, probably written by the brother-in-law of the company’s marketing chief. Doing a few simply Internet searches can reveal A LOT about a company. Either good or bad.

One Stop Shop: Don’t limit your search to just three or four companies.  Find an independent broker like me to shop for you. Yes, this makes your decision much easier and quicker. Buying life insurance is a serious, crucial purchase that will impact your family, this is not the time or place to try and play the professional.  The advantage of an independent life insurance broker is it’s easy to look at fifteen, twenty companies. Each company is going to be very different, all of them have different ways of looking at an applications and calculating your monthly premiums. That’s why it’s so vital that you get quotes from a dozen companies before you choose one.If you were to try and look at all of these companies on your own, you could spend several days calling all of the different companies. The more companies you look into, the more likely that you will find the best life insurance policy out there for you. Sometimes you won’t be able to compare specifically “apples to apples”, but that’s OK because you may discover some great policies that may cost you only a few dollars more each month.

Talk to your friends: Talk to friends, relatives, co-workers, your workout buddies…what companies do they use for insurance; perhaps they’ll even discuss what they pay.  The more information you gather, the better.  Plus, these are recommendations from people you know you can trust, they aren’t mysterious, unknown authors of reviews that you’ll read online. The reviews from people that you know are the best reviews that you can ever get.

Finally, working with an independent insurance broker like me can give you an insider’s view of various companies that you’ve learned about. A lot of people misunderstand what working with and independent agent is like. These agents are basically like working with a traditional insurance agent, but instead of only representing one company, we represent dozens of different companies. There are several advantages to working with these kinds of agents.

The biggest advantage, as I mentioned early, is that it saves you time. You don’t have to do all of the calling and researching yourself, we will do that for you. The other advantage is that we can ensure that you’re getting the lowest rates possible. Our agents understand the insurance marketplace and have experience working with the different insurance companies. They can walk you through the application process and answer any questions that you may have about life insurance or the different types of policies. After a search this diligent, you will end up with the best life insurance policy that fits your individual needs.

Aside from picking a company, you’ll also need to determine how much insurance coverage that you and your loved ones need. There are several different things that you have to consider when you’re looking to buy an insurance plan. The two biggest things are your debt and your annual income.

One of the main purposes of life insurance is to pay off any debt that you would leave behind to your family. Before you purchase your plan, sit down and add up any final expenses your loved ones would be left with if you passed away. Not having life insurance could leave your family with thousands and thousands of dollars of debt that they have no way to pay off.

The other main purpose of life insurance plans is to help replace the income your loved ones rely on. If you’re one of the primary income earners in your family, they would experience financial hardships if something tragic were to happen to you, but that’s where an insurance policy comes in. It will give them the resources they need to find a way to permanently replace the lost salary without losing their standard of living.

You never know what life is going to throw at you tomorrow, but you can always plan for the worst. Having life insurance is the perfect safety net for you and your loved ones, and it most cases, it’s a very affordable life net. Don’t wait any longer to give your family the protection that they deserve.