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Life Insurance

Benefits, premiums, and reserves for term, whole life, and endowment insurance.

Premium and reserve come from four things: what the contract promises, how mortality behaves, the discount rate, and how many years premiums are paid. Here you can compare term, whole life, and endowment under the same assumptions.

Read the decision, cash flows, assumptions, method, interpretation, and limits as one continuous case.

Actuarial case explained

What premium funds a death benefit during a defined term?

Purpose

Decision informed

Compare cost, protection period, and reserve pattern before choosing term, whole life, or endowment coverage.

Benefits and cash flows

  1. 1Premiums while the policy remains in force.
  2. 2Sum assured at the end of the covered year of death.
  3. 3The term model pays no survival benefit and builds no surrender value.

Assumptions

AssumptionValue / unitSource and status
MortalityBundled EMSSA-09Synthetic
Synthetic laboratory table
Technical rate5.5% yearlyIllustrative
Illustrative, editable assumption
Benefit timingEnd of year of deathConvention
Model convention

Method

Equivalence principle

The net premium equates the actuarial present value of premiums and benefits; loadings are shown separately.

P · äₓ:ₙ = SA · A¹ₓ:ₙ

Results and interpretation

Sensitivity separates the exposure effect, meaning amount and term, from the biometric effect of age.

Applied example

Ana buys a 20-year term policy

Ana, age 32, buys a term life policy to cover her mortgage and her daughter's education in case of death. The policy pays the sum assured only if death occurs within the term and builds no surrender value. The cost of the coverage depends on three variables, adjustable here.

Adjust the parameters to observe how the result changes.

Annual gross premium

Actuarial interpretation

The premium reflects expected mortality at each age: a higher issue age raises it, while the term and the sum assured scale it. The calculation uses the EMSSA-09 table, a 5.5% technical rate, and expense and profit loadings.

Validation and limits

What is checked

  • Commutation and equivalence identities.
  • Fackler recursion for endowment reserves.

What it does not prove

  • The mortality table is synthetic and does not validate a professional tariff.
  • Loadings are illustrative and do not represent observed expenses.