For many people, the world of insurance is something you have little incentive to understand in great depth—once you have your chosen policies in place, it’s easy to file them away and pay them little mind beyond paying your annual premiums. Individuals with universal life insurance policies, however, should review their policies, assess how their investments are performing, and check their premiums.
Realizing you don’t fully understand how your policy works? Here is a quick primer on universal life insurance to get you started.

If you have been struck with steep increases in your universal life insurance policy, you may feel faced with two equally unappealing options: You can either pay what for many policyholders amounts to thousands of dollars a year in premium costs, or you can forfeit the policy and lose both the death benefit and all the hard-earned savings you’ve contributed to your account throughout your lifetime. (Read more about universal life insurance fraud.)

As we recently reported, life insurers across the U.S. continue to face legal action from policyholders who are filing class action lawsuits based on fast-rising, allegedly unjustified cost-of-insurance increases. (Read more about why some policyholders are suing their universal life insurers.)

As steep increases on certain universal life insurance policy premiums continue to attract nationwide attention, one segment of the population in particular is feeling the impact of these fast-rising costs.

Some retirees or soon-to-be retirees, many of whom purchased their universal life insurance policies in the 1980s, are now facing increases on their premiums in the double-digit percentages. In some instances, this amounts to thousands of dollars a year—just to keep the death benefit from lapsing, while the “nest egg” cash value component of the policy is nearly exhausted.