Living and Death Benefit Riders

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. The Two Benefit Riders of Life Insurance and Annuities: Living and Death.

These clauses represent add-ons you can have put into certain insurance products...for an additional cost, of course. They can apply to either life insurance or annuities, depending on the situation.

Basically, the living benefit rider makes life insurance more like an annuity, and the death benefit rider makes an annuity more like life insurance.

Usually, life insurance only pays off if a person dies. Then the insurance company pays a pre-set amount of cash to the deceased's pre-named beneficiaries (spouse, kids, secret kids, pets...whatever the person lays out in the policy). That situation represents the usual way life insurance plays out. However, the living benefit rider can enable the policy to pay out some benefits while the holder is alive.

Meanwhile, many annuities stop paying when the recipient dies. But an added death rider can add some death benefits to the agreement. In these cases, the policy would also pay out to beneficiaries, similar to life insurance.