ManhattanLife is one of the oldest life insurance companies in the country—they were founded back in 1850. It was originated to provide protection for widows and orphans affected by cholera. They commissioned the first skyscraper in Manhattan, in 1894. Since then, they’ve provided life, health, and supplemental Medicare insurance for their customers, and they have annual revenue of $36.68 million. They are now headquartered in Houston, TX.
- Pros and Cons of Manhattan Life Insurance
- Products Offered by Manhattan Life Insurance: 60/100
- Financial Strength Rating of Manhattan Life Insurance: 60/100
- Customer Satisfaction Rating of Manhattan Life Insurance: 60/100
- Consumer Complaints Rating of Manhattan Life Insurance: 10/100
- Digital Experience Rating of Manhattan Life Insurance: 30/100
Pros and Cons of Manhattan Life Insurance
| Pros | Cons |
| – Some policies don’t require a medical exam – Some policies only have four health questions – Several ways to pay for your whole life insurance | – No online quoting – Policies are sold through agents – Higher than average number of complaints – No Universal life insurance products |
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Products Offered by Manhattan Life Insurance
ManhattanLife offers a few different term life insurance policies, some of which do not require a medical exam. This is called the Viva series and it targets young adults looking for basic insurance, families looking for coverage, and living benefits insurance.
Viva Life Professional offers 20 year term insurance for those 18 to 55, or 15 year level term insurance if you are 56 to 60.
Viva Family Life offers term insurance for the whole family, in that you can add on additional insured people and children’s insurance benefit riders.
There are also underwritten term insurance plans which you can get in terms of 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 year level terms.
They also offer two types of whole life insurance; underwritten whole life insurance and simplified issue whole life insurance.
The underwritten whole life insurance plans can be paid for in a single payment, up to age 65, for your lifetime, or for three, five, ten or twenty years. Whatever way you choose to pay, you’ll have life insurance for the rest of your life, as long as you don’t let the policy lapse.
>>MORE: A Guide to the Best Whole Life Insurance Companies
Simplified issue whole life insurance is available in amounts of up to $100,000 for adults or $50,000 for children.
There are also some riders you can attach to your policy. These include:
- Accidental death benefit – Learn more about accidental death life insurance
- Critical illness rider
- Waiver of premium
- Child rider – learn more about life insurance for children
- Twenty-year term rider
ManhattanLife also offers accident insurance, cancer insurance, medicare supplement health insurance, and mortgage protection. They have group life insurance as well, sold through employers. All of their policies are sold through agents, which is nice if you like working with agents, but it does tend to make the rates a little higher, to compensate for the agent’s fees and commissions. It’s also difficult to assess how competitive prices are, as they are difficult to find.
>>MORE: Why Is Whole Life Insurance Not Worth It?
Financial Strength Rating of Manhattan Life Insurance
Manhattan Life Group (ManhattanLife’s parent company) earns a B+ (Good) from A.M. Best. On the ManhattanLife web page, ManhattanLife is listed as number 112 on A.M. Best’s list of the top 200 U.S. Life and Health insurance companies.
Customer Satisfaction Rating of Manhattan Life Insurance
ManhattanLife does not appear on J.D. Power’s U.S. life insurance study, so we turn to the BBB. They earn an A+ rating from the BBB, and they have been accredited since 2013. There are twenty complaints, and thirteen one-star reviews. Most of the reviews concern the disability insurance or the supplemental Medicare insurance.
Of the twenty complaints, twelve are problems with a product or service and seven concern billing issues (one is “delivery”). The first complaint deals with disability insurance and after that, none of the details of any complaints are available. It’s a little odd, but twenty complaints overall are not that many for an insurance company, especially one that offers disability insurance and supplemental Medicare insurance.
Consumer Complaints Rating of Manhattan Life Insurance
The NAIC rates every insurance company on an index. The median average score is 1.0. ManhattanLife gets a ratio of 5.7, which means they have almost six times as many complaints as you would expect.
However, as mentioned above, since ManhattanLife provides disability and supplemental Medicare insurance, those types of insurance policies tend to get more complaints. There is a breakdown of what types of insurance got the complaints, and nine of them concerned individual life insurance, six were for term life, and four were for whole life. All the rest were for Accident and health insurance. Nineteen complaints on the NAIC website isn’t great—some much larger life insurance companies have scores close to zero.
Digital Experience Rating of Manhattan Life Insurance
Since ManhattanLife sells policies through agents, you might have guessed that there is no online quoting available. If you want to discuss rates, you have to click the button that says: Have an agent contact me. This may result in some pressure to purchase a policy before you’re ready to make a decision. On the other hand, some people do enjoy working with life insurance agents. Just remember, their goal is to sell you a policy, not figure out which policy is the best one for you.
You can file a claim online, or you can use the Easy Upload mobile app, which allows you to scan documents and then upload them into ManhattanLife’s system. However, it’s unclear if this can be used for life insurance claims (remember ManhattanLife offers several different types of insurance).
Supposedly, you can view your policies and contract, claims, and correspondence on the online client portal, but we can’t confirm this. because you have to log in to view it. You can also upload forms on the client site.
Last Thoughts
ManhattanLife is one of the oldest life insurance companies in the country. They seem to focus mostly on Medicare Supplemental insurance, health insurance and disability insurance, but they have several life insurance policies to offer as well. They do seem to attract quite a few complaints on the NAIC website, so proceed with caution. Oftentimes, customer satisfaction rests on how good their insurance agent is. If you have a need for a basic life insurance policy and you like or know an agent who works for ManhattanLife, they may be perfect for you.
