TruStage Life Insurance is underwritten by CMFG life insurance. They’ve been around for a long time: since 1935. They now insure more than 20 million people. They used to offer products only through credit unions, but now they are available to everyone. They offer term, whole, and guaranteed acceptance whole life insurance, as well as some other types of insurance.
Interestingly, the initials CMFG might not mean anything. The letters could mean CUNA Mutual Financial Group, but no meaning is given on the website or has ever been made available to the public.
- Pros and Cons of TruStage Life Insurance
- Products Offered by TruStage Life Insurance: 40/100
- Financial Strength Rating of TruStage Life Insurance: 80/100
- Customer Satisfaction Rating of TruStage Life Insurance: 70/100
- Consumer Complaints Rating of TruStage Life Insurance: 60/100
- Digital Experience Rating of TruStage Life Insurance: 80/100
Pros and Cons of TrusStage Life Insurance
| Pros | Cons |
| – No medical exams are required (for most applicants) – Excellent financial strength – Approval in minutes – Easy application process | – Coverage is only offered up to $100,000 – No riders are available to add flexibility to your policy – Rates on term insurance increase every five years – High prices |
Products Offered by TruStage Life Insurance
Life insurance products TruStage offers:
- Term
- Whole
- Guaranteed acceptance whole
Term life insurance is a bit unusual at TruStage. Term life insurance is available up to age 69, which is great. However, your rates increase every five years, whenever you reach a new age band. You can keep your term insurance up until you reach age 80, or until the cost becomes exorbitant. It’s kind of like a whole life policy, only without the cash value and possibly without the death benefit if you actually do make payments until age 80—at age 81, your coverage evaporates.
TruStage tries to spin this the same way other companies try to sell you whole life insurance: that even if you develop a serious health condition later, you’ll still have life insurance.
Although you don’t have to have a medical exam, you could still be denied coverage, based on your answers to medical questions.
Term insurance used to be available in amounts of up to $300,000 but the website seems to indicate that you can now only get coverage up to $100,000.
>>MORE: Decreasing Term Life Insurance: Is It A Good Choice for You?
Whole life insurance is also a bit unusual, in that you be approved and purchase it online in less than five minutes. They ask you a few questions, including permission to check your prescription records and your payment information, and that’s that. Unlike term insurance at TruStage, rates never increase through the life of the whole life policy. Also, like term insurance, you can only get up to $100,000 in coverage.
A 45-year old female can get $100,000 worth of term life coverage at TruStage for $58.50 a month. She can also get a $100,000 whole life policy for $87.00 a month. It sounds like the term insurance is much cheaper but remember the term insurance rates go up every five years. The chart on the TruStage website stops at ages 50-55, but the odds are good that by the time our customer is 60 or so, her rates will be much higher.
Given all of this, why would someone choose term insurance over whole life at TruStage? It’s certainly cheaper to get whole life, especially as you get older. We can only assume people who don’t read the fine print buy term insurance from TruStage.
>>MORE: A Guide to the Best Whole Life Insurance Companies
They might not shop around either, because term insurance can be found at lower prices at many other life insurance companies. The big draw for TruStage is the very quick application process, not the prices.
Guaranteed Acceptance Whole life: This works much like guaranteed acceptance whole life from every other insurance company. You get a small amount of coverage, from $2,000 to $25,000 and everyone is accepted. Often called final expense insurance, this insurance is to cover the costs of the funeral and any final medical bills. Oddly, when we requested pricing information on this insurance, the website said they could only help us over the phone.
In addition to life insurance, TruStage also offers:
- Accidental death and dismemberment insurance. Learn more bout accidental death life insurance
- Auto (through Esurance and Liberty Mutual)
- Property (through Liberty Mutual)
- Health (Supplemental)
TruStage has no riders available, thus limiting the flexibility of policies.
Financial Strength Rating of TruStage Life Insurance
A.M. Best gives TruStage’s parent company, CMFG an A rating for financial strength and predicts a stable outlook.
Customer Satisfaction Rating of TruStage Life Insurance
Neither TruStage nor its parent company, CMFG, were reviewed in J.D. Power’s life insurance study, so we will have to consider other sources.
Trust Pilot is a well-respected consumer review website. TruStage has excellent reviews, over 3,000 of them and most are five-star reviews. Most reviews comment on how easy it was to get life insurance, how simple the whole process was and how friendly the representatives are.
Consumer Complaints Rating of TruStage Life Insurance
TruStage doesn’t appear on the NAIC’s website, but CMFG earns a ratio of .79. The median average is 1.0, so we can infer that CMFG receives slightly less than the average amount of complaints for a company of this size.
Although TruStage is not accredited by the BBB, they earned an A+ rating. There are eight complaints in the last three years, which is really very low. They have seven one-star reviews on the website which is also miniscule.
Digital Experience Rating of TruStage Life Insurance
Many of TruStage’s customer’s praise how easy it is to get life insurance through their online application. You can get a quote in under a minute, and then name a beneficiary and answer a few questions. You can be approved in minutes.
This is the lure for many of TruStage’s customers—no medical exam, no one comes to your house, and you don’t have to meet with an agent.
You can also pay your bill online, download a policy summary, or update your information. Filing a claim will have to be done by phone or email. There is no mobile app, but you can find TruStage on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter.
Last Thoughts
An incredibly simple application process is the big draw for TruStage life insurance policies. We would encourage our readers to take some time to shop around, however, because better deals can be found with other companies.
