Fort Dearborn Life Insurance Company

This is what I just posted on my blog: "First of all, get it, max it out, it doesn’t cost that much. Second, I have had a very hard time getting Jim’s life insurance check from Dearborn. If this is your only source of life insurance, and you need to use it, you may need about three months of liquid savings. I received Jim’s other life insurance checks, from New York Life and Mass Mutual, over a month ago. I filled out the forms TRS gave me, sent those forms and Jim’s death certificate (by certified mail) to Dearborn. Then, two weeks later, I got another form, “Claim for Death Benefits Under Group Life Insurance,” from Dearborn to fill out too. Why that’s not in the original package, I don’t know… But, this is when I started to worry about the whole process. Then, the lovely oh-so-professional little lady you get to deal with, to find out what is going on, could obviously care less if you ever get the check. Not only can you tell by her voice and the words she chose not to use, but she waited three weeks (sending one email per week) before finally calling TRS to get Jim’s proof of paid insurance premiums. I don’t know about you, but in the professional world, I never wait that long for a response. Especially if money for an individual is involved. Yesterday, I finally received Jim’s check. I also received my first apology for how long it took. That was nice. What else I found interesting was that the other two life insurance checks included interest – not Dearborn – and they took the longest time getting the check to me. Sorry, but at the very least that looks really bad. [Added later the same day: Found out it is not in the contract with TRS to include the interest. Now it looks even worse that it took a month longer to receive Dearborn's check.] Hopefully, this is not the standard process for receiving a life insurance check from Dearborn. I just thought Jim’s co-workers deserved to know what can happen. I know Jim would be really upset about what I had to go through to get his check."