Company Review: TD Insurance Canada

Introduction

TD Insurance is an insurance company located in Canada. Founded in 1949, it is relatively later and smaller in size than the major insurance companies in Canada. Although TD Insurance is not a big name in the insurance industry, it is part of TD Bank Group, one of Canada’s largest financial services organizations. 

TD Insurance has total assets of $0.2 billion and total annual premiums of $112.6 million. The company provides home, car, travel, health, and life insurance services to individuals and businesses in Canada.

Rating

Insurers are usually rated by independent rating companies such as A.M Best, Fitch Rating, Moody’s. Each company has its own criteria, but the final result indicates solvency, financial strength, and, for insurers, the ability to pay when policyholders make claims. 

However, TD Insurance is not rated by these independent rating agencies. While it is owned by one of the largest financial institutions in Canada with a robust financial background, that is not enough to imply anything about TD Insurance’s credit ratings.

Anyway, if you want to know the rating of TD Group, you can check out the public information from TD’s website.

Products

Term life insurance

Term life insurance is a type of insurance that the company will pay the death benefit if you pass away within a period, thus the word “term.” The length of the term is up to your choice. Typical terms are 10-year, 20-year, 30-year. Some insurance companies offer custom periods to suit your needs. When the term expires, you can renew it, switch to a permanent life policy, or terminate it. 

TD Life offers 10, 20, 100-year terms. Below is a comparison between the TD term life insurance price and the average price on the market. Price is listed for a man, 39 years old, non-smoking with a death benefit of $400,000.

Term	Monthly	Annual	Market Price
Average	Minimum
10 year	$23.00	$261.00	$23.39	$20.16
20 year	$35.00	$404.00	$35.08	$32.04
100 year	$337.00	$3849.00

TD term life insurance prices are slightly different from the average, and obviously, you can find products with more competitive prices in the market.

Term-100 life insurance

Unlike most insurance companies in the market, TD Insurance doesn’t offer whole life insurance; instead, they offer term life insurance with a 100-year term. It provides lifetime coverage and a guaranteed payout like whole life insurance but without complicated investment features of cash value and dividends.

People choose to buy term-100 policies because:

• It’s simple as term life insurance, but it provides lifetime coverage like permanent life insurance.
• When short terms expire, you will have to renew. The new term will have a higher premium at that time. A 100-year term will “never” expires. Thus, the premium is locked.
• The death benefit is almost guaranteed.

Guaranteed Acceptance Life Insurance

TD Guaranteed Acceptance Life insurance is designed for those who want coverage to pay the final expenses. Anyone between the ages of 50 and 70 is eligible for this policy. You will be accepted without a medical examination, regardless of your current medical condition or medical history. There’s no end date; as long as the policy stays active, you have coverage. The coverage ranges from $5000 to $25,000. When you pass away, your beneficiaries will receive a tax-free payout to cover funeral expenses, medical bills, other expenses, and a little leftover. It has two essential features:

• Living benefit: Once your coverage has been active for two years, you can choose to take 50% of the death benefit in advance if you’re diagnosed with a terminal illness. The remaining 50% is paid directly to your beneficiary when you pass away.
• Accidental Death Benefit: In the case of accidental death, your benefit amount is five times the death benefit if you’ve been covered for over two years.

Example quote: a 50-year-old man, non-smoking, with the maximum coverage of $25,000, would pay $88.54 per month. 

If you don’t have a critical illness, you may want to choose guaranteed-issued life insurance. It works the very same way. You don’t need to take a medical exam, but you have to answer questions about your health. But the price is usually half of the guaranteed acceptance insurance.

Health insurance products

These insurance are ways to expand the traditional health insurance coverage. TD Insurance will pay a good amount of money to cover treatment and recovery expenses. You can buy critical illness insurance alongside medical insurance to provide additional coverage because the cost of critical illness, like cancer, is not just the medical cost but travel, visit expenses, and loss of income.

TD Insurance offers four types. The names are pretty confusing because they seem to overlap one to another. 

	Critical Accident Recovery Insurance	Critical Illness Recovery	Accidental Death Insurance	Accident Disability Insurance
Max Coverage	$150,000	$250,000	$250,000	$500-$1500/month
TD pays if you	have injuries caused by accidents (not illness)	have a critical illness on the accepted list.	die because of accidents (not illness)	become disabled (any reasons)
Payment	Lump-sum Daily hospital indemnity benefit	Lump-sum	Lump-sum Daily hospital indemnity benefit	Monthly (for Disability and Rehabilitation stages)
Acceptance	Guaranteed accepted	Require medical exam	Guaranteed accepted	No medical exam required

These can also be purchased along with the term life insurance to expand the coverage. 

Others

TD insurance also offers a wide range of other insurance products such as accident, critical illness, home/condo/tenant, Car and Motorcycle & RVs, Travel insurance. Compare to life insurance, health insurance, their Car insurance is much better.

Customer Services

Some people had good experiences; others had bad experiences. If you search for good experiences, maybe you don’t find many; if you search for negative reviews, you’ll surely find them. But fairly said, this happens to all companies, not just TD Insurance. There’s the fact that you can easily find a lot of people who are frustrated with their customer services. Most of the complaints are about

• Phone waiting time: when you make a call, it often takes hours to get connected.
• Cancellation experience
• Slow processing customer’s requests

However, we should keep in mind that these reviews are from customers who are not satisfied with TD Insurance; It’s not entirely fair to assume that this reflects TD Insurance’s overall quality of customer service. We do not have enough data to make conclusive and objective comments. It depends on your own experience, the branch you work with, and the specific stage of the company.

And sometimes, it’s also hard to deal with the insurers on your own. A broker agent may do it more efficiently. We are one of the most trusted insurance brokers in Canada. Contact us via here.

Claims

First, you make a call and wait for them to send a form; you fill in the form with all required information and documentation, then send it back. The settlement process will start on the company side, and you wait for them to contact you. You can find instruction details on their official website. This back and forward mailing process will take time if you don’t prepare documents well enough. 

Unfortunately, you can only make claims via phone and mail; the company doesn’t offer an online digital tool to submit forms and documents. Indeed, they provide a handy mobile application on both Android and iOS platforms that helps you claim efficiently and quickly, but it’s only for Car, Home/Condo/Tenant insurance. 

After all, the claim is all that matters. After all the loss, a smooth and quick claiming process will ease the pain. But there are many negative reviews out there about the claiming experience. Most of the complaints are about slow processing. 

Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
100-year term life insurance is simple and covers lifetime protection The maximum coverage is $10 million, as much as other big insurers offer. TD Brand name is well recognized Discount to preferred customers Get insurance quotes from their website quickly (but keep in mind that the accurate price is likely different.)	No whole life insurance Few options and riders More expensive than the market They are not rated by independent organizations Customer service is not so good

Discount

The big advantage of TD Insurance is a 5 – 10% discount for preferred customers. If you are a TD employee or an existing customer, you will receive a 10% discount. If you or your spouse is an alumnus or professional from the listed universities, you will receive a 5% discount. However, the maximum discount doesn’t exceed 10%.

• TD customer or TD Auto Finance customer: 10%
• TD Home or Auto Customer: 10%
• TD Wealth Customer: 10%
• TD Employee: 10%
• Affinity discount – Canadian university or college, or professional association: 5%

Few options

Indeed, TD Insurance doesn’t offer many choices of life insurance. If you are interested in whole life insurance and its investment aspects, you must find another insurer. With cash value, dividends, accumulated growth, and tax-deferred, you have a wide range of possibilities to apply it for various purposes. 

Even for term life insurance, there are not many term choices. You have to choose either 10-year or 20-year for short terms. Strangely, they don’t offer more options such as 15, 25, and 30. 

TD Insurance also lacks riders to add coverage to life insurance policies. Other companies often offer a list of common riders: waiver of premiums, guaranteed insurability, accidental death, family income, accelerated death benefit, child term, long-term care, return of premium… Although TD Insurance provides accidental death, guaranteed as separate products, the rest of the common riders are not available.

High Price

TD Insurance rates may not be the highest, but there are other companies with better prices. Check out the five lowest prices for the 10-year term of a male, 39 years old, non-smoking, with $300,000 coverage.

• $20.16 from Foresters Life
• $20.79 from Wawanesa Life
• $21.06 from Humania
• $21.06 from SSQ Insurance

* Quotes from Insurance Direct Canada

Summary

TD Insurance is better at Car and Home insurances than life insurance and health insurance. It’s one of the largest direct-response home & car insurance groups. They have the advantage of the cheapest car insurance, easy to get a quote and buy, a mobile app to claim when there is a problem with the car and home. 

However, they are not a company that serves everyone’s needs in the life and health insurance industry. Their products are not as diverse as other top insurers. Besides, the prices of life insurance policies are also slightly higher than the average of the market. 

Bank-related insurance companies usually don’t sell products that are designed to maximize customer benefits. They tend to sell their existing bank customers the less competitive products. If you take your time shopping around, you will find products in the marketplace with more options and better prices.

Our agents can talk to you and give you a comparison between various products of top insurance companies with which we’re working. They will help you find the products with the best options and prices that suit your needs.

There are more Canada insurance companies reviews on our site such as ivari review, Canada Life review, Canada Protection Plan review, Manulife review, etc.