Our sources

We work from primary documents wherever one exists. If a fact matters enough to publish, it comes from the body that actually sets or administers the rule. Our full standards are on the editorial policy page.

Insurance regulators

Insurance is regulated state by state, so the rules that apply to you depend on where you live. These are the bodies that write and enforce them.

• National Association of Insurance Commissioners: the organization through which state regulators coordinate. Its model regulations and consumer guides are the backbone of a lot of what we explain. content.naic.org
• NAIC Life Insurance Buyer's Guide: a genuinely useful, neutral overview. PDF
• Your state's department of insurance: the office that licenses agents and companies where you live, takes complaints, and publishes consumer guides. This is also where you verify that an agent is actually licensed. Find yours
• Texas Department of Insurance and California Department of Insurance: two states that publish unusually clear consumer guides we cite often. TDI · CDI
• New York Department of Financial Services: its glossary and product outlines are among the most precise consumer-facing definitions published anywhere. dfs.ny.gov

Taxes

• Internal Revenue Service: for how life insurance proceeds, dividends, and cash value are actually taxed. irs.gov
• IRS Publication 550: the treatment of policy dividends and of interest left with an insurer. Pub 550
• Internal Revenue Code: the statute itself, for the sections that govern life insurance (§101 on death benefits, §7702 and §7702A on what qualifies as life insurance, §2042 on estates). Cornell Law School

Social Security

• Social Security Administration: survivor and retirement benefit rules, eligibility, and the figures behind them. ssa.gov
• Survivor benefits: who qualifies and how much. ssa.gov/survivor
• my Social Security: where you get your own numbers, which we can't estimate for you. Create an account

Industry and actuarial

• Insurance Information Institute: a neutral industry-funded explainer we use for how products work and for its needs-based coverage guidance. iii.org
• LIMRA: industry research, and the standard source for sales and coverage-gap statistics. limra.com
• Society of Actuaries: the underlying actuarial research on mortality, pricing, and product design. soa.org
• CDC / National Center for Health Statistics: life expectancy data. cdc.gov/nchs

Insurance companies' own documents

For how a specific product actually behaves, nothing beats the contract. Two kinds of document are especially useful, and both are public:

• Carrier product pages and guides: what a company says its own policy does, which is what it can be held to.
• Filed policy forms on SEC EDGAR: the actual contract language for many policies and riders, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. When we quote what a policy really says, this is usually where it comes from. EDGAR full-text search

Professional credentials

For checking the letters after an advisor's name:

• The American College of Financial Services: grants the CLU, ChFC, and others. theamericancollege.edu
• CFP Board: grants the CFP and publishes its ethics standards. cfp.net

How to check our work

Every content page ends with a Sources block listing what that page relied on. If a figure has a year attached, it's because that number changes and we're telling you which version we used.

If you check something and we're wrong, please tell us at contact@lifeinsurancelearn.com. We'd rather fix it than defend it.

Last updated: July 23, 2026