This is post 5 of 10 in my cryonics signup guide, and the second of five posts on life insurance.

In this post, I'll cover the different types of life insurance policies you might want to use to fund your cryopreservation. This is the most complicated part of this entire sequence and it's taken me many, many hours of confusion to reach even the tenuous understanding I'm presenting here. Please bear with me and let me know if you spot any errors or have any questions.

Note that in addition to being labyrinthine, the life insurance landscape changes fairly often, such that the options that were available to you when you signed up for cryonics ten years ago might no longer be offered. They're always adding new types of life insurance and getting rid of old ones, and the name of a policy doesn't always tell you the relevant information about it.

Getting oriented

Life insurance policy types vary along several major axes. Some cover you forever, while others expire; some are more expensive than others; some are more reliable and others are more flexible.

Here is the basic information in table form. You may want to refer back to this if you get confused while reading.

	Duration	Premiums	Death benefit	Cash value	Interest rates	Price
Term Life	Fixed term	Fixed	Fixed	No	N/A	`$`
Whole Life	Permanent	Fixed	Fixed	Yes	Guaranteed	`$$$$$`
Universal Life	Permanent	Adjustable	Adjustable	Yes	Determined by the carrier; variable	`$$$$`
Guaranteed Universal Life	Permanent	Fixed	Fixed	No	Guaranteed	`$$`
Indexed Universal Life	Permanent	Adjustable	Adjustable	Yes	Indexed on S&P 500, capped	`$$$`

For maximum hope of successful communication, I've approached this question from two angles – first I'll talk about the ways in which policies differ from one another, then I'll give a summary of each type of policy.

Properties of an ideal cryonics life insurance policy

Before we get into what types of life insurance actually exist, I think it's useful to think about what a life insurance policy tailored specifically for cryonics would look like. Then we can find the real-world policy that corresponds most closely to the ideal.

Permanence

You want coverage until you die, because otherwise there's no point. This means that you should steer away from term policies, unless you expect to ...

Cryonics Signup Guide