What Kind of a company is New York Life?

New York Life is one of the three remaining large, high quality, high financial rating Mutual Insurance Companies in the USA.

The top three are:

Massachusettes Mutual Life Insurance Company
New York Life
Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company

Mutual life insurance companies tend to be stronger financially and have better claims paying ability than stock companies. This is because they use a different corporate structure. Mutual companies are owned by the Whole Life Insurance contract holders. They do not issue shares of stock.

Stock companies (like Met Life, John Hancock and others) are owned by shareholders.

So why is that important?

When you are beholden to shareholders, your thinking tends to be short term. Shareholder value becomes the driving force for the company.

When your allegiance is owed to your Whole Life contract owners your outlook must be longer term than that. I came up at MassMutual, for example, and they have literally thousands of Whole Life contract holders (meaning OWNERS) with contracts in force over 80 years. People don't tend to keep stock that long. People tend to keep whole life policies till they die. With that as an owner base the corporate direction will be longer-renged in thinking.

Now, because of this the tendency (and this is not an absolute rule) insurance will tend to cost more from a Mutual company than from a Stock company. It's up the the individual contract owner to decide if the higher premium is worth it to them.

I tend to think it is. My line of thinking is this:

I buy whole life. I want a company that tends to think long term. I want a company that has been around over 150 years and that shows no signs of financial weakness so I can feel confident that even if it takes me a long time to die, that company will still be around. I don't want a company that is relatively new, or that is financially weak, where I might pay premium for a few years and then see the company fold.

Now, others may buy lower cost insurance, like term insurance, with more frequency. IN that case your risk is lower because the odds of a particular company failing in the short term are lower than the odds of it failing over a 50 year period. When buying term insurance your options are very, very large as far as the number of great carriers to choose from.

For me though, my cercumstances dictate that whole life is the way to go, so I go Mutual.

You asked about New York Life. It's a very solid company, one of the Big Three Mutuals, and you can be confident in its financial stability and claims paying ability as of the time I'm posting.

Best wishes.