Life insurance is one of the few financial products where delay has a predictable, calculable cost. Because pricing is age-banded, the same coverage gets more expensive every year you wait — and because a policy locks in that rate for the life of the term, a small delay compounds into a real number over 10 or 20 years.
How age-banded pricing works
Life insurers price risk primarily on age and health at the time of application. Roughly speaking, premiums for healthy applicants tend to increase by somewhere in the neighborhood of 8–10% for each additional year of age at application — a pattern that holds fairly consistently across insurers, even though exact numbers vary.
A worked example
Take a healthy 35-year-old shopping for a $500,000, 20-year term policy. If they buy today, they lock in a rate for the full 20 years. If they wait five years and buy the same coverage at 40 instead, the starting premium is meaningfully higher — and because that higher rate is now locked in for their own 20-year term, the gap compounds across the entire policy life, not just the five years of delay.
It's not just about age — health can move against you too
Age-based pricing increases are predictable. Health-based increases aren't. A new diagnosis, a weight change, or a new medication between now and "eventually" can push you into a higher-cost health class entirely, independent of age — sometimes doubling a premium or triggering a decline outright. Waiting isn't just betting against the calendar; it's betting against your own health staying exactly the same.
What this doesn't mean
This isn't an argument for buying coverage you don't need, or for skipping the comparison-shopping most financial advisors recommend. It's an argument against open-ended procrastination once you've already decided you'll eventually need coverage — in that specific case, "eventually" has a real price tag attached to it.