Pros Explained

• Financially strong: Forethought received an A (Excellent) financial strength grade from AM Best and is also the only preneed provider to be named a Ward’s 50 top life and health insurance company for 13 straight years.
• Available at funeral homes nationwide: The Global Atlantic website notes that you can find Forethought preneed products at a funeral home near you. 
• Online payments: Global Atlantic offers a convenient online payment platform, and credit card payments are accepted for a fee. 

Cons Explained

• Preneed is the only type of insurance Forethought issues: You can’t get any other type of life insurance, such as term or whole life, from Forethought. However, its parent company offer indexed universal life through with another subsidiary as the issuer. Even taking this into account, your options are very limited making Forethought and its parent company not suited to most life insurance customers.
• Doesn’t provide details online: Costs and requirements aren’t available online, so you’ll need to visit your local funeral home for more information. 
• High complaint index for individual life: During the past three years, Forethought had extremely high NAIC complaint indexes in the individual life category. On the positive side their overall complaint indexes are consistently low. This indicates issues with satisfying customers of individual life insurance.

Complaint Index

Forethought Life Insurance Company received many more complaints than expected in the individual life segment with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) over the last three years, raising concerns about the company’s life insurance customer service. Each year, the NAIC reports a complaint index for every insurance company that indicates whether the number of complaints the company received was high or low relative to its market share. 

An index of 1.00 represents the number of complaints expected, while an index below 1.00 is ideal. Over three years, Forethought routinely had a high index for individual life, coming in at 3.55, 3.07, and 4.18 in 2021, 2020, and 2019 respectively. On the other hand the company consistently had impressively low company-wide complaint indexes which were 0.06, 0.08, and 0.04. Perhaps this disconnect between the two groups of scores indicates potential customer service problems with regard to individual life insurance, but an overall well run and reputable company.

Third-Party Ratings

Forethought Life Insurance Company is rated excellent for financial strength by AM Best, an independent credit ratings agency that evaluates the financial stability of insurance companies. However, some of the top insurers we reviewed have even higher grades. Forethought received an A (Excellent) financial strength rating from AM Best, which is the third-highest available grade. We typically don’t recommend any insurance providers that score below the A bracket. 

Policies Available

Preneed Life Insurance

Preneed life insurance is a type of permanent policy intended to cover your funeral expenses. You can purchase Forethought’s preneed life insurance directly from your local funeral home, which will become your beneficiary. Therefore, your loved ones won’t have access to the money.  The death benefit is just large enough to cover funeral costs, and preneed policies aren’t typically refundable or transferable to another funeral home. You may have the option of paying premiums in a lump sum or in installments. Details about Forethought’s policies aren’t available on Global Atlantic’s website and may vary by state or funeral provider.

Available Riders

Riders are coverage add-ons used to customize an insurance policy. For example, some riders provide living benefits or access to the death benefit during illness while the insured is still alive. 

Forethought doesn’t offer any riders with their policies. If you want to customize your coverage, we recommend opting for final expense insurance or traditional whole life insurance from another company instead. Some providers offer riders with these policies, and you can name your loved ones as beneficiaries.

Customer Service

You can contact Global Atlantic by phone or email. Call 800-331-8853 or email ask.us@gafg.com. There are additional numbers and email addresses on the website for various departments. Global Atlantic also offers a convenient online payment platform for paying your premiums. 

Our Methodology: How We Review Life Insurance Carriers

We designed a comprehensive ranking methodology based on consumer priorities and life insurance company fundamentals to rank more than 90 insurers across five general categories: financial stability, customer satisfaction, product and feature variety, the overall buying experience, and cost. In order to do this, we collected over 5,000 data points and scored each company based on 55 metrics. We grouped metrics by category to see how insurers performed in each; we then weighted category scores to determine how companies performed overall.

To learn more, read our full Life Insurance Methodology.