Free online portal helps families find unclaimed life insurance benefits

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Life insurance is designed to provide financial resources to your loved ones after your death, but accessing the policy can be a challenge.

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As we mark Life Insurance Awareness Month, Hawaii Insurance Commissioner Scott Saiki joined HNN’s Sunrise to talk about a free online portal that can help you locate a loved one’s policy after they pass.

“One of the issues with life insurance is that, as you know, sometimes people pass away without informing their relatives that they’re a beneficiary of a policy. so that happens over and over again,” Saiki said. “And it’s really difficult to track down a policy because there are hundreds if not thousands of life insurance companies operating in Hawaii and the United States. Life insurance companies are obligated to try to track down a beneficiary upon someone’s death, but sometimes they don’t do that or they’re not able to find the beneficiary.”

Saiki said the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) created the Life Insurance Policy Locator at https://eapps.naic.org/life-policy-locator so people can register themselves and their deceased relative to see if there is a policy for them.

“Just go to the website, sign up, provide some basic information. The NAIC will contact you if there is a match with the life insurance company. Not all life insurance companies participate in this program, so it is not 100% guaranteed a result, but it does give people a good head start in trying to identify these policies.”

In 2025, about 400 Hawaii residents were successfully matched with a policy, and that amounted to about $11.2 million.

“The person should have a death certificate, and then the beneficiary, the potential beneficiaries identifying information as well, address, birth date, social security number,” Saiki said.

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“People should at some point draft up some kind of inventory of all of their property, including bank accounts, policies, other kinds of benefits that are available, and have that inventory available to your spouse or your relative or your attorney or whoever can help make that information available upon your passing,” he added.

And it’s always a good idea to review your insurance policies regularly.

“People should just be aware of what kind of insurance is out there, what kind of insurance we require for our own situations,” he said. “We should make sure that we have good agents who explain what is needed and what is available to us, what the cost is, what the coverage is, what the benefits are and just keep all of our papers in order so that people are aware of what we have purchased.”

“With life insurance, someone has paid for a life insurance policy to benefit a spouse or a relative or a child. You wanna make sure that you’re able to obtain the benefit of that policy that’s already been paid for your benefit,” Saiki said.

Access the free Life Insurance Policy Locator on the NAIC website at https://eapps.naic.org/life-policy-locator.

Consumers with questions about life insurance or this tool may contact the Hawaiʻi Insurance Division at 1-844-808-DCCA (3222) ext. 4. Additional consumer resources can be found online at https://cca.hawaii.gov/ins.

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