Life Activity Climbs — for Two Age Groups

Americans ages 60 and older pumped a torrent of applications into U.S. life insurers in January.

Americans ages 45 through 59 sent in more applications.

Americans ages 44 and younger continued to back away.

MIB Group Inc. has given that picture of U.S. individual life application activity in a new batch of activity data.

Life insurers created MIB to give themselves a mechanism for sharing some of the information used to verify applications for life insurance, disability insurance and other medically underwritten products.

Life insurers use MIB services to process about 90% of medically underwritten applications submitted in the United States, according to MIB.

In January, overall application activity was 2.1% higher than in January 2018. That's the first overall, year-over-year increase since July 2018.

This is how the year-over-year activity change broke down for the three major age groups MIB tracks:

Ages 0-44: -4.4%
Ages 45-59: +4.6%.
Ages 60 and older: +18.2%.

MIB's monthly application activity figures for people in the 44-and-younger age group have been falling since June 2018.

"While still negative, the performance of younger age buyers is showing slow improvement over the past three months, digging out of the November 2018 trench," MIB says in a comment on the latest results.

In November 2018, activity for the 44-and-under age group sank 9.4%. In December 2018, activity for that age group fell 7.4%.