Congratulation on not using your life insurance!!!
You dodged a bullet the rest of us will have to face very soon.
(A heads up for insurance holders/beneficiaries... Sorry to bring bad news.)
Insurance is a business where they take your premiums and invest them. The interest they get pays for claims and running the business. What is left over is all profit. By making up the actuarial tables, they ensure that they will end up with a profit. Insurance companies have been one of the most consistently profitable businesses around...until today.
With the Fed lowering rates, the banks and other investments are only paying a fraction of the 6-10% they need for a profit. The result is, either some businesses will stop issuing insurance, or rates will double or triple. The alternative is to go out of business.
Same with pension plans. Their whole business model is to make returns of 6-10% and they are lucky to see 2%. Most pension plans around the USA are grossly underfunded and the demographics are grim: There are more retirees lasting longer and longer and its taking more employees to support those insurance plans. It used to take 2.5 employees to handle each retiree. Now its upwards of ten employees. With downsizing due to the bad economy, there aren't ten employees to support each retiree, so the plan is underfunded.
Uncle Samuel decided they would get into the pension guaranty business about twenty years ago. Like every big-government operation, they are grossly underfunded after totally misjudging the coming crisis, even though they only pay 10 cents on the dollar for every retiree payment they assume.
Cancelling people like Mickeyd will become a more common occurrence, even for plans not specified with a "drop dead date." (Sorry for that!)
Until sanity returns to the investment markets and interest rates return to healthy levels, we may see it nearly impossible to get insurance over the next few years. Meddling by the US Fed has created a huge bubble in the stock market and that bubble is about to burst, further threatening pension plans which are heavily invested in stocks.
The central banks around the world are actually into negative interest rates which means it costs you to save and they pay you interest to get a mortgage. This kind of lunacy is unsupportable and indicates we are getting near the end of the crack party the world economy has become. Too many promises from big government for too many social programs has finally led us to where we are.
Make plans accordingly...
Ray
PS: Like MickeyD, my wife is a military retiree. The current administration has repeatedly tried to lower retirement benefits on retirees. My wife and I are expecting a "sunset date" on government retirement for military members. In other words, after a certain age, your retirement benefits end. Sad but, with the coming crash after 60 years of deficit spending by both parties, the handwriting is on the wall.