There's another trick or technique that you can use when buying life insurance. As Flyinhigh mentioned in his above post, and something that's not readily apparent, is that when it comes to life insurance, the company you purchase the insurance from will look at your birthday and add 6 months. If you're past your half-birthday (for example, my birthday is March 21, 1946, which makes me 66 and a half on September 21, 2012), the insurance company will look at you as if your a year older. That was one of the reasons I elected to retire on September 15th, thereby giving me about a week to get the insurance quote. However, Lincoln didn't get around to quoting me until September 23rd, which then put me at 67 years old, in their eyes. So here's the trick: you can ask them to pre-date the policy, so that you can take advantage of your younger age, ie in my case 66. They will usually do that, although it might cost you a little extra for your first years premium, but over the course of the policy you can save a significant amount of money.
JJ