After offering auto insurance for more than 27 years, Estrella Insurance has branched into a new area: selling life insurance.
It's a natural expansion for the company, which has 45 insurance agencies throughout South Florida, says Rick Estrella, brother of the company's founder. Besides, he says, the Hispanic and immigrant communities that are Estrella's core market are underserved by the nation's major life insurance providers.
''For very little money, we're giving a family financial security,'' he says.
The company, for example, is offering a 10-year term life insurance policy for a 25-year-old man for just $11 a month -- a price that's affordable for many Hispanics, Estrella says.
''We had been thinking of expanding our business for a long time. Helping our own people create wealth and protecting families is important to us,'' says Estrella, who is in charge of agency operations, franchising and new ventures.
Only one-third of Hispanic households age 25 to 64 with annual household income of at least $25,000 had individual life insurance, according to a 2001 study by LIMRA, an insurance industry trade group. That was considerably lower than the 50 percent holding life insurance policies in the LIMRA general population sample.
What's Estrella's theory on why the Hispanic life insurance market has been ignored? The major insurers want to sell life policies with face values of more than $1 million. These insurers, he says, haven't wanted to focus on a market that's interested in much smaller term-life policies, which provide death benefits for a set number of years.
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