August 6, 2026
4:53 pm

Can You Sell a Washington National Final Expense or Burial Policy? (2026)

A Washington National burial policy is very unlikely to attract a life settlement offer, because the death benefits in that product category almost always land below the roughly $100,000 the secondary market bids on. That is a size problem, not a carrier problem. Washington National is a financially ordinary, licensed life insurer; the issue is that a $12,000 whole life contract does not generate enough economic spread to cover the underwriting, escrow, legal, and multi-year servicing costs a buyer incurs on every file it purchases.

The useful work here is different from what people expect. Rather than shopping a policy that will not draw a bid, the productive steps are confirming which company inside the CNO Financial family actually issued your contract, establishing whether the benefit is level or graded, checking whether the policy is already pledged to a funeral home, and then choosing among the nonforfeiture options your contract already gives you.

Those four steps take about a week and they usually produce a better financial outcome than any amount of shopping. There are also four narrow fact patterns where a sale genuinely is worth exploring, and this page names them specifically rather than leaving the door vaguely open. Pine Lake Life Solutions provides educational information and a free policy review only, and does not offer legal, tax, or investment advice.

In This Article

First, Confirm Which CNO Company Actually Issued Your Policy
What Washington National Sells Today, and What It Does Not Publish
Why the Death Benefit Size Decides This and Almost Nothing Else Does
Graded, Modified, and Level Are Three Different Contracts People Call the Same Thing
How to Read Your Annual Statement Without an Agent
Preneed Assignments, Funeral Homes, and the Medicaid Burial Rules
What to Do Instead, and the Four Exceptions Worth a Call
Frequently Asked Questions

Can You Sell a Washington National Final Expense or Burial Policy? (2026)

First, Confirm Which CNO Company Actually Issued Your Policy

Washington National Insurance Company is headquartered in Carmel, Indiana and is one of the brands in the CNO Financial Group family, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CNO. Washington National came into the Conseco organization in the late 1990s, and Conseco renamed itself CNO Financial Group in 2010. The practical point for a policyholder is that CNO markets through several distinct consumer-facing brands, and people routinely mix them up.

The three that matter here are Washington National, Bankers Life, and Colonial Penn. Colonial Penn is CNO’s dedicated direct-response brand, the one advertised on daytime television with unit-based coverage and guaranteed acceptance for older applicants. Bankers Life sells through its own career agent force and is heavily focused on retirees. Washington National’s historical core is supplemental health insurance, meaning critical illness, accident, and hospital indemnity coverage, distributed through career agents and independent agencies to middle-income working households.

So a person who says “I have a Washington National burial policy” is, in a meaningful share of cases, actually holding a Colonial Penn contract, or a Bankers Life policy, or a Washington National whole life policy that was sold alongside a supplemental health product years earlier. Each of those has different benefit structures and different service departments. The declarations page settles it in one line. Read the issuing company name at the top of the contract and use that name for everything that follows, including any conversation about value.

If the paperwork is genuinely lost, there are two free tools before you start calling companies at random. The NAIC operates a free Life Insurance Policy Locator service that queries participating carriers on behalf of a beneficiary or an authorized representative. Separately, every state runs an unclaimed property program, and matured or abandoned life insurance benefits are a common category there. Neither is instant, and the locator service is generally oriented toward a deceased insured rather than a living policyholder, but both are free and neither requires an intermediary. For a living insured, the fastest route is usually a call to the carrier’s policyholder service line with a Social Security number and date of birth in hand.

What Washington National Sells Today, and What It Does Not Publish

As of 2026, Washington National’s consumer life lineup includes whole life, universal life, and an individual term product. The whole life offering is explicitly positioned as final expense coverage, described in the company’s own consumer material as designed to help families cover burial costs, outstanding debts, and other end-of-life expenses. The two features it leads with are level premiums guaranteed for life and cash value that accumulates over time.

The term product is the newest and the only one with published numbers. Washington National launched an individual term life product on June 23, 2025, offering death benefits from $25,000 to $250,000 with 10, 20, and 30 year term lengths and three built-in riders: an accidental death benefit, a terminal illness accelerated death benefit, and a waiver of premium benefit. That $25,000 floor is a useful signal about the market segment this carrier serves.

Here is where honesty matters more than confidence. Washington National does not publish face-amount bands, issue ages, or underwriting class detail for its whole life product on its public consumer pages as of 2026. Anyone who tells you the exact issue-age band or maximum face amount on a Washington National final expense contract without reading your policy is guessing. The company’s consumer service line is (800) 525-7662, and a written statement of your current face amount, premium, cash value, and any assignment is the document that decides your options. Ask for it in writing rather than accepting a verbal figure over the phone.

Why the Death Benefit Size Decides This and Almost Nothing Else Does

Life settlement buyers are institutional investors purchasing a stream of future premium obligations in exchange for a death benefit at an unknown future date. They price to a required return, and every dollar of fixed transaction cost comes out of that return.

The fixed costs on a single file are substantial and largely independent of policy size: two independent life expectancy reports from separate underwriting firms, retrieval and review of several years of medical records, a licensed provider’s underwriting and compliance work, escrow through a third-party agent, legal review of the closing package, state-required disclosure documents, and then annual servicing and periodic contact with the insured for as long as the policy remains in force. That last item alone can run for a decade or more.

Load that cost stack onto a $500,000 policy and it is a manageable fraction of the transaction. Load the same stack onto a $12,000 burial policy and there is nothing left. This is why the floor exists at roughly $100,000 of net death benefit, why the $50,000 to $100,000 band draws only occasional and health-driven interest, and why below $50,000 the life settlement market is effectively closed. The relationship is not linear and it is not a matter of negotiation. Our explanation of the minimum policy size for a life settlement walks through where the line sits and the handful of conditions that move it.

There is a second reason small policies fare badly that is rarely explained. Final expense contracts are priced with a high premium relative to face amount, because the underwriting is loose and the applicants are older and less healthy. A $15,000 policy at $94 a month costs $1,128 a year against $15,000 of benefit, a ratio of roughly 7.5 percent. Buyers model the present value of paying that premium for an uncertain number of years against a fixed benefit, and at that ratio the arithmetic stops working quickly. The same insured’s $400,000 universal life policy might cost $9,000 a year, a ratio of 2.25 percent, which is a fundamentally different investment. Size and premium load work against small policies at the same time, not one after the other.

One nuance worth stating: the number that matters is the net death benefit, meaning face amount less any outstanding policy loan and accrued interest. A $60,000 policy carrying a $19,000 loan is a $41,000 asset to a buyer, not a $60,000 one.

Benefit Structure	What Pays in Years 1-2	Typical Underwriting	Secondary-Market Relevance
Level benefit	Full face amount from day one	Simplified issue with health questions	Only if net death benefit is roughly $100,000 or more
Graded benefit	A stated percentage of face, often about 30% then 70%	Limited health questions	None while inside the graded window
Modified / return of premium	Premiums paid plus stated interest, commonly around 10%	Guaranteed acceptance	None while inside the modified window
Any structure, assigned to a funeral home	Paid to the funeral provider under the preneed contract	Varies	Generally cannot be sold without the assignee’s consent
Washington National individual term (launched 6/23/2025)	Full face amount, $25,000 to $250,000	Individual term underwriting	Depends on convertibility; term is saleable mainly when it can be converted

Why the Death Benefit Size Decides This and Almost Nothing Else Does

Graded, Modified, and Level Are Three Different Contracts People Call the Same Thing

Final expense policies are sold under three broad benefit structures, and the difference determines both what your family receives and whether the policy has any market relevance at all.

Level benefit. The full face amount is payable from the first day for any cause of death other than suicide within the contestable window. These are typically simplified issue with real health questions, and applicants in reasonable health qualify. This is the only structure that behaves the way most people assume their policy behaves.

Graded benefit. The contract pays a stated percentage of face in the early policy years before stepping to the full amount, commonly something like 30 percent in year one and 70 percent in year two. Accidental death generally pays the full face amount from day one regardless.

Modified or return-of-premium benefit. Death from natural causes in the first two or three years returns the premiums paid plus stated interest, frequently around 10 percent, rather than any portion of face. These are the guaranteed-acceptance style contracts, priced for applicants who could not answer health questions favorably.

A policy still inside its graded or modified window has no secondary-market relevance, because the benefit a buyer would actually collect is not the face amount. Separately, most states allow the carrier a two-year contestability period during which it can rescind for a material misstatement on the application, and rescission risk is priced severely by any buyer. Find the issue date on your declarations page and count forward. Past three years, both clocks have almost certainly run.

How to Read Your Annual Statement Without an Agent

The annual statement answers most of the questions people pay someone else to answer. Six lines matter.

Face amount or basic amount of insurance. The contractual base benefit. Note whether the statement shows a separate “total amount payable at death” figure, which may be larger because of paid-up additions or smaller because of a loan.

Paid-up additions. On a participating whole life contract, dividends used to buy additional coverage show as a separate block. These add to both death benefit and cash value and are frequently overlooked when people estimate what they own.

Cash value or accumulated value. The gross figure before any deductions. On a decades-old small whole life contract this may be a few thousand dollars.

Surrender charge. Universal life contracts usually show this explicitly on a declining schedule. Traditional whole life generally embeds it in the guaranteed cash value table instead of listing it, so a whole life statement showing no surrender charge line does not mean the guaranteed values are unreduced.

Loan balance and accrued loan interest. Two separate numbers on most statements. Add them together, because both come off anything you receive.

Premium mode and next due date. Monthly bank draft policies are easy to forget you are paying. A surprising number of households discover a decades-old $9 draft only when they finally read the statement.

If you want a walkthrough with an annotated example, our guide to reading a life insurance annual statement line by line covers the same fields in more depth.

Preneed Assignments, Funeral Homes, and the Medicaid Burial Rules

A large share of small burial policies are not freely owned by the person insured. They were purchased as part of a prearranged funeral, and the death benefit was assigned to the funeral home to fund a specific goods-and-services contract. Preneed arrangements are regulated at the state level, and states differ substantially on trust requirements, cancellation rights, and whether an assignment may be made irrevocable.

Practically, the assignment document controls. If the assignment is irrevocable, the owner generally cannot sell the policy, surrender it, or redirect the benefit without the funeral provider’s written consent. If it is revocable, the owner usually retains those rights but should expect the funeral contract to unwind at the same time. Some preneed policies also carry a growth or inflation rider that increases the face amount over time to keep pace with funeral prices, which is a genuine benefit that would be forfeited on any sale.

The Medicaid interaction is where this gets consequential. Under the SSI resource rules that many state Medicaid programs follow, life insurance is excluded entirely if the total face value of all policies on one insured is $1,500 or less; above that threshold, the cash surrender value becomes a countable resource. Several states apply a higher figure, so the exact number has to be confirmed for your state. Separately, an irrevocable burial contract or an irrevocably assigned burial policy is treated differently from a policy the applicant still controls, which is precisely why assignment status matters so much in a Medicaid application. Read our summary of the $1,500 face value rule, and take the specific application question to an elder law attorney or a certified Medicaid planner in your state rather than deciding it from a web page.

What to Do Instead, and the Four Exceptions Worth a Call

Ranked by how often they turn out to be the right answer:

1. Request a reduced paid-up quotation. Most whole life contracts let you convert accumulated cash value into a smaller, fully paid-up death benefit with no further premiums, ever. A $15,000 policy might become $6,100 of paid-up coverage. The premium obligation ends permanently and the remaining benefit is still generally income-tax-free to the beneficiary.

2. Ask for the extended term option alongside it. Extended term keeps the full face amount but only for a defined number of years, after which coverage ends. It is the better choice when the insured’s health is poor and the term is long enough to cover realistic life expectancy. Compare both in writing; see how the nonforfeiture options compare.

3. Check every rider before anything else. An accelerated death benefit for terminal illness, a chronic illness rider, or a long-term care acceleration may pay out now with no buyer, no broker, and no transaction cost. Payments under a qualifying accelerated death benefit are generally excluded from income under Internal Revenue Code section 101(g) for a terminally or chronically ill insured, subject to the statute’s conditions.

4. Consider simply keeping it. If the premium is affordable and the policy is past its graded period, a burial policy that pays quickly and outside probate is doing exactly the job it was bought for.

The four exceptions where a sale genuinely deserves a look: a policy whose net death benefit is $100,000 or more, which happens more often than people expect when a term or universal life policy is mistaken for a burial policy; a documented terminal or advanced chronic illness, where viatical economics differ and buyers sometimes consider smaller face amounts, discussed further in selling a policy after a terminal diagnosis; several policies held at once, where a consolidated review usually finds at least one contract worth keeping and one worth converting, covered in reviewing multiple policies together; and a policy where a large loan has quietly grown to the point that lapsing it would trigger a taxable event.

To find out which category you are in, send the policy cover page for a free, no-obligation review or call (305) 209-7183. If the answer is that the policy is too small for the market, you will hear that in the first conversation rather than after weeks of paperwork.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is my burial policy from Washington National or Colonial Penn?

Both are CNO Financial Group brands and people mix them up constantly. Colonial Penn is the direct-response brand advertised on television with unit-based, guaranteed-acceptance coverage. Washington National sells through agents and leads with supplemental health. The issuing company name printed at the top of your declarations page is the only reliable answer.

How large does a policy need to be before a buyer will look at it?

Roughly $100,000 of net death benefit as a working rule in 2026, where net means face amount less any policy loan and accrued interest. Between $50,000 and $100,000 interest is occasional and driven by health rather than size. Below $50,000, the life settlement market is effectively closed.

What is a graded death benefit and how do I know if I have one?

It means the contract pays only part of the face amount if death occurs from natural causes in the first two or three policy years, often about 30 percent in year one and 70 percent in year two. Look for the words graded, modified, or return of premium on the declarations page or in the benefit provision section.

Can I sell a policy that is assigned to a funeral home?

Generally not without the funeral provider’s written consent, and not at all if the assignment is irrevocable. Preneed arrangements are governed by state law and by the assignment document itself. Pull the assignment paperwork and read who currently holds ownership and beneficiary rights before making any plans for the policy.

Will keeping the policy hurt a Medicaid application?

It can. Under the SSI resource rules many state Medicaid programs follow, life insurance is excluded when total face value on one insured is $1,500 or less, and above that the cash surrender value becomes a countable resource. Several states use a higher figure. Take the specific question to an elder law attorney or certified Medicaid planner in your state.

What do I need to send for a free review?

The policy cover page showing the issuing company, policy number, face amount, issue date, and current premium, plus any assignment document if the policy is tied to a funeral contract. That is enough to get a straight answer at (305) 209-7183, usually within a few business days and with no obligation.

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