In a way, that’s the situation I face. I was recently shopping for term life insurance. For me, on a 20-year term life insurance policy the difference between the Preferred1 (cheapest rate) and Preferred2 rates was $100 a year. When I clicked on the underwriting guidelines for the policy, it spelled out their criteria for the different rating groups. Among things like cholesterol, family health history, and smoking, it listed the weight guidelines. It turns out if I lose about 10 pounds I would move from Preferred2 to Preferred1 and save $100/year over the 20 years. Hopefully that will be the extra incentive needed to do what I know I should be doing anyway.

By the way, if you have term insurance and haven’t checked rates in the past couple of years, it’s worth checking again. Even though you’re older than when you first got your policy, it still might be cheaper to get a new one since rates have dropped significantly lately. Sites like insure.com can give you an idea of the rates, though you’ll actually need to go through the full application process to get exact rates.