No one wants to pay more than they have to for life insurance. You want the best deal, and the most coverage, for the least amount of money. That’s what being a responsible consumer is all about.

There are several ways you can reduce your life insurance premiums, too. You can get a multiple policy discount. You can make sure to choose term life insurance over whole life insurance policies. You can reduce your coverage if you need to, or you can choose a plan with a generally lower premium.

There is something you should never do when you’re trying to reduce your life insurance rate, however:

Lie.

You see, there isn’t a whole lot you need to do to get a life insurance policy. You need to fill out a relatively short questionnaire, and it will ask you some health questions. Among those, for example, it will ask about whether or not you’re a smoker.

Herein lies the problem. Smokers can often be charged life insurance rates that are two times the rate that a nonsmoker will be charged. It can be tempting to fib a little bit on your application if you’re a smoker, for example. One study even suggests that almost 15 percent of people lie to get a better rate on their insurance, including life insurance.

Unfortunately, if you lie about smoking or something else in your health history, you put yourself and your life insurance policy at risk.

How so? Well, let’s say that you state on your life insurance application that you’re not a smoker, but you actually smoke a pack a day. Five years later, you pass away from lung cancer.

Your family isn’t going to get a dime.

The insurance company investigates just about every payout it makes. If and when they discover that you died due to a smoking-related illness and that you were actually smoking when you made the application, they can deny the claim. Your beneficiaries can be left with nothing at all, and you will have wasted all of that money you spent on premiums.

Photo via Hoggheff aka Hank Ashby aka Mr. Freshtags