Delaware Life & Health Study Guide

If you are sitting both Delaware exams — and the state’s same-day fee rule is a good reason to — the material that spans them is the guaranty association and the rules that keep your licence alive. Delaware’s guaranty limits are not one number but a ladder, and the ladder is where the marks are.

The guaranty association — four health tiers, not one

If a life or health insurer becomes insolvent, the Delaware Life and Health Insurance Guaranty Association responds (§ 4401 et seq.). Delaware follows the NAIC model, but with a tiered health structure that rewards precision:

• Life death benefit — $300,000
• Net cash surrender value — $100,000, a separate bucket from the death benefit
• Annuity present value — $250,000
• Health benefit plan — $500,000
• Disability income — $300,000
• Long-term care — $300,000
• Other health benefits — $100,000
• Aggregate per life — $300,000, except up to $500,000 where a health benefit plan is involved

Note also that Delaware keeps the death benefit and the cash surrender value in separate buckets — $300,000 and $100,000. Some states put both under a single combined ceiling. A question giving you a policy with a substantial cash value is testing whether you know which structure Delaware uses.

And a prohibition that only runs one way

Using a guaranty association as a selling point is prohibited — but in Delaware, only on the property and casualty side. Section 4419 bars it for the Delaware Insurance Guaranty Association, while the life and health act carves that section out.

The free-look ladder across both lines

Delaware’s numbers sit at three different levels depending on the product, and only one of them is the one you probably memorised elsewhere:

20 days to return a replaced life policy or annuity (Regulation 1204 § 7.4). 30 days for long-term care (§ 7105(f)). 30 days for Medicare supplement (§ 3406).

Continuing education — one requirement, two lines, a fixed date

Here is the rule that rewards holding both lines: your continuing education does not double. Delaware sets 24 credit hours per biennium including 3 hours of ethics for the producer licence as a whole (18 Del. Admin. C. § 504) — not per line of authority.

The cycle is a fixed calendar one, which is unusual: it runs 1 March to the last day of February of an even-numbered year, and that final day is both your CE compliance date and your renewal deadline. Nothing about your own birthday or licence anniversary enters into it.

Carryover is capped and lopsided. Up to 5 excess credits move into the next biennium — and carryover never applies to the ethics hours. Bank general credits if you like; you will still be taking three ethics hours every single cycle.

And the two product gates

Two requirements attach to selling rather than to renewing. Annuities need the one-time four-credit best-interest course under Regulation 1214 before a producer may sell them at all, plus insurer product-specific training for each annuity recommended. Long-term care needs 3 hours of Delaware LTC training in each biennium in which you solicit it.

Both count toward the 24 — but neither is optional, and the annuity course is a gate rather than a credit: without it, the sale simply may not happen.