DeniseM

Life insurance companies may offer non-smoking rates to people who are occasional or "celebratory" smokers. To qualify as an occasional smoker, you should be smoking 12 cigars or less in a year.

As part of your underwriting process, you'll have to go through a medical examination to test, among other things, the presence of cotinine in your system. Cotinine is a metabolite of nicotine and while nicotine disappears from the system in about 48 hours, cotinine can be detected in blood and urine for up to 7 days.

Denise