All You Need To Know About Getting Your Insurance License In Texas

You are thinking about getting into the insurance business in Texas and you know you need insurance training and an insurance license. There are some very basic things you need to know in order to get pointed in the right direction.

First, you need to understand that you hold your insurance license in your own name. It’s yours. You do not need to be sponsored by an insurance company or an existing agent in order to take out a license. You can take a classroom insurance training class like the ones we have at Test Crushers Insurance Exam Prep. Or you can take our live webinar for your insurance license. You can even do a Test Crushers on-demand video course to prepare for your Texas Insurance Exam. All on your own with no sponsorship or approval from anyone.

Once you get your insurance license and you are ready to start selling, that is when you will need either to be affiliated with an agent, or be an appointed agent yourself, but that comes later.

If you are going to apply for a job to work in an insurance office for an agent, you will be expected to have your licenses. That is the investment you must make in yourself. Very few agents will hire you without a license and pay you to study, so don’t plan on that. (They don’t know if you can pass the General Lines Property and Casualty Agent test, so it’s a pretty big risk to hire an unlicensed person. It also goes to show you that these tests are no joke and the license really means something.

Maybe the best thing about getting either your Property and Casualty or Life and Health license is that once you have it, you can get a job with NO EXPERIENCE! The license IS your experience. In virtually every town in Texas, there are agents praying every night for a licensed person to walk in looking for a job! But they’re not going to hire you and pay you to study. You must make the first move. (But you could negotiate to have them reimburse you the costs of your classes. It never hurts to ask!)

You need to understand the two types of licenses that most Texas insurance professionals hold.

1. The Texas General Lines Property and Casualty Agent License (P&C)
   1. This is the license you need in order to sell and service “insurance on things”. This license allows you to sell insurance policies such as Homeowners, Renters, Condominium Unit Owner, Auto, RV’s, Trailers, Golf Carts, Commercial Property, Commercial Liability, Workers Comp, and more.
2. The Texas General Lines Life and Health Agent License
   1. This is the license that allows you to sell “insurance on people”. With this license, you can sell and service: Individual and Group Life, Individual and Group Health, Annuities, Disability Income, Long Term Care, Medicare Advantage, Medicare Supplement, and more.

Most agents have both, but plenty of agents are specialists and only focus on one or the other. If you plan to get both of your Texas Insurance Licenses, it really doesn’t matter which one you get first. For what it may be worth, the Property and Casualty Exam is generally thought of as the more difficult one, compared to the Life and Health Exam. This may be because the Property and Casualty Exam included specific policy knowledge, while the Life and Health Exam does not.

There is a fair amount of basic insurance industry knowledge that is common to both exams, so you do get the benefit of that cross-over when you start studying for the second one.

The most important thing to leave you with is this: You do not need any insurance industry experience in order to get started on a very good career. Your licenses are the keys to the kingdom. The total cost to be fully licensed as inexpensively as possible would look like this:

• Test Crushers Video Course Bundle: P&C plus Life and Health @$299 ($189 each when purchased separately)
• Exam fees paid to Department of Insurance $86 ($43 each test, each attempt)
• Fingerprints $50
• License Application Fees $50 each.
• All done for less than $600