Serious Illness & Life Assurance
Are there people in your life who depend on your income? In a nutshell, life insurance is protection for your family for the permanent loss of your future income stream due to premature death. Serious illness cover is added protection for the family in the event of certain illness events such as heart attack, cancer or stroke. Each pays out a tax-free capital sum. Our role is to guide you through the jungle of terms and conditions, clauses and hidden costs, to find the best fit for you.
Not all life insurance policies are equal
There are two main types of life insurance – term and whole of life insurance (sometimes called permanent life insurance). Term, as you would expect, covers you for only a specific amount of time, say 20 years. Whole of life insurance, on the other hand, covers you for your whole life as long as you keep up your premium payments.
This is not a one size fits all situation and what type of insurance you should get depends on a number of variables such as age, health, hereditary illness, occupation, savings, inheritance tax, etc. We’ll have a chat with you, asking the pertinent questions, to not only get you the best deal but find the insurance policy that is most suitable for your situation.
How we optimise your cover
We ensure that money isn’t wasted on life insurance beyond what is necessary, but also to provide for automatic extensions to terms of cover if needed.
We check in on any waste where the wrong type of cover has been sold attached to mortgage debt so that the excess is redirected to build up your assets and not commissions.
We look critically at expenditure on Serious Illness against the strength of your balance sheet and whether money is better spent paying down debt or shoring up investments and retirement funding.
We take a critical look at existing inheritance tax life cover at its long-term cost against the gap created by growth in your estate and identify better ways to deal with inheritance taxes.
Our take on Serious Illness and Life Assurance
We’ve dealt with enough incidents of premature death among our client base over three decades to witness the fundamental importance of life insurance. Had those families whose breadwinner died not had the right level of life insurance in place, there is no doubt that things like children’s third-level education costs and the lifestyle quality of the surviving parent would have been crushed, especially when debts have not been cleared by life insurance.
The same is not the case for Serious Illness cover, the cost of which goes through the roof just when the benefit gets valuable - over the age of 50. It is common for an audit of cover and costs to reveal how thousands of euros can be saved and redirected into better things and it’s something we love to do as soon as we take on a new client.