Better Finance Stories

My Search For The Right Life Insurance

I have always made it a point to compare life insurance for me and my family. My early life involved travelling to beautiful places over the world in places, like Guyana and Tibet, have impressed upon me a simple lesson. Anything can happen, or to quote a dear friend, "beyond our personal little world is a world where anything is possible."

So when we got back to the UK, I began to compare life insurance quotes with the simple aim of making sure that my children and husband will be covered if anything should happen. It wasn't all that easy actually. I had to go through a lot of quotes and offers from this company or that company.

It was learning experience. How you compare life insurance policies and their prices was serious business. The first lesson I learned was that UK based residents should avoid off shore or any type of overseas based life policy in order to keep their costs down.

For speedy operation and lower costs, it's always best to buy your life insurance only from a UK based life company. So keeping things simple is not only good for the mind, it also kept prices down.

For cheap quotes, you can pick a simple straightforward term policy firm for a cheaper plan. This kind of policy only provides a lump sum payout when the one who is injured dies. It's one of the cheapest options I ever encountered.

Next, I had to deal with exclusions. Suicide was one for example. Others include, check travel and recreational activity, which was of big importance to me because me and family travel a lot, and I'm always concerned that we may not be covered when we do. This is also important for my husband because he goes on a lot of business trips.

My next concern was the risky "activities" that me and my family were doing. Travelling a lot means that we were under careful scrutiny by the companies we were applying to. So I looked at their underwriting guidelines and whether or not our activities will increase our insurance costs. I have to admit that at this point it was tough. Most underwriting guidelines considered activities scuba diving, hang gliding and being a pilot as "risky." This was the part where I had to compare life insurance offers a lot just to find one that won't object so much to my family's past times.

Other lessons I learned to be wary about were tied agents and non medical insurance plans. "Tied" agents were insurance agents that sold only their company's products, so they were catering to their own interests and not mine. Also, the easiest way of doing things is via an online website where I would be able to compare life insurance quotes much easily.

As for a "non-medical life insurance plan," they have more premiums and lower sums assured than traditional life insurance policies. Their death benefits are also often limited to no more than the return of the premiums paid plus interest during the first two policy years. So they weren't for me and my family, because what we needed was insurance for extensive activities and traveling which we were prone to do every year.