Best Life Insurance
Making sure you buy the right product and the right level of cover.
The best life insurance policy isn’t always the cheapest; it’s the one that best matches your needs. Decide first whether you’re saving for your family, ensuring that your debts are paid off when you die, looking for a steady income for your dependants, or covering a shorter term risk. Until you know what you want, you won’t find the right product.
What’s the best life insurance? How long is a piece of string! Sure you can shop around and get the best rates, but the only way to get the best life insurance is to sit down in a quiet moment and fully understand why you want to buy it in the first place.
It all seems a bit silly- after all, when the policy comes to fruition, by definition, you won’t be around to enjoy it! So why do people get life insurance policies? Well, there are a whole host of reasons.
The first is to pay off outstanding debts. This is very common, not least because some of your debts, e.g. a mortgage, often come with the proviso that you must provide for payment of the debt in the event of your untimely death. Equally, even if you aren’t forced to get cover, you may wish to provide so that your family, descendents and dependants don’t have to take on your bills when you die.
If you don’t have a significant estate, you may also want to take out life insurance in order to provide a cash sum to your family when you die. This is slightly more complicated, as you have a broader range of products at your disposal for this purpose. You can reduce your payments by changing the terms of cover or the amount to be received at the end. Insurance, for example, covers you if you die in a certain specified period, but delivers nothing if you survive. Assurance is more like an investment package- knowing that we will all pass away sometime, it is an investment tool that provides for your family’s future in a more guaranteed fashion. Finding the best life insurance package in this respect will be the hardest to research.
There are two more very good uses for life insurance policies. The first is making a charitable contribution. If you don’t have a family to pass on your wealth to, you might wish to make a significant charitable contribution, and a life policy is a very efficient way to do this. One reason it’s efficient is that life policies deliver hard cash to whomever you want to give it to. And that leads us to the second reason- liquidity for inheritance purposes.
Usually, the largest part of the estate we leave to our heirs is our property. And currently, above a threshold of around a quarter of a million pounds, inheritance tax is payable to the government on your death. All too often, selling your property will be the only way to raise enough cash to pay off inheritance tax liabilities. A life insurance policy can be a wonderful way to raise enough cash not to have to split up assets such as the family home. This can not only make the transfer of assets much simpler, but far less emotionally taxing.
When looking for the best life insurance policy, consider these reasons as the basis of your judgement: only then can you sensibly assess what the right type of policy for your needs will be- let alone which is the most economical.
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