to ask about your life insurance policy

[minnie465]

Have been putting off getting life insurance for months now.
DH and I are early 30s. I have Crohn's disease. Assuming this will increase the premium.
How much is your cover for? How much does it cost monthly?
Do you have critical illness cover?
I work for NHS so I'll get full pay for 6 months and half pay for 6 months in the event that I do become unwell.

£30 a month joint (so one payout), increasing cover of 150k (enough to cover the mortgage) but no serious long term health issues. Also have £10/pm critical illness cover (just me on that one), with Aviva.

Decreasing cover is cheaper, it just depends what you would want the insurance money for. Decreasing is good if you just want a mortgage paying off, we picked increasing as we have 4 children x

Mine is £15 a mth for 120k cover. No critical illness cover. last 60 years with no price increases, got it young with no existing conditions

£19.70 a month joint, includes critical illness, it's decreasing term so about 190k at the moment and 20k for critical illness. I've mild asthma so not bad enough to affect the premium.

I wish I’d got critical illness cover. I have life insurance and income protection and thought that would be plenty. Critical illness though will usually give a payout if it’s your child who develops a critical illness as it was for us (cancer in our case). This also means taking long periods of time off work so do think about this eventuality too - I didn’t.

Mine is $23/month for $250k on me and $100k on DD. I also have critical illness on myself as female cancers run very strong in my family.

I've not been accepted for life insurance as I had oral cancer 15 years ago. I just get refused even though so much time has passed and not had it come back. It's so frustrating

The longer you leave getting life insurance the more it will cost. We had decreasing life cover to pay the mortgage off, which cost very little 25 years ago, but trying to get life insurance now at 60 is prohibitive. I just wanted cover to pay for my funeral, but it's not worth it so I've just put a lump sum in a high interest account for when my time is up.

It wasn’t doable for me with crohns and past surgeries - quoted circa £300 a month

Hi my DH has colitis and we have decreasing life insurance and critical illness cover. My DH needed to answer more questions and had to pay slightly more than me, not much though.

As some one else has mentioned it depends how well controlled your chrons is and what if any meds you are on.

With my pension I get 3 months payout. So I chose life insurance that would top this up to pay off the mortgage, so the house would be left.
I think it's around £80k and costs £10 a month.

£36 a month for £300k including £50k critical illness cover. We're married in our mid 20's.

We have joint life, critical illness and "off work" payments. We have a mortgage but our policy is a fixed payment not a depreciation in line with mortgage.
I'm glad we took a comprehensive policy out I've claimed on it for being off work.

My DH and I took a joint life and CI policy out in 2006. £41pm with 5 yearly reviews. We were so lucky, last year he was diagnosed with bowel cancer and the CI was paid out very quickly.

@Knicknamehistory there are some specialist insurers

It wasn’t doable for me with crohns and past surgeries - quoted circa £300 a month

Same with me - I don't have Crohns, but my own current medical conditions, history and family history mean that, if anybody would give me LI, each month's premium would probably be as much as the value of the payout!

No matter how much they try and sell it as valuable peace of mind, it's a product like anything else - a gamble designed to make them as much money as possible.

Ask a LI provider if you should have it and they'll tell you you should consider it as an absolute essential, but if you have a bad hand of life-cards, all of a sudden, their message is that you obviously can (and indeed must) live without it.

They sell you insurance because they want to sell you something - any cover and peace of mind you might end up with as a result is purely incidental and very much secondary as far as the insurance big boys are concerned.

This is my big fear for the NHS, should it be dismantled/reformed/sold to Trump. The very people who need it most will be the exact people for whom it's not in any way affordable or simply not an available option.

I've paid £9.50 approx a month with a large insurance company for £150,000 cover for the last few years; taken out when I was in my late 20s.

I can’t afford it as I had PND and I’m priced out of the premiums.

Thanks all. Will get cracking looking for quotes today. I think I've been putting it off as I'm afraid it'll be too expensive for me. Crohns has been well controlled and only one surgery ten years ago so here's hoping.

@QuestionableMushroom very interesting about the PND. I would never have realised that.

Me - £14 a month - pays out on death of £200k. Had it for about 15 years.

DH - €800 a year - pays out €500k on death, or critical illness.

Note: We learnt our lesson the hard way. I got diagnosed with MS. If I'd had critical illness cover it would have paid out. So when we got DH's we made sure he was covered.

I nagged a friend of mine about getting critical illness cover because of what happened to me. The nagging worked and they got it. Randomly less than 2 years later they got diagnosed with MS (no signs before), the critical illness cover paid out.
They have since said they wish they had got more.

Please learn from what happened to me.

I can't get life or critical illness cover because I've got MS. Yet I have worked full time and paid tax since diagnosis 20 years ago. To me, it's very unfair.

My life insurance is
9.56 - for 50k

But I got PTSD

We’ll be well off if one of us dies but a bit screwed if we get a limiting illness. Critical illness cover was much more expensive and we’ve taken a bit of a gamble. Our biggest fear was one of us dying young and not being able to afford mortgage and childcare or both of us dying and leaving the children. The gamble aspect was the assumption that if one of us got a critical illness it probably wouldn’t be in our 30s when our outgoings are high with nursery fees. If it happened in our 40s or 50s which is statistically more likely, the financial implications would be different and we’d have more chance of managing on one salary.