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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

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Original poster

Do you have Critical illness cover?

99 replies

Brooksey5 · 11/02/2020 08:41

Me and DH are buying out first home. Need to sort out life insurance etc. I’m put off by the minimum £20 monthly premium for critical illness cover. Is this something that most home owners pay?

OP posts:

Veterinari · 11/02/2020 09:39

Second what the PP said - having done lots of research, income protection is more of a priority than critical illness.
I pay £50/month but it's a guaranteed policy and premiums will only increase with inflation not age so it'll be a fairly static expense for me

Piffyonarockbun · 11/02/2020 09:40

My husband had it with work. I didnt have him on my policy at work. At 29 he was diagnosed with ms. Its a shame he wasnt on mine but he got a very good payout from his that allowed us to pay all our debts and meant he can now work fixed reduced (very slightly) hours to reduce fatigue.

TabbyMumz · 11/02/2020 09:41

It doesnt just pay off the mortgage not paid, it pays you out the amount you were covered for. So if you get a critical illness and you've taken cover out for say £100,000, then youd get £100,000. If you've already paid off a chunk of your mortgage or even all of it, that's pretty good going. Trust me, you dont want the critical illness, but if your covered, it's a good payout.

PhoneLock · 11/02/2020 09:44

I don't but my husband does. £20 a month, I think.

2020runner · 11/02/2020 09:44

My husband and I are farmers, he does more work then me as I look after the little ones. He has critical cover but I dont

Alsoco · 11/02/2020 09:47

We didn’t take it out. I’m rather glad we didn’t as our friends father spent his last few years fighting Aviva to pay out for his family (and losing). We have life insurance and I’m looking into income protection now my husband has a new job, he seems to like getting made redundant love him

BlingLoving · 11/02/2020 09:48

It's very expensive but we actually think it's as important as life cover. If one of us dies, and the insurance pays out, the other one can then carry on working with the added benefit of the house being paid off. But if one of us is sick, it potentially impacts BOTH our earnings as one of us may need to be a carer etc. So it's really important and we definitely have it. Costs a bloody fortune though as, of course, for the insurance company there's a much higher risk they'll have to pay this one out than there is that one person dies.

CherryPavlova · 11/02/2020 09:51

No but I wish we had looking back. We’d have been a quarter of million or so better off. Friend diagnosed a year after me had got cover and had an extension built plus a holiday or two.

mumoflittlemice · 11/02/2020 09:52

Just here to add to those saying DO get it. Check the details of the policy and what is covered carefully but really don't leave it to chance.

Our mortgage advisor sold us ours, 2 separate policies for me and DH, that's important too, and I didn't give it too much thought.

In the nearly 8 years since we got it we have each claimed (1 x successfully, 1 x being processed currently, but absolutely should be covered according to the terms of the cover). It is tens of thousands of pounds and while we would've far rather not needed to, it makes a huge difference no matter what protection through work sick pay etc you think you might be able to rely on.

My only regret with our fairly large mortgage is that we didn't arrange cover that would have paid that off. Now that would have been a game changer and is what I would highly recommend even if it's twice as much to pay per month now.

We were both young, fit and healthy when we took out our cover just to add, with absolutely no reason to think we had any serious health worries heading our way..... hope you make a choice you'll be glad of 10, 20 years down the line

saraclara · 11/02/2020 09:53

We had to take it out as a condition of our mortgage (which was slightly over the amount considered the maximum for it salaries) 40 years ago. We pretty much forgot about it, but when my husband has to give up work on health grounds 23 years later, it turned out to be invaluable.

Piggles39 · 11/02/2020 09:53

I took it out, and when I was diagnosed with breast cancer last October I made a claim. By early January they had not only accepted it, but I had the money in my bank account, have been able to pay off the bulk of our mortgage, and can sleep a lot better at night now I don’t need to worry about how my rapidly decreasing sick pay is going to cover monthly mortgage payments (it’ll be several months yet before I can go back to work). It’s also meant DP can afford to take time off work to come to appointments with me.

It’s easy to think it’ll never happen to you until it does.

Squiffy01 · 11/02/2020 09:53

I think it depends on your circumstances.
Can you afford the monthly payments?
If something happened and one of you couldn’t work for a while could you afford everything on your own?

We have it. We happened to get our mortgage so then life insurance and critical illness each 2 years ago and only thought about getting it cause my partners mother was ill and we thought if that happened to us we would have to sell up. We should have put more thought into amount we chose and don’t more of a cover the mortgage type one but we did £50 000 as it was cheaper.

Thank god we did. I was diagnosed with cancer three months ago and just got my payment last week. Took ages and they went back to GP for more info I was sure they weren’t going to pay even though all cancers were covered.

notanothergiftcard · 11/02/2020 09:54

I do. I can't get private cover for DH as he has Crohn's. He gets life cover and income protection through work though.

Lailaha · 11/02/2020 09:56

There was a thread on here not long ago posted by someone who was faced with possibly losing her home as she's not eligible, under UC, to have her mortgage interest covered (I think) and was saying how unfair it is that btl landlords effectively have their payments made through benefits, but because she's a homeowner, she doesn't. She'd been in and out of hospital, from memory, and likely to be unable to work for at least another year. People were (well this is MN ) asking why she didn't have cover of some kind.

I think it's worth looking into some kind of cover, in terms of insuring your income in some way, but not necessarily the one you've been offered, unless it's the best for you. £20 a month is nothing for this type of cover, but it obviously depends on the coverage you are getting, plus what LTV you have, the cost of your repayments, and lots of other variables that are personal to you.

Hingeandbracket · 11/02/2020 09:58

No - I don't trust the insurance industry not to have cooked up the rules to make the policy worthless, see also PPI etc - I never took it out as I could see it was a swindle for most people.

DavinaAddict · 11/02/2020 10:01

We do - it gets more expensive as you get older as your risk goes up. We felt it was worth it as you never know. Ours isn’t linked to the mortgage though, and we each have separate policies.

makingmiracles · 11/02/2020 10:02

@Squiffy01 who was your policy with out of interest? (Knowing that they cover all cancers as most don’t)

BlingLoving · 11/02/2020 10:06

No - I don't trust the insurance industry not to have cooked up the rules to make the policy worthless, see also PPI etc - I never took it out as I could see it was a swindle for most people

It's funny, I don't actually know anyone who didn't get their insurance paid out for a legitimate claim. I was just talking to a man whose wife died a few years ago and he told me the call a few weeks after she died to say her benefits were being paid out was possibly the best phone call of his life. we've had to claim a few times for the car and every single time our insurance provider has been responsive, helpful and has paid out promptly. it's a highly regulated industry these days.

As for PPI, the swindle was that people were paying for it without knowing they had it or being given the option. The truth is that if you'd died and your estate had made a claim, it would have been paid out. In my case, the PPI was added by the bank sales person who was organising my loan. I assume she was on commission. Obviously, the insurance industry must take a huge chunk of responsibility for not being more careful about how their policies were being sold and happily accepting these huge PPI profits, but I think it's an entirely separate issue as to whether or not insurance companies would have paid out in the case of claim.

ActualHornist · 11/02/2020 10:07

I do, but it’s through work so about a tenner for the pair of us. I also have a specific women’s policy that my mum took out for me when I was a teen - I didn’t know about this till about three years ago and I’m 37! I pay it now, it’s less than £4 a month.

I also have life cover through work. Everything plus pension is about £90 a month before tax - I wouldn’t be able to afford separate policies.

Sugarplumfairy65 · 11/02/2020 10:08

I wish I'd taken it out. Diagnosed at 51 with an incurable cancer and a host of autoimmune conditions that mean I'll never be able to work full time again. The cancer would have guaranteed a payout as it has for others in my support group.

BlingLoving · 11/02/2020 10:11

@actualhornist - I miss the work insurance policies. I use to work for a huge multinational and we had life insurance, critical illness etc for about the same amount. AND it was all managed and processed by work so if you needed to claim it was relatively painless (sadly, I know this as a colleague had to).

MereDintofPandiculation · 11/02/2020 10:14

I had income protection insurance but not critical illness. Too easy to find the particular illness that is causing you to be off work is not one of those covered by the critical illness insurance. My income protection insurance paid out for me when I was off work for 18months.

Browniegal13 · 11/02/2020 10:21

We did and I do. I was going to cancel it when we first got our mortgage m, but thank goodness I didn’t. My husband was diagnosed at 32 with terminal cancer. The critical illness paid out first and then the life insurance. It has made me and our children secure for the future, my life would be so very different if we hadn’t have had it xxx

TowerRingInferno · 11/02/2020 10:27

I did and got my mortgage paid off when I was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 40.

LifeBeginsNow · 11/02/2020 10:27

I've gone for accident & sickness cover as the critical illness cover looked like it had too many clauses with regards to the type of illnesses covered (and it was very expensive).

Unfortunately my current condition isn't covered for the first year but if I don't start paying into it now, it never will be! I could've added unemployment cover on but again, this bumped the premiums sky high. It's such a balancing act. When you're young, generally it's harder to afford with all of the other bills but when you're older and need the cover, you regret not going for the best.

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