What made you decide to get life insurance?

[EvaJones]

I'm considering getting life insurance, but I was just curious as to the reasons why others have decided to take out a life insurance policy.

Also would love to know the reasons why you haven't got it if you've decided not to take out a policy yet!

Thank you in advance for your help!

We also both have death in service benefits and savings.

I got it once I stopped working and no longer had Death in Service benefits. DH's cover through work would pay off our mortgage with a good chunk left over, but once I gave up my career there wasn't anything the other way around. There is strong breast/ovarian cancer risk in my family too so it seemed sensible.

The only problem with waiting until you finish work is it gets more expensive the older you get, and you're more likely to pick up health concerns as you get older increasing premiums. Best to get it as young as you can!

@Notanothernam, Not enough that it would be a problem or a stress. I’d probably sell an investment to clear our mortgage. I guess we have investments that are both our pensions and our insurance. Most people don’t have that. Plus we both have jobs that can afford our lives singlehandedly so income would still be coming in rather than us just eating into savings/investments. Id certainly juggle our current financial set up to make everything work for the new situation but we don’t need insurance to be honest.

I have critical illness cover - because i look after the kids while dh works very long hours - we insured me to the value of paying someone to come in and look after the kids - in the event of death or inability to do what I do now.

I was quite shocked when I did a quote out of interest to see how much our cover would be now. 3 years later my premiums would be 70% higher for exactly the same cover. The younger you can do it the better.

We had to get it with our mortgage and I'm really pleased we did.. We set it at the original mortgage amount and not to decrease in line with our mortgage payments, so if one of us dies then whatever left on mortgage gets paid off and there'll be money left to survive on.

@Auntiepatricia I see what you mean, hopefully you have critical illness though in case you both were to get ill and not work? I always think worse case 😂

@notanothernam, that would be quite a worst case. But we’d probably still manage a bit of a juggle of investments and have options plus family who would help us. Is life insurance usually for critical illness too? I didn’t think so.

It depends on your policy, there are joint policies, or ones that pay out for death or illness whatever happens first. Pretty sure my critical illness policy pays out on death. Statistically speaking you're much more like to get too unwell to work than you are to die young, one of the reasons I have income protection is because I think one of the most likely things to happen to me is a car accident. I'm real fun at dinner parties!