Following on from Mb's advice, where do you start with buying life insurance?

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Any advice welcome. Neither of us has any.
TIA.

you can take it out on someones life if you are financially dependent on them in some way, e.g a business partner.

mlp dh has similar history and is with asda, bumped payments up by £12 pcm is all

Soapbox - how much cover do you think is sufficent for a SAHM with school age children then?

hmm
theyd need a nanny for....10 years i suppose

Dh and I have individual policies worth £200k on each of us, so if we both die there is a pay out of £400k.
My policy is £10 a month and his is £15. (He has limited cover through work too.) That is for a 20 year policy with Legal and General via our IFA.

I think it depends on the age of your children but for pre school children you would need a full time nanny and a cleaner probably. So that is about £30k per year times 10 years say - £300k. That's before funeral costs, a cheering them up holiday etc etc. So I'd say a minimum of £350k.

For older children you might get away with £20k a year for holiday clubs, after school nanny, cleaner etc. So perhaps £200-250k?

It also depends on whether you want to try and make up for your loss from their lives by leaving your children a personal bequest too - or an education/college fund. If so you'd need to add to it by a slug to cover that.

goodness, this is an eye opener.
DH & I have a policy linked to our mortgage - if either of us die, the mortgage is paid in full. I have cover at work where DH would get 4x my annual salary (so he'd get 100,000) plus my pension but that is all we have.

I do have one of those well women policy though that covers female cancers, its a 15 year policy, if I dont make a claim, I get a lump sum payment, if I do make a claim, its quite a big payout, including childcare cover etc.

How much is the female cancer policy per month. Do you really get your money back if you don't claim? I never thought of having enough to cover nannys etc, I presumed when the mortgage was paid my DH would stay at home to look after DDs.

I pay £15 a month and you get all the money back if you make no claim. It wont be a great sum of money, just under £3000 at the end of it.

can I ask a question - do any of you have critical illness cover? I'm just quoting at the minute, its between £25 and £40 for a 20yr policy with critical illness, is it worth it?

its £13 to insure me for 20 years @ 500,000!

We have no critical illness cover. We ummed and ahhed and decided it was too expensive. We have paid a few pence extra to insure the life insurance policy if anything were to happen meaning we couldn't make the payments on that instead.

Elf - You are young. Take it out now while you are young!!!

Have just gone through money supermarket to an insurer who is saying £7 a month for 20yrs @ £250k

Take the £500k. In 20 years that will be peanuts anyway. Always take the max you can afford.

we need to do this too. been talking about it for years but never done it.
we have life cover to pay mortgage and small pay out from our respective employers

I am confused about what we need - i have a 6 year old, a 3 year old abnd one due in sept and presume they may wish to go to uni......

Critical illness cover is well worth it - someone I know was in the terrible position of having to sell their house when he had terminal cancer because he couldn't work, and they couldn't keep paying the mortgage till he died (when it would be paid off and more by their life insurance)

I'm not saying it's never useful, but critical illness insurance only pays out for the specific critical illnesses on the list. If you get the wrong kind of cancer, have the wrong kind of heart attack or succumb to some nasty virus that lays you flat for years, you won't get a payout. It can be a real gamble. Policies that will actually pay out if you are too sick to work/care for your kids/care for yourself are more expensive - they're sometimes called income protection insurance.

I looked at the critical illness stuff on the online search I was doing, and it covered heart attack, stroke, cancer, organ failure, but didn't cover a lot of things, benign brain tumours and a massive long list of others.

Thanks for all of this. I put in £1m of cover for 25 years to get that quote (random numbers!) so obv that was too high.

We have no mortgage but if my earnings were factored out of dh's life, well, it's a big drop in lifestyle for the children and for him.

OK, we need to see a financial advisor don't we?

I'm a contractor so no death in service benefit. Last perm job had 4 x salary.

can i just recommnded \linkwww.charcol.co.uk/life-insurance-protection\charcol} as an IFA?
We used them for our mortgage and found them to be brilliant

charcol

I wouldn't put £1 million on my life - dh might be tempted to leave a bar of soap on the stairs

Where is the best place to get help with writing a will?