Life insurance/income protection advice for stressed FTB

[feelingnaive]

Hi! We're FTB hoping to exchange in the next few weeks. Our mortgage broker put us in touch with their insurance advisor who talked us through the importance of insurances to cover the mortgage, including building and contents (sorted), life insurance, critical illness cover and income protection.

My partner didn't trust the insurance advisor and would rather not use him, but I am quite worried about setting it up ourselves and then not having the right protection in place. I've checked my work contract and asked HR to confirm what is offered by my employer but I am on a fixed-term contract so feel a bit uneasy relying upon this.

Also aware that asides from buildings insurance all insurance is optional and many people don't use it, or see the value in it/are wary of difficulties paying out. I'm getting stressed that I don't know what I'm doing and could just do with a conversation with somebody that knows more than me!

Does anybody have recommendations of good guides to setting this up, or perhaps a recommendation for an insurance advisor?

Thank you!

My recommendation would be to forget about it until after you've moved, then approach on a considered way when you're not stressed.

It's not s prerequisite of getting the mortgage - don't worry. Advisers always throw in the hard insurance sell when they're brokering your mortgage because they know you will be vulnerable & more willing to sign up there and then. Oh, and they get a fat comission off the back of it (probably higher than the one for the mortgage)

Absolutely don't wait until you move in, it will drop down your list of priorities in the excitement of your first house and if anything happens before you get it sorted (unlikely, but still a possibility) it will be a disaster.

Have a look on the Martin Lewis website, there is a guide for Mortgage Life Insurance and various explanations / Q&As about different types of cover.

Definitely get life insurance cover. It is actually quite sensible to get that from the same provider as is giving you the mortgage if possible, because then in the unlikely event that one of you dies, it's two departments of the same organisation talking to each other to wrap up the financial affairs.

Critical illness and income protection cover are often a rip-off with so many exclusions that its very rare that you will ever make a successful claim, so we never bothered. However we have the luxury of both bring from reasonably affluent families and we can be confident that in the event that one of us was so critically ill that we couldn't earn long-term, the families would rally around and ensure we didn't have to deal with threats of homelessness on top of that. I might have got some modest level of income protection if I didn't feel I had an existing safety net like that.

Don't use their advisor. Look at MSE and which? They'll both explain the products and how the decision should be made so that you can speak to an advisor knowing what you want/need. I think IP is still an advised product so you will need to speak to an advisor but it'll go better off you know what you want and choose your own (when we did it we approached a firm who sold what we wanted at the price we wanted and they made an advised sale where they didn't compare with other providers - worked for us because we'd already done the comparisons).