Security for Individuals and Families
The stereotypical ‘life assurance salesman’ is the person you avoid at parties, the guy who will turn any occasion into an opportunity to try and sell you a policy. We have met ‘advisers’ who are like that and we’ve met their victims, clients who have been so loaded down with expensive cover that they can’t afford to live. One of our case studies illustrates a classic example. An estate agent’s in-house so-called ‘adviser’ had stitched up Simon and Petra, a young couple, with every kind of cover possible.
We don’t do that. We are proud of every policy we’ve ever sold and no widow has ever complained that her husband had too much cover. We’ll work out what you need and what you can realistically afford to come up with a practical solution, just as we did for Simon and Petra, and we’ll find you the optimum combination of economic premiums and value-for-money cover.
Ensuring Your Business Doesn’t Die with a Key Person
If you are in business on your own account and you want to borrow from the banks, you’ll probably find that they insist you have at least life assurance cover and maybe also critical illness cover. You will also find that they probably want you to use their in-house insurance company as in this case study. Lloyds Banking Group, for example, uses Scottish Widows which it owns. That is unlikely to be the best solution however, because in our experienced Scottish Widows is usually amongst the most expensive companies and is also the most finicky when it comes to underwriting. Contact us for a better value-for-money solution.
If you have business partners or co-shareholders who are not part of your immediate family then you need to ask yourself if, in the event of their death, you would want their spouses or children as your business partners. We invariably find that nobody wants that to happen. It’s not an unkind reflection on the family of business associates, but merely the reality that whereas a co-shareholding director is great at handling your HR and general administration, her husband has his own employment in a completely different field. If he inherits her shares on her death then the remaining shareholders are stuck with a sleeping partner entitled to dividends but putting nothing into the business which, meanwhile, is also short of a key person. We can solve that with partnership, co-shareholder and key person insurance, enabling the survivors to buy out the deceased’s family and providing a significant sum of money to tide the business over and provide funds to pay for the head-hunting of a replacement.
UK Life Assurers Pay Out
There’s an old myth propagated even by respected journalists that insurers look for excuses not to pay claims. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As the statistics show, nearly 100% of claims are paid. Those that fail are invariably down to non-disclosure, i.e., proposers not telling the truth on the application form, or claims that are outside the policy conditions, e.g., trying to make a critical illness claim for a condition that is not actually a critical illness, e.g., breaking a leg. One client we advised had previously arranged her own life and critical illness cover. We could not understand how she had got it so cheap. Then she told us she had declared herself a non-smoker because she “only smoked 10 a day and it’s none of their business.”
All insurance contracts are governed by the legal doctrine of Uberrima fides, a Latin phrase meaning “utmost good faith”. It means that all parties to an insurance contract must deal in good faith, making a full declaration of all material facts in the insurance proposal. The bottom line is that if you tell the truth on the proposal form and you pay the premiums, life assurance will always pay out if you die and critical illness cover will always pay out if you come down with one of the critical illness conditions specified in the policy conditions.
