‘Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.’ – Elbert Hubbard
‘Lives, like money are spent. What are you buying with yours?’ – Roy H Williams
If you make a list of topics for a financial advisor to discuss with clients in order of priority, life assurance should always be at the top. Quite simply, within the financial services arena this is the absolute beginning.
Simply put, anyone that has children or debts or shared responsibilities or virtually any type of financial commitment should have life assurance. How much they should have is another matter, but for now, let us settle on the requirement to have something in place.
Whether you or I like it, any type of financial responsibility means that someone is dependent upon us and our abilities to earn and pay. This may mean that if you die you will leave debts to your relatives, or perhaps they use your income to survive (children and a spouse or an aged parent?) or you travel extensively and it will be costly to have your body transported home.
The reason is, to a certain extent irrelevant. What matters is that if you are in such a situation and need to have life assurance cover but do not, you are now aware.
From here, it is important to understand the approximate level of cover that you need. Before I launch into this, I ought to point out that virtually everyone on earth thinks that they either need no cover or they ‘have enough’. However, the real situation is that most people need several times more life assurance than they have!