Life Events That Call For Reviewing Your Life Insurance Coverage

2024-08-02

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Health and term insurance are small decisions with big impact on your family’s financial future. Ideally, you should spend good time in deliberating and selecting the best insurance for family, and that should be all. Once you have the plan, you should dedicate as much time possible for the wealth building investments.

However, life insurance usually cannot keep up with the changes in your life on its own. So, from time to time, you need to revisit and adjust the levers to meet the new demands of life with your term cover.

Here are five different types of life events which warrant your attention to your insurance covers:

1. Significant Income Growth

Your term cover is usually based on your annual household income. That is to support your family’s lifestyle after your demise and maintain it as it was while you were alive. Thus, it makes sense to revisit and increase your health and term cover after a significant growth in income.

While your savings growth will help you build more wealth and meet your financial goals easily, income growth impacts the family’s lifestyle as well. Thus, it is only logical to increases the cover for both health and life insurance plans.

Does this mean you will need to reduce the coverage if your income drops significantly? Not really. Income drops are usually temporary and if you reduce or eliminate life insurance or health cover you will find it difficult to increase them later.

2. Marriage

Marriage is another significant life event. Starting of family life could seem like a completely new world and in this new world your life insurance is no longer just the minimum liability cover.

You need to ensure that your life cover will provide adequate financial support to your spouse in case anything happens to you.

Similarly, with the health insurance plan you should add your spouse under a family floater plan. This will help you and your spouse to avail maternity cover and health cover for the newborn child as well.

3. Buying the First House

First house is most likely to be your home, and in the event of a disaster falling upon you, you would want it to remain in your family’s possession. Thus, you will need to include the liability you are incurring through a home loan and any transfer cost in your term plan.

Now there are two ways you can accomplish that:

Buy a new term cover separately
Buy a home loan term cover with the home loan

Buying a separate life cover is, however, better for your family, as the home loan cover will only cover the home loan balance in any given month. Whereas, the separate cover will double up as additional life cover for the family as you repay the home loan.

4. Childbirth

Welcoming a child in the family adds to both your happiness and responsibility. Since your responsibilities are increasing, so should your life and health cover. We have already discussed how getting a family floater plan helps you provide health insurance cover to your newborn child. So, if you have not availed the family floater medical cover now would be the good time to do it.

About the life cover, few term life insurance plans such as i-Select+ from Canara HSBC Life offer automatic enhancement upon such life events. You can increase your term cover by 50% upon marriage and 25% each on the birth of two children.

Thus, if you originally had a life cover of Rs. 1 crore, after marriage your new life cover would be Rs. 1.5 crores, after first childbirth, Rs. 1.75 crore and upon second childbirth Rs. 2 crores. These increments save your time, effort and money by avoiding the full underwriting process.

If you have a different life cover, however, you may need to buy a new policy which may need medical checkup and have a higher premium cost.

5. Other Significant Life Events

Other significant life events can include acquiring disability, changing country of residence, or changing the profession completely. These life events may or may not cause significant financial change in your life. But, if they do, you need to adjust your insurance policies accordingly.

You may notice that increasing the life cover is easier than decreasing it. That is because, life cover is supposed to protect your family’s lifestyle and decline in lifestyle is equally difficult once achieved a certain level.

Thus, ensure that your family is adequately protected at all times, a little extra protection wouldn’t hurt for a while.

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