Life Insurance - The Essentials?

Mortgages and Home

Updated on 16 December 2008 | 0 Comments

How important is life insurance? Well, do you have a family that depends on you?

The other day, while flipping TV channels, I chanced upon one of those American makeover programmes - the kind where a team of volunteers marches into a desperate family's life, pulls down their house and builds them a new one inside seven days. It's incredibly cheesy but I've been addicted to Extreme Makeover - Home Edition ever since.

Quite apart from the fact that a couple of the presenters are very funny (incredibly, some Americans do understand irony!), it is also the sort of feel-good programme that makes viewers cry into their hankies and resolve to be nicer to their neighbours.

Anyway, much as I enjoy the programme - and I almost can't believe that I ask myself the question while I'm watching it - I keep wondering why none of the subjects appears to have had life insurance to cover them for unexpected events such as Dad dying, Mum dying, children to bring up etc...

I appreciate that I'm probably being naïve - some of the people featured in the programme clearly have more of a struggle to put food on the table for their children so paying for life insurance really isn't a consideration. I understand that. But I have also watched families who probably could have afforded life insurance but who have been left unnecessarily destitute because the breadwinner didn't have it.

I guess many of us have a tendency to go through life thinking that 'it won't happen to me'. And the fact is, it probably won't. But you never know. It's an awful thought but, in the UK, around one in 20 adults die while their children are still financially dependent.

And there's the rub. If you have no children or you do not have a partner who depends on you, then don't bother with life insurance. But if anyone in your family would suffer financially without your income, then you need life insurance.

You could, of course, rely on the hope that some enthusiastic Americans would descend on your dependents to help sort them out in the event of a disaster. But, trust me, while it's fun watching the programme, your family would die of embarassment if the Extreme Makeover team turned up on the doorstep. Seriously, life cover is only not worth considering when you have no dependents at all.

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