Term cover first, then everything else

Insurance answers one question: what happens to the people who depend on you if your income stops or a large bill arrives. Investment answers a different one: how does money grow when nothing goes wrong. Products that promise to do both usually do neither particularly well.

Why term cover comes first

Term insurance pays a sum assured to your nominee if you die during the policy period, and nothing otherwise. Because it has no savings element, the premium for a given sum assured is a fraction of what a bundled product costs — which means a working professional can typically hold cover of many times annual income for a premium that does not disrupt anything else.

The correct sum assured is not a round number chosen for its own sake. It should cover outstanding liabilities, replace income for the years your dependants would need it, and fund any specific obligation such as education. Work backwards from those, not from a premium you had in mind.

Health cover is not optional because you have employer cover

Employer group cover ends when the employment does, and its limits are usually set with a younger workforce in mind. A personal policy held alongside it survives job changes and continues into the years when fresh cover becomes harder and more expensive to obtain.

Read the waiting periods, the room-rent limits and the exclusions before signing. These are the clauses that decide what a claim actually pays, and they vary considerably between policies that look similar on premium alone.

Disclosure is the whole game

The commonest reason a claim is disputed is non-disclosure at proposal stage — an existing condition, a habit, a prior policy or a prior rejection that was not declared. Insurers investigate at claim time, and the consequence of an omission falls on your family, not on you.

Declare everything, even when it seems likely to raise the premium or invite an exclusion. A policy with a known exclusion is worth far more than a policy that pays nothing.

Then, and only then, invest

Once cover is in place, investing becomes a cleaner exercise: money can be committed to longer horizons because an emergency no longer forces a redemption at the worst moment.

Insurance is a subject matter of solicitation. Premium, terms, exclusions and claim settlement are governed entirely by the policy document issued by the insurer, and products are solicited through our licensed insurance partners.