Your health and life insurance costs
05th Jan 2017 |

Your health and life insurance costs are important considerations. Did you know that adopting a new healthy lifestyle, including losing weight could lead to a cut in the cost of your life insurance, serious illness cover, and/or income protection premiums?

Key points:

• Losing weight, quitting smoking, and getting the all-clear after an operation, or serious illness can all help to reduce your premiums.
• If you’ve made positive lifestyle changes, consider informing your financial adviser, or insurer, or shopping around for a new policy.
• Don’t cancel an old policy, before a new one is active, and think carefully about whether things such as pre-existing medical conditions are covered by a new insurer.

Key Decisions

Life insurance can be one of the most important decisions you make in your family’s future and you’ll want to be sure that you have enough coverage for their needs if the worst happens.

There are ways to cut the cost of premiums without compromising the level of cover and one of the most sensible – both for you and for your family – is to help yourself to get healthy.

There could also be a positive impact on your mortgage protection, serious illness and/or income protection premiums – not to mention the obvious savings that can be made by eating less, drinking less and by quitting smoking.

The cost of life insurance is based not only on the sum insured and length of the policy but on your age, state of health, and lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise.

So, if you smoke or are considerably overweight your premiums will be higher to reflect greater medical risks and shortened life expectancy associated with smoking and obesity.

Most insurers class people who have stopped smoking for12 months as non-smokers, making them eligible for cheaper premiums. While if on e-cigarettes for 12 months or more, Aviva will also allow non-smoker rates for Irish customers.

Switching insurance

If you’re considering switching policies, you should also think carefully about any pre-existing medical conditions and whether they would be covered by a new provider.

Note that it is possible to hold multiple life insurance policies, and in some circumstances it may make sense to take out a new policy to cover changed circumstances while also keeping the old one.

For more tips on the right way to make the cost of premiums affordable, read our guides on cutting the cost of life insurance .

Get instant term life insurance quotes.

To make an enquiry,  fill in your information and an adviser will call you.

Ken O’Gorman – QFA

OneQuote.ie – Smart Financial Protection