Personal insurance is the most important insurance you can have. With luck, you’ll never need it. But because personal insurance covers the income source for your family we’d rather you be safe than sorry. At Bennett Wealth Group we can offer you an ideal solution.
What are you covered for?
Ask yourself, what are the most important things in your life? From our experience the top four things most people say are: family, food on the table, a roof over their head and good health.
Now consider what you have covered by insurance. Most likely you can replace your car, your house and your contents. But is the most important thing covered? How will your family cope without your income?
A strong foundation.
Effective and ideally structured personal insurance will build you a strong foundation. Chances are you’ll never need to use it, but it’s definitely money well spent.
When we assist with claims for families in desperate times, it’s great to know that financial strain is one thing that they won’t have to deal with.
Are you covered effectively?
Think ahead.
Most importantly, as with all insurance, you need to apply for cover before you need it. Leaving it until a situation occurs where you or your family actually need it may mean you don’t get cover.
There are four main forms of personal insurance cover: life, total personal disability (TPD), income protection, and trauma insurance. Each can overlap slightly, and each can be tax deductible if structured properly, but generally none of them are suitable on their own.
Which is the best policy?
There are many policies to choose from, but caution needs to be taken when choosing one. Cheap policies can be an indication that it has limited scenarios under which you will get paid out.
The two main TPD definitions will cover you differently. One covers you if ‘you can’t do your occupation’ while the other will cover you if ‘you can’t do any occupation’.
For example, an engineer in Karratha may still be able to answer phones in Perth, but without the right TPD definition he wouldn’t be able to keep his kids in private school or cover his investment property costs. Which definition do you think he needs?
Recent improvements to job categorising in the mining and oil and gas industries have opened up more options for insurance. If you work in these industries and your policy is more than a few years old, it’s probably more restrictive and expensive than what’s available to you now. Just because you work onsite doesn’t mean you’re still treated like a jumbo driver or deep-sea welder!
What are the options?
Getting advice pays off. What’s right for your colleague won’t necessarily be right for your situation.
There are a few options, you can:
- Accept what you have – either get lucky or live with the regrets.
- Call the companies advertised on TV or online – simple, expensive but immediate cover. They often have limited terms and generally verify your history when you claim, so your premium might be accepted for years but when you claim and they dig a little deeper you may not get paid out!
- Go to an insurance broker – while specialised in the insurance offerings, they may not consider your cashflow, taxation, investment strategy and estate planning situation which are all influential in an insurance strategy.
- Use your bank – often you’ll get the bank’s insurance policy, but this might not be the best fit for your needs.
We use many companies because each of our clients has different needs and unique lifestyles. Companies will offer certain age pricing or occupation pricing preferences, and we find the one that best matches the individual.
The BWG Way.
We’re not aligned to any one insurer.
We help you structure your insurance correctly using your current policies and super fund if appropriate, or with replacement cover if needed.
There are risks with changing policies and providers so it’s best to avoid this where possible.
Being fee for service means we have the cost of our objective review and advice covered. This means we don’t have to change your insurance in order to generate a commission to cover our costs.
Contact us to discuss your unique Personal Insurance options and you will experience:
- Refreshingly effective service.
- Intelligent structuring that earns you big savings long term (for example, ask us about a little used feature called level premiums).
- Tax effective policy ownership, given we specialise in tax management strategies.
Get in touch.
We can help you make the right insurance choice and find the ideal solution for you and your family. Contact us to discuss your options.
If you’d like to read more about the services we offer click on the links below:
- Stock Market Crash and Perth Property Hits the Wall
- Quality Investments in Troubled Times
- The BWG Way
- Re-tender your loan to reverse the rate increase