EasyEquities Blog

Adjusting Life Insurance Based on Your Needs

Written by Mbulelo Mpofana | Apr 15, 2024 12:10:33 PM

People take out life insurance to ensure they have enough to support their loved ones should anything happen to them. We know investors are long-term thinkers and builders of wealth and want to live and eventually die with assets that far exceed their liabilities. But they also want the flexibility to adjust their life cover, based on their changing life circumstances.

EasyProtect is asset-aware life insurance designed for investors. As your investments grow, your gap and dependency on life insurance reduces. It’s life cover that shrinks as your assets grow - a bridge between where you are now, and where you aspire to be on your wealth creation journey.

EasyProtect allows clients to reassess their portfolio of assets and liabilities every six months. This process can be automated, so you can set it and forget it while reaping the benefits.

Your life cover can be adjusted downwards to reflect the growth in your assets over a period of time and as your cover decreases so will your life insurance premiums, with the difference being swept into your EasyEquities account where you can invest it to further accelerate the growth of your portfolio.

The quick and easy reassessment ensures that you are never stuck paying for more life insurance than you need while maintaining the coverage you do need. EasyProtect is an insurance product designed to help you reduce your need for insurance in the long term by building wealth instead.

Asset growth isn’t the only reason you may want to change your life insurance value though, here are a few more reasons.

Your child/dependant graduates from university:

This is a major milestone for any family. It also means a significant amount of future cash flows you were providing for in your life insurance policy are potentially no longer needed as your child has now graduated from university and is possibly off “your payroll” (depending on how much more support you child may still need). This is a natural point to reevaluate your life insurance and potentially lower your policy value.

You pay- off or pay down your home loan or other debt:

A significant portion of the cash flows provided for in your life insurance policy are likely to pay off debts. Settling debts (or reducing the outstanding balance) is another great reason to reassess your policy and possibly reduce your policy value.

Retirement:

For many people, retirement is a financial inflection point where one moves from being dependent on your ability to earn a salary to living off your built-up savings and investments. It’s important to assess what your remaining need for life insurance is at this point as it could be greatly reduced.

What about increasing my coverage?

If you take on more financial responsibility, such as a home loan or having another child, you might want to consider increasing your coverage. It’s really simple to increase your cover should you need to do so as an existing policyholder, however if you would like to increase your cover by more than 10%, it does then require a new application for a new policy for the additional portion of cover. The semi annual (auto)adjustment is a great time to review your insurance needs.

EasyProtect Life is a life insurance product underwritten and administered by Sanlam Life Insurance Limited, a licensed life insurer, and is offered exclusively on the EasyEquities platform for distribution by EasyEquities. EasyEquities is an authorised FSP, registered credit provider and licensed ODP.