Your Finance Tales

Direct life insurance appears to mean buying direct from the insurer rather than buying through an agent or through price comparison companies. The advantages of buying direct life insurance are probably that you my get some free cover for a certain amount of days each year. There is definitely at least one company that advertises an offer of some free days if you buy direct life insurance from them. Direct life insurance is probably cheaper too as they will not be having to pay price comparison sites for advertising and listing their product.

Cover can range from just the cost of a funeral to loss of your income for your family. The premiums will vary, not only from company to company but from within a company for different types of cover.

If you have a chronic illness such as asthma or bronchitis, you may need to pay higher premiums to ensure you will be covered by your insurance. It is a false economy not to mention these in your application as, often, the insurance companies will not pay out. This is not a scam by them, it is to protect against fraudulent claims and to protect themselves from losses they may incur if information is not totally correct to start with.

Many companies offer serious illness cover too but, again, you need to read the small print and include all information even if you don't think it is relevant. There have been a number of television programmes which have featured serious illness cover insurances which have not paid out. In the majority of cases the person insured had omitted some information which had not seemed relevant to their original application for serious illness cover. As with everything, always read the small print, not doing so could cost you or your loved ones quite a lot of money.

All the larger, reputable companies will take a second look at your claim and some, as a goodwill gesture will pay out in spite of your original mistake. Obviously this is up to the discretion of the company.

There are so many insurance companies around nowadays that, sometimes, word of mouth from a satisfied customer is a better option than searching round comparison sites and other companies not listed on comparison sites.

I don't know about you but I rarely have the need to include life insurance in general conversation. it just doesn't seem to crop up. I'm more inclined to chat about the news, soap operas or my grandchildren.