Insurance a word implies all it’s about. Before doing anything everyone wants to get insured financially. To take an insurance first you have to first analyze which type of insurance you actually needed.
What is Insurance?
It’s an arrangement by which a company or the state undertakes to provide a guarantee of compensation for specified loss, damage, illness, or death in return for payment of a specified premium. Life insurance is to compensate your survivors if you die, in return for payment of a specified premium. Keep in mind that much of what insurance agents try to sell you is not insurance.
How much should you be insured for?
There are many ways to get the answer, but a starting point could be ten years’ worth of your current income. This will obviously vary according to other family members’ income, assets, house etc, but rarely would an amount less than ten years’ income suffice.
Do you have enough insurance?
How do I know that? Because that’s the correct answer for a vast majority of Indians and so statistically speaking, this is likely to be your answer too. The strange thing is a lot of people know how much premium they pay to insurance companies, but do not know what their family will get if they were to drop dead. Actually, it’s not that strange as life insurance business is optimised around taking the money and indeed, measures its success not by how much its customers are insured for, but how much money the customers pay. It does so by ensuring that a vast majority of products are not insurance but expensive and opaque investment products that have a small smattering of real insurance as a statutory requirement.
The insurance regulator (IRDA) measures success by how much money the industry takes from customers, rather than how much insurance they have delivered and to how many people. The IRDA annual report or any other published data in this country does not reveal the actual extent of which people are insured. IRDA uses something called ‘insurance density’, which is the per capita premium charged from customers and as well as the premium as a ratio of GDP.
These numbers do not tell us how much insurance cover is delivered, only how much money the industry has extracted from people. The real questions are: When a customer dies, how much money does his family get? How many customers have what amount of this cover? What is the ratio of the total premium collected to the cover provided? Shockingly, this information either doesn’t exist (meaning IRDA has not bothered to collate it), or it’s a secret.
There are various ways in which agents will try and befuddle you is too long a story. You should just focus on getting ten years’ income worth of insurance. If you do this, you will get only the right kind of insurance product which is a term insurance. The reason for that is that in another kind of insurance products, getting ten years worth of life cover will cost you your entire income.
The basic principle of buying insurance is to keep insurance and investment separate and buy only pure insurance (term insurance). In India, insurance sellers have encouraged an investing culture where people are averse to buying term insurance because ‘you get back nothing’.
Agents do this as they get higher commissions in insurance. It’s not possible to be charitable while commenting honestly about this existing system so I won’t even try: this system exists because the regulator is asleep, agents are conniving and manipulative and customers are foolish.
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