Insurance World

When considering life insurance, you’re planning and preparing for an event most of us would rather not think about. But life insurance represents a critical step in managing your personal finances and ensuring your family’s well-being.

The Two Approaches to Life Insurance

You can use one of two approaches to estimate how much life insurance you should buy: the needs approach or the replacement-income approach. Using the needs approach, you calculate the amount of life insurance necessary to cover your family’s financial needs if you die. Using the replacement-income approach, you calculate the amount of life insurance you need to equal the income your family will lose. Let’s look briefly at each approach.

You need how much?

Using the needs approach, you add up the amounts that represent all the needs your family will have after your death, including funeral and burial costs, uninsured medical expenses, and estate taxes. However, your family depends on you to pay for other needs, such as your child’s college tuition, business or personal debts, and food and housing expenses over time.

The needs approach is somewhat limiting. The task of identifying and tallying family needs is difficult, and separating the true needs of your family from what you want for them is often impossible.

Replacing Income

Using the replacement-income approach for estimating life insurance requirements, you calculate the life insurance proceeds that would replace your earnings over a specified number of years after your death.

Life insurance companies sometimes approximate your replacement income at four or five times your annual income. A more precise estimation considers the actual amount your family members need annually, the number of years for which they will need this amount, and the interest rate your family will earn on the life insurance proceeds, as well as inflation over the years during which your family draws on the life insurance proceeds.
Note: Do remember as you quantify the income you want to replace that Social Security provides generous survivors benefits if you’ve qualified. These benefits can easily total $2,000 a month or more.

Calculating Replacement-Income Amounts with Excel

If you’ve got access to a computer running Microsoft Excel, the popular spreadsheet program, you can use your computer to calculate the amount of insurance you need to replace a specified number of years of income. Suppose, for example, that you want to buy enough life insurance to replace the income from a $50,000-a-year job for 15 years. If you figure your family will earn 5% on the life insurance proceeds should the worst case scenario occur, you enter the following formula into a cell in an Excel workbook to calculate the replacement income life insurance amount:

=-PV(5%,15,50000)

Excel returns the formula result 518,982.90 indicating that you would need roughly $520,000 of life insurance, invested at 5%, to payout $50,000 a year for 15 years.

Two Calculation Tips

If you want to factor in inflation because you’re trying to replace income over a long period of time, you should use a real rate of return rather a regular, or nominal, rate of return.
To calculate a real rate of return, subtract the inflation rate from the interest rate in the formula. For example, if you expect 2% inflation, you could replace the formula shown earlier with this formula:

=-PV(5%-2%,15,50000)

Here’s a final calculation tip: You probably want to round up your number. For example, if the formula provided earlier returns the value 518982.90, you might want to round up this value to $600,000. Or $750,000.

The Financial Services Authority has recently carried out a review of the way in which information and advice is given to retail customers purchasing financial products. One of the products which they considered was the sale of Critical Illness Cover.

Critical Illness Cover is often taken out by people taking out a mortgage, usually as part of a term assurance policy. It may also be purchased as a stand-alone product. The policy will pay out a lump sum if the borrower becomes seriously ill with one of a list of specified illnesses, commonly cancer, heart conditions, stroke etc.; this will help with loss of earnings due to the illness and general life-style changes which may be the result of the illness.

Firms selling critical illness cover are required to comply with certain standards and although these are being met reasonably well, the survey showed that there could be some improvement in the way in which they could help the customer to gain a better understanding of the product.

The FSA have visited firms and employed mystery shoppers to look specifically at how compliancy is working out with regards to sales processes when selling critical illness cover.

Supervision visits were paid to 42 firms. Whilst in the main these were financial and mortgage advisers, they also included banks, building societies and insurers. The market research company, Research International, carried out 80 mystery shops to 51 firms in total, to report on what actually occurs.

Director of Retail Firms, Sarah Wilson, has said that whilst many of the findings were positive, a few problems had been identified. Initiatives have been launched in order to deal with them. The fair treatment of customers is of prime importance, especially with regard to making policy application forms and documents more easily understood. So far these changes seem to be helpful.

Critical illness cover is, however, complex and some of the problems cropped up in the context of the financial promotion of the schemes and general insurance documentation. Customers sometimes have difficulty in comprehending exactly what they are being sold. Therefore it is difficult for them to assess whether this is the correct cover for them, or whether a payment of income protection product would be more suitable.

The needs of the customer have to be taken into account and there should be a careful assessment of the type of protection which they need. However, where there were two or more types of policy, the cost was sometimes the only aspect taken into account when recommending the most suitable one. Other factors may have been left out of the equation, such as conditions covered or whether there were other products more suited to a particular client’s requirements.

Miss-selling is a risk, but most firms had taken reasonable measures to manage this. There were found to be good training programmes and risk based monitoring.

As is the case with prime mortgage payment products, customers have time to consider their options before they make the decision to purchase the cover.

The results of the survey offer some reassurance that the needs of the customer are being protected and any changes to be implemented can only offer change for the better.