By: Nick Torjussen - Our insurance adviser.

Did you get a letter from your life insurance provider last year telling you the price of your insurance was going up? Maybe you got one from them the year before, and, let’s face it, you’ll likely get one from them this year…

A very frequent moan from life insurance clients is about the annual letter they get saying, ‘Thanks for being our customer – oh, by the way, we’re putting our prices up!’
There are a few reasons why prices increase, but age and inflation would be the two main ones. In fact, age is the thing that really pushes the premiums up, and unfortunately, we’re all getting older!
Luckily, there’s some good news! Most insurers have options to ‘level’ your life insurance premiums, allowing you to lock them in like you do your mortgage rates. Most insurers will allow you to lock them in until age 80, some will go even later.

I’ve been having lots of discussions around this option lately, and while it doesn’t suit every client, it might well suit you. When you lock in the rates for the long haul you can be more certain that the cover will be there when/if you need it, and save yourselves tens of thousands of dollars in the process. For those who don’t lock in these rates, the insurance company will most likely be the winner.

These graphs show all too well how premiums increase as you get older. In the examples below I’ve selected a couple of non-smokers at age 40 with $500,000 of cover. Unbelievably, the total savings for this couple would be $581,000 in premiums. Yes, that’s right. Saving $581,000 over the next 40 years. That’s paying off a mortgage! (In reality, without level premiums you’d just end up cancelling your policy once it got too expensive and helping the insurance company to maintain that flashy central city office block!)

If your cover is already in place, you may not even have to complete another insurance application. Too easy?
Please feel free to call me if you have any questions, or if you’d like some quotes to see how much you might be able to save.