Arestrata Blog

I told the dragon that the credit crunch was not really a good time to increase the family expenditure, but she insisted that meant the family needed more financial protection. So despite the current recession encouraging me to cut expenditure back, I was given my instructions to increase the family’s financial protection. It was more like a shopping list!

The dragon’s specific instructions (where does she get all her information from?) were to get more life cover to make ensure our mortgage would be paid off if I keeled over (nice of her to plan for that!) and to make sure we had income protection insurance which would provide monthly cash in case I lost my IT job at Asda. She even wanted mortgage protection which would pay our mortgage instalments if I lost my job. Whilst I was sorting those aspects out, I decided to look into medical insurance. Ever since I needed an operation on my hand, I had a bee in my bonnet about getting medical insurance - so I took the opportunity to add it to my shopping list.

Being in IT and the dragon doing a lot of her shopping online, I knew I’d be able to sort it all out online. So when I got home from work yesterday, I once again settled down behind a computer. After 7 hours behind a computer at Asda, I’m a glutton for punishment!

Now I’ve already got £50,000l life cover which I bought before I met the wife and I must admit to being rather dilatory in not getting extra life cover to repay our mortgage if the worst were to happen. (Does the wife know something I don’t? Perhaps she uses her reptilian powers to foresee the future!) Anyway life insurance is where I started.

My neighbour told me to go through a broker as brokers can play one life insurer off against another. So once on Google, I ignored the sites from Bupa, Legal & General, Norwich Union and other insurers, until I came across a site run by Brokers Online – this sounded the right sort of name to me but I found it strange that their site address was www.life-insurance-bureau.co.uk. It turned out that Brokers Online is a co-operative of web sites all called Brokers Online. Every site in the co-operative specialises in family finances and family insurance. They turned out to be a pretty slick operation.

Brokers Online provided a quote comparison service for my life cover and within fifteen minutes one of their advisers from Click Financial phoned me. He went through a number of quotations and suggested that as I had a repayment mortgage, I could go for low cost Decreasing Term Life cover. Their quote was far cheaper than any thing else - but just to double check I got a price for comparison from Norwich Union through their own site (Yes I know I said I wasn’t going to!). Anyway, Click Financial was still the cheapest.

Whilst on the Brokers Online site I noticed that they could also sort out my income protection insurance and mortgage protection. It turned out that they’ve linked up with British insurance for both these insurances. Apparently it’s because British Insurance have been showered with awards for their protection policies. It took me just ten minutes to get both of them organised and they were much cheaper than I had expected. What’s more I wasn’t tied into either of the policies – I can cancel them without notice at any time and without penalty. The dragon was impressed!

That just left the medical insurance. Again I used Brokers Online. It turns out that medical Insurance is actually quite complicated. It’s not difficult to understand but there are so many types of policy and optional extras available. So I completed my details and a specialist medical insurance consultant phoned me back to discuss the options and costs. It was much simpler than trying to sort it all out myself. I’m sure left to my own devices, I’d have made a mistake. In the end I bought a family medical insurance policy which suited me just right.

The whole process of organising the four policies took me 45 minutes online and 35 minutes on the phone. Thanks to Brokers Online!

Tags: Life Insurance, life assurance, income insurance, income protection, life cover, critical illness cover, Family Income Benefit, LifeSearch, UK