Insurance and protection
18 articles
What to Do After Buying a Health Insurance Policy
The half-hour immediately after buying a policy is the cheapest time you will ever have to make it work properly. Almost nobody spends it, and the cost of not spending it appears years later at a hospital desk.
4 min read
How Base Health Insurance and Super Top-Up Policies Work Together
A super top-up buys the cover you cannot afford as a single policy, by only paying above a threshold you agree to carry yourself. Understanding how that threshold is measured is the whole of the decision.
5 min read
Cashless or Reimbursement: How Health Insurance Claims Differ
Both routes pay the same policy. They differ in who is out of pocket while it is being decided, and in what happens if part of the bill is disallowed — which is why the choice matters most to the people least able to absorb it.
5 min read
How to Choose Health Insurance Cover for a Family
Most of the decision is made in three choices — how much, individual or floater, and which limits you accept — and the premium is the least informative number on the page.
5 min read
Why Employer Health and Life Insurance May Not Be Enough
Cover provided by an employer is real cover and worth having. Its weakness is not the quality of the policy — it is that someone else chose the amount, and it ends on the day the job does.
5 min read
How to Evaluate Insurance-Cum-Investment Products
A product doing two jobs can be assessed by asking what each job would have cost separately. That comparison is straightforward, rarely offered, and usually decisive.
5 min read
How to Measure the Return and Exit Cost of an Insurance Policy
Deciding whether to keep a policy you regret is an arithmetic question, not an emotional one — and the answer turns on money already spent being irrelevant, which is the hardest part to accept.
4 min read
How to Create a Family Financial Continuity File
Most of the financial distress that follows a death or a serious illness comes from paperwork nobody completed rather than money nobody saved. An afternoon fixes it, and almost nobody spends the afternoon.
5 min read
What to Do When a Health Insurance Claim Is Rejected
A rejection is a decision, not a verdict. A significant share of them turn on documentation or procedure rather than on whether the treatment was covered — and those are the ones that get reversed by somebody who asks the right question in writing.
5 min read
How to Assess Health Insurance for Senior Citizens
Cover for an older person is priced differently, underwritten differently and limited differently, and the features that barely matter at thirty decide almost everything at sixty-five.
4 min read
How Health Insurance Deductibles Change Cost and Cover
A deductible is an amount you agree to pay before the policy engages, and it is the main lever available for making large cover affordable. It is also the feature most often accepted without anyone working out what it would actually cost them.
5 min read
Do You Need Home Loan Protection Insurance?
You need the risk covered. That is not the same as needing the product the lender offers you at the loan desk — and the difference between the two is usually a large amount of money and a much less flexible policy.
5 min read
How Much Life Insurance Cover Does a Family Need?
The answer is not a multiple of salary. It is the size of the hole your death would leave in your family's finances, less what they would already have — and working that out takes an hour and gives a very different number.
6 min read
How a Family Can Structure a Term Insurance Payout
A term insurance payout arrives as a single large sum at the worst moment a family will ever have to make financial decisions. Almost everything that protects it is decided before it arrives.
5 min read
How to Build a Medical Buffer When Health Insurance Is Unavailable
Self-funding medical risk is worse than insuring it, and for some people it is the only option left. Doing it deliberately, with a named reserve and a written plan, is very different from hoping.
5 min read
Do You Need Personal Health Insurance Alongside Employer Cover?
Almost always yes — but the useful question is not whether, it is how much, in what order, and what it should be doing that the employer's policy is not. Buying the wrong shape of cover is a common and expensive way to answer this correctly.
5 min read
When and How Should You Port a Health Insurance Policy?
Porting moves you to a different insurer while carrying your served waiting periods with you. That single feature is what makes switching possible at all — and the things that do not travel are what make it worth checking carefully.
4 min read
Why Health Insurance Premiums Rise and How to Plan for Them
Premiums rise for three separate reasons that behave differently, and only one of them is about you. Knowing which is which tells you whether a rise is worth arguing about and what to do instead.
5 min read