-
18 February 2022
Lots of people reassess their insurance after repaying the mortgage and cancel their income protection. I often think that's a mistake. Mortgage-free years are usually when you build the wealth that f…
-
11 February 2022
When people are thinking about cancelling or reducing their personal insurances because of short-term cash flow pressure, I try to get them to s-l-o-w the decision down. Step back. Think big picture a…
-
2 October 2020
Involuntary retirement — losing a role and not returning to the workforce — can have a huge financial and emotional impact. Playing it "safe" by staying put in one role for decades can actually be ris…
-
20 December 2019
It's easy to think about insurance in binary terms — you have it or you don't. But there's a huge difference between a 4-week and a 13-week waiting period, between $100,000 and $1 million of life cove…
-
31 May 2019
You'll never have the "right" amount of insurance, because you're dealing with uncertainty. You can only tell what you needed with hindsight or a crystal ball. For most people the best case is paying…
-
12 November 2018
Parents help their kids in obvious ways — education, deposits on homes. But there's a subtler one worth naming: underwriting risks. A parent in a sound financial position can take the place of a traum…
-
18 June 2018
Every so often I meet an insurance adviser who waxes lyrical on trauma insurance — there's something almost religious about it. In person, it's compelling. This article is an antidote. Trauma insuranc…
-
15 March 2018
As a general rule, I say "no" to level premiums for personal insurance. Your insurance needs should reduce over time, so if you select level premiums, you may end up locking yourself into unnecessary…
-
15 December 2017
If you need personal insurance, it's tempting to go direct to an insurer or use a comparator like Life Direct. I don't recommend it. Policies look similar but differ in ways that matter: wording, excl…
-
17 August 2017
Retirement is often a euphemism for being displaced from the workforce — and involuntary unemployment is one of the few things with an enduring negative impact on life satisfaction. Career risk is rea…
-
19 June 2017
Many insurance advisers provide terrific advice — but not always. Two red flags worth watching for: when the adviser has recommended the same level of life insurance cover for both you and your partne…
-
12 May 2017
I'm a HUGE advocate for insurance — most working people should carry some. But I'm also a big advocate for self-insuring where you can, and a message I don't see often enough is that your insurance ne…
-
5 May 2017
If you lose the ability to make decisions, your spouse or parents can't just step in — someone has to apply to the Court, which means months of delay and thousands of dollars. An EPA avoids all that.…
-
13 April 2017
Plenty of people are under-insured. But plenty are also over-insured — paying expensive premiums for cover they no longer need. Reducing cover is trickier than it sounds, and most advisers have financ…
-
14 July 2016
Life insurance advice is almost cliche: if the client dies, they want the mortgage paid off. That's often the start and end of the conversation. But the mortgage is a red herring. The real question is…
-
25 May 2016
I'm an advocate of many forms of insurance, but not all of it is equally useful. It tends to earn its keep against low-probability, high-impact events — things that would otherwise be financially cata…
-
20 February 2016
One of the best forms of good luck is the absence of bad luck. I've been lucky in that sense — no major health issues, no tragedies. The defensive side of managing luck is every bit as important as co…
-
10 October 2015
I'm a huge advocate of most forms of insurance — general insurance for the house, contents, and car; personal insurance for life, income, total and permanent disability, and trauma. It's a foundationa…
-
9 September 2015
The things most likely to kill us aren't swashbuckling. Turbulence and close calls get the heart racing, but heart disease is the leading cause of death — and the risks driving it are sitting on the c…
-
1 July 2015
Working out how much life, TPD, and trauma cover you need is both simpler and more complicated than it looks. Two clients with identical objective circumstances can legitimately want different amounts…
-
6 February 2015
Do ALL people need life, trauma, total and permanent disability, or income protection insurance? No. Do MOST people need insurance? Yes. These policies are typically about making sure the people who d…
-
15 December 2014
If you're in your late twenties or thirties, the odds that you'll die in a given year are very low — less than 0.15% for men, less than 0.07% for women. Pretty good odds. But in a group of 300 friends…
-
7 December 2014
A will is only one piece of estate planning — and often a small one. Superannuation, jointly-owned property, life insurance nominations, and trust assets often bypass the will entirely. Plan the whole…
-
4 December 2014
David Myers' Intuition: Its Powers and Perils shaped how I think about probability. Big hearts and hard heads can come wrapped in the same skin — being wise means asking to see the numbers, even when…