My simple guide to life insurance
Life insurance is an insurance. It is used to protect against of the
risk of lost of income. For example, let's say A is the bread winner
of the family. If something happen to A ( for example die in an
accident), you will not longer have income from A. The family still
need to survive. Life insurance can provide/replace some portion of
the income so that the family still can survive. In some
circumstances, A will suffer some form of disability and can no longer
work, life insurance provide some compensation to help the family to
survive too. Please noted that in Malaysia, the protection against
disability is limited to what is specified in the policy. In advanced
countries like USA, they have disability insurance that pays as long
as you cannot work regardless whatever the cause is. This kind of
disability insurance does not exist in Malaysia. In summary, life
insurance is used to protect against the loss of income and
disability.
So, does life insurance makes sense to you??
1) Do you have dependents?
A) If you are single and have no dependent, it really does not make
much sense to buy life insurance.
B) If something happen to me, I would like to leave something for my
parents. Is your parent depend on your income for survival?? If answer
is no, why buy life insurance?? If you want leave something for your
parent, why not give your parent the money now?? Save the money from
insurance premium and give to your parent now every month.
2) If you are home maker and makes no income, why buy life insurance??
3) If you are married and your family depend on you to provide income,
in general, you should buy life insurance.
4) However, it may NOT be worthwhile for you to buy life insurance if
you have a lot of savings (more than 200K). In general, life insurance
in Malaysia get very expensive for payment greater than 200K.
All my comments does not necessary apply to medical insurance. Do your
own research to find out what is right for you. If your insurance
agent cannot explain to you why you should buy life insurance, why are
you buying??
The very complicated and complex thing about insurance in Malaysia is
that we do not have pure term life insurance. All insurance product in
Malaysia is normally a combination of life insurance, disability
protection and medical protection. In most cases, unless your
insurance agent is good and you do a lot of research, you really have
little or no idea what you are buying. I am not qualify to tell you
what you should buy and how much to buy in each circumstances.
The bottomline is you need to know is
1) what are you protect against??
Life, disability, medical
2) What is the likelihood for each risk at your age??
3) What is the cost for each option??
4) What is the maximum pay and deductable in each situation??
Insurance is used to protect against the situation where you do not
have enough resources to cover. You need to buy just enough so that
when the bad thing happen, you are coverred. But, you should NOT buy
so much that it costs too much to you.
Dreamer
Thanks dreamer for your info on this. This is really a useful guide.
You said that most of the insurance in Msia is combination of life insurance, disability protection and medical protection, is it true? I heard that there're some insurance, where we pay the premium every year and no saving feature. Normally life insurance has saving feature, where we can withdraw the money at certain age.