risk life
Term life insurance is important for people with a family or ongoing real estate financing. If the policyholder dies, a fixed sum is paid out to the surviving dependents. Relatives who are dependent on the income of the deceased or who have to pay off loan debts do not also face financial ruin as a result.
A sufficiently high sum insured is important for term life insurance. “When financing your own home, it should correspond to the loan amount,” explains Wolf. “With one child in the family, it should be three years net income, with two or three children about three to five times as much to help the family through the first few years.”
Being badly insured is fatal – but so is throwing away a lot of money every month on unnecessary insurance. “I recommend a combination of a BU and inexpensive accident insurance to protect the workforce,” says the broker Jacobs. The accident policy should have an insured sum of half a million euros in the event of total disability. “You can get a policy like this for 100 to 150 euros a year,” he says. Even if the accident insurance cannot fully replace the BU, it still offers something that the BU does not provide: a high one-off payment. “This can be used, for example, to finance renovation work in the house after a serious accident,” he explains. “You need a lot of money for that in one go, a BU with a monthly pension of 2,000 or 3,000 euros doesn’t help at first.”
Some intermediaries tend to prefer to sell customers an accident policy with many additional benefits than an BI. For the intermediary, the BU means a greater consulting effort, and with the cheaper accident policy, the probability is higher that the customer will access it. However: “The assumption that with a fluffy accident insurance policy for half the money you have a policy that offers almost as much as an BI is wrong,” says Jacobs.
The broker recommends taking out insurance individually and adapting it to the respective life situation. “A career starter only needs a BU, but no term life insurance,” he says. “It only becomes important when starting a family.” If a couple is in good financial shape, the property has been paid off, the children have moved out and maybe even an inheritance has fluttered into the house, BU and term life insurance may no longer be necessary. “As a rule of thumb, a policy like this is important until the kids are 25 or the property is paid off,” says Jacobs.
If the BI is too expensive, consider getting a contract that lasts until age 60 rather than 67 rather than not getting a policy at all. “A policy that lasts until the age of 60 costs about half as much per month as a contract until the age of 67,” explains Jacobs. “And then you are well secured, at least in middle age.”
The bad news for consumers: More and more providers are offering mixed forms of the insurance policies shown. This makes it more difficult to see exactly what is insured and what is not, and where the differences to other offers lie. There are also big differences in costs and benefits. Good advice is therefore indispensable. The representative of the insurer is extremely unsuitable for this; as the name suggests, he represents the interests of the insurer.
An insurance consultant who calculates a fee for his time independently of a deal and is therefore always on the side of the customer is a better fit. If the customer does not want to pay a fee, a broker, who by law is also the customer’s guardian and not the insurer’s, is a good alternative to the agent.