Your Home Or Your Life? Insurance Surprises

Bright Gray, the specialist protection arm of Royal London, has released research showing that UK consumers thing they should insure their lives, home contents and mortgage payments, in that order. Almost 40 per cent of the people polled said life insurance should be a priority, with 23 per cent favouring home contents insurance and 11 per cent thinking that insuring mortgage payments was essential.

So if that’s the case, why aren’t they doing it, then?

Contrary to their stated priorities, consumers show a different set of priorities when you look at actual insurance policies. Instead of rushing out to protect their lives, most Brits are spending money on home contents insurance and travel insurance rather than life cover. It seems it’s more important to make sure the annual holiday runs smoothly than to make sure dependents are taken care of if something happens to you.

And what about the house?

Well, there’s another surprise. Credit card protection insurance and central heating insurance are just as important as insuring mortgage payments. The figures tell the whole story. Some 74 per cent of people have home contents insurance, compared with 85 per cent last year, and 61 per cent insure their holidays (compared with 53 per cent last year).

The proportion of people with life insurance has fallen from 60 per cent last year to 53 per cent this year. Twenty-three per cent of people have mortgage payment insurance and 20 per cent insure their credit cards (down from 28 per cent last year). In addition, 15 per cent have insurance for their income, white goods and mobile phone, 14 per cent have critical illness cover and 10 per cent protect their loan repayments.

Should we be worried about these statistics?

Bright Gray certainly thinks so. More people are worried about protecting their possessions than the home they are in, and providing protection for dependents through life cover is also a relatively low priority. Even those without dependents should consider critical illness cover.

The insurer claims that people’s ‘financial savvy’ has ‘gone out the window when deciding what insurance to buy’.  It’s time to get some advice and rethink their priorities. Maybe then they’ll give more importance to protecting their lives than their holidays.