This is the continuation of a conversation with a reader who is having difficulty accumulating an emergency fund and who depleted her savings after her dual income household became a single income household.
Reader:
I just read on "How many 20 years and $29,000 do we have?"
I have the Prulink too and have been paying for 12 years now.
Apart from this I have an endowment plan to be paid for another 9 years before mature.
My husband and I plus 2 kids have whole life plans, personal accidental and hospitalisation plans.
AK:
You are (probably) paying too much for insurance.
Your children don't need life insurance. Life insurance are for people with dependents. Children don't have dependents.
I won't touch investment linked policies or ILPs (e.g. PruLink) even with a 5 feet pole. I don't mix investment and insurance.
My action plan if I were in your shoes:
1. You and your husband just need term life insurance (+Critical Illness cover). (You need life insurance until your children are no longer financially dependent on you.)
2. You do not need whole life insurance. Definitely, your children don't need life insurance (until they have dependents). It is a luxury.
3. ILPs are terribly expensive life insurance. (I would get rid of this.)
4. Keep the hospitalisation insurance (H&S). (This is essential.)
5. Accident insurance is not a must but they are pretty cheap. You can keep this if you like. (Otherwise, don't renew when it expires.)
6. Endowment plan, 9 more years. A form of forced savings. Just complete it. (A plain vanilla endowment is less problematic than an ILP.)
Before terminating any of your life insurance policies, get covered with term life insurance of equivalent level of protection first.
We should increase our income if we can but we must be sure that in the event our income suffers a dip or disappears, we are able to cope.
We want to be especially careful with any long term financial commitment that takes up a significant percentage of our regular income.
Making sure that these long term financial commitments are absolutely necessary will help to avoid weakening our financial health too much.
This family can bring down their expenses rather significantly and strengthen their balance sheet by not overpaying for insurance and to buy only what they need.
Related posts:
1. Critical illness insurance.
2. Disability insurance.
3. Term life insurance.