Insurance, Investments and Group Benefits

As a lawyer who formerly specialized in advising clients about estate planning, I’ve seen firsthand how important it is for Canadians to make a Will. Whether it’s to maximize the estate you leave behind for the next generation, or to make sure your wishes are carried out the way you planned, making a Will is vital. Despite this, over half of Canadians do not have a Will![i] That’s why I take the opportunity in November to mark Ontario’s “Make a Will Month” and to promote this crucial aspect of estate planning to advisors, friends and colleagues.

For the average consumer, getting the unbiased facts about life insurance in Canada can be challenging. When Money Sense magazine decided to put together a series of articles answering some of the key questions Canadians should consider when looking for life insurance, one of the first people they turned to was Empire Life’s own Peter Wouters, Director of Tax, Retirement and Estate Planning.

In our last post in December, we talked about the idea of using insurance to protect the things you care about and value the most. Your good health just might be the most important thing you possess, and as we’ve seen during the pandemic, a public health emergency can turn the world on its head in an instant. The same holds true for families and individuals when a health crisis hits. This month we want to focus on the need to protect against the financial impacts of a serious health issue, and that’s where critical illness insurance comes in.

When looking at insuring the things that are most important to you and your family: your home, your health and your life are a few of the most obvious examples. Most people have at least one of those insured. While it may not be as obvious, your ability to meet your loan and other credit obligations is probably one of the most valuable things you possess. Do you have that insured?

As we saw last time, avoiding life insurance ownership pitfalls takes a bit of maintenance work. With something that is built to last for years, decades or even a lifetime, the ability to adapt to the changes that come with life’s ups and downs is valuable. With life insurance, that means making sure you know what the options are and how to make them work for you. Let’s take a look at a couple of overlooked pitfalls to avoid.

Throughout Life Insurance Awareness Month in September we offered simple tips for first-time insurance buyers. Now we turn our attention to helping those with the foresight get life insurance to ensure you continue to enjoy the benefits that true peace of mind brings. Owning life insurance is not like owning a house or a car – you don’t have to watch it every day. However, it is often a decades-long investment and you should check under the hood every so often.

With that in mind, here a few common pitfalls you can avoid:

As Life Insurance Awareness Month 2020 draws to a close, we want to offer one last tip for the first time life insurance buyer and that is to choose an insurance company that you feel conformable with. Things you might want to consider are:

Now that you’ve crunched the numbers and learned the lingo, you need to think about which type of life insurance policy suits you best. There are two basic categories of life insurance: term insurance and permanent insurance (sometimes called “whole life”).

We’ve done the “why” and the “how” of owning life insurance, this week it’s time to look into the “what” as in “what are they talking about?”

Last week we went over the question” Why do I need life insurance?”. This week we’ll tackle the “how” – as in “how much life insurance you and your family need”. This is a fairly straightforward process but requires some legwork and university-level math skills (that’s a joke, BTW).