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Thursday, August 02, 2007

Parents should get life insurance to protect dependents

What does the word parent mean? It means having a child or children. And when they are young, they are totally dependent upon the parent to provide the food for them, to provide a roof over their head, to clothe them, to provide for their needs like incidental necessities - tooth brush, tooth paste, towels, soap, etc. To provide the school or college fees.

Parents are human. That means they cannot be 100% sure they will always be around while the child or children are dependent on them. It is their responsibility to continue to provide for their child or children's needs if, to put it crudely, they die. And this is what life insurance is all about. To have a sum of money to enable the family to continue, preferably with the same standard of living, when they are gone as when they were still around.

There are many types of insurance of which the cheapest and purest form is term life insurance. It is like car or fire insurance. You pay premium for a defined period of time. If anything happened to you, a sum of money called sum insured is paid to the beneficiaries. If at the end of that defined period, nothing happen, you get nothing back. My opinion is in a period of high inflation, term life insurance, is the most logical type of insurance one should get.

For a young family, the house they stay in is most likely to have been bought with the help of a housing loan. The distinctive feature of a housing loan is that as you make the monthly repayments, the amount owed is reduced. Now there is a special type of insurance called mortgage insurance where the sum insured is reduced in tandem with the reduced loan outstanding. This is even cheaper than term life insurance and ensure that your dependent will continue to have a roof over their head if (sorry) you die.

Now not every parents are well to do. Some have to struggle to make ends meet. If you are in such circumstances, you should look for affordable insurance quotes for families.

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