Life & Critical Illness
Life and critical illness cover answer two halves of the same question: if the income stops, what happens to the people who depend on it. Life cover pays them after you are gone. Critical illness cover pays you while you are still here.
We place the structure rather than a promise about a number. What is worth arguing over is where the sum insured comes from (debts, dependants, and how long a household could hold out), how strictly the wording defines what it pays for, and what the premium does over the next thirty years.
Cover
What this typically covers
Life cover
The money your family gets when you are gone. What it is for is unglamorous and specific: clear the bond, finish the schooling, and spare the people left behind from making large financial decisions in the worst year of their lives.
A lump sum payable on death, structured against liabilities, dependants' needs, and estate liquidity.
Critical illness
It pays when you are diagnosed, not when you can no longer work. That one difference is what separates it from disability cover, and it is the thing most people have wrong.
A lump sum on diagnosis of a defined condition at a defined severity, paid on diagnosis rather than on incapacity.
Severity tiers
How much you get depends on how ill you are. An early diagnosis may pay a fraction rather than the whole amount. That is not the insurer being clever, it is the table in the wording, and it is worth reading on the day you buy.
Graded benefits paying a proportion of the sum insured according to the severity of the diagnosis.
What the money is for
Nobody tells you how to spend it. It can settle the bond, pay for treatment, or buy a year away from work. The sum insured should be worked backwards from those, not rounded to a figure that sounds about right.
Debt settlement, dependants' income, estate liquidity, and the earnings gap during treatment.
Underwriting and disclosure
The questions asked at application are the foundation of the contract. Answer them loosely and they get read back to you line by line at claim stage, which is where most declined long-term claims begin.
Health questions, medical evidence, and disclosure of history at application, which together form the basis of the contract.
How the premium behaves
A premium can start higher and stay put, or start cheap and climb every year. Twenty years out those two lines are a long way apart, and the choice usually gets made in a hurry on the day of the application.
Level, age-rated and escalating patterns, and what each does to the cost over the life of the policy.
Limits
What this will not cover
Suicide in the opening period
Most long-term wordings do not cover death by suicide within a stated initial period. It is worth knowing how long that period runs, and whether replacing or reinstating a policy starts it again.
A diagnosis that does not meet the definition
Critical illness pays against the severity the wording describes. The same illness early and late can be two different things inside the policy, and that is not something to discover at claim stage.
What you did not mention at the start
Medical history, smoking, occupation, dangerous hobbies. Non-disclosure surfaces at claim, and the consequence is usually not a reduced payment but no payment.
Waiting periods and pre-existing conditions
Some benefits do not start on day one, and an existing condition may be loaded, excluded, or deferred. All of it is on your schedule rather than in the brochure.
Claim
When you claim
Critical illness, you claim yourself
You claim on diagnosis, while you are alive and often while you are still being treated. It does not wait for you to stop working, and it does not ask what you intend to spend it on.
The specialist's report against the definition
A critical illness claim turns on whether the diagnosis meets the severity the wording sets out. Send us the full report rather than a summary, because whether the definition is met sits in the detail.
Life cover, somebody else claims
A family member claims, with the policy number, the death certificate and the notice of death. Where a beneficiary is nominated the benefit goes to them directly rather than waiting on the estate.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
They answer different events. Life cover looks after other people once you are gone; critical illness looks after you and the household's cash flow while you are still here and seriously ill. Most people need both, and which comes first depends on who relies on your income and how long the household could hold out without it.
Then it does not pay, which is why the definitions are worth reading before you buy rather than after. Critical illness cover responds to listed conditions at listed severities, and the length of that list and the strictness of those definitions is most of what separates one product's price from another's.
It depends which pattern you choose. A level premium starts higher and stays roughly flat; an age-rated premium starts cheaper and climbs every year, steepest in the years you would least want to cancel. Choose on how long you intend to hold the cover, not on the first year's price.
It is a good start, and it belongs to the job. Leave, get retrenched, or watch the company change insurer and it can disappear, at which point you are older and possibly no longer as insurable. A policy in your own name does not resign when you do.