Smoking and life insurance
[social_share]For all those in need of that one final reason to give up smoking, you’ve come to the right place. Forget the patches and hypnotherapy; this article will do the trick … for at least 12 months.
Latest statistics show that approximately 1 in 5 Australian adults smoke at least twice weekly. Granted, this is a dramatic reduction from tobacco’s glory years of the 1940s, when more than 70% of Australian males smoked, but we think further improvement is possible; especially if smokers thought about their habit in the same way life insurers do.
Death by numbers
Life Insurance companies operate by figuring out the price of risk. They employ people who love numbers (actuaries) and have them calculate the likelihood that a certain event will occur. E.g:
- Falling off a piece of furniture is the 18th most common way to die. Approximately 2.4% of deaths occur this way
- You are almost 6000 times more likely to die in a bicycle accident than a terrorist attack
- Worldwide, about 3 times as many people are killed by elephants as by sharks
Once they have compiled all of these amazing statistics, Life Insurance companies figure out what they should charge their customers to provide financial protection should such an event occur.
Stop comparing yourself to others … unless they’re paying less for life insurance
By comparing life insurance premiums, therefore, you can effectively determine the likelihood that something will happen to you.
For example, based on one insurance product we looked at:
- A 40 year old man is 1.4 times more likely to die unexpectedly than a 40 year old woman
- A tradesperson is 1.5 times more likely to become permanently disabled than an office worker
- At almost any age, a smoker at least twice as likely to either die, become disabled or suffer a trauma condition than a non-smoker.
Translated back into dollar terms, smokers pay more than double non-smokers for comprehensive insurance cover.
But if you’re a smoker, there is good news.
Insurance companies class anyone who has not smoked (at all) for at least 12 months as a non-smoker. So all you need to do is quit (completely) for 12 months and you can apply to cut your insurance premiums in half.
An attainable goal
So if you’ve previously had difficulty trying to quit “forever”, only to find that forever seems too far away, we suggest you only try to quit for 12 months instead. After all, 12-months doesn’t seem that long for a 50% savings on your life insurance bill … not to mention the cost of the cigarettes themselves.
We’re here to help
We’re not going to pretend we can make it easier for you to quit smoking. But we can help you get the well-deserved financial bonus of lower insurance premiums. Give us a call today to discuss this and other great ways to save money on life insurance.
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