Critical Illness Cover

  Critical illness cover is a form of protection cover that is designed to pay you a lump sum of money should you suffer from one of a number of critical illnesses that are covered under the plan that you decide to take. There are many people who combine their life insurance with critical illness cover. However the two plans are designed to cover very different things. A life insurance plan is designed to pay you a lump sum of money should you be unfortunate enough to die within the policy term. You will also often find that a lot of life insurance plans also include something called terminal illness cover. Terminal illness cover simply means that should you be diagnosed with a terminal illness during the policy term then the policy would make the payment there and then before you die to help you sort your affairs out. This would need to be upon confirmation from a medical practitioner. You will often find that the term terminal illness cover is widely confused with critical illness cover and they have very different definitions.

The premise behind taking a critical illness cover plan is that it will provide money to help when a critical illness would normally make things more difficult. The lump sum that is paid out should aid with the extra costs that a critical illness may trigger. It is an important factor to take into consideration that it will not simply pay if you suffer from any critical illness and that it has to be one of the illnesses defined in the specific plan that you decided to take. The majority of the main illnesses that are covered in these type of plans are heart attack, cancer and stroke. These are where a lot of the main claims come from.

When deciding exactly how much critical illness cover you require it is important to take a number of things into consideration. You may want to think how much you would need to pay off your mortgage. Often your mortgage is the biggest commitment you have and if you were to suffer from a critical illness you are unlikely to be able to continue to pay for it. You may need to consider some form of modifications that may need to made to your home should you have a critical illness. The lump sum payment could help pay for this.

The actual plans that are available in the market are wide and varied and it is important that you do your research to ensure that you get the correct plan for you. The better plans that are available will cover you for about 40 different illnesses and they all have slightly different pros and cons going for them. It is always a good idea to speak to a critical illness cover expert to ensure that you are getting the correct plan that will suit your needs and circumstances.

The other main contributing factors that will effect the premium that you pay for your insurance are things such as: the length of time cover is needed for, how much cover you need, your smoker status, occupation, health, sex and age along with family history also having an effect.

You may decide that you want a critical illness cover plan with your partner this is an available option to you and can sometimes be more cost effective than taking single life plans. This sort of critical illness cover plan will often pay on a joint life first critical illness basis. You can in some circumstances also find some critical illness cover that will also provide cover for your children as part of the package. The children’s critical illness cover can be a very useful addition to a policy and can help you deal with what could be a very traumatic period of time. If you combine your life insurance with critical illness cover this can often be a cheaper alternative than taking out separate policies and can be a cost effective solution of getting adequate cover for your needs. It is also worth considering that if you take out critical illness cover only it more often than not will have a waiting period built into it. This waiting period can often be 14 days and this basically means the plan will not cover you if you were to suffer from one of the defined critical illnesses and then die within 14 days. If you were to have life insurance combined with your critical illness cover it would pay as the life insurance part of the plan would cover you.

You can with many of the critical illness cover plans place “add-on’s” to your cover. These are extras that will often cost you more per month but can make your plan a little more comprehensive. A popular “add-on” is total and permanent disability (tpd) and this basically means that should you become disabled permanently from injury or illness and be unable to work the plan would pay out. One of the other popular “add-on’s” is the option to buy back your life cover in the event of a claim on critical illness cover. Known as buy back it will allow you to cover yourself with some life insurance after a claim has been made. Simply offering a little more protection should the worse happen to you.