Personal insurance is the work of making sure that if something serious happens to you, the financial side of your household keeps working. The cover types and the cover amounts get most of the attention. The decisions that determine whether the cover actually does its job are structural, and they get less.
If you do not have cover yet, we will design what fits your situation. If you already have it, we will tell you what we would change about the structure you have, and what we would leave alone.
Where insurance fails
Personal insurance fails at the moment of claim. The decisions that cause the failure were made years before, at setup.
For most clients, nothing happens for years. Premiums are paid. The policy sits filed. Then the event happens, and the policy is read carefully for the first time. The decisions made at setup decide what happens next.
The illness is diagnosed. Or the accident happens. Or, at a routine check, something is found that was not there before. The policy is opened, often by a partner or family member, often under conditions where reading anything carefully is the last thing anyone wants to do.
The relevant definitions are extracted and matched against the medical record, the employment status, or the capacity to perform daily activities. The ownership structure determines who receives the payment, and how it is taxed. The definition determines whether the cover triggers at all. The premium structure determines whether the cover was still in place by then.
None of these were decided at the moment of claim. They were decided at setup, sometimes a decade before, and have sat unexamined ever since. That is what the work on this page is mostly about.
The structural decisions
Six decisions, only some of which are about cover amount.
Click any decision to see the trade-off being made and the failure mode we most often see at claim time. The decisions appropriate to your situation are determined through advice; the structural shape of each decision is the same regardless.
General educational content only. Not personal financial advice. The structural decisions appropriate to your situation are determined through advice and depend on your circumstances, the cover types involved, and the providers under consideration. Definitions, premium structures and tax treatments referenced here change over time and across providers.
Insurance is one of the few products where the right answer at age forty is rarely the right answer at age fifty. The annual review is most of the work.
Get in touch
Bring us your cover. We will tell you what would actually pay.
If you already have personal insurance in place, the introductory conversation includes a candid review of the cover types you hold, the ownership structure, the definitions, the premium structure, and the provider. We will tell you what we would change, why we would change it, and what we would leave alone. If you do not have cover yet, we will tell you what would fit your circumstances and how we would put it in place.
