If you don’t have an adequate life cover, then the best time to buy a Term Insurance is Today and Now. Just go online and buy one. Don’t wait.
But if you want to be a bit smart about it, you can time the insurance buying & premium payment, so that you can pay lesser premium. The trick is to buy your term insurance before your birthday. But make sure you have enough time for the form filling, document submission, re-submission (yeah it happens), medical test, etc. I would suggest a month before your birthday would be ideal.
Term insurance premiums are calculated by your age and with each increase in the year, the premium cost goes up. So by taking a term insurance well before the birthday (instead of just after one) you are locking the premium for the entire term (30-35 years).
Also remember to time it on a month where you would have enough cash at hand. For example, March is a bad time to take term insurance. With all the last-minute taxes to be settled it is too much of a hassle, especially if you are salaried and this extra Rs.10000-12000 will make or break your month.
I would suggest to make all your tax savings or annual payments before the end of December and have the entire January-March period free. Saves you a lot of sleepless nights.
Also make sure you don’t have it during the April-June period as you might have to pay your kid’s education fees (even though “kids” might be in the future).
One can easily plan for such repeated expenses properly and don’t have to worry about borrowing money from banks/friends.
So if your birthday is coming up in the next few months, go ahead and buy that term insurance now. If your birthday was just over and you still don’t have term insurance, well, go ahead and buy that term insurance now.
Yes. LIC’s term insurance is the costliest you can get from the market. Most of it I think is because of the old practices of agent fees.
If you ask the LIC agent “why is term insurance costly” they would give crappy answers like “settlement ratio is the highest”. The settlement ratio published by IRDA is for all of their insurance products (ULIPS, traditional, term, etc). No one publishes the settlement ratio of just term insurance.
Even if you want to believe the settlement ratio reasoning, I find that HDFC, ICICI, SBI are all having almost similar rating (though a tad bit less than LIC).
You can choose any of these and go online to their website and fill up the proposal form and pay immediately. I myself have an HDFC click2protect online plan and found the form filling procedure easy. There is a live chat if you have any doubts too.
Whichever company you choose, IRDA’s rules ensure that they are not fly-by-night operators. You can get your term plan for whichever company which gives the lowest rates (but double check your form before submitting). Any single point you missed relating to health or your history gives them a right to reject a claim.
Another site you can use to compare plans is https://www.coverfox.com/
I heard LIC term insurance and its related are very costly and hence planning to get it with HDFC. just wanted to confirm if it is good and really fine to go with it ?