Monday, April 20, 2015

CompareFIRST - Insurance Comparison

The first thing I was looking for was the cost for Critical Illness but I could not find it.

There were Whole Life, Term Life, Endowment, Investment-Linked Policies (ILPs), and a new category called Direct Purchase insurance products, which is quite similar to buying insurance online directly from the insurer.

Pros
You can see at one glance which Term Life is the cheapest.

You can see at one glance which endowment has the highest guaranteed payout for the premiums paid.

This is probably the most straight-forward case.

Cons
It is not so clear when one selects "Yes" to Critical Illness cover. In the search results, I got some with mortgage insurance, some with accident and terminal illness, one says there is a choice of 4 plans (how can there be a choice if there is only 1 price listed?), one as Total and Permanent Disability (TPD) and premium waiver benefit. I did not have the patience to scroll and read all the search results.

It is also difficult to compare the distribution costs across different products.

Overall, it is a good attempt. I would prefer they put in some recommended insurance based on typical average Joe scenarios for people to have a rough gauge of how much insurance one ought to buy.

2 comments:

  1. That would be advisory services already.
    The hardware store will not provide a handyman to recommend you what to buy and teach you how to fix without charging you for the handyman.
    The concrete company will not provide you an architect and engineers along with workers foc together with the concrete.


    you can choose fee based or commission based.
    then compare online.

    Providend has been advertising their diyinsurance.com on several finance blogs recently. Though I have major doubts on what I see them doing, you can try it out and let us know the difference from an unbiased point of view.

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  2. diy insurance seems to be more informative (more explanations on the different types of insurances and life stages applicability), but they are still commission-based. after thinking about the critical illness (CI) coverage for a few months (my agent "recommended" me to "reconsider" my termination of the CI coverage) i still think the best insurance against CI is eating and living healthy. for the hundreds of dollars i pay for CI coverage, i probably would be better of spending the money on my body.

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