Most life insurance adverts play on your guilt. You know… they’re about leaving your family in dire straits if you die. Or else thay’re about happy families running along beaches…
Well… this is a life insurance advert with a twist…!
Whilst highly improbable, this is one of the funniest life insurance adverts I’ve seen in a long time.
Click here and see it on YouTube
AIG last week released the results of a survey of 380 people which canvassed views on a range of personal financial issues, including life insurance.
Some interesting points to ponder…
· 48% of Kiwis have life insurance – compared with 80% of Australians (taken from a similar survey carried out in 2005), 67% of Singaporeans and 53% of Hong Kong residents.
· Two primary reasons were given by respondents for not purchasing cover: 1) a lack of funds and 2) the belief that insurance is not worth the cost.
· Of those respondents that said they were uninsured, 71% said they would use their savings if the need arose and the rest would rely on family support or equity in their property while 50% of these respondents said they could not survive more than 6 months without their usual income.
One of the conclusions reportedly drawn by AIG was that “the resistance to insurance take-up stems largely from the incorrect assumption that personal insurance is expensive”.
I’d like to add another. Life insurance has traditionally not been an easy product to buy. Of course that’s all changed now with instant online insurance arriving in NZ during 2007.
Why do you think only 48% of Kiwis have life insurance? Really interested to hear your views…
The reason we have life insurance is because we don’t exactly know when (or how) we will die. It could be tomorrow or it could be in 50 years time. It may be an accident or it may be through illness. We don’t know. And so we buy life insurance… just in case… to provide a lump sum of money to those that depend on us being around.
So wouldn’t it be helpful if you knew when you were likely to die?
Now you can play the ‘longevity game’.
Answer a few questions and viola… it calculates how long you’re likely to live for.
So… how accurate is it?
Not sure, but I sure had a lot of fun with it.
How about this life insurance story?
LOS ANGELES, California
Two elderly women dubbed “the Black Widows” are accused of killing two transient men with a car in order to collect on their life insurance to the tune of almost US$2.8 million.
The prosecutor said the women befriended the two homeless men and took out life insurance policies on their lives, then drugged them and ran them over to make it look as if they had been killed in hit-and-run accidents. Olga Rutterschmidt, 75 and Helen Golay, 77, each pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and two counts of conspiracy to commit murder for financial gain in the deaths of 73-year-old Paul Vados in 1999 and 51-year-old Kenneth McDavid in 2005.
The prosecutor told the jury the women found the men in a homeless shelter at a Hollywood church, set them up in apartments and supported them for two years, all the while taking out multiple insurance policies on their lives valued at US$5.7million, costing them $64,000 in life insurance premiums.
Each man was kept by the women for two years, the length of time that would make their insurance policies uncontestable. Then after killing them, they went to the coroner’s office, claimed the body as a relative and had it cremated.
The women ultimately profited off the deaths with $2.8million and were still trying to collect the remaining $2.9million when they were arrested.
NZ Money Talk is an online financial chat forum with a growing New Zealand readership that is really worth a look. The site has been going for over 6 months now so there is plenty to read.
You can chat or read the discussion posts in the following forums:
· Mortgages
· Credit Cards and Loans
· Pensions and Retirement Planning
· Savings and Investments
· Tax Talk
· Insurance & Life Assurance
· Other Money Matters
· Student Loans / Finance for young people
There are some good questions posed and answers provided by other consumers as well as industry experts.
Pinnacle Life is proud to be associated with this forum. Readers purchasing a Pinnacle Life policy online through the NZ Money Talk website will automatically get $10,000 free accidental death cover.
Australian consumers can now buy up to $1,000,000 life insurance cover online, in less than 10 minutes.
SYDNEY 7 March 2007
Congratulations to Australian group, Once Australia, who today extended its on-line product range by launching ‘instant life insurance’.
The new website, launched through its subsidiary Once Life Pty Limited (https://www.oncelife.com.au) is Australia’s first website to offer instant life cover backed up by electronic underwriting, utilising the same Intelligent Life technology as Pinnacle Life which launched a similar product last year in New Zealand.
The insurance product is straightforward and easy to understand, underwritten by St Andrews and reinsured by Hannover Re, the largest reinsurer of life insurance in Australasia.
HOW IT WORKS
The entire process from application to policy approval is fully electronic with consumers receiving their policies online, instantly.
Visitors to the simple immediate-fulfilment site are greeted by an intuitive interface, which leads them through a series of typical insurance questions regarding age, health and occupation. The process takes less than ten minutes, by the end of which full and immediate cover up to $1,000,000 is granted without the need for a medical examination, unless certain specific conditions are highlighted. You even get to see a draft of your customised policy document before you decide to buy.
