life assurance glossary

Life Cover
With Life Cover you can simply protect those who depend on you against your death. Critical Illness Cover
You can be covered if you're diagnosed with a serious illness like a heart condition or cancer, and your income is affected. This is called Critical Illness Cover.

Permanent Health Insurance
You can protect against losing your income through disability, no matter how it's caused with Permanent Health Insurance.

Level basis
Fixed premiums for a fixed number of years and a full payout on a claim at any point. Almost always the right choice for family protection and "interest-only" mortgages.

Increasing basis
Costs more, but cover goes up every year without any medical (and so does the premium). This caters for the fact that people need more cover as their income rises.

Decreasing basis
A cheap option in which the payout reduces over the length of the cover period. This occurs in line with a repayment mortgage.

Renewable basis
This is a short-term policy. This makes it cheaper initially, but more expensive long term. Importantly, it can be renewed without medical evidence

Term in years
This is how long you require the policy to last.

Benefit amount
This is the amount that will be paid out by the policy.