Alan Knowles is appointed as the new chairman for the Protection Distributors Group

CuraVision Alcohol Life Insurance – Video Transcript

Today I’m going to be talking about the role of alcohol when it comes to insurances, so life cover, critical illness cover, and income protection. Insurers are going to be particularly interested if you have ever been alcohol dependent, or excessively consumed alcohol. And what they will do is categorize that based upon the amount of units that you drink per week.

Now, they may ask you in units, they may ask you in regards to how many glasses of wine, or bottles of beer do you drink per week. And if your GP’s ever told you that you have alcoholism they will also have that, as a point of interest.

The main thing the insurer is going to want to know is when did this happen, so when was the month and year that your dependency on alcohol ended? And how long had you been dependent on it? They’re going to want to know the time since that’s happened, so the longer it’s been since you were dependent on alcohol, the better. The more policy that’ll be available to you, the more insurers that’ll be available, and the better pricing for these policies.

A big thing as well is whether or not you currently drink. So even if you have been dependent in the past, and are no longer dependent, but still continue to drink, that is something that the insurer is going to want to know about.

Now, the good news is that there’s always going to be something available, so not to worry, there will always be something available. But what’s available to you will very much depend upon your circumstances. So you may find that if you are still drinking, the premiums that are offered by an insurer on a standard market would be too high to consider, and it just wouldn’t be practical or affordable to set yourself to that every single month, for how many years you need the cover for.

The insurers will want to know if you’ve had any secondary conditions, so if you have any lasting implications with your liver, they will be interested in that. If you do have any liver function test results available, that will be very handy to have in the application, so the insurer knows quite early on as to what your general health is.

Now, the good news is as well is that you may find that if you are in that circumstance where the premiums are a lot higher than what you want, there are policies, and these are specialist policies out there, that you can apply for, that instead of increasing the premium, what they do is they exclude claims related to the alcohol. So in a sense it sort of reduces the claims set for the policy, and whilst that’s maybe not ideal, it may be an affordable solution for at least in the short term, until you are a longer time frame from having had alcohol, and then the standard policies that can include any cause of say death or critical illness, or claim in regards to not being able to work, become much more affordable.

So the point is that don’t worry, even if you’ve looked elsewhere and in the standard market they have turned around and said that they are a bit unsure as to whether they can cover you, or they’ve given you what we call terms that are just ridiculously out of your price packet. Don’t worry, there are specialist policies out there, and it’s just a matter of finding the right kind of policy, and tailoring it to suit you.