Whole of Life Insurance is often taken out for family protection purposes to provide a lump sum to your dependants in the event of your death.

Whole of Life Insurance provides life cover as the title describes-potentially for the whole of your life i.e whenever you die the policy will pay out as long as you maintain the premiums. This is different to Level Term Assurance which usually only pays out if you were to die during the term of the policy. Hence the cost of Whole of Life Insurance is usually greater than that of Level Term Assurance.

The premiums for a whole life insurance policy are normally invested in a fund and the cost of providing the cover is taken out of the fund. The policy is often reviewable after 10 years to assess if there is sufficient monies in the fund to continue to provide the level of cover required. There are a number of options available at this time i.e.do you need to increase the level of premiums if there is insufficient monies left in the fund to maintain the same level of life cover. The whole life insurance policy is then reviewable again in say 5 or 10 years time when the same assessment is made and the level of cover is agreed for a further period. Should you decide that there is no longer any need for the whole of life cover you can cancel the policy and you may receive a lump sum representing the surrender value of the policy.

Whole of Life Insurance policies often have other options such as the ability for the level of life cover and/or the premiums to increase automatically each year. There is often an option to include Critical Illness cover in the policy so that the policy would pay out either upon earlier diagnosis of a specific critical illness i.e. heart attack, cancer, stroke, kidney failure or upon death which ever happens first.

As can be seen whole of life insurance is a flexible policy with many options so, as stated earlier, you should seek sound advice from a suitably authorised financial adviser as to whether a whole life insurance policy is suitable to meet your requirements