Insurance clarity

I ought to make it clear about the Insurance. It is something I took out myself against getting a critical illness and not something attached to the NHS or anything like that. It was a conscious decision to cover the family should anything happen to me. The facts are these days, as I suppose I have just proved, that you are more likely to survive a critical illness than in the past and that an ordinary life insurance wouldn't do anyone any good if I survived.

So the way we set this up was to have individual Critical Illness covers (husband and wife) and also life insurances first death paid out the other. This covers all that stuff. We haven't had medical insurance since I worked as an employee back in the early 90s. I was just about to get Medical Insurance when I was diagnosed - how ironic is that :-) However, I probably wouldn't have got seen or operated on so quick anyway.

So - Having said all that - it means that the house can be paid off and that I can go and do this new riskier venture (if I don't do it now and take a risk - then what I've learnt about myself in the past 9 months would be betrayed) and more than that - it is going to help get family life stable again. By that I mean, the knock you take as an individual is bigger than you think. Your confidence and your self belief are rock bottom, you don't feel good about yourself or your body, you know there is something wrong with you, you can't see it and it can kill you. Disturbing. Now imagine what it does to your family - whether they can take in the enormity of it or not?

The family gets whacked sideways as well and whilst money isn't the answer it will enable me to do a few things like have a really good family holiday - it may be one of the last together as the oldest is 17 now anyway. It means that I don't need to worry that I lost my job and I don't need to worry about paying the bills if I did lose my job. It means that we can have a party (my 50th coming soon) and not to worry about the little add-ons that will make it memorable. It's a security blanket because it isn't over yet but from now on, no one needs to worry about the expense of being ill, getting treated and wondering where the next penny is going to come from.

When I said it was a weight off my mind - perhaps you can see that it steadies the ship, it removes uncertainty and it allows us to remove pressures of the mortgage - once that is gone, the house is ours. It means that I don't need that mundane "steady" job I can go for the excitement and risk of this new one. If that falls apart, I can say I gave it my best shot and then return to what I am doing now and it would allow me to setup a business that I would want to run not the one I run at the moment if that happened as well if I wanted.

University beckons for the oldest - that is no longer a worry financially.

Anyway - you get the picture - it isn't Rockefeller money nor is it enough that I don't have to work and it certainly wouldn't work as a Pension but it just eases everything.

Whilst I never really wanted the thing to have paid out at all - I am glad that we went down the route of taking it out.