ComingSoon wrote:
In the quoted part above it sounds as though you are looking for a combination investment and life insurance product. Perhaps I misunderstood?
With few exceptions, most people are much better served by splitting their life cover and investments into separate vehicles. You can get low cost term life from a life company and invest separately using a securities firm (or your bank) to purchase low cost index ETFs. This will work out much better for you than ANY life product that an agent will recommend (Agent seldom recommend term life as the commissions are low).
Good luck!
First off, thanks everyone including those who have PM'd me for the advice and referrals. I particularly appreciate the referral to the online marketplace for cheap insurance products.
In answer to your question, I agree 100%. My primary, long-term investments are via ETFs. These are steps I took after poor experiences with financial advisors a number of years ago. After these experiences I came to the conclusion I was going to have to do it myself and spent some time educating myself.
As you've pointed out, we are looking at 2 things primarily. The first is standard life cover to ensure our kids are looked after if one of us suffers an accident. We've had this via employers in the past, but now with 2 small children we feel it would be wise to have substantially more to cover them in case of a serious issue.
The second is an insurance 'savings vehicle'; this isn't meant to be our primary investment vehicle, we are just looking at balancing our investments over a number of different asset classes with a number of different risk thresholds. Part of this may include a small monthly investment in an insurance policy with a defined payout. We recognize these can be poor choices for retirement planning due to fees and the hidden costs that come in terms of guarantees in principle and lost returns used to pay these out. But they can be useful for other things like tuition planning for our children when they head to university, or other expected 'major life expenses / purchases'.
We don't have any real interest in purchasing a pension product at the moment, but given in the past we haven't had any insurance products other then the standard cover offered by employers we are looking to thoroughly understand everything an insurance company has on offer. We are keen to further our own knowledge and evaluate them against our desire to have a balanced portfolio.