Your Family’s Future is in your hands!
I remember the day that I turned 18, like it was yesterday, even though it was 30 years ago. I was really hoping my parents would buy me a car for my birthday and could not wait to get home from school that day. But when I got home there was no car; rather I returned home to a strange man sitting at the kitchen table with my father. “Come and sit down,” my dad said. “You are 18 now and we need to get you a life insurance policy”. Imagine my disappointment in hoping for a car and receiving an insurance policy! It was a policy for R100 000 life cover, with a premium of R96pm. Why do I need this? I am invincible! I would never die, surely, I would live forever… I never paid a cent for that policy because I never saw the need for it. It was important to my dad, so he paid it. When I got married, I never took out any additional cover and 5 years into my marriage, in 2007, I joined Liberty Life and learned with a great shock the value of having sufficient cover in place.
Just a couple of months into my new career with Liberty Life I had my first death claim. It was for a friend of mine that passed away in a motor vehicle accident. He had a life insurance policy of R800 000, and only paid 3 premiums before he passed away. He was unmarried, with no dependents, but he saw the value of having life insurance. His mother was the beneficiary and I made contact with her in order to start the claims process. She came to my office, and I showed her the policy and she burst into tears. I tried to console her, thinking that she was crying out of grief, but she said “No, you understand…”
She then told me that they had a farm in the Badplaas area, but when her husband died, he had no life insurance and left them without any financial security. The farm was all they had, and it was about to be repossessed by the bank because she fell behind on the bond payments, and the drought happening at the time didn’t help either her cash flow situation. She never told her son about it, she thought that she would be able to make a plan on her own. I asked her how much she still owned on the farm, and she said R800 000. The exact amount of the policy pay-out. That was the day I truly realized for the first time the power of life insurance, and how it can help your financial dependents, or leave them destitute if none.
Today, with the Covid pandemic and our friends and loved ones passing away all around us, I think about how foolish I was so many years ago, risking my family’s financial wellbeing. One day all of us will die, but how your loved ones carry on living, is in your hands.
Make the right decision and contact your IWCP Financial Advisor today!
Author:
Walle Van Hoving – Unit leader at IWCP Mpumalanga and proud IWCP financial advisor.
