Ok, this is veering way off my usual topic but I feel it needs to be said. If you have kids, and especially if you have children with special educational needs YOU NEED TO HAVE LOTS OF LIFE COVER IN PLACE.

In the interests of transparency, once upon a time I was a Life and Pensions consultant but I left that industry a number of years ago to start Hummingbird Learning Centre.  I am no longer a broker, nor am I affiliated with any. Thankfully, only once in my career did I have to meet the surviving spouse of a person who died and give them the life cover sum that they had taken out.  Believe me, once was enough. I will never forget what he said to me. He said, “We have loads of cover on me, but we only did what we had to do for the loans on her. While it’s great that the loans are gone, we still have every other bill to pay and now we need to pay for childcare but only one salary. It would have been peanuts to have taken out more cover on my wife but we didn’t ever think this could happen to us.’

What struck me the most was that during the whole time that he was with me, never once did he say ‘I’, everything was still ‘we’. Now I know it reads just like an advert, but it’s what happened.

Life cover has never been cheaper than it is right now. Think about it, if you were gone wouldn’t you want your children’s future to be as financially secure as possible. They will be going through enough and your partner will be going through enough, without the added worry of finances.

I know I sound a bit preachy but with good cause. I am at an age now where I seem to be going to more and more funerals and unfortunately some of them are of young parents. I was reminded recently of the need for life cover. I could bore you with the statistics but numbers just hide the reality of the people left behind.

So this week I’m asking you to take a trip to your financial advisor and have a full financial review and if you need more cover, put it in place.

I pray that you will never need to draw on it and that it will have been a complete waste of money but if the opposite happens I hope you, or the people you leave behind, will be glad that you read this and acted upon it.

E