TV Life insurance

It seems every day there are more TV ads advertising life insurance, and every month a new life insurance company! Now Australians as a whole are under insured so I guess there is nothing wrong with encouraging us to think a bit harder about insurance.

The main problem I have with this is Life insurance is just one type of insurance, certainly an important one where kids, houses and mortgages are involved but in some cases there are other insurances that are as important if not more important than life insurance. Almost exclusively all of the TV ads are pushing life insurance only and many of the companies involved don't even offer any of the other personal insurances.

The problem I have is where is the duty of care to consumers? As advisers we are expected to put our clients interests ahead of our own and yet the same expectation does not apply to large corporates? Now maybe I am naive but I think there are very few advisers out there that would recommend life insurance only without at least discussing if not recommending other personal insurances such as TPD, Trauma or Income protection!

Last night i even saw an ad basically recommending everyone should have a life insurance policy in the value of 10 X their income, yes this is a good benchmark and for many people a policy of 10 X their income may be appropriate but again where is the duty of care, what about people with very large debts, no debts or even no income? At times my wife has not brought in an income but we have a mortgage and two young kids, if she was to die I would be severely disadvantaged.

Everyone is different and deserves proper financial advice and in an era where the standard of financial advice and ethics as a whole are improving it is interesting to see that this is one clear area where the quality of "advice" (if you can call a TV ad advice!) seems to be declining.

Do yourself a favour and get some financial advice