Life insurance not popular amongst young people

Friday, May 7, 2010

A new report released last week has found that perhaps unsurprisingly the number of young people in the UK that are buying life cover or any other type of financial protection is alarmingly low.

LifeSearch revealed figures gathered for February 2010 show that only 3.5% of their protection policies sold during the period were bought by under 25’s validating the trend that seems to have been forming over the past year.

Such policies as critical illness, income protection and life insurance are inevitably much cheaper for younger people due to age and likelihood of being healthy yet they are still not buying the protection products on offer.

However, the results did show that when the under 25’s did decide to purchase protection critical illness and income protection cover were the most popular with 6.1% of these policies being sold to people in that age group.

In contrast to this just 2.4% of people in this group purchase life cover and 3% opt for family income benefits.

Policy adviser at LifeSearch, Matt Morris stated that: "The industry continues to fail to reach young people with the message of how important protection is for their financial stability. Often they either buy no financial protection at all or rely on the Internet to get the best deal. That might work with car insurance, but not with financial protection."

It is true that the industry does indeed fail to reach young people but with many under 25’s not in full employment due to education it is thought that life insurance would be very low on their list of priorities due to their often low income and lack of knowledge on the subject of insurance.