How Health and Lifestyle can affect your life insurance premiums

We aim to offer our lowest premium to the majority of customers.
Getting healthy and taking steps to control or improve your health could help reduce the cost of taking out life insurance.
Demonstrating that you regularly exercise and have a healthy diet increases the chances of living a longer life, making you a less risky applicant.

To determine whether you qualify we’ll ask you a number of medical and lifestyle questions during the application process.

Like other life insurance companies, we determine through underwriting whether to accept an applicant and how much to charge for the insurance protection. Each company's underwriting rules are likely to differ, but the basic concepts are the same.

We’ll look closely at your present and past health, but we’ll also take into account a number of other factors when calculating the premium:

What we consider when calculating the premium

Current age
Height and weight
Family health history
Purpose of insurance
Marital status
Amount of cover and length of term
Occupation (high risk occupations such as being in the armed forces or being a commercial driver may incur higher premiums)
Driving record (a person's driving record not only affects his/her car insurance rates but could also affect their life insurance premiums)
Income
History of smoking (whether you have ever smoked)
Dangerous hobbies or activities (sports such as parachuting, scuba diving and motor sports) will affect your policy. If you’re thinking of undertaking such activities on a one off basis you may want to get extra cover on your travel insurance.

Getting healthy and taking steps to control or improve your health could help reduce the cost of taking out life insurance.

Heart disease and high blood pressure, for example, are commonly linked to obesity and smoking. If you give up smoking for at least 12 months prior to taking out life insurance, this could also dramatically reduce the cost of your life insurance.