How health and lifestyle can affect your premiums
We aim to offer our lowest premium to the majority of customers.
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.
Factors when calculating the premium:
- Current age
- Gender
- 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. Demonstrating that you regularly exercise and have a healthy diet increases the chances of living a longer life, making you a less risky applicant. 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.
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