How your health and lifestyle can affect your life insurance premiums

Here are some of the things we consider when you get a Life Insurance quote

• Current age
• Height and weight
• Family health history
• Amount of cover and length of term
• Occupation (high risk occupations such as being in the army or being a commercial diver 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)
• Smoking and drinking habits
• History of drug use
• Overseas travel
• 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.

• We aim to offer the majority of our customers our lowest premium rate.
• Getting healthy and taking steps to control or improve your health could help to keep the cost of life insurance down.
• Demonstrating that your health conditions are well managed, 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.