Apologies if this upsets or offends anyone as its not the nicest of topics to talk about! My father is 60 years old and has started Living with us.. He is on the pension so only gets a little income and we take care of everything else! He really wants me to help getv things in order such as his will (the only thing he owns is a car) and set up funeral & life insurance as he would like to make sure we aren't out of pocket for his funeral and he also wants to be able to leave us as much money possible (even though he doesn't have anything) hence the reason for wanting life insurance.. What should I be looking into? I've never done anything like this before.. He will be living with us for the rest of his life and although he his only 60 he is a very very heavy ciggerate smoker.. Any advice would be great xx
3 Replies
you can apply for life insurance only up until the age of 75 with most policies but you may find him being such a heavy smoker and his age they will deny him cover or the premiums may be prohibitive. You may be better to look in to a funeral cover policy which basically pay out an amount to cover the cost of the funeral. Does he still have any super left? That often has a small amount of life insurance attached to it. If he has not a lot of assets a simple Will from a will kit will suffice. Just make sure he puts in place Powers of Attorney both financial and medical (probably with you as to PoA) so that you can make decisions for him should he be unable to) It shouldn't be an upsetting topic, its so important to get your affairs in order and the earlier we all do it the better. Especially once children come on board. Good luck, i hope you get something sorted so your dad feels at peace with his position in life.
Look at prepaid funerals plans and compare to the cost of funeral insurance or the other option is saving the money, although I understand the insurance industry has cleaned up its act in the last few years. If he is likely to live a long time funeral insurance can be a rip off and some people find they've paid for a funeral multiple times over in premiums.
Being a smoker I think he will have awful trouble getting life insurance and if he has any medical conditions that will make it even harder.
If you are an only child and he has no assets other than the car you can get a will kit from the post office or news agency and that would suffice.
If your dad is getting frail the important thing to look into is power of attorney. Getting that signed before your dad gets sick/frail/mentally declines is very important in how smoothly things can get done and decisions can be made etc. also him adding you as a contact for Centrelink etc.
Any life insurance policy he manages to get underwritten for would charge him massive premiums. For both his age and smoker status. He won't be able to leave you with anything.
Regarding his funeral he'd be better off either paying into prepaid funeral plan or saving those funds himself. Forget funeral insurance. They're not worth the money.