How can a financial adviser help me with insurance?

So what do we do with our members? Looking down the list I can see some names that we've certainly helped with insurance. But you know, working out what the right cover is, which is a function of your health, your occupation, what you qualify for, what you have in your super fund. Sometimes your employer might pay for something. You often see people whose employer provides two years of income protection, which is great while you've got it. But you know, and sometimes we can find a policy that has a two year waiting period within cover to age 65. So you have your employer one, which is usually paid for by the employer for two years. And then when that two years expires, the retail policy kicks in. That's one way of structuring. The other way is to realise, well, actually, if I'm not going to be at this employer for a long time, then maybe I need to look after myself as well, because I might not be able to get the insurance when I change jobs. And do I really want an adverse change in my health to create a bit of a golden handcuff to my job? So putting the cover, working out how much, putting the cover together and working out the right insurer to do that. Tailoring it to your budget. As I said, you would typically expect to pay two to five percent of your income. But, you know, sometimes money's tight and you need to think about, because all spending decisions, everything you say yes to, you're saying no to something else. So is this the right use of your money? And, you know, tweaking cover here and there can make a big difference. So working out if you've got a budget of X dollars, how should I allocate that among these covers to get the right policy? Helping you through the underwriting process. So when you apply for this insurance, the insurance company is going to look at your medical record. So they will generally do a telephone interview. Many of the people who do that are ex-nurses. And so they have some medical training and they will ask you a series of questions which will highlight things that might need further investigation. If further investigation is required, they will probably write to your doctor and get your doctor to answer some questions. Doctors can be really slack about doing this. So sometimes it's worth badgering your doctor, particularly if you've got a doctor you've been seeing for a long time. The insurance company pays them to do this but they seem to be reluctant to do paperwork sometimes. If I was a doctor, I'd be doing lots of insurance medical requests because it's good money. And then if for really large policies, they might also look to get some blood tests done. And usually they'd send a nurse out to your home or office to do that. That's all at the insurance company's cost. Then based on all of that, they will come with an offer of terms. In many cases, that will be at standard terms. If something comes out of that underwriting, there's a few options that can happen. One, they can include an exclusion. We see this a lot for mental health issues. We'll cover you at standard rates but we won't cover mental health issues. We've seen that a bit more often with younger people. The other thing that can happen is they can apply a loading which says we'll cover you for everything but we'll charge you an extra 25% or 50%. Many of these decisions can be reviewed in the future. Particularly with mental health, we often see that where people get postnatal depression or they seek treatment following a divorce or death of a parent. Those episodic ones can usually be reviewed very quickly. A bit trickier for ongoing medication. That's a big one. And then of course they can also refuse cover. Generally, what we'll do is based on the questions that we ask you, we'll often pre-assess with an insurance company because they all have slightly different views. Particularly around recreational drug use. Some companies are much stricter than others on that. We usually pre-assess to get a view as to which insurance company might be the better answer for you. If it looks like we'll get a decline, we'll usually withdraw the application rather than have a decline on your file. If you've got a decline, you'll need to disclose it to a future insurer. Whereas if we withdraw the application before they issue the decline. We'll chat to the underwriter and if they're saying, we're looking at an exclusion here or we're looking at a decline, use that to withdraw the application. So the underwriting process can be long and involved and working out whether an exclusion or a loading is problematic or not. And then of course, as we said earlier, reviewing that cover every year or when your circumstances change. And most importantly, helping you through the claims process. I've seen far too many cases of, and it usually is women, so I'm not being sexist here, but I've seen so many people go from thriving soccer mom to full-time carer to grieving widow and single mom. And they're usually not in a position to deal with the paperwork with the insurance company. So having your advisor there to deal with that process and get the reports from the doctors and ease that burden is really, really valuable. So that's what your advisor gets. Your advisor will generally receive a commission from an insurance company and where that commission exceeds a threshold, we'll rebate it to our members. But that's one of the things that came out of the Royal Commission was those commissions were standardized. So every insurance company pays exactly the same rates. So you're not going to get steered to one, whether it's with us or anyone else, you're not going to get steered towards one insurance company because they pay more commission. That doesn't happen anymore. But actually price is important.