Just been talking to my next door neighbour. He's self employed, works from home, no employees. He's convinced that his family history and lifestyle mean that he's likely to suffer some sort of critical illness in the next 25 years, (probably a heart attack) so he's just taken out critical illness insurance to go with the life cover he already has, but asked me what the alternatives were. Obviously he could invest the premiums instead, but if he has a heart attack next year, that won't amount to much. On the other hand, he doesn't want to pay the premiums for a number of years, then run the risk that his income drops and he can't afford the premiums any more. If he then gets a critical illness, he'll have effectively wasted all the premiums he has paid, and got nothing for it. It looks like the policy will be cancelled even if he just misses a direct debit on the premium payment
It looks like he's envisaging some kind of illness that obviously isn't fatal, but which might leave him able to continue work after a while (a heart attack is the example he gave), effectively treating the policy as a pension. Is there an alternative that provides better options if he does suffer a loss of income that doesn't mean his entire premium payment history would be worthless?
Brian