Before making any decisions pertaining to insurance and get life insurance quotes or income protection insurance quote, or others, it is always a good idea to evaluate the level of coverage you already have.  This sort of evaluation normally reveals a number of things.  In some cases, it reveals that one is actually over-insured.  This happens when the results of the evaluation show that one has too much insurance cover.  At other times, the evaluation reveals that one actually has too little insurance.  This happens when the results of the insurance show that the level of coverage one has is too low, given one’s real insurance needs.

A good number of Australians have some level of insurance coverage by virtue of being members of super funds.  This may come across as news to many people.  But the law is such that the people who manage the super funds are required to provide some level of insurance coverage (automatically) to the members of their funds.  So if you happen to be a member of one such fund, your evaluation of insurance coverage can start there: by figuring out how much insurance coverage you have automatically by virtue of you being a member of such a fund.

Insurance Salesmen by Mike Davis, on Flickr.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

What most super fund trustees do, in order to comply with the law, is to provide the minimum allowable level of insurance coverage to their members.  The upshot is that the members who rely entirely on the super funds for insurance coverage end up with too little coverage for their needs.  But there are adjustments that can be made to top that up, and bring it to a level that would cater adequately for the members’ needs.  Such adjustments can only be made by the members themselves, after coming to appreciate the need for adequate insurance coverage.

Often, situations arise where people have membership in several super funds, and where they have different insurance covers by virtue of being members in the different super funds.  The individual insurance covers are too little, but combined, they are adequate.  One way of dealing with this situation would be by consolidating the funds, thus ensuring that the insurance coverage attained by virtue of membership in the different super funds becomes adequate.

There are also many Australians who have some level of insurance coverage by virtue of their employments.  This is against a background where many employers nowadays offer insurance coverage as an employee benefit.  So in making the assessment on whether you have adequate insurance cover, you need to take into consideration any coverage you may have by virtue of your employment.

When making an evaluation to figure out how much insurance cover you have, you need to look beyond the monetary value of the insurance.  You also need to look at the types of insurance cover.  You may, for instance, have a very high value of life insurance coverage.  But you should know that such life insurance can only come into play in case you lose your life (in terms of providing benefits to your loved ones).  It can’t, for instance, help you in case you temporarily lose your ability to work due to an injury.

So, in addition to it, you may need something like income protection insurance.  The point we are making is that you need diversity in your insurance covers: to ensure that you are well protected against various contingencies.