Vitality Life Insurance [REVIEW]

What Does The Vitality Life Plan Cover?

Key Policy Factors

Indexed / Increasing Cover Available

Vitality’s indexed / increasing cover means inflation won’t erode the purchasing power of your payout over time. Your payout rises annually in line with Retail Prices Index (RPI) inflation (rounded to the next 0.25%).

The maximum annual benefit increase is 10%. With indexed cover, your benefit can never exceed £18 million.

Vitality automatically applies increases until the last plan anniversary before your 80th birthday. With Joint Life Cover, it’s the 80th birthday of the youngest of the two people on the plan.

At this point, Vitality writes to ask if you want to continue with indexation. You must agree explicitly — otherwise, Vitality changes your policy to Level Life Insurance.

Guaranteed Insurability

You can increase your benefit (up to the £18 million cap) without supplying further medical information if one of the following events happens:

• Childbirth / adoption
• Marriage / civil partnership
• New / increased mortgage
• Rent increase
• Promotion / change in job resulting in a salary increase
• Increase in the value of your estate meaning a larger inheritance tax liability (Whole of Life Cover only)
• Legislative change meaning a larger inheritance tax liability (Whole of Life Cover only).

You can only increase your benefit within 3 months of the event.

Guaranteed insurability is available up to the plan anniversary before your 55th birthday for everything except a rise in inheritance tax liability. For this, you can use guaranteed insurability until the plan anniversary before your 70th birthday.

Waiver of Premium

Opt for waiver of premium cover for an extra premium. If you become incapacitated, Vitality stops charging premiums while leaving the cover in force until you recover and return to work.

Splitting of a Joint Plan

Split a joint life first death plan into two single Life Insurance plans, one for each ex-partner, if you divorce or dissolve your civil partnership.

Serious Illness Cover, Not Critical Illness Cover

Add Serious Illness Cover for an additional premium. This differs from the Critical Illness Insurance most other insurers offer in several ways.

Firstly, it covers many more conditions. As standard, Vitality covers 153 illnesses. You can add Serious Illness Cover Plus for an extra premium to increase the conditions to 182.

Furthermore, Vitality pays out on a sliding scale of severity. Under Serious Illness Cover, you get between 15% and 100% of your benefit depending on the nature of your condition. With Serious Illness Cover Plus, the sliding scale is 5%-100%.

Family Benefit

Even without paying extra to add Children’s Serious Illness Cover, you get some child cover as standard with Serious Illness Insurance.

Family Benefit pays £5,000 once you’ve held the policy for 9 months if:

• You develop one of five pregnancy-related complications, plus foetal death in utero / stillbirth after 20 weeks gestation
• Your child is born with one of eight congenital conditions
• Your child passes away during the term of the policy before age 18 (23 if in full-time education).

Protected Cover

Most Life and Critical Illness Insurance policies only pay out once. Your plan then ends. If you have Life and Critical Illness Cover and develop a critical illness that warrants a 100% payout, your policy therefore ends. You no longer have Life Insurance.

At that point, it will likely be tricky to get replacement Life Insurance due to your critical diagnosis. It will also be almost impossible to get new Critical Illness Cover.

However, Vitality’s Protected Cover (an optional add-on for an extra premium) tackles this. There are two options:

• Protected Life Cover
  Keep your Life Insurance benefit if you make a Serious Illness Insurance claim
• Protected Life and Serious Illness Cover
  Keep your Life Insurance and Serious Illness benefits if you make a serious illness claim. Claim multiple times for serious illnesses until you receive a maximum of three times your initial benefit. Even after this, you still retain your Life Insurance.

Additional Benefits

Vitality Life Insurance additional benefits are largely through its Vitality Plus and Vitality Optimiser Programmes.

However, it also will advance up to £10,000 of your benefit to a funeral director to help pay for your funeral if your overall benefit is tied up in probate.

Vitality Plus Programme

The most unique aspect of Vitality’s Income Protection is its Vitality Plus Programme. This gives access to lower premiums, cashback and other rewards. However, to get these benefits policyholders must maintain a healthy lifestyle.

The Vitality Plus Programme:

• Can be added to any core protection product for an additional £5 charge
• Involves earning Vitality points through exercise, healthy living and health reviews
• Offers discounted gym memberships, fitness gadgets, bikes, running gear and holidays
• Provides free weekly cinema ticket and a coffee
• Lets you use points to unlock better rewards, earn cashback and cut your premiums
• Means premiums won’t rise just because you don’t engage with the programme.

The Vitality Life Programmes

These programmes really open up the rewards element of your policy. You get access to freebies, discounts, cashback and potentially annually reducing premiums.

There are two options to choose which offer slightly different benefits: Vitality Optimiser and Vitality Wellness Optimiser plan.

If you add either of these, you get an initial upfront premium discount. If you don’t want an Optimiser plan, you can simply add Vitality Plus to any core product and take advantage of the rewards linked to that specific plan.

It’s important to know that with Optimiser policies, your premiums could go up as well as down. If you don’t engage with the Healthy Living programme and maintain a healthy lifestyle, your premiums may increase.

Vitality Optimiser

• Vitality Plus is included as standard at a price of £3.80 (you cannot remove Vitality Plus from the policy)
• Get an upfront discount on your ‘optimised’ Life Insurance policy and lower premiums
• Earn Vitality points through exercise, healthy living and annual health reviews to spend on rewards
• You can only access some discounts by collecting a certain number of points regularly
• Vitality will reduce your premiums annually if you collect enough points to reach Vitality’s Platinum status
• Premiums increase if you don’t engage with the programme and reach Platinum status; how much they go up by depends on the status you achieve.

Vitality Wellness Optimiser

• Vitality Plus is included as standard at a price of £3.80 (you cannot remove Vitality Plus from the policy)
• Get a significant upfront discount on your ‘optimised’ insurance policy and lower premiums
• Earn Vitality points through exercise and healthy living to unlock rewards and reduce premiums
• You can only access some discounts by collecting a certain number of points regularly
• Earn Wellness points by maintaining a healthy BMI, cholesterol, blood pressure and blood glucose level to unlock rewards and reduce premiums
• Premiums increase if you don’t engage with the programme; how much they rise by depends on the status you achieve.

How Does Vitality Compare?

Minimum Entry Age of 16

Vitality lets you take out Life Insurance from age 16. The minimum age for many other providers is 18; Vitality is therefore a good option for the youngest people seeking Life Insurance.

Benefit of Your Choice With Optional Children’s Cover

With most Critical Illness Insurance policies, insurers fix the available benefit with children’s cover at a percentage of your benefit (typically around 25%).

However, with Vitality, you can choose how much you want as a child benefit (between £15,000 and £100,000).

Protected Cover

Few other insurers offer the Protected Cover option Vitality does. Vitality are therefore a good option if you’re concerned about your policy automatically terminating if you make a serious illness claim.

Children’s Cover Not Standard With Serious Illness Cover

You can choose a benefit of up to £100,000 with children’s Serious Illness Cover. However, it doesn’t come with adult cover — you pay extra for it. Many insurers include children’s cover as standard with Critical Illness Insurance.

While this does mean you don’t pay for cover you won’t use if you don’t have kids, it’s something worth considering if you do have children or plan to start a family.

Total Permanent Disability Cover a Paid Extra

Total Permanent Disability Cover pays out if you become so completely and totally disabled through illness or injury that you can’t ever work again.

With Vitality, it’s an optional add-on for an extra premium. However, some insurers include it as standard with Critical Illness Cover.

14 Day Survival Period

Vitality’s Serious Illness Cover requires you to survive at least 14 days after your diagnosis to make a serious illness claim.

While many other insurers also have a 14 day survival period, there are plenty in the market with a 10 day period.

Limited Maximum Life Insurance Benefit

Vitality caps the maximum benefit at £18 million for Life Insurance. While this will be sufficient for almost every Life Insurance client, there are insurers which offer higher / unlimited Life Insurance benefits.

If you do need more than £18 million in Life Insurance, you’ll therefore need to choose another provider.

No Online Trusts

Vitality doesn’t offer online trusts. Writing your Life Insurance into trust to protect it from inheritance tax therefore requires paper forms and wet signatures.

This can cause delays compared to an online trusts service, which your adviser can help you complete when they arrange the policy.

How Much Does Vitality Life Insurance Cost?

So you can get a feel for how much your cover may cost we’ve provided example premiums based on varying ages, with and without Critical Illness cover below.

To calculate these quotes we have assumed that the individual looking for cover wants £250,000 Life and Critical Illness cover:

• Needs a decreasing term
• Is in a low risk office based role
• Has no pre-existing conditions
• Is a non-smoker

Get Vitality Life Insurance Quotes & Expert Advice

Vitality are one of a number of insurers who offer a suite of Life Insurance products in the UK. If you would like to learn more about the alternatives to Vitality we have written a comprehensive guide comparing the best UK life insurance providers.

It is often only when we start looking into policies in a bit more detail we come to realise how complicated it can get. If you need some help you can chat to one of our expert independent advisers by giving us a call on 02084327333.

On the other hand if you feel you know exactly what you need you can use our handy life insurance quote tool to compare costs and apply online 😊 →

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• There is no fee for our service
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For help and fee-free Life Insurance advice, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Pop us a call on 02084327333 or email help@drewberry.co.uk.