Vitality Life Insurance [REVIEW]

Who Are Vitality?

Vitality is a leading insurance and investment company. It offers a range of Life and Health protection policies, such as Life Insurance, and Serious Illness Cover .

Vitality’s core purpose is to make clients healthier while helping them protect their lives. This is why they offer discount up to 40% for active policy holders.

It’s VitalityLife product is rated 5 star by Defaqto and in 2021 91% of claims were paid out.

Vitality Life Insurance Policy Overview

• Comprehensive Policy
  A comprehensive Life Insurance policy with a maximum benefit of £18 million
• Additional Serious Illness Cover
  Opt to pay extra for Serious Illness Cover, which includes 153 conditions as standard. Vitality pays between 15% and 100% of your benefit depending on the severity of the illness
• Vitality Plus
  Use Vitality Plus to earn discounts, cash-back and bonuses when you complete healthy living goals.

What Does Vitality Life Insurance Cover?

Vitality offers a menu plan called the Personal Protection Plan. Within this, you can pick and choose which policies you’d like to include.

The core policies you can choose from are Life Cover, Serious Illness Cover, and Income Protection Cover. We’ve written a separate review for Vitality’s Income Protection, so we’ll break down the Life Cover and Serious Illness Cover below.

Vitality Life Insurance Key Policy Factors

There are a range of policy factors to consider when look at Vitality’s Life Insurance. We’ve outlined these below.

Waiver of Premium

For an extra monthly cost, you can add Waiver of Premium cover.If you’re unable to work due to incapacity, Vitality will pay for your premiums after a certain period.

You can choose this deferred period based on what would suit you the best. There are a range of options available between 1 and 12 months. Vitality will stop paying your plan premiums until either you return to work, the policy expires, or you die.

Splitting A Joint Plan

People who have a joint life plan and go their separate ways can each keep their own cover. Vitality gives you the option to split a joint plan into two single policies. This option can only be used following divorce, separation, or dissolution of your civil partnership.

Guaranteed Insurability

Vitality also offers Guaranteed Insurability. This allows you to increase your benefit without any further medical assessment. After the increase, your cover must still meet the cap of £18 million for Life Cover, or £3 million for Serious Illness Cover.

Guaranteed Insurability can be used within 3 months of any of the following life events:

• Marriage or civil partnership
• Birth or adoption of a child
• Taking out a new mortgage, or an increase to your current mortgage
• An increase in your rent
• Promotion or a 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).

Serious Illness Cover

Rather than Critical Illness Cover, Vitality offers Serious Illness Cover for an extra premium. This differs from the Critical Illness Insurance on the market in many ways.

Firstly, it covers many more conditions. Depending on the insurer, Critical Illness policies typically cover around 60 total conditions. Vitality covers 153 illnesses. You can also add Serious Illness Cover Plus for an extra premium to increase the conditions to 182.

In addition, 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% to 100%.

Protected Cover

Most Life and Critical Illness Insurance policies only pay out once, and then your plan ends. That means that if you claim for a critical illness, your policy ends and you’re left without 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 take out 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 after 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.

Family Benefit

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

Once you’ve held the policies for 9 months, Family Benefit pays out £5,000 if:

• You develop one of five pregnancy-related complications
• You suffer foetal death in utero or 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 (or age 23 if in full-time education).

Increasing Cover Available

Vitality’s increasing cover means inflation won’t erode the purchasing power of a claim over time. With this option, your benefit rises annually in line with the Retail Prices Index (RPI) rate of inflation.

Vitality automatically applies the 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 to opt in — otherwise, Vitality will automatically change your policy to Level Life Insurance.

With increasing, or Index-Linked cover, the maximum annual benefit increase is 10%. Vitality will round this to the nearest 0.25%.

You need to remember that the annual increases must not exceed the benefit limits. These are £18 million for Life Cover, and £3 million for Serious Illness Cover.

Rauri Taylor
Independent Protection Expert

Additional Benefits

Vitality’s additional benefits come under its Vitality Plus and Vitality Optimiser Programmes.

Vitality Plus Programme

The most unique aspect of Vitality’s life protection products is its Vitality Plus Programme. This gives policyholders 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 a free weekly cinema ticket and a coffee
• Lets you use points to unlock better rewards, earn cashback and cut your premiums
• Assures your premiums won’t rise if you don’t engage with the programme.

Vitality Optimiser 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: Vitality Optimiser, and Vitality Wellness Optimiser. Each one offers slightly different benefits.

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 option.

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.

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
• Complete health-related goals to build your Vitality Status, 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 levels
• Premiums increase if you don’t engage with the programme; how much they rise by depends on the status you achieve.

Funeral Payment Advance

A further benefit Vitality offers is that it will advance up to £10,000 of your life insurance benefit to a funeral director. This will allow your family to cover the cost of your funeral if your overall benefit is tied up in probate.

How Does Vitality Life Insurance Compare?

We’ve highlighted some of the key features of Vitality’s cover to help you compare their Life Insurance against other UK providers.

Minimum Entry Age of 16

Where the minimum age for most other providers is 18, Vitality lets you take out Life Cover from age 16. This is a good option for the youngest people seeking Life Insurance.

Limited Maximum Life Insurance Benefit

Vitality caps the maximum benefit at £18 million for Life Insurance. While this should be enough for most people, there are insurers which offer higher, or unlimited Life Insurance benefits. If you do need more than £18 million in Life Insurance, you’ll therefore need to choose another provider.

Protected Cover

Few other insurers offer the Protected Cover option Vitality does. This makes Vitality a good option if you’re concerned about your policy ending after a Serious Illness claim.

Children’s Cover Not Standard With Serious Illness Cover

Unlike some other insurers, Vitality doesn’t include Children’s Cover as standard with its Serious Illness insurance. Instead, you can choose to add it on for an extra cost.

On the one hand, this means you won’t pay for cover you don’t need if you don’t have children. But on the other hand, it’s worth considering if you do have children or plan to add to your family.

Benefit Of Your Choice With Optional Children’s Cover

With most Critical Illness Insurance policies, insurers fix the child cover at a certain percentage of your benefit. This is typically around 25%.

However, if you do add on Children’s Cover with Vitality, you can select how much cover you want. You can choose any amount between £15,000 and £100,000.

Add On Total Permanent Disability Cover

Total Permanent Disability Cover pays out if you become so disabled through illness or injury that you can’t ever work again. Some insurers include this as a standard critical condition. With Vitality, it’s an optional add-on for an extra premium.

14 Day Survival Period

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

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

No Online Trusts

Vitality doesn’t offer online trusts to help you protect your benefit from inheritance tax. Writing your Life Insurance into trust 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?

The cost of Life Insurance is subject to several factors. As well as the type and amount of cover you’d like, your health status is also assessed.

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

To calculate these quotes, we’ve assumed that the individual in question wants £250,000 of cover, and:

• Needs a decreasing term to cover a mortgage
• Wants the policy for 25 years
• Is in a low-risk, office-based role
• Has no pre-existing conditions
• Is a non-smoker.

Life Cover Only

Life & Serious Illness Cover

Compare Vitality Life Insurance Quotes & Get Expert Advice

Vitality is one of a number of insurers who offer Life Insurance products in the UK. Check out our comprehensive guide if you’d like to compare Vitality with the other top UK life insurance providers.

It’s often when we start comparing policies in more detail that we 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 😊

Why Speak to Us?

We started Drewberry™ because we were tired of being treated like a number.

We all deserve a first class service when it comes to issues as important as protecting our health and our finances. Below are just a few reasons why it makes sense to talk to us.

• There is no fee for our service
• We are an award winning 🏆 independent insurance broker who works with all the leading UK insurers
• You’ll speak to a dedicated expert from start to finish
• We are very proud of the 3978 and growing independent client reviews rating us at 4.92 / 5
• Claims support when you need it most.
• We are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. You can find us on the financial services register here 🧐

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.