Failed marriages create life insurance minefield
Kim Fitzgerald of OnePath said advisers need to ask a lot of questions of clients to make sure the ownership structure of their life insurance policies suits their individual circumstances, otherwise things can get messy.
"If the wrong person owns the contract it can create problems for all sorts of reasons. There are a lot of cases we hear about where the only people that make any money out of a life insurance contract are the lawyers because it's been set up wrong."
Fitzgerald said there are a number of options for ownership, with different advantages and disadvantages for each.
These include the insured person owning his own policy, spouses owning each other's policies, two or more people having a jointly owned policy, or a person's policy being managed by a trustee of a trust (trusts themselves are not classed as ‘people' and therefore can't own policies).
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