Why I Don't Have Life Insurance Yet
Whole life insurance is one of the most oversold products in Canada, and most people who get pitched it don't actually need it. I don't even carry basic life insurance myself right now, and that's a deliberate choice.
Life insurance is there to protect the people who depend on your income, and right now nobody depends on mine. I have no kids, no mortgage, and my wife has a strong career she'd carry on with just fine if something happened to me. The day that changes, say a mortgage or a child comes along, I'll buy term insurance that week.
Term insurance is built for exactly that window. You choose a term, say 20 years, that covers the stretch when your family would struggle without your paycheque, and you pay a low premium for it. It stays cheap because most people outlive the term, and once your savings have grown and the mortgage is gone, you usually don't need it anymore. Insurance is there to protect the plan. Growing your money is a separate job.
Whole life insurance is permanent coverage that never expires as long as you keep paying, and it comes with a cash value that gets pitched hard as an investment. I was talking recently with someone who holds a large stock and bond portfolio in their non-registered accounts. When they pass away, those investments will trigger a big capital gains tax bill, and an advisor had recommended a whole life policy to cover it.
In their case, I don't think that makes much sense. Stocks and bonds are liquid, so when the tax bill comes due, the estate can just sell a portion of the portfolio to pay it. Set that against paying steep whole life premiums every year for decades. The vast majority of the time, selling a slice of a liquid portfolio at death leaves a bigger estate than all those premiums would have.
A business owner, or someone holding a cottage or a rental property, faces the same kind of tax bill at death but without an easy way to pay it. The family often doesn't want to sell the business or the cottage just to raise the cash. That's where whole life can genuinely earn its place, covering a bill on something you can't easily sell or don't want to.
Whole life is expensive, and for most Canadians it simply isn't the optimal choice, even though it gets sold that way constantly. Nobody should buy a whole life policy without an unbiased second opinion first, ideally from someone who earns no commission on the sale. The illustrations look great on paper, but a lot of the growth built into them isn't guaranteed.
If you already own a whole life policy, this isn't me telling you that you made a mistake. Plenty of people were sold these by someone they trusted, and in the right situation the policy really does fit. It's worth understanding what yours is actually doing and whether it still makes sense for you. Have you ever been pitched whole life, and did anyone ever walk you through what it really costs?
