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Not an enjoyable subject to ponder, death. Maybe that's why life assurance seems to be surrounded by alternate phrases and unexamined rules. For example, it's called life assurance, but it's in fact death assurance. It may make the whole selling process slightly harder if you advertised under such terms though. The most popular is the one that says your guaranteed life-assurance benefit should equal four times your annual income. Or is it five times? It's not a very useful guideline if you can't remember the figure, and people disagree on the number often.

One of the first questions to ask about life assurance is whether or not you need it. People who have dependents are the most likely to need life assurance - that is, people with school-age children, nonworking spouses or parents who are unable to take care of themselves.

It’s a fact of financial business that if buying a product express from it's provider, it could end up being more costly to you. Unlike other businesses, where in cutting out the middleman you would expect the cost to a customer to decrease, in this case the addition of a middleman can make it cheaper. Sometimes, the middleman helps the product provider by taking work off them and introducing customers. The life assurance business is one such business. There are a number of product providers, and they front a commission to life assurance brokers if someone takes out a policy by way of one of them.

If you take out a policy directly from a provider, they invite the administration costs that would normally be incurred by a broker, so they do not have as much of a reduction. Also, the life assurance provider will want to set its charges at a level that makes sure it makes profits, which also increases the cost of premiums.

There are a variety of life assurance policies on the market today; the majority of these will fall into one of the following categories. To make life easier we have given a brief description of the different protections available to help your dependants cope financially in the event of your death.

With a "whole life" policy, the insured individual pays fixed premiums all through his/her life span, this accumulated capital quantity, augmented by compound interest, is paid to a beneficiary in the shape of a lump sum in the occurrence of the insured's death, the benefit is paid even if the policy was annulled by the insured person. Care should be taken in view of whole-of-life policies: they can be appealing because they give you life cover and they have a surrender value at any time - but to get your hands on the surrender value you've got to cancel the policy.

A "universal life" policy differs from the whole life policy because the insured person is able to vary the amount and the timing of the life assurance payments; the funds compound to create the death benefit.

With "variable life" the fixed monthly premiums are invested into a portfolio, and the death benefit payout will be based on the performance of the investment.

We provide you with the top assurance companies for all types of assurance, not just life assurance. You can be assured that our listed providers are competing with only the best deals on the assurance market today. But we suggest that you take the time to compare offers from the top few companies.