When it comes to buying risk benefits, whether you smoke or not is a major factor in the price of your cover. For life cover and specified illness cover, you can expect for the cost to be double for a smoker than it for a non smoker. The increase for income protection isn’t as much but expect to pay 33% more if you smoke. But what about e-cigarettes and vaporizers? You are seeing more and more people walking down the road with these big contraptions, puffing away with a cloud of odourless water vapour above their heads. So what are insurance companies attitude towards e-cigarettes when it comes to life cover and other risk benefits.
Insurance companies aren’t all adopting the same approach to e-cigarettes. I rang each of the main providers of life insurance in Ireland to see what they thought of e-cigarettes.
To avail of the reduced premium of Zurich Life, you must have stopped smoking tobacco products for at least 12 months. This is standard for anyone moving from a smoker to non smoker status for their life cover.
E-cigarettes are still a relatively new product with research being carried out on their effects all the time. Insurance companies are keeping their classification under regular review and may change the classification either way based on new research.
Have you converted to using e-cigarettes and are still paying smoker rates for your life cover, specified illness or income protection? Maybe you can save yourself a lot of money over the long term by availing of non smoker rates now? If you would like to see if you can save yourself some money, drop me an email at steven@bluewaterfp.ie
Article was updated on 01 April 2018. Aviva and New Ireland changed their approach to vaping to class is the same as smokers.