It's one of the most common things I hear from people in their twenties.
"I'm only 25."
"I've got no health issues."
"Surely life insurance is something I'll think about when I'm older?"
When you're young, healthy and busy building your career, protection planning is rarely high on the priority list. There are holidays to book, careers to build, homes to save for and plenty of more exciting ways to spend money.
Life insurance can feel like a problem for future-you. But ironically, being young and healthy is often one of the best reasons to consider it.
Insurers generally prefer certainty, so if you’re young and in good health, you may be in one of the strongest positions you’ll ever be when applying for cover.
Most people assume they’ll sort it out later. The challenge is that “later” has a habit of arriving much sooner than expected.
One minute you're focused on work, weekends away and saving for your next goal. The next, you're discussing mortgages, planning a wedding or thinking about starting a family.
By the time those milestones arrive, you’re older than you are today and your health may not be the same. That’s why so many people who initially thought they were “too young” for life insurance end up wishing they’d looked into it sooner.
Many people also assume life insurance only becomes important once they have children. But if you think about it, we insure almost everything else. We insure our cars without expecting to crash them and our homes without expecting them to burn down. Yet the one thing that often gets overlooked is protecting ourselves and our future plans.
One of the most common reactions when clients explore protection early is, “that’s actually a lot cheaper than I thought.”
Because younger applicants generally represent a lower risk to insurers, premiums can often be surprisingly affordable, sometimes less than a few streaming subscriptions, a regular Sunday night takeaway or a gym membership.
The Bottom Line
Life insurance isn't something that suddenly becomes important on your 40th birthday.
For many people, protection is simply part of building sensible financial foundations for the future, alongside saving, investing, buying a home and planning for long-term goals.
That doesn't mean everyone needs life insurance at 25.
But it does mean the question shouldn't necessarily be "am I too young?", and instead, it might be "if protection is likely to become important, could there be a benefit in exploring options now?”
For many people, the answer is yes. Not because they expect the worst, but because they'd rather put plans in place while everything is still on their side.