Discover life insurance is a life insurance policy with monthly premiums starting at R200.00. With Discovery life insurance, policyholders can select a cover amount of up to R10,000,000.00. Furthermore, Discovery life insurance holders can receive up to 42% off their upfront or ongoing premiums when they combine their life insurance with a Discovery Health Medical Scheme, Vitality, and/or Discovery Bank.
Discovery life insurance protects your financial interests throughout your life and death. Their life insurance is adaptable and suitable for all. In the same way that your life insurance policy is flexible, so are your premiums.
Discovery is best known for its rewards program, the Vitality Rewards program. Every month, as a Discovery insurance policyholder, you will receive the Vitality rewards. Furthermore, you can get health insurance from Discovery to earn even more Vitality rewards points.
Discovery has a track record of paying claims on time and to the full amount covered. The insurer has paid out over R31.1 billion in claims to date. In addition, the company returns R2.7 billion to policyholders each year in paybacks and discounts.
Your family will not only be beneficiaries of your Discovery life insurance policy, but you as a policyholder will also receive paybacks and discounts. The company also looks after your health by encouraging you to live and eat in a healthy manner.
Members of Discovery life insurance have an average life expectancy of 87 years. When compared to South Africa’s average life expectancy of 64 years, you are likely to live 23 years longer if you take part in the Discovery Health benefit.
We discuss the Discovery life insurance and its products in detail below.
Benefits of Discovery Life Insurance
With Discovery life insurance you get a number of benefits but most importantly you get to be healthy. Discovery will reward you for maintaining a healthy lifestyle with discounts and paybacks on premiums.
Let’s look at all the health benefits that you get by choosing Discovery life insurance as your life insurer.
Upfront premium discounts
You can get an initial discount of up to 32% and can maintain this discount by managing your health and finances. If you complete health checks you can get a further discount of up to an additional 15%. By performing checks and maintaining a healthy lifestyle your upfront discount can be up to 42%.
Paybacks
If you manage your health well you can receive 100% of your premiums back. Yes, you will get 100% back by making healthy lifestyle choices.
Discovery Vitality fund
With the Vitality fund, you can get up to 20% more on your life insurance cover. But there is a catch, which is living healthy. If you live healthily and manage your finances well, you can save up to 26% on premiums.
The additional 20% on your life cover comes at no additional cost on your premiums. Furthermore, the 20% increase in your life cover comes with no additional underwriting.
Buy-up cash conversion
The buy-up cash conversion allows you to convert your healthy lifestyle choices into cash in retirement. This can happen at an additional premium.
Discovery Income continuation fund
The income continuation fund allows you to convert your healthy lifestyle choices into additional income in retirement. Unlike the buy-up cash conversion, the income continuation fund comes at no additional cost.
University funder benefit
Talking about benefits that go a long way, the university funder benefit funds your children’s tertiary tuition up to 100%. This benefit is based on your health and wellness.
Vitality rating longevity discount
With this benefit, you can unlock up to 10% discount on your Discovery life insurance premiums. You can do this by having more qualifying medical checks in retirement.
The Discovery Life Fund
It is important for you to know the Discovery life fund because it forms an integral part of your life insurance with Discovery. The life fund is a funding mechanism that adds to your life cover and other benefits. All your benefits will be on the life fund and life cover.
The life fund gives you an opportunity to earn more on your life cover by adding cover integrator and financial integrator funds. This additional life cover opportunity comes with no underwriting.
You can choose to have a minimum protected fund which ensures that your life fund never goes below a certain amount.
In the event of your death as a policyholder, a lump sum payment is made to your family from the life fund.
Discovery Life Insurance Features
With life being unpredictable, Discovery insure has come up with a list of benefits that you and your family may need. These benefits work singular or in combination. However, you should know that you can take as many benefits to ensure that your needs are covered.
Benefits that you can add to your Discovery life cover include:
- Estate planning benefits.
- Severe illness benefit.
- Capital disability benefit.
- Income continuation benefit.
- Global education protector, and
- Child protector benefit.
We will discuss all these benefits that you can add to your comprehensive dynamic life cover. Now, let’s look at the benefits that you can add to your life cover and how they will benefit you.
Estate planning benefit
When you pass away and leave behind money, property or other belongings these will form part of your estate. The fact is an estate is taxable through the estate duty. The tax percentage is somewhat high too, the percentage is up to 25% of all your estate.
With the estate planning benefit, you will be able to plan on how you will leave your family with the sum to estates duty payable.
Discovery will provide you with tax-efficient means of wealth transfer. This will ensure that you leave enough money and resources for your family.
The estate planning benefit pays a lump sum after you and your spouse die. The payout from the estate planning benefit will be made in addition to your life cover.
Additionally, premiums of the estate planning benefit stop when you or your spouse die. The cover amount will also lock, meaning that it will stay the same with no further increases.
Estate planning benefit also includes two benefits that you can take advantage of which are terminal illness and access cover benefits.
The Access Cover benefit allows for a payout of 30% of the estate planning benefit in the event of the death of a spouse. The unaccessed amount will still remain and will be paid out when both you and your spouse pass on.
The terminal illness benefit allows for the acceleration of the estate planning benefit. You or your spouse will receive the estate planning benefit cover payout if any of you experience terminal illness.
Severe illness benefit
Discovery severe illness benefit covers all major body systems and automatically covers you for multiple claims. You have the option to choose whether you want the cover when you are 65 years or for your entire life.
If you choose the classic life plan, your children and parents will get benefits from the severe illness cover. Benefits for your children and parents will come at no additional costs.
From the severe illness benefit, you can choose to add the following to your benefit depending on your coverage needs:
- Discovery Lifetime severe illness benefit which provides 100% of your cover amount for heart attacks, cancer and strokes. Additionally, it will pay up to 215% of the cover amount depending on the long-term impact of the illness.
- The comprehensive benefit which paysout a lump sum depending on the severity of the illness.
- There is a plus benefit of the discovery lifetime and comprehensive benefit which payout at the early stages of an illness.
The Capital disability benefit
With the capital disability benefit you will be simply protecting yourself should you become disabled. The capital disability benefit pays out a lump sum should you become disabled. This money can go a long way, especially with managing changes in your lifestyle.
Benefits on the capital disability include the Discovery core and Comprehensive plus disability benefits. You will receive additional payouts from the lifetime capital benefit so that you can get access to medical technology to help minimize the impact of your disability on your lifestyle.
Discovery insure will support you or help you regain your pre-disability lifestyle. For extra benefits, you can select the lifetime 300 or lifetime 200 benefits that will pay a further lump sum of 300% and 200% respectively should you suffer a disability.
The capital disability benefit will cover you up to the age of 70. Capital disability benefits will give you continued protection even after the age of 70 so you don’t need to worry. Also, your child gets an automatic child impairment benefit that pays out 10% of the cover amount.
Discovery Income continuation benefit
The income continuation benefit protects you and your family financially should you suffer from an injury or severe illness.
As a breadwinner or a financial contributor in your household, you will be able to keep up with your living expenses.
This is because the income continuation benefit pays out a monthly income if you are unable to work due to sickness or injury.
Income continuation benefit is the best way to maintain your lifestyle should you get an injury or become ill. Furthermore, the income continuation benefit is tailored to suit your needs.
You can choose from the comprehensive and essential benefits of the classic life plan and essential life plan respectively.
When you retire you will still benefit from the income continuation benefit. However, after retirement, the benefit will change to cover severe illnesses and disabilities. You will also qualify to receive the long term benefit lump sum that pays 12 times your cover amount.
Discovery Global education protector
The global education protector benefit protects your children’s educational journey at every stage. The global education protector pays out 100% of your children’s tertiary education fees even if you don’t claim. This is if you live a healthy lifestyle.
The global education protector offers the following protection offerings to suit your needs:
- You can choose to get cover for severe illness, disability and death.
- An option to get cover for your spouse for severe illness, disability and death.
- You can select the core and private benefit options which provides different levels of cover for severe illness, disability and death.
- Vitality members can qualify for the global education protector.
The core and private benefit options cover the costs of local institutions from crèche to high school.
For tertiary education, with both core and private benefit, cover tertiary fees locally and internationally.
Here is the breakdown of the global education protector benefit in years:
| Education stage | Number of years covered |
|---|---|
| Creche | 3 years |
| Pre primary school | 2 years |
| Primary school | 7 years |
| High school | 5 years |
| Tertiary | Within specified duration of selected undergraduate degree or diploma or certificate |
The benefit offers an annual lump sum payout so that necessary resources can be acquired to enable your child’s education.
With the lump sum benefit you can buy things like uniforms, textbooks, necessary electronics, cover transportation, pay for school trips and pay for extra lessons.
Child protector benefit
The child protector benefit covers your child should they suffer severe illness and/or disability. With this benefit, your child can get international medical help if needs be.
If diagnosed with cancer you will receive a 100% payout of your child’s cover amount. Other severe illnesses claim payout ranges between 5% to 100%.
Should you prefer to use global medical care, you can get a benefit of up to 1.8 times the cover amount. Also, you get an additional funeral benefit of up to R30,000 at no additional premium.
Advantages of the Discovery Life Insurance
- There are three life insurance plans to choose from which cater for any type of individual.
- There are addons that can be added on any plan that is selected to enhance it.
- Cover for educational purposes is available and can be taken out separately.
- Discovery life insurance policy holders can get up to 42% discount on their monthly premiums.
- The life insurance plans available all pay a lump sum to beneficiaries.
- A funeral benefit is available which is paid out instantly when the insured passes away.
Disadvantages of the Discovery Life Insurance
- There is no cash back benefit.
- Minimum monthly premiums of R200.00 or more are a little steep for low income earners.
Conclusion
Discovery life offers the most diversified life insurance policies that can be tailored according to your life cover needs. There are several benefits that you can add to your life cover and these can help insure your spouse and children.
If you are a holder of Discovery products you can also get a discount on premiums of up to 42%.
If you are a member of the Discovery medical scheme and Discovery Vitality you get up to a 20% discount. Vitality Active members can get up to a 15% discount.
This is because Discovery wants to ensure that you manage your life well so that you can live longer. From the look of things, it is not surprising that Discovery Vitality members have a life expectancy of 87 years.
Being a member of Discovery offers financial and health benefits that will enable a long healthy life. So taking life insurance with other Discovery products will help you live longer.
