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Mondays are usually pretty awful.

It’s a new week and there are five more days to get through until the weekend.

And that’s if you’re lucky enough to work nine-to-five.
If you’re a nurse and you’re into your third night shift and you still have several days to go, it must be tempting to pull a sickie.
It’d be so easy to call your boss, cough pathetically down the line, and tell them you just can’t make it in.
Unfortunately, it’s not really an option, as you’ve got lives to save.
Of course, you could go the opposite and take a ridiculous amount of sick days. An Enterprise Ireland employee spent a spectacular 20 years on sick leave while a former local authority worker hit the news recently for an unfair dismissal case; his employers alleged he’d missed 202 days of work on sick leave between 2011 and 2016.
That’s not a bad auld set of holidays – but most employers aren’t quite so giving.

What percentage of Life Insurance claims do you think are paid out?

A fiver says you’ll probably guess wrong. If you’re right, the fiver is metaphorical.

So, around 95 percent of all death claims are paid out.

Believe it or not, the insurers actually want to pay claims. Without claims, there is no point in having Life Insurance.

Plus, they don’t want the bad publicity that goes with declining a claim. So, if you genuinely forget to disclose something, they’ll try to make some sort of payment. But if they get even the faintest whiff of fraud...

Moral of the story: don’t try and pull a fast one over the insurer. It won’t work in your favour if you’re caught.

So what are the Life Insurance pitfalls you should avoid?

Chronic illnesses are shit – there’s no two ways about it.

Everyone knows someone who has a chronic illness. Your neighbour who has diabetes. Your mam and her MS. Your childhood best friend who you haven’t seen for years who has Crohn’s.

Or maybe you’re the one with the chronic illness and that’s why you’re on this blog.

According to the HSE, about one million people in Ireland suffer from one of diabetes, asthma, COPD, or cardiovascular disease.

That’s almost a quarter of the population – so why aren’t we talking more about the reality of a chronic illness?

It’s very easy to think that bankers are wan…bad guys. Sure wasn’t it the bank’s fault that the Boom collapsed so badly?

Between massive loans and inflated prices, it was all a bit of a disaster. But we’ve sort of returned to a middle ground where the banks aren’t such bad guys after all.

Or have we?

When it comes to Life Insurance, that’s definitely not the case. Why? Let’s take a look at why buying insurance with a bank will hit you square in the pocket.

If you Google the most popular fears, you’ll get a list that looks like this:

1. Fear of public speaking.
2. Fear of death.
3. Fear of spiders.
4. Fear of darkness.
5. Fear of heights.

Which means that most people find the idea of public speaking scarier than death.

Okay, so you might think that Serious Illness Cover and Health Insurance are the same thing.

I mean, they’re pretty similar: insurance that covers you if you get sick – but that’s not entirely the case.

Think of it like Batman. So Batman is a bad-ass, but even he goes into battle with his trusty gadgets: his Batsuit, his Batmobile, and his utility belt.

In this metaphor, his Batsuit is Life Insurance: it’s his most important defence.

Tick tock.

Do you hear that?

That’s the sound of your life getting shorter, second by second.

Okay, so that’s a bit dramatic – but it’s true.

To answer the heralded question in the blog title: now is the best time to get Life Insurance.

The ‘40s were a different time. Obviously, the war was pretty contentious – but that’s a whole other topic and it’s not what I want to talk about today. (My post on war history is coming next week. )

So in 1946, Camels, the cigarette company, ran an advert around the tagline ‘More Doctors Smoke Camels’. It ran for several years and essentially peddled a pack of lies.

One of the most popular searches around Life Insurance is ‘is Life Insurance a scam?’ If you Google it, you’ll get a whole bunch of results – some of which include helpful articles on spotting or avoiding such a scam.

The vast majority of the time, Life Insurance is a fair deal.

I’m all about honesty at Lion so let’s take a crack at some of the biggest myths around Life Insurance.

It’s the dream that’s been drilled into your head since you were a kid. Grow up. Go to college. Graduate with a good degree so you can get a job and, eventually, a house of your own. (Probably after moving home with your folks and living on ham sandwiches so you can save the deposit.) Don’t stop believin’.

Or, to quote the iconic opening of Renton’s monologue in Trainspotting: “Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family.”