“First of all, the key issue around life insurance is whether or not your son has financial dependants.

If he has, life insurance would replace the income lost in the unfortunate event of his death.

Normally the term of the cover would equate to the term of the financial dependancy, so for children it might be until they reach age 21 for instance. In my opinion the most suitable plans are those (i) priced to simply provide the cover for the term, with (ii) an inbuilt option to continue cover thereafter without having to provide any further evidence of health (important if a person’s health has deteriorated – they can still get cover). Such plans are reasonably inexpensive.

Plans that have associated savings, while seeming like a good idea, don’t really work (again in my opinion) as (i) one normally doesn’t know how much is being deducted from the fund to pay for the cover; (ii) if one suffers financial issues and has to cut back there is only one plan to stop, hence the life cover is lost as well; and (iii) Joe Duffy is making a living from those type of plans. If I thought longer I’d probably come up with more reasons but I believe that it is better to separate savings from life insurance.

So far so good. However I know that your son lives in Australia. Unless he intends to return home in the near term he should probably get his life cover there. We could possibly get him cover here if he has an Irish bank account but I suspect it would be better for him to get his cover where he and any financial dependants live. If he doesn’t have an Irish bank account we would have significant difficulty getting him cover here due to constantly updating Anti-Money Laundering legislation.”