Life insurance acts as a safety net, protecting your family from financial vagaries in your absence. In order to ensure that your beneficiaries have a smooth claims process, there are a few steps that you must take after buying life insurance.
Inform your family: The family must know that you have purchased adequate life insurance policies to protect their future. As morbid as it may seem to talk about your death to your loved ones, it is financially prudent to tell your spouse or children (if they are grown up enough to understand) about the life insurance coverage that you have purchased for their financial security when you are gone. It is also a good practice to maintain a written record about details of the policies and leave simple instructions that can be accessed by your dependents when you are not around to guide them.
Safe keep of documents: Your original policy bond is an important document that ought to be kept safely. It would be prudent to also keep copies of it in separate places just in case you happen to misplace the original copy. The most important aspect is keeping details of your life insurance policy handy and ensuring that you share the same with you family or nominees. It is a good practice to keep digital records of all your important policy details like policy number, name of insurer, contact and claim process etc. These can be shared through numerous cloud-based applications.
Keeping digital copies also ensure that in cases of physical calamities where one may lose hard copy records, there is always the safety net of digitized copies which can be retrieved from anywhere. In a world of advanced digital technology, most of your records are also maintained digitally at the insurer’s end and most insurers now can process your claims if you can produce digital copies of your documents.
