As parents, our children are naturally the most important people to us in the whole wide world and although it’s never a nice thing to have to think about, we do need to have measures in place to know that they will be looked after and cared for both emotionally and financially if we were no longer around.

My husband and I both took out Life Insurance cover when we bought our house 10 years ago. It was set up through an Independent Financial Adviser and was based on us, as a couple before we were married and had children. Life has been so busy since then, that we have not once thought to go through and update the cover to reflect our current needs and financial status.

Zurich has put together a useful tool called ‘Value Your World‘  and the tool helps assess if we have enough life insurance cover in place and most importantly whether we have the correct cover for our family.

Here are my thoughts on the tool

We started off by answering a few questions about our family so the tool could start working out how much we’d need to protect ‘our world’ It asked whether our children were in Private or State Education and also asked whether we intended to support them through university. My boys are only young but we would very much like to support them through University if they chose to do so in the future.

We found the interface clear and easy to use. It was great that you had the option to save your quote for later if there were questions that came up that needed you to find paperwork for. As you progress through the tool you can see the “value” update as you go along and within a few minutes, we had our figure. We could then easily go back and fine tune this if we wished to do so.

The tool also breaks down the “big” items and it was no surprise that the cost of bringing our children and education topped the list, followed closely by our mortgage. At this point, we were asked to fill in some personal details such as our name and DOB before it gave us the option to get a quote for life cover. We were also prompted to seek financial advice if we were unsure about our figure.

I was quiI was pleased to see that the monthly amount for joint cover was not disimilar to what we are already paying. The Zurich tool is definitely useful to give you a guide as to how much you would need for the future. For us, we would still look to see a financial adviser to double check we hadn’t missed anything important and that the amount put against certain items were a realistic figure for us.

I would say if you were just starting to look into cover for your family that the Value Your World tool is a good place to start and is something I would certainly recommend to my friends and family.

*I am a member of the Mumsnet Bloggers Panel, a group of parent bloggers who have volunteered to review products, services, events and brands for Mumsnet.  I have editorial control and retain full editorial integrity. I have received payment in return for writing this post.