Barclays Life Assurance Co Ltd > Reviews (1)

There comes a time in everyones life when responsibility sets in, you settle down, buy a house and end up with a stonkingly huge mortgage to pay off. This is what I did followinhg what can only be described as my wild 20s and needed to get some life cover in place should the worst happen and I die.

Essentially, if I died without cover in place the mortgage debt would fall on my partner as it is in joint names, who on her own would not be able to keep up with the repayments so for peace of mind, we opted to scour the life insurance market with the help of a broker to get a joint life, first death life insurance policy to cover our £172,000 mortgage. So, in the event of either of us dying, there would not be the additional worry of how the hell am I going to keep the house on top of the grieving process.

We received a number of quotes and I will just here point out that we did not go for the cheapest option, we elected to take our 25 year policy out with Barclays as we have both got accounts with them and both have never had any reason to question their standards or professionalism. The cheapest options available were what is known as decreasing term assurance where the lump sum payable on death decreases each year in line with the outstanding mortgage debt. This meant that if one of us died straight away £172,000 would be payable, but if one of us died in 24 years, the likely lump sum would be only £10,000-£15,000. We opted to go for level term assurance so the lump sum payable would remain at £172,000 for the entire 25 year term. It works out more expensive, but if one of us dies in 15 years, there is a nice lump sum available to assist with funeral costs and additional expenditure (it increasingly looks like it will probably be used to cover any inheritance tax liability that falls on our kids). The monthly premium in the end came to £37 and this is fixed for the full 25 year term of the policy.

The application forms were onerous and took over an hour to complete with every bit of personal information you could think of required. In addition to this, we had to give our consent to Barclays approaching our GP for details of our medical history. This is where I started to worry due to a few niggles thanks to my past. To ease the sense of foreboding I asked to see a copy of the doctors report prior to it being sent to Barclays. This slowed the process down by a week or so, but wasn't that much of a problem as we had a month for everything to get sorted before we completed on our house.

Overall, it took Barclays 2 weeks to turn around the application after the doctor had written to them and we received a letter confirming that we had been accepted for cover along with a policy document that outlined the terms and conditions of the policy.

I was pleased with the service we received and I'm happy to be paying to a reputable company like Barclays for my life cover. My name on the policy document was spelt wrong (a common error) but the staff when I phoned were polite and very helpful and within 5 days a new policy popped thgrough the letterbox. When we came to change our address there were no problems again, I confirmed some personal information and the lady at the other end of the phone change our details. 4 days later a letter popped through the letterbox just to confirm that the changes had been made. Now that is service.

I can't comment on the claims procedure and really hope I never have to. I would be very happy to pay to Barclays for 25 years without claiming just for the peace of mind.