Overlapping, Outdated, or Over-Insured: The Case for Reviewing Your Insurance in Singapore

Insurance bought over decades, even if well-bought, still needs a second opinion to understand if it still serves your life.

A client came to us at the cusp of retirement holding eighteen insurance policies, sold over the years by four different adviser representatives. That figure excluded policies that had already lapsed, and representatives who had long since left the industry. We remember two other clients who came to us in similar circumstances — one held twenty-one policies, another twelve. All three had spent decades in good financial standing, all three had purchased thoughtfully at each point in time, but all three arrived at retirement still feeling under-resourced and unable.

The instinct, on hearing a number like eighteen or twenty-one, is to assume the problem and fix is straightforward. Reduce the number to cut the excess and keep the essentials. In practice, once we went through each client’s policies individually, we did not cut the load by even half. Most of what they held had a legitimate purpose. What none of them had was someone assessing each policy against what was most important to them (a well-defined retirement unique to their own life), and changing what didn’t fit.

This is the more useful way to think about an insurance portfolio review. Policies accumulate in isolated moments across a working life. A policy at twenty-five. A rider added at thirty-two. Another plan purchased after having children, and a fourth after starting a business. Each decision was reasonable when it was made. What rarely happens is a moment where someone asks, of everything held, whether it is still doing the job it was bought to do.

What happens without ongoing assessment

What happens without ongoing assessment

This is the single fact that explains most of what tends to go wrong in an insurance position built up over decades: things purchased at different moments, for different reasons, rarely get reassessed holistically unless someone makes it their specific job.

That kind of reassessment is not a fair burden to place on the very person the coverage exists to protect. Stewarding an insurance position against someone's actual goals, year after year, as both grow and change, is a professional responsibility, not a side task fitted around a career and a family.

Without it, coverage overlaps. Personal accident cover attached to a credit card, a separate accident rider bundled into a health policy, a standalone accident plan bought years before either of the other two existed. None of these were bought as duplicates on purpose. Each simply arrived at a different time, unchecked against what already existed. The cost surfaces most sharply at the point of a claim. A family already under strain is expected to remember that coverage exists in three separate places — a card's fine print, a policy rider, and a plan bought a decade ago.

Coverage also falls behind. A sum assured calculated against an income from ten or fifteen years ago rarely keeps pace unless someone deliberately revisits it. Riders suited to a single person renting a flat make far less sense for someone who is now married, owns a home, and has children. The Dependants' Protection Scheme, which most Singaporeans are automatically enrolled into at twenty-one through CPF, is frequently forgotten entirely.

Nominations on older policies go unreviewed for the same reason a will, a CPF nomination, and an insurance nomination can drift apart from each other over time, a pattern we've seen closely enough to write about separately in Common Estate Planning Mistakes. Each document updates independently and keeping them aligned is exactly the kind of continuous stewardship a plan loses without a dedicated professional watching it.

The same neglect works in reverse, too. Just as coverage can silently overlap, it can just as easily look excessive without being so. The number of policies held says nothing on its own about whether someone is over-insured, under-insured, or exactly right. Five whole life policies can sound like a great deal of insurance, until you notice that each is worth $50,000, the combined sum assured comes to $250,000, and the person holding them earns $300,000 to $500,000 a year, supports a family of four, and carries a mortgage. Judged by policy count, that looks like excess. Judged by what the coverage needs to do, it may fall well short.

A whole life policy bought for you in childhood, often by a parent, adds a further wrinkle. It typically carries a rate locked in from a very young age, guaranteed insurability regardless of current health, and cash value accumulated over decades, none of which a new policy can replicate. Whether any single policy is worth keeping depends on what it is doing for you, assessed on its own terms. The number of other policies sitting alongside it says nothing about that on its own.

Products like investment-linked plans (ILPs), designed to combine protection, investment, and flexibility in a single structure, raise a related question, worth asking plainly rather than as a criticism. Does combining three distinct objectives into one product make it easier or harder to assess whether each part is serving you, compared with holding each objective separately and judging it on its own? That is worth understanding before deciding whether the convenience is worth the reduced clarity into what each part is doing. Which is exactly the kind of judgement our three clients had never had made on their behalf.

What the assessment looks like

For two of the three clients, most of what they held was not a failure. It was the ordinary result of good decisions made at different times, by people who had never had their insurance position stewarded as a whole. Once properly assessed, most of it still made sense as it stood.

The third client’s position was different. Years of churning had caused genuine damage, but once the position was properly assessed, there was a clear course of action. Although the damage could not be undone, it could be managed in a way that made him look forward to the retirement he wanted.

In each case, what changed was not the number of policies carried. It was that responsibility for the insurance position, year after year, no longer rested with the client. Instead, it now rests in professional care and expertise — an adviser keeping the whole position coherent as life, needs and priorities change.

We’d welcome a conversation

If it has been some years since anyone assessed your full insurance position against what matters to you, rather than piecing it together policy by policy, adviser by adviser, or entirely on your own, we'd welcome the opportunity to do that with you. Our Discovery Meeting is where we start: a complete view of what you hold and what matters most to you, which becomes the basis for weighing your position against your goals and shaping what comes next.

Three questions we hear most often

Does reviewing my insurance mean I’ll be told to cancel policies?

Not necessarily, and in most cases, no. As the examples above show, the point of a review is to assess what each policy is doing against what you are trying to achieve, not to reduce the total number by default. Some policies, particularly older whole life plans, are often worth keeping precisely because of when and how they were bought. A proper review is as likely to confirm what you hold as it is to change it.

How often should an insurance position be reviewed?

At minimum, after any significant change in circumstances: a marriage, a divorce, a new child, a property purchase, a career change or pay raise, a business sold, an inheritance or other windfall, or the approach of retirement. Beyond that, a periodic review every few years is a reasonable rhythm, since sum assured, riders, and nominations can all fall behind even without a major life event to prompt it.

What is insurance churning, and how would I know if it happened to me?

Churning occurs when a policy is replaced or restructured primarily to generate new commission for an adviser, rather than because it genuinely serves the client better. It can be difficult to identify without a professional review, since the paperwork for each individual transaction often looks reasonable in isolation. Signs worth flagging include multiple policies taken out with different advisers over a short period, earlier policies that lapsed shortly after a new one was purchased, or being unable to recall why a particular product replaced another.