Dying is Profitable

A letter arrived in the mail yesterday from a life insurance company offering me a life insurance policy.  I'm 31 years old and this is the first time anything like this has been sent to me, up until now I wasn't part of the demographic that these advertising campaigns focus on.  After the initial shock of being sent this offer, I stopped to think about why it got to me so much.  The easy answer is to say that it is a reminder that you are getting old and that life insurance is a way of gently reminding you that you are going to die some day.  I don't think that's what caused such a response from me personally though because I've never really focused on my age that much, I'm not the sort of person that dreads their next birthday and being another year older, it really is just a number to me.

So what was it about this letter that got to me so much?  Well when I give myself a day or two to think about it and all that it entailed something dawned on me.  The amount the policy would cover me personally for was around £60,000 [$77,000] at a premium of £6 [$7] per month.  I've had a lot of things on my mind lately and most of them are not positive.  Life is a bit of a struggle right now at times and having another worry to add to the list isn't something that is appreciated.  I've noticed my finances slowly grow tighter and things are getting harder to balance, so much to the point that I've had to dip into savings to pay down some bills which I don't feel good about because honestly right now I feel like I will never get that money back, my savings will never be that high again.

When I think about how much debt I am in, there is a negative spiral of emotions that are evoked, to the extreme this leads to a feeling of complete despair.  The past few years have not been easy as anyone who has been following my health journey on my other blog will know and attest to.  My career prospects right now are quite bleak and the UK as a whole is teetering on the edge of recession and Northern Ireland where I live has already entered recession based on feedback from many businesses and knowing how my own finances are constricting I would assert that to be true too, even though official data does not acknowledge it, you can see the signs if you look.  Shops are closing, restaurants are closing, prices are rising and the consumer can't keep up, even if wages are rising on paper, their purchasing power is not.

Add to all of the above the fact that today there is a summit in Brussels intended to try and reach a deal for the UK in its Brexit negotiations, will that happen?  I honestly don't know and at this point I don't think it will make any difference whether there is a deal or not, remaining is the only course that could save our economy both in Northern Ireland and the UK as a whole but that now seems unlikely.  Any Brexit in any form is going to fuck this country financially and at this point I think it is now inevitable.

Signs of hope for the future are few and far between.  I've been actively avoiding the news, rationing my access to it because I know it only makes me feel worse and right now what I need is escape not further doses of reality that are too much to bear.  I know I am not alone in all of this and that isn't a consolation, it only extends your worry by adding the people you love and care about to the list of things you worry about.  My concern for the future and for my finances are not limited to my own but extend to my family's finances too because I know they are also struggling.

I have been suicidal in my past, and at one point I acted upon that, I am still here.  The reason I am still alive I believe is because I am meant to be.  I don't know why, but I have accepted that isn't an option for me, even if I went down that router one day again I believe something would happen that would keep me here.  I realise how dark this sounds and I would like to allay the fears of anyone reading this I have no intention of going anywhere.  I am going through a low point right now but I know I will survive, that doesn't make it any easier to endure though.

That letter that arrived got to me so much because if I am brutally honest with you and myself, the thought when I saw the £60,000 was that financially at least, my family and the people I care about would be better off if I was dead.  That is an incredibly dark thought, and it is one that I recognise as incredibly dangerous.  I know my family would miss me, and I know they love me and I know that they would never swap me for that money, if anything happened to me they'd probably give that and much more to bring me back, if they knew it could they'd find a way.  What this made me realise though is that I am stronger in mind than I give myself credit for, and it also made me genuinely concerned for other people who might not be. 

These advertisements are purely to generate revenue for the companies that send them out, but at what cost?  When you offer credit to people there is a requirement in UK law to be a responsible lender and determine that the credit being offered is affordable to the person it is being offered to, as a means of protecting people who are vulnerable to exploitation.  If such a thing exists for credit lines, why is there no equivalent precautions in place for life insurance?  I understand that the company that sent this probably never even considered the mental health of the person they were sending it to, and I also understand that it's only an offer and maybe during the application process for the policy itself there would be some sort of evaluation that would recognise that this would be a very bad idea to offer something like this to someone like me, with my history.  That doesn't change the fact that they sent this without considering any of this, and it doesn't change the fact that it has clearly had an effect on me.

Suicide is something that I don't really talk about, beyond the semicolon in my twitter name which was part of Project Semicolon a not for profit organisation that ran a campaign where those who participate would use a semicolon ';' as an indicator for those who knew about the project.  The semicolon was a way of showing people you were a survivor and that you were there to talk if they were going through something similar or had been through it.  The project I am unsure is still active as their website at time of writing was unresponsive and their social media profiles haven't been updated in some time.

Beyond the semicolon there isn't much indication that this is something I have been through.  There isn't a register that companies can search, medical records aren't accessible to private companies without explicit consent granted by the patient and even government initiatives that share some medical information for research purposes conform to DPA and GDPR legislation by anonymising the data before it is shared so there's no way a company like this can check before they send this type of marketing information out. 

What can you do then to remedy the negative consequences of this type of advertising?  There are two main options I can think of, the first is to ban it completely which would be using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut and would likely be met with backlash and protest from the industry.  The other means of reducing the impact of this type of marketing would be to remove the figures from the letter.  Allow life insurance companies to continue to send out their letters informing people about their service but do not include individual tailored quotes with figures. 

You might argue that you could simply opt out of this type of marketing, and my response to that is simple - I never opted in.  When I sign up for anything online and fill out forms etc I always read that section about marketing and untick or tick the relevant boxes to opt out, I am certain I never signed up to this.  What's more, I am 31 years old and the letter they sent has my age as 30 so I know they didn't get my details from any of my banks, or credit card companies or any other financial company and as for the electoral register I am opted out of the public register and only listed on the full register which companies can't use for marketing.  So I have no idea where they got my details from, and having asked companies in the past for details as to where their data comes from, the same response is usually given which is a stock reply telling you they don't keep an individual record of the source of each piece of data they have and offer you a list of partners as long as your arm of who they share data with.  It sounds lazy and I admit it is, but I don't have the energy to find out, it's much easier just to shred the letter.