How One Young Family Protects Their Future With Insurance

Davindra and Pari Singh* live in the GTA with their five-year-old daughter. When they’re not socializing with friends in their backyard, they take their daughter to soccer, swimming, and gymnastics. “Gymnastics is her favourite,” says Davindra.

Growing up in India, Davindra would often talk about insurance with his family, but policies in Canada can look different. Luckily, a family member who’s an insurance broker helped Pari and Davindra choose. But life as young parents has changed somewhat now. Though the family’s main focus is keeping up with interest rates and paying down debt, Davindra thinks it’s probably time to revisit the family’s policies.

Expenses

Mortgage: We have two properties: a house and a condo. The total mortgage on both is $1.6 million. We pay $4,100 a month for our house and we charge $3,100 a month in rent for the condo, but because of the increase in the interest rate, we’re actually losing money on the condo.

Childcare: Our daughter goes to aftercare, so that’s about $400 a month.

Other monthly expenses

Food, which includes takeout and eating out: $1,400 a month

Entertainment: I have subscriptions to YouTube Premium, Disney, Netflix, and IPTV, so that’s $70 a month.

Phone and internet: $280 a month.

Transportation: I own my car, so I don’t have any car payments, but I pay about $180 a month in insurance. I’m not driving to work full time, so I’m paying about $120 in gas a month.

Savings: My wife and I both contribute to our work RRSPs, because our employers match our contributions. We have just under $150,000 in total.

Insurance: We have home insurance and car insurance, a term life policy, and critical illness coverage.

Growing up, what kinds of conversations did you have about insurance?

We always had insurance discussions at home, back in India. So words such as insurance and premium were pretty familiar.

Why did you choose critical illness insurance and term life insurance?

We got the term life insurance policy, which suited our budget when we were younger. It’s a 20-year policy, and we’ve paid about 10 years.

It seemed like the best product, because the other option was three times more expensive per month, which was a no-go at the time. We never regretted it, but we’ve also never revisited it, even after having our daughter.

The thought was that, if we ever needed it, the insurance would pay off the mortgage on the first house. That’s probably unlikely now with interest rates. However, when we bought the policy at age 30, the assumption was that we would have investments and assets outside of the insurance policy, which we now have with the condo. If something were to happen, we could sell that, and it would bring a windfall.

We knew it was important to get critical illness insurance because we thought that, if we got sick or badly injured, we would get this lump sum of money to pay our bills, even if we weren’t working.

When did you first get home insurance? Did you shop around and compare rates and premiums?

It was when we bought our first home in 2014. We didn’t shop around. We worked with our insurance broker, who said this was the best price and product. We trust them, so we got it.

Where did you learn about insurance and what type of coverage you needed?

Our insurance broker, who happens to be family, came in when we bought our first house and suggested we get home insurance, so we went ahead and got the policy.

Since then, a lot has changed. Our income has increased due to promotions and new jobs. So have our housing costs, but we haven’t changed our insurance policy. We probably need to rejig it, considering our debt levels have changed.

How are you trying to save on insurance costs?

We worked with our insurance broker, but, other than that, we haven’t really looked into bundling different policies.

Do you have financial goals as a family?

We want to pay off our mortgages, save for retirement, and make sure we’re all comfortable. Right now, we spend a lot of time at home with friends. We do travel, doing one trip a year. We’re currently travelling in Canada, because international travel is expensive.

Our last trip was to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. We stopped in Halifax. For our next trip, we want to go to the West Coast and Alberta. The good thing is, you can stay within Canada and use your local currency.

What are you doing now to help plan and prepare for your family’s future well-being?

We’re going to continue contributing to our RRSPs. Starting an RESP has been on the radar for a while, but we’ve put that one aside temporarily, because we’re trying to stay on top of interest rates.

Our rental property is also part of our long-term plan to save for our daughter’s education.

We don’t know when we’ll retire. The long-term plan is to downsize. In 30 years, we probably won’t need this big of a house and probably won’t need to live in the city. We’ll sell the house, so that when we’re 70, we’ll have those funds, plus the money we’re putting into our work RRSPs and whatever savings we have.

What concerns do you have about your family’s financial future?

The number one thing on our minds is, we want to be comfortable. We want to find a balance between “Hey, live your life in the present as much as you can and save enough for the future as well.” We want to have the freedom to choose what we want to do and own, without having to meticulously plan our budget and cut back.

If we’re dreaming big, we love the East Coast. It wouldn’t be a terrible idea to retire there.

*Names have been changed.

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