I know I’m getting off on the wrong foot here but there’s no getting around it – life insurance should really be called death insurance.

There, I’ve said it: the dreaded D word that few in our cosseted, comfortable, complacent culture can bear to contemplate. We’re quite disposed to talk plausibly about winning the Lottery, for example, a one in fourteen million chance; but not about dying, which is a cert that absolutely no one can avoid. I’m sorry but you, me and everyone else you’ve ever met are going to have to shuffle off the mortal coil at some point in the not too distant future, so let’s get real about it.

Not that many people want to though. Even the pension providers market their products as post-work pocket money that will go on forever as you undertake golden Caribbean cruises and ‘discovery holidays’ to old Cornish mining villages, preserved in a benign time warp that just adds a few laughter lines and grey wisps here and there as the years slip painlessly (and endlessly) on. An annuity is an eternity in this never-never land.

But not only is life not like that – it’s a good deal harder than that as well. Death doesn’t only take silvery octogenerians who have lived life to the full and who slip painlessly to the other side surrounded by their adoring families wondering who’s been left the Val Doonican albums. It is quite as likely to claim younger, hard working, well paid people whose departure will cause much grief – financial and otherwise – to those left behind.

This is where life insurance (let’s agree not to call it death insurance) comes in and what we shall be looking at in the next section. In the meantime, why not go and get yourself a UK life insurance quote? Because you won’t live forever, you know.

For more information on life insurance, go to the Association of British Insurers (ABI) on www.abi.org.uk