Money secret No. 22: Check your insurance policies and other contracts

One of the first things I always advise people to do is to make a list of all the insurance policies you’ve taken out over the course of a year.

Take some time to look at each of the policies on your list. They might be several years old. We always take out an insurance policy based on what we know at a given point in time. It’s worth your while to check whether the insurance policies are still useful given what you know today. Calculate how much money you spend in a year on each policy and ask yourself if it’s really necessary.

Take pension insurance, for example. These contracts often have all kinds of hidden fees – take a moment to read the fine print. You generally aren’t going to get your money back without paying some additional high fees, but it still might be practical to stop making contributions.

Even when it comes to life insurance, you should figure out if you actually need it. You don’t really need life insurance if you don’t have any dependents, nobody in your family is dependent upon your money, and you have enough money for those you leave behind to handle immediate expenses in the event of your passing. On the other hand, if you have a family, you do need a sufficient life insurance policy to support them upon your passing.

Money secret No. 22: Be completely honest with yourself and ask: Is it worth it for me to keep paying pension insurance? You would more than likely be better off investing that money straight into an ETF portfolio that you own completely and that you can control.