After marriage: which insurance policies should you keep?

This is a practical housekeeping lesson — the kind of admin that is easy to postpone and expensive to get wrong. An hour spent here, soon after marrying, sets the household's protection right for years.

Health insurance: family floater, individual policy, or both?

Before marriage you each likely held an individual health policy. Now you can add a family floater — a single policy with one sum insured shared across the family. The question is whether to switch, keep both, or layer them.

The floater's appeal is real: lower premium, and a bigger limit that either partner can draw on when they are the one who needs it. For a young, healthy couple it is often the sensible core of their health cover.

Do not cancel your own policy because your employer provides cover

Many couples, once both are working, allow their personal health policies to lapse and rely on their employers' group cover. It feels efficient. It is a trap.

Employer health cover ends the day the job does — resignation, redundancy, a career break, a move — and that is often exactly when you are least able to buy fresh cover on good terms, especially if a health condition has appeared in the meantime. Keep at least one independent personal or family policy that belongs to you, not your employer, and treat the employer cover as a bonus layer on top rather than your foundation.

The same logic applies to a partner who stops working to run the home or raise children: they must not be left dependent solely on the other's employer cover. Their protection needs to be independent of anyone's job.

How marriage changes your need for life insurance

Here is the shift that matters most. Before marriage, often nobody depended on your income, so life insurance was optional — the health-before-life logic of the first-job stage. Marriage changes that. The day another person's security rests on your earnings, term insurance stops being optional.

The principle in short: buy term insurance — pure, cheap life cover with no investment mixed in — sized to what your partner (and later your children) would need if your income vanished. Avoid policies that bundle insurance with investment; they serve you poorly on both counts. The full method for sizing the cover properly, which gives a larger and more honest number than the usual "10 times income" rule, has its own dedicated lesson. If both partners earn, both may need cover; if one earns and the other runs the home, the earner's cover matters most, but the homemaker's economic contribution is real and often underinsured.

Update all policy details and nominations

Update nominations everywhere. This is the single most-forgotten task at marriage. Insurance policies, bank accounts, mutual funds, EPF — many still name a parent or nobody. Update them to reflect your new situation. A nominee is not the same as who legally inherits, an important distinction with its own lesson, but an out-of-date nomination causes real delay and difficulty at the worst possible time.

Review, do not blindly cancel. Before dropping any existing policy, check what you would lose — a waiting period already served, a pre-existing condition already covered, a low premium locked in when you were younger. Sometimes an old policy is worth keeping exactly because it cannot be bought again on the same terms.

List everything in one place. Part of merging financial lives is that each partner knows what protection exists and how to claim it. A simple shared list of every policy, its cover, and its documents is worth an afternoon, and invaluable if one of you ever has to act alone.