Following Morgan Stanley's lead, RGA asked a teenager, Sean Brewer, to conduct research into insurance. The results, with a foreword from Greg Becker, were enlightening
Why do young people not buy life insurance and how can we get them interested in it?
For young people, insurance is a tough concept to understand. In our ignorance, we believe death will never happen to us, or others of our age. As much as we hope this to be the case, there is only one certainty in life: that is death.
Why me?
During work experience at RGA in London, I was set a challenge to find out why young people do not buy life insurance and how the younger generation could be made aware of how important life insurance is.
To answer the fundamental question: we analysed what information would be required to enable us to get people to get involved.
A list of questions that would form the basis of our survey, using Survey Monkey, was sent out to friends and friends of friends, through a number of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and even by basic email.
Although ‘Tweeting' @Lord_Sugar did not invoke a response, 126 people did complete the questionnaire, of which 33 were workers at RGA. The survey was open over a six-day period, and to help encourage more people to complete it, a £50 prize voucher was offered as an incentive to one lucky respondent, who was picked at random.
The survey contained about 30 relatively simple questions and was answered by 56 males and 37 females. There was a larger proportion of males under the age of 18 who completed the questionnaire. It is believed the reason for this was because the author encouraged a large number of his friends to complete the survey.
It transpired that there was a significant difference between the three specific age groups when it comes to having life insurance. Looking at the chart 1 (top right, opposite), it shows a very colourful picture. Perhaps obviously, more than 80% of under-18s who responded do not have any life insurance. This correlation shows that the number of people without life insurance clearly decreases as age increases.
As expected, the youth of today know little, if anything, about life insurance. This could be the reason why young adults do not have life insurance. It seems that life insurance is not a major concern for middle aged people (18- to 30-year-olds); they have few, if any, dependents requiring that level of protection, so will tend to spend their money on other things.
Younger people do not want to think about life insurance, being that they are young, innocent-minded and believe they will live forever, so are unconcerned about it.
