Insurance
What protects the wealth that has been built.
Insurance for a HNW family is not a product decision. It is the answer to a set of specific questions: what happens to the business if one person is gone, where the family gets money while an estate is frozen, and what a serious illness treated abroad costs in a currency the family does not earn.
Cover is sized against exposure, not against income
The common approach, a multiple of annual income, produces the wrong number for a family whose wealth sits in a business and whose obligations sit in three currencies. The right method starts with the exposures: outstanding liabilities, the cost of running the household for a defined period, school fees to completion, and the liquidity the estate will need before probate.
The business carries a risk nobody has written down
A policy whose proceeds fall into the estate joins everything else that is frozen. Written correctly, with beneficiary designation and ownership considered in advance, the proceeds reach the family directly and quickly. This single distinction is the difference between cover that solves the liquidity problem and cover that solves nothing, and it is settled at the point of purchase rather than at the point of claim.
Nigeria: cover sized in naira against costs billed in dollars
Two gaps recur when existing cover is audited against actual exposure. The first is a sum assured set several years ago in naira against a treatment or education cost billed in dollars or pounds. Currency movement since has made it materially inadequate, and nothing in the policy adjusts for that. Cover should be reviewed whenever the naira moves significantly, not only at renewal.
The second is geographic. A domestic health plan covers Nigerian providers. A student abroad on a university plan and a parent at home on a Nigerian plan leaves a gap in the middle, discovered at the point of claim. The questions that decide adequacy are whether the policy covers the countries where treatment would realistically be sought, and whether it continues if the family’s country of residence changes.
Every Nigerian employer of three or more people is required to maintain group life cover for employees under the Pension Reform Act. Families frequently count that cover toward the household’s protection without checking what it actually pays or whether it survives the founder leaving the business.