About Best Life Insurance

Best Life Insurance is a referral service. That is the whole of it. We publish research about New Zealand life, trauma, TPD, income protection and mortgage cover, and when a reader wants to act on it we pass their enquiry to one licensed adviser firm.

We are not an insurer. We do not underwrite anything, we hold no policies, and we cannot accept or decline an application. We are not a Financial Advice Provider either. We hold no licence to give regulated financial advice in New Zealand, and nothing on this site is personalised advice — it cannot be, because we do not know your health, your income, your debts or who depends on you.

We do not sell insurance, we do not quote premiums, and we do not take applications. Every premium figure on this site is quoted from a named third-party source on a stated date. It is a reference point for what the market looks like, not an offer and not a price you will be charged.

When you complete a form here, your enquiry goes to Marble Life, a New Zealand adviser firm. Their Registered Financial Service Providers hold the licence, do the fact-find, compare the market and make the recommendation. If you buy something, you buy it through them, from an insurer, under that insurer’s policy wording.

1. 1

   You send an enquiry

   Contact details, an age band, a region, what kind of cover you are thinking about and anything you want to add. We do not ask for medical information on this website and you should not put any in the notes field.

2. 2

   We pass it on

   The enquiry goes to one adviser firm. Not to a panel, not to a lead auction, not to a list of insurers who will each ring you. One firm.

3. 3

   An adviser contacts you

   They will ask a lot of questions before they say anything useful. That is the job. You can ask them for their disclosure information at any point, and you can look any New Zealand adviser up for no cost on the Financial Service Providers Register.

4. 4

   You get a recommendation in writing

   Options, reasoning, and what each policy does not cover. You are free to take it, take part of it, or take none of it.

We do not sell your details on. Your enquiry goes to one firm for the purpose of giving you advice, and that is the only place it goes. What we collect and why is set out in full in our privacy policy.

New Zealand is well served for pages that list premiums side by side and tell you life insurance is important. It is very poorly served for pages that explain the parts of the transaction that actually decide whether you get paid.

So that is what we write about. The material the rest of the market leaves out, either because it is difficult, or because it is commercially awkward.

• Underwriting mechanics — what an insurer actually asks, why two people with the same condition get different answers, and what a loading, an exclusion or a deferral means in practice.
• Why claims get declined. Non-disclosure, definitions that do not mean what people assume, waiting periods, and the difference between an “own occupation” and an “any occupation” test.
• Tax and estate treatment. Who receives a payout, whether it is taxable, how it interacts with a will, a trust and KiwiSaver, and where the money can get stuck.
• The ACC gap. ACC is generous for accidents and covers nothing for illness. Most people who need income protection need it for the illness half, and most do not know that.
• Policy wordings. What the document says, rather than what the brochure says.

We say when cover is not worth buying

This is the part that separates us from the insurer-owned blogs. There are situations where the honest answer is do not buy this. Funeral cover held long enough that the premiums exceed the payout. Mortgage protection sold alongside a loan that duplicates cover you already hold. Trauma cover bought at a sum insured so small it will not change any decision you make. Stepped premiums taken by someone in their fifties who will almost certainly cancel the policy in their sixties, at exactly the age it was meant to matter.

We are paid when we refer an enquiry, so writing that costs us money. We write it anyway, because a site that never says no is not research, it is marketing. If you read a page here and conclude you do not need the product, we would rather that than the alternative.

Every page on this site is written and reviewed by the Best Life Insurance editorial team. It is not user-generated, it is not sponsored, and no insurer pays for placement, ordering or favourable wording anywhere on this site.

1. 1A page starts from the question a reader actually types, not from a keyword. If we cannot state the answer in one sentence at the top, the page is not ready.
2. 2Every factual claim is traced to a public source — a regulator, an industry body, a published comparison, or an insurer’s own policy wording. Anything we cannot source is written as a general tendency (“insurers typically…”) rather than as a number.
3. 3Product mechanics are checked against current policy wordings and product disclosure material rather than against marketing pages, because the two often disagree.
4. 4Regulatory statements are checked against the Financial Markets Authority, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the relevant legislation rather than against other websites.
5. 5Every figure carries the source and the date it was read. When a source updates, we update the figure and the date together, or we remove it.
6. 6Pages are re-read on a rolling basis. Premium tables age fastest, so they are the first thing we check.

The limits of what we do

We are careful, but we are not infallible and we are not a substitute for reading the policy document. Insurers change definitions, rates and underwriting appetite without announcing it. A page that was accurate in September may be out of date by March. If a decision matters, confirm it with the adviser and with the wording before you act on it. If you find something on this site that is wrong, tell us and we will correct it.

We prefer regulators and industry bodies for market data, and named published comparisons for pricing. We do not use anonymous aggregator figures, and we do not repeat a number we cannot trace to a document with a date on it.

Date-stamping is not optional here

A premium figure without a date is a marketing claim. Every number we publish carries the source it came from and the date that source was read, and every page carries the date it was last updated. The market data on this site was last re-checked on 2026-09-04. If you are reading this a long way from that date, treat the figures as historical and ask an adviser for current rates.

The same discipline applies to product features. Benefit definitions, occupation classes and evidence limits change. Where we describe how something usually works, we say “typically”, because the exception is always an insurer-specific one and it is always in the wording.

We are paid a referral fee by the adviser firm when we pass on an enquiry. The adviser is paid commission by the insurer if you take out a policy. That commission is built into the premium whether an adviser is involved or not, which means going direct does not get you a discount — it just removes the person whose job it is to argue with the insurer on your behalf.

That arrangement creates a conflict, and pretending otherwise would be worse than the conflict itself. We set out how it works, what it means for you, and the questions you should ask any adviser about their remuneration on our “How we get paid” page. No competitor in this market publishes that page. We think that is the point.

You will never see paid placement here. Insurer order in our tables follows price or the source’s own ordering, never a commercial arrangement, and no insurer has any input into what we write about them.

Email hello@cover4you.co.nz or call 0800 468 376. We are a New Zealand service and we can only help New Zealand residents.

One thing we cannot do: answer questions about a policy you already hold. We have no access to it, and guessing would be worse than useless. Those questions go to your insurer or to the adviser who arranged the cover. If you have a complaint about an adviser, raise it with the adviser firm first, and if that does not resolve it you can take it to their dispute resolution scheme at no cost to you.