You will map your current insurance against four risks and list the gaps.
Most people do not know what insurance they hold. They know they pay premiums, they remember a meeting with an adviser a few years ago, and they think their company covers "something". Ask them what happens to their family if they die tomorrow, or to their rent if they cannot work for a year, and the honest answer is a shrug.
In this exercise you replace the shrug with a single page. You will map every policy you hold against the four risks from the last three lessons and list the gaps. It takes about half an hour, most of it spent finding documents.
Gather every source of cover. Some of it you bought, and some came to you through the government, your employer or your family.
Start with the national schemes. Log in to cpf.gov.sg with Singpass and check MediShield Life, the Dependants' Protection Scheme, CareShield Life, and the Home Protection Scheme if you have an HDB flat bought with CPF.
Then your own policies. Check each insurer's app or website, your email for policy documents, and any paper files at home. A policy your parents took out for you as a child counts too. MAS MoneySense's MyMoneySense service can pull together policies from many insurers in one view, if you link your accounts.
Finally, employer cover. Your HR portal, benefits handbook or employment contract should list group hospital, group term life and any other group cover.
Set up a table with one row per policy and columns for the four risks: hospitalisation, death, critical illness and disability income. For each policy, write in the right column the amount it pays and when the cover ends.
Be precise about the amount. Hospital cover is described by ward class and whether it has a rider, from lesson 4.1. Death and critical illness cover are lump sums. Disability income cover is a monthly amount with a waiting period.
Some policies cover more than one risk. A life policy with a critical illness rider goes in two columns. A policy that is mainly savings may still pay something on death, so read its benefit summary rather than guessing.
Then add one more column: does this cover end when you leave your job? For group cover from your employer, the answer is usually yes, and often the cover stops on your last day.
This matters because job changes are common, and the gap appears at an awkward time. If you leave a job and fall ill before your next employer's cover starts, or before you buy cover of your own, the group policy will not help. A condition diagnosed while you rely on group cover can also make your own cover harder to get later, or come with that condition excluded.
Now read across each column and ask: if this happened tomorrow, what would pay, and would it be enough? Use the amounts you worked out in lessons 4.2 and 4.3 as your measure.
Rank the gaps by the damage each could do to you and the people who depend on you, not by how likely each event feels. A gap that would cost you S$15,000 matters less than one that would leave your family short by hundreds of thousands, even if the smaller one seems more likely.
Here is Farah's map, with figures made up for the example. She is 29, single, with essential spending of S$2,500 a month, and she gives her mother S$800 a month.
For hospitalisation she has MediShield Life, which lasts for life, and group hospital cover at work, which ends when she leaves. She has no shield plan of her own.
For death she has S$50,000 of group term life at work, which also ends when she leaves, and the Dependants' Protection Scheme, whose sum assured and end age she copies from the CPF website.
For critical illness she has a policy her parents bought when she was 18, paying S$30,000 on a major critical illness.
For disability income she has nothing. She checks CareShield Life on the CPF website and notes when her cover starts. It pays for care after severe disability and would not replace her salary.
Then she ranks the gaps. First, disability income. As lesson 4.3 showed, a year off work would leave S$15,000 of her bills unpaid even after her emergency fund, and a longer absence would cost far more.
Second, death. Her mother would lose S$800 a month. If Farah wanted that covered for 15 years, that is S$800 x 12, which is S$9,600 a year, times 15, which is S$144,000. She has S$50,000 that ends with her job, plus the Dependants' Protection Scheme payout.
Third, hospitalisation. When she leaves her job, she is left with MediShield Life alone, sized for subsidised wards.
Fourth, critical illness. A year of her essential spending is S$2,500 x 12, which is S$30,000, so her policy would pay for about one year of bills.
She does not buy anything yet. She takes the list to a licensed adviser, with the detail in Insurance Decoded as her preparation, so she arrives knowing what she needs rather than what she is being offered.
A finished map has every policy you hold in it, each placed against the risks it covers, with an amount and an end date in every filled cell, and employer cover flagged. Below the table sits a short list of gaps, worst first.
Open the CPF website and your insurer's app side by side, and start filling in the first row.
Complete the insurance map for all your policies and write a list of gaps in order of the damage each could do.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).