Insurance Guides
Guides on term life, health insurance, critical illness cover, and ULIP vs MF decisions.
Cashless vs Reimbursement: The Real Claim Walkthrough for 2026
Cashless is the default on most Indian hospitalisations — until the pre-auth comes back with a haircut or the procedure isn't network-eligible. We walk through both paths end-to-end, including the IRDAI 1-hour and 3-hour approval windows, and name the specific triggers when reimbursement is actually the better call.
Read guideHealth Insurance Portability in India: When It's Worth It
IRDAI lets you port a health insurance policy to a different insurer without losing waiting-period credits or no-claim bonus. That does not mean porting is always the right call. We map the specific triggers where porting wins, the traps where it costs money, and the 30-day process most people get wrong.
Read guideHealth Insurance Policy Audit Checklist: Clauses to Check Before Renewal
A practical Indian health-insurance renewal checklist: room-rent caps, co-pay, deductibles, PED waits, sublimits, consumables, modern treatments, maternity, renewability, and claim-shock leakage.
Read guideCritical Illness vs Health Insurance: Why You Likely Need Both
Health insurance pays the hospital. Critical illness insurance pays the household. They solve different financial problems after a diagnosis, and for most salaried earners carrying loans or dependents, skipping one leaves a gap the other cannot close.
Read guideHow Much Health Insurance Sum Insured Do You Need in 2026?
Medical inflation has quietly turned ₹5 lakh into the new ₹2 lakh. We work out the Metro Floor rule for Tier-1 cities in 2026, walk through the room-rent sublimit trap that can halve a ₹10 lakh claim, and show how a base cover plus super top-up usually beats a single high sum insured.
Read guideHow Much Term Insurance Do You Actually Need?
The 10× income rule-of-thumb was invented before inflation and dependents mattered. We break cover sizing into three blocks — income replacement, liabilities, and dependents' support — so the number you arrive at is the one your family can live on, not the one an agent upsold you.
Read guideULIP vs Term + Mutual Fund: The Real 30-Year Math
ULIPs hide four layers of charges behind a single premium. Over 20 years, the charge stack typically costs 25-45% of the corpus vs a pure term policy paired with a direct mutual fund SIP. We walk through the charge-by-charge math and name the handful of cases where ULIP genuinely wins.
Read guide