First it was $38. Then it was $97. You can see where this is going. But I couldn't, exactly.
There was no way of telling how much my life, disability and trauma insurance premiums would rise in the years to come. They obviously weren't staying flat! And since my previous experience with life insurance had "level" payments instead of these "stepped" ones that advance with age, I could not imagine how high these were headed.
This is one of the chief things to grapple with when buying insurance these days - costs spiral up as we go along. It makes it challenging to know what we're in for and plan ahead.
According to industry expert Russell Hutchinson, who runs a platform that advisers use for quoting, "93% of all the quotes done by advisers on Quotemonster are for stepped premiums". He says policies that don't come with advice (like mine) will probably have stepped premiums even more often. These can be sold online or through a bank call centre - about a third of all sales.
Imagine if our payments were like this when buying a car, say for $20,000. Instead of being fixed at $455 a month for five years, payments would instead go: