I bought in 2018 and had the whole sales pitch regarding insurance, quite aggressively sold down your throat as well. Ultimately as Bill1827 mentions its down to your risk tolerance and what buffers you already have in place.
In my opinion income protection probably a waste of money if you are following the MMM lifestyle as you should have a small pot to cover your expenses, if you do lose your job those expenses should be pretty low (if you are saving a large % of your income). This is especially true if your partner could comfortably cover all of your expenses (will suck for a bit) until you get another job.
The main thing with insurance is you can always say ‘if this happens you will be glad’ but if the chance of ‘that’ happening might be 1 in 1,00,000 over 40 years, would it be worth paying £40pm on covering that risk when you already have £X in the bank, death in service etc.. You have to weigh up the risk, the cost of the cover (compounded if you would invest the cost otherwise), impact on your family to get your answer!
One annoying thing I find about insurance products are all the exclusions, when we were looking at life insurance there were quite a few things that that they did not cover. From memory there were some specific cancers on there and quite a few others meaning if you died as a result of any of those the policy wouldn’t pay out, before this I thought life insurance was life insurance, you died not through natural causes you get paid out. These exemptions vary from policy to policy but often in smaller writing where you might not notice, if you buy life insurance I would definitely check what is covered!!
Not sure if you can tell but I hate insurance in general!! But it can be a good tool to manage risk and exposure. Currently we don’t have any life insurance, income protection, injury insurance etc… I am 32 and work at a University, Partner is 27 works in manufacturing as a maintenance engineer, we can both afford all of the household expenses on one income if needed and we currently don’t have any children. We both have generous death in service benefits of 4 times income. For us, our main reason for not purchasing insurance is the fact we can both cover expenses on one income, work in different sectors, death in service, insurance exclusions and we are still relatively young and healthy. We are planning on children soon and we might consider life insurance for additional protection but I don’t think we would really bother with anything else.