Default cover is better than nothing. It's also rarely the right answer for an Australian family with a mortgage and kids.
Most Australians have some form of personal insurance through their super fund and don't think twice about it. The premiums get deducted automatically, the policy details sit buried in an annual statement, and life moves on.
It's only when something happens — a serious illness, an accident, a death in the family — that the gap between what's actually covered and what was needed becomes painfully clear. Here's what tends to be wrong with default super insurance, and how to think about whether yours is fit for purpose.
When you join most super funds, you're automatically issued some combination of three types of insurance:
The defaults are calibrated by the fund based on broad averages — typical age, typical occupation, typical balance. They are not calibrated for you.
Default Life cover for a 35-year-old member is often somewhere between $100,000 and $300,000. That sounds like a lot until you write down the bills. A typical Australian household with a $700k mortgage, two kids, and one primary income earner needs Life cover closer to $1.5m–$3m to clear debts, replace income for the years the family depends on it, and cover education and a buffer.
If something happens and the payout is $200k, the family pays off a fraction of the mortgage and runs out of money within a couple of years. That's a structural failure — not a near-miss.
Most default Income Protection policies inside super only pay benefits for two years. After that, the income stops, regardless of whether you've recovered. Outside super, you can structure cover to pay all the way to age 65.
For someone in their 30s or 40s with a long working life ahead of them, the difference is enormous. A 2-year benefit on a $120k income is $240k of cover. A to-age-65 benefit on the same income is closer to $3 million in expected payouts — same illness, same person, very different financial outcome.
Trauma (sometimes called "critical illness") cover pays a lump sum if you're diagnosed with one of a list of major medical conditions — cancer, heart attack, stroke. It's the cover that gets you through the period when you're alive but very unwell, with bills piling up and reduced ability to work.
The ATO doesn't allow Trauma cover to be held inside super. So if you only have super-based insurance, you don't have it. For most families this is the most cost-effective gap to fix.
The five questions worth answering on a Sunday afternoon:
For most people, fixing this isn't expensive. Restructuring super-based cover to better-suited policies, often with a different insurer, frequently reduces total premiums while increasing the benefit amount. We've had clients walk out paying less per month with double the coverage — purely because the original setup was wrong, not because they were over-paying out of choice.
A proper insurance review takes about an hour and looks at your existing cover, the gaps, the tax structure, and what an appropriate setup would cost. The discovery chat is complimentary; the formal advice that follows is fixed-fee and disclosed upfront.