Hi,

My fiance and I are just in the process of buying our first house and are aware that there are certain insurances that we should be taking out. Just for info, we are buying a shared equity house.

So...we know we need to get buildings & contents which is fine. Understand that one!

Then I've been reading up on here about various policies to cover us if the worst happens and am now more baffled than before!!

As far as I can see the options are:-

- Mortgage Payment Protection (or Accident, Sickness & Unemployment)

- Critical Illness Cover

- Life Assurance

- Permanent Health Insurance.

But my question is - do you need ALL of these (ideally) or do some overlap with others?? i.e. if you take ASU does the 'sickness' part cover you for critical illness etc and if you take out PHI is that the same as taking out critical illness/sickness & or do you need both? So confused!!

I don't think we really need a policy covering redundancy as I work for the Local Education Authority where there is very little chance of redundancy & my fiance is a soldier so I think we're pretty safe there. I've also read quite a few negative things about MPPI so as we dont need unemployment should we just forget MPPI and take out health insurance instead?

Any advice would be really welcome, our mortgage adviser is supposed to be emailing us with details but to be honest I haven't found her very helpful with anything so far, and I'm sure she will want us to buy the policies through her. Basically we just want to get the right cover to suit our needs but not 'over-insure' and over-pay!

The other thing I'm not sure about is whether we need to be taking out some sort of insurance for the equity share of the mortgage even though we dont have to pay anything for that for 5yrs and also (last thing I promise!) when you apply for these policies online I've noticed they ask how much your monthly mortgage payment is - as there are two of us paying the mortgage do you put in 50% of the mortgage payment here as we will both have our own policies?

Thanks, sorry for the long post!