Bang on Target, Subra Sir.

The flexibility pure term plans offer in terms of switching, lower premiums due to competition kicking in or due to technological advances (online term plans instead of regular agent based insurance)cannot be matched by anything else. Further, as you have rightly pointed out, if God has been kind to you, the Sum Assured that looks like ample right now might not amount to anything in your overall wealth portfolio at later stages of life. So it’s better to junk the plan totally and invest the amount somewhere else.

Another way you can still minimize the insurance expense is through laddering. It might not be known to many that contrary to endowment plans/Ulips etc, a term plan becomes costlier as the duration increases. For, say, a 35 year old male, premium for 40 year term plan will be more than a 30 year plan for same Sum Assured. What you can do here is to Stagger the plans as per your needs. In my case, for example, I have taken one term plan of 10 year duration to cover Kid’s education expense, one of 15 year duration to cover their marriages and one of 30 years to cover life expectancy. The total premium outgo is much lower than a single policy of 30 year duration. Now if I were to die today, the total SA will be available to my family. If it happens after 10 years, my kids education would have been completed by that time and there will not be any need to cover those expense. So I don’t need to have that cover at that stage. Ditto for marriage. Of course, you need to keep a few things in mind to do so, the first and foremost being filling the insurance form yourself and providing details of your existing policies there.