Your insurance premiums are, similarly, affected by both smoking and vaping.
You see the ads about smoking being dangerous to your health and vaping risks pretty much everywhere. However, there are chances that you don’t even realize what damage it can do to your budget.
If we take, for example, just one year, during this year, vaping “steals” from your purse about $1000, which could be additional insurance premiums. That’s an extreme amount — especially when you have to work hard to close some debts, to spend money on education or medical treatment.
Why the Insurance Agencies Hate Vaping?
As soon as e-cigarettes began to appear on the market, the vast majority of would-be smokers decided to replace their cigarettes with vaping, consoling themselves with the fact that it is a harmless alternative.
Even though statistics from the Public Health Agency of Canada show only 20 cases of lung disease caused by smoking by mid-2020, the government has no idea what the long-term effects can be.
The principle of e-cigarettes is to heat the liquid you inhale in the form of vapor, hence the name. Even though not every type of vape or “juice” liquid has nicotine in its content, most of them do. Moreover, even products with “contains 0% nicotine” labels still contain nicotine.
So far — just lies and uncertainty. Do you really need more arguments? Here they are:
- The chemicals used to flavor the vape liquid are tested for food safety, but these tests never proved they are safe for breathing;
- While we can theoretically perform all the necessary tests on the liquid itself, when it gets heated, more new chemicals are formed, namely formaldehyde;
- Vaping liquid can contain heavy metals in the form of lead, nickel, tin, aluminum, and various substances that can cause cancer;
- Oh, and did we mention that vapes can literally explode in your pocket?
Now, we’re not trying to talk YOU out of vaping. It’s your choice, it’s legal, blah blah blah. However, these are the arguments that absolutely scare the insurance agencies. They, somehow, seemingly care about your health (or, at least, want to get more money for every health risk you choose to take part in).
So what is the level of impact of vaping on our insurance?
For a long time now, tobacco use has been a red flag for health insurers. Since very little research has been done on the effects of vaping, the vast majority of insurers consider it to be as unhealthy as smoking.
To show the way vaping affects your life insurance policy, we decided to use a popular quote comparison site to find a term life insurance policy available.
So, we entered information about a perfectly healthy 40-year-old man who lives in Vancouver. Taking a long time to find the lowest cost of insurance coverage, we were matched with a 20-year term option worth $500,000, with a monthly premium of only $47.08.
Add nicotine? Boom! Now, this guy has to pay $126.90 monthly for similar protection. So a monthly difference of $79.82. It would be a pretty hefty sum for the entire year — around $957— all of it — in addition to the money you pay for all the vaping stuff.
Ways to lower premiums
Perhaps some of us assume that we can leave our bad habits out of the application, but keep in mind that insurers often monitor social media, using special units that check questionable claims.
If some “hidden” important details resurface — you will have to pay a large sum of money, get a denial of insurance compensation or lose your policy.
Fortunately, there are multiple ways that you can use to cut the insurance costs these days:
- Most importantly, opt-out of vaping. To obtain substantially lower rates, a smart move would be to quit smoking and vaping altogether. There is also a category of insurers that will charge a person a little more after learning about their history of nicotine use. However, this doesn’t sound as intimidating when compared to your status as a current smoker;
- It is advisable to reduce other risk factors. Even though you can’t change your proneness to genetic heart or cancer diseases, you can get rid of excess weight and eliminate excessive use of tobacco and alcohol at any time. It’s a good time to take a good hard look at improving your overall health while reducing your risk to the insurer.
Look for the best bets by shopping around. It is not necessary to choose the first-rate you see and stick exclusively to it. Compare 3 or 4 insurance companies and get a financially healthy habit to check their offers every year or so — it will save you more than you can lose because of vaping.