VHIS Insurance Strategy

[aw451]

It's time for another insurance thread. I am sure there are many people in a similar boat as me but I haven't really seed a dedicated VHIS thread.

Anyway,

So I am a guy in my early 30s, have plans to keep a base in Hong Kong and change jobs occasionally. Most jobs provide some kind of group medical insurance but the cover tends to be hit and miss and seems to be on the decline these days however in general the coverage tends to cover from HK$500k - 1 million in medical expenses per year. This is roughly the same as most VHIS flexi plans.

So here lies the problem: group medical coverage is not continuous so sometimes I am completely uninsured and if I get sick I will become uninsurable or have an exclusion at the next company.

One option is to use VHIS and Bowtie seems to be one of the more popular / cost effective options but there are two options:

• Standard / Flexi with around 500k - 1 million coverage
• Flexi Pink with 10 million coverage but an 80k deductible (or an excessive premium)

During periods of employment, the group medical will cover the deductible on a FlexiPink but you can't change the deductible without re-underwriting the policy so it seems that maintaining a "Flexi Pink" policy by itself is risky in the event that the covered person doesn't have group medical to cover the deductible during a period of unemployment / early retirement. I guess I could maintain 80k in liquefiable assets just for this purpose but it seems excessive.

I can see three options:

• Maintain Standard Flex and Flexi Pink and use the former to pay the deductible of the latter (and be overinsured most of the time)
• Flexi Pink only and eat the HK$80k deductible if anything goes wrong when I'm unemployed
• Just use Standard Flex and have lower coverage for a single incident of sickness

What are others doing?

[ndt]

If i were you, i wouldn't over-optimize black swan event so to speak. Lets assume you will be insured with employer group insurance 90% of the time for 90% of the issues that could occure in early 30s, you still have HK public health care system for remaining 10% as a fallback plan, i know not ideal but still much better than lot of other places.. IMHO, it would be a case of overinsuring yourself, we take so many other bigger risks in life everyday, this one seems much smaller with good safety net..

Personally, i didnt buy extra insurance in my early 30s but thats just me YMMV..

[pin]

Interested and following. VHIS and thinking about it does give me a headache though but interested to see if there is a tax saving element.