This may be a selfish, perhaps a morbid, point of view, and of course no one has any right to sink capital in an annuity unless he has already made full provision for anyone that he leaves behind, and preferably, in my view, handed that provision over to them, so that no one may be waiting for monetary advantage from his demise.
As to the non-profit or with-profit division, very shrewd advisers have pointed out to me the disadvantage of paying the higher premium that a with-profit policy requires, when there is a risk that one's company may have no surplus to divide in bonuses. But it seems to me that in normal times this risk is negligible. The companies must work on a margin, and that margin becomes surplus. My feeling is that good insurance companies can invest better than I can—for one, among many other reasons, because they handle much larger funds—and in my youth I took out two with-profit endowment policies, and I see no reason to regret having done so.
But if insurance has all these advantages why should one bother about any other form of investment? Why not put all that one can save into life policies? For those who are going to die young, this would certainly, from the point of view of their heirs, be the far, far
