“What sum insured should I choose?” – the most common and most important question, and the responsible answer is never a single number but a method. Instead of promising premiums or amounts, here are the principles of sizing – the reasoning that, applied to your own numbers, produces the right answer.
- The guiding principle is income replacement: amounts should match the time off work and the cost of readjusting – not round numbers.
- Each element follows its own logic: the daily benefit is sized to the weeks, the permanent disability amount to the years, the death benefit to the family's situation.
- The typical mistake isn't a wrong number – it's a random number: policies that are “kind of covered.”
The guiding principle: what needs replacing?
The accident sum insured isn't an asset value (as with home insurance) – it's a stand-in for a situation: what we're sizing is how much money would be missing. Three timeframes, three questions: during the WEEKS of recovery, how big is the monthly gap (lost income + extra costs)? In the case of a LASTING impairment, what lump sum would be needed to rearrange your life? In the worst case, what amount would give the family enough of a bridge? These three answers set the size of the three big elements.
Element-by-element logic
Daily benefit: worked back from the monthly gap – with an eye on the sick-pay situation and your fixed outgoings; self-employed people can size it more generously. Permanent disability: the biggest item – look at the base amount AND the progressive scale together: the payout for a severe case should reach the scale of rearranging a life; this is the worst place to cut corners. Accidental death: sized to the family's dependency – building on top of the life-insurance base, not replacing it. Fracture, hospital, surgical: these are the “nice-to-have” elements – keep them at a meaningful, not token, level, but they shouldn't drive the decision.
The two extremes
The typical face of under-insurance is the token package: small premium, small amounts – fine for ticking a box, not for real protection; at claim time it's a source of disappointment (“is that really all it's worth?”). Over-insurance is rarer, but it happens: stacking parallel packages with overlapping, unused elements. The remedy for both is the same: a stocktake of what already exists (a review) plus deliberate sizing – for the layer that's actually missing.
Life changes – so should the amount
The right amount isn't forever: children are born, income grows, loans come and go, sports change. The quarter-hour of the annual review routine exists exactly for this – updating the amount is typically a simple amendment, not a new policy. Rule of thumb: if life has taken a big step, the policy should take one too.
Getting to the numbers: together
The needs assessment is what takes you from the principles to your own numbers – 20 minutes, free of charge. The online calculator (in Hungarian) is a good place to experiment even before that: vary the amounts and watch how the premium moves – and then we'll talk through the final sizing together.
A question about your own situation? Run the numbers in minutes with the online calculator (in Hungarian), or book a free 20-minute consultation →
