Frequently Asked Questions

DIMEDebt, Income, Mortgage, Education. Add those four, subtract what you already have, and the remainder is the gap. stands for Debt, Income, Mortgage, Education. Add those four obligations, subtract what you already have — existing cover, liquid savings, statutory offsets — and the remainder is your gap.

We use DIMEDebt, Income, Mortgage, Education. Add those four, subtract what you already have, and the remainder is the gap. because it forces you to itemize. No rule-of-thumb multiplier ("ten times your salary"), no gut feel from an agent. Your actual debts, your family's actual expenses over a set horizon, your children's actual tuition trajectory. The number is yours, not a product shelf's.

We include cash and savings. We discount or exclude market-exposed assets.

The reason is timing. If the market is down 40% the week you die, a portfolio valued at ₱5M on paper might liquidate at ₱3M. Life insurance pays a fixed sum on a fixed event. Your offsets should have the same certainty. We'd rather show you a gap that's slightly too large than one that evaporates in a correction.

Group life is tied to your employment. If you resign, get laid off, or become too ill to work, the cover disappears — exactly when your family would need it most.

Treat employer group life as a bonus, not a foundation. ClearCover excludes it by default so your gap calculation survives a job change.

Separate insurance from investment. That's the core principle.

A VULVariable Universal Life. One policy that mixes insurance with an investment fund. The premium is expensive because it is paying a salesperson, a fund manager, and a death benefit at the same time. bundles a death benefit with a managed fund inside a single policy. The premium pays three things at once: the salesperson's commission, the fund manager's fee, and the mortality charge. Each layer has a cost. Those costs compound against your returns for the life of the policy.

The alternative is straightforward. BTIDBuy Term and Invest the Difference. Buy cheap pure insurance. Put the rest in something you actually own — MP2, a bond, an index fund.. Buy term life for the death benefit. Invest the premium difference yourself — MP2, a bond fund, an index fund. You keep more of the return, and you can see exactly what each peso is doing.

Whole Life guarantees a payout eventually, which means the insurer prices for certainty. The premium is multiples of what term life costs for the same face amount.

For most people — especially younger earners with dependents — the priority is maximum coverage at minimum cost during the years the family is most exposed. Term life does that. Whole Life makes sense in a narrow case: high-net-worth individuals who need guaranteed liquidity to settle estate taxes on death. If that's not you, it's an expensive way to save.

An endowment bundles a savings goal with life insurance. The insurer sets the return, sets the timeline, and charges you for the packaging.

The internal rate of return on most Philippine endowment plans runs 2–4%. Pag-IBIG MP2 alone has averaged higher, with full liquidity and no mortality charge baked in. Buy term life to cover the risk of dying early. Put the rest somewhere you control and can see the yield.

The peso gap between what a hospital stay actually costs at your preferred tier and what PhilHealth plus your HMO will cover. Three scenarios: a routine outpatient year, a five-day minor hospitalization, and a ten-day major surgery. The gap is what comes out of your pocket or your family's savings.

Four tiers based on how Philippine hospitals actually price. Tier 1 is government and DOH facilities — lowest cost, longest queues. Tier 2 is mid-range private: Manila Doctors, Cardinal Santos, Chong Hua, and similar. Tier 3 is premium private: St. Luke's, MakatiMed, Asian Hospital. Tier 4 is overseas treatment — we show it for context but don't model peso gaps against it because the cost range is too wide to be useful.

We apply PhilHealth case rates from Circular 2024-0037 as an offset against each scenario. For outpatient care, the offset defaults to zero — PhilHealth's outpatient coverage is minimal enough that treating it as meaningful would understate your gap. For hospitalization and surgery, case rates reduce the gap, but they rarely come close to covering the bill at Tier 2 or Tier 3 facilities.

If you have one, we offset up to its maximum benefit limit (MBL) against the hospital cost. The key word is "up to." Most HMO plans cap annual benefits between ₱100K and ₱500K. A ten-day stay with surgery at a Tier 3 hospital can run well past ₱1M. The quiz shows you exactly where the HMO stops paying and your savings start.

We flag it. We don't model it as a standalone scenario because critical illness cover — cancer, renal failure, cardiac events — is a lump-sum benefit layered on top of hospitalization. It doesn't replace the hospital bill, it supplements it. In the major surgery scenario, if you declare a critical illness condition, we apply the highest applicable PhilHealth Z-Benefit as an additional offset. That's where it belongs in the math.

Philippine medical costs have been rising 15–19% per year (WTW Global Medical Trends Survey, 2025). The toggle projects your gap forward at 15% annual inflation so you can see what the same hospital stay costs in five or ten years. It defaults to off because the base gap is the number most people need first. Turn it on if you're planning cover that needs to hold up over a longer horizon.