France: Retirement: Market Insight on Retirement Planning for Employees

France: Market Insight on Retirement Planning for Employees

Our French Asinta Partner, Damien Vieillard-Baron, CEO of GEREP, recently released this article about retirement planning. If you have employees in France you will find his insights particularly helpful.

Preparing for Retirement? Don’t forget to plan ahead
Would you forget about your complementary healthcare? That’s impossible, given that, on average, every family relies on it about 3.5 times per month. As for disability/death insurance, that’s far more frequently overlooked or misunderstood by employees. And yet it is this insurance that provides the cover when life’s biggest setbacks occur. When an employee starts retirement, this protection disappears, just at the same time as the risk of having an accident, a fall, or becoming dependent increases. However, there are options available out there which can provide such cover, even in retirement.

Personal complementary life and disability cover
This cover is aimed at providing guarantees which guard against personal accident and, especially, for protecting those closest to you. In such cases, these guarantees enable a capital amount to be left to one’s family upon death, for refunding funeral costs, or to cover the expense and shortfalls associated with long-term disability or invalidity.

Clearly, the loss of income related to an accident or illness no longer presents a concern for pensioners. On the other hand, the wish to protect loved ones does not disappear simply because working life comes to an end. It is not unusual for a pensioner to still have children of school age. Some people provide financial assistance for their offspring, whilst most have an awareness of a risk that increases with age: that of becoming a burden to their family. With the increase in life expectancy, pensioners should prepare themselves for a stage in their lives where they will become dependent. This brings with it the threat of their carefully accumulated savings being eroded away or even swallowed up.

Personal accident insurance: the minimum for a peaceful retirement
If taking out complementary life and disability cover is considered unnecessary or too costly at a stage in life where income reduces, those who are recently retired have the possibility of confining themselves to a personal accident insurance, at a cost of no more than 11 € per month for a single person. These contracts provide protection against the repercussions of accidents, burns, or falls, which can occur in the home, during leisure time or, for instance, when doing DIY or gardening activities.

This is a risk that is far from being considered unimportant. If traffic accidents kill 4,500 people each year, everyday accidents kill 20,000; nearly three-quarters of these people are over the age of 65. In addition, a third of all elderly people will sustain one or several falls each year.

These events, which can turn the lives of pensioners upside down, are covered by personal accident insurance: repatriation and assistance in case of an accident, compensation for non-material damage and personal injury, for making alterations to the home, as well as various ways of assistance in case of handicap, reimbursement for funeral costs etc. For those pensioners who are proactive, if they consider savings to be the best way to get ready to spend their latter years in comfort, then personal accident insurance is the tool that will enable them to deal with the unexpected, regardless of all the precautions they may take.

If you need benefits consulting in France, we’d be happy to put you in touch with GEREP. Just let us know.