How much insurance do you really need?

Financial services providers tell us that we need to insure our pets, our weddings, our mobile phones and more. But is there a better way to protect yourself against a calamity?

The inboxes of personal finance journalists can make for terrifying reading. Every week press releases arrive packed full of stories about awful things that have happened to people, or that could soon happen to them.

There are stories of people breaking their legs in seven places on skiing holidays and having to be airlifted back to Britain; of families having to spend entire package holidays in the same clothes because their suitcases have been lost; of brides spilling red ink all over their £3,000 dresses; of people having their dogs stolen or losing £400 worth of belongings from their handbags and so on.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.