What entertainment subscriptions do parents rank higher than their kids futures?
Over the past five years, streaming services and other kinds of subscriptions have taken over our daily lives. From Spotify on the commute and Netflix in the evening, to snack subscriptions like Office Pantry during the day, we’re all more than happy to send out a little money each month in return for reliable, quality services.
In fact, in the US alone, spending on streaming services totals around $24 billion a year! Netflix is pumping over $7 billion dollars a year into original content, and the gig economy is exploding, with Deliveroo reporting an estimated revenue in 2016 of £128 million in the UK.
These numbers are all pretty mind boggling, but what does that all mean for you and me?
To put things in perspective, here is how much you’re likely to spend per year on 5 of the UK’s most popular subscription services
- Netflix: £95.88
- Spotify: £119.95
- DisneyLife: £59.88
- Amazon Prime: £79.99
- Apple music: £119.95
These prices confirm it: we aren’t just dipping our toes in subscription culture, but we’re totally invested in it. Even for kids, DisneyLife is putting parents £60 a year down.
And for me the case of DisneyLife raises a really important issue: we’re happy to funnel so much money every month into keeping our kids entertained, but we don’t seem ready to give the same attention to their long term welfare.
Crucially, this is because life insurance is lagging so far behind in uptake. When you think about it, life insurance is as much a subscription as any of these other services, except that instead of getting access to a film, you’re getting peace of mind. In many cases that peace of mind is worth at least £150,000, at a subscription fee of only £6.00 a month.
So why were a million fewer policies taken out in 2017 than Netflix subscriptions?
The answer is in the immediate return fallacy. We tend to think that seeing a return on the money we spend today is more valuable than seeing a return tomorrow. I can watch Netlifx today, but I don’t want to die for a long time! We can all sympathise with this point of view, but for the sake of one more subscription, it’s a point of view that puts many of our children’s futures at risk.
Insured Life offer life insurance from all the top providers like Vitality, Legal & General, HSBC and more.
Find out how to do a quick free quote by clicking here
