Nadine Higgins is a familiar friendly face to most Kiwis – a TV presenter, award-winning journalist, financial expert and now, ambassador for AA Life Insurance.
In the last few years since we spoke to Nadine, so much has changed for her. Against the odds she’s had two children as well as some heart-stopping moments that have made her and her husband have some hard, but necessary, conversations about the future. Here, Nadine talks to Capsule’s Alice Hampson about the absolutely wild ride that is motherhood, the dramatic birth of her son Ari, being in the ‘sandwich’ generation and how to alleviate some of that financial stress we’re all feeling during this cost-of-living crisis…
Capsule x AA Life Insurance
It might be a cliché but in the end, it really is the little moments in life that matter most.
Those little moments – the quick snapshots in time – also have the ability to profoundly alter your life. A moment, a thought, a realisation – it’s all it takes to make you see the world through a different lens.
For Nadine Higgins, life has thrown her a few of those moments.
If you’re familiar with lovely Nadine and her family, you’ll likely know the story behind her journey to motherhood – one that stretched for more than four years, through the heartbreak of IVF and miscarriages into an exploration of surrogacy. Nadine and her husband Dan shared their journey through the award-winning podcast, The Human Race, and ultimately their joy – and complete surprise – at discovering they were pregnant with a little boy, Frankie.
Then, just a year later, Nadine got the second surprise of her life when she discovered, quite against the odds, she was pregnant again.
While it was a joyous, life-changing moment, another more terrifying surprise was on the way.
Nearly two months before her due date, Nadine’s waters broke and their second little boy, Ari, was born quickly and in terrifying circumstances.
“Dan didn’t make it to the hospital in time for his birth, because he was born so furiously fast,” tells Nadine. “He walked into the delivery room to see Ari being resuscitated and me in a puddle of blood. I think he had this moment where all the blood left his body, and he thought that maybe he’d lost both of us. I think just that very thought changed both of us.”
Ari was whisked away to the NICU where he spent his first three weeks. “It was terrifying having him come early, because you do what you can to protect them when they’re in your body, but then they’re in this little fish tank incubator, with feeding tubes and things in their tiny little veins and you just feel so powerless to protect them.”
Going home without Ari felt “10,000 kinds of wrong”, but Nadine says they felt immense gratitude that they had their little boy, and that, despite being born so early, he was an otherwise healthy baby.
And now, as we chat to Nadine, that baby has grown to be a “beautifully chubby” little toddler who is racing around after his big brother. Nadine feels so much joy and contentment but also, because of the wild multi-faceted realities of motherhood, there’s also the fear and the worry.
“I described it to a friend the other day, that I love my kids so much that it hurts,” she says. “That sounds a silly thing to say, because obviously love is a positive emotion, but I think it’s that thing where people describe having a child is like a piece of your heart running around outside of your body, and that feels very raw and very risky to me, because I just want to protect them.”
Nadine continues, “In some ways becoming a mum softened me, and in other ways it toughened me up. It’s brought out my inner lioness, wanting to protect my cubs, but it’s also made me more risk averse, because I’m worried about them all the time. I used to be such an adrenaline junkie, and now I feel deeply uncomfortable, because I think about, ‘what if?’”
That’s why Nadine jumped at the chance to become an ambassador for AA Life Insurance, helping more Kiwis protect their financial future. Just as she is looking to protect her family and children, she knows it’s on the mind of a lot of Kiwis, who are also worrying about their finances with the current state of the world.
With her background in business journalism and experience, she’s someone we trust to go to for information. And, Nadine says AA Life Insurance is who she trusts.
Having The Hard Conversations
“There’s a glaringly obvious risk to family finances,” says Nadine. “That is, if anything happened to one of the parties, or for the single parents, to them, who is going to keep the wheels turning and pay for all of the things that these kids are going to need? Or if you get sick and it takes out one of your incomes – most people can’t sustain an unexpected or definitive end to their income without it having massive ramifications.
“I just want to provide a bit of education around it, because I think most people think insurance is too complicated, or it’s too boring, or it’s too expensive – and it doesn’t need to be.”
It’s at this point that I share with Nadine that I don’t have life insurance myself (despite the fact that I worry about our kids and the future… oh, all the time?!). My husband does – he’s the main breadwinner so in my mind, we really just needed to protect his income. But… yes, Nadine has given me food for thought. What if, heaven forbid, I got seriously unwell. What would happen to us then?
But, as Nadine said, I assumed life insurance was expensive and complicated. How do you know where to go for it and what to do?
How Do You Know Where To Start?
For a start, Nadine says, you need to look at your own set of circumstances to figure out what’s right for you – and that doesn’t need to be a lot, or expensive, or time consuming!
“Actually, you can get a level of cover in place for roughly the cost of a cup of coffee a week,” she says.
“I think the first thing you need to do is look at your own situation, because that will give you an idea about what your risk exposure is. You know you need to know what your life costs: what would it cost to keep paying the mortgage and keep the lights on and the pantry full if you’re in a partnership, if one of us couldn’t work, or if one of us, heaven forbid, died?”
Then, you can look at what option might best suit you and your family.
“I think it’s also about not necessarily going for gold-plated cover, because obviously we’re in a cost-of-living crisis,” says Nadine. “It’s about getting something in place that buys you time to grieve, to regroup, to take time out of the workforce to fight cancer or whatever it is.”
But What About ACC? The Public Health System? My Kiwisaver? Won’t They Cover Me?
Yes, says Nadine – it is brilliant we’ve got ACC and a public health system in place that can support us when the unexpected happens. But – and this is a big but – they certainly don’t cover everything.
“ACC doesn’t cover stuff like cancer or a stroke or a heart attack,” says Nadine. “So if you get something that’s not an accident happening to you, and you don’t have some other kind of financial safety net set up for yourself, that’s a massive exposure. It gets really ugly, really quickly. And I think that’s why we see so many people turning to your Givealittle’s and other crowdfunding ways. Because when it happens and you don’t have anything in place, you’re literally on your knees saying, ‘Help me’”.
And yes, if you’re relying on being able to withdraw your KiwiSaver early if you run into serious trouble, you might also find yourself out of luck.
“People generally think that it’s easy to dip into your KiwiSaver if you need it, but it isn’t,” says Nadine. “There are only really two circumstances outside of retirement, permanent migration, death or buying your first home, and that is serious illness and financial hardship. But with financial hardship, you need to prove that you’re basically defaulting on everything, and even then, they only release you enough to cover your living costs for about 12 or 13 weeks.”
“I wrote an article recently about a 53-year-old woman who has stage three, triple negative breast cancer – the rare, aggressive type. She applied to get hold of her KiwiSaver to help pay for another drug that was going to improve her chances of survival, and she was declined. And that is because when you dig into the detail, it isn’t really being diagnosed with a serious illness that gives you access to it. It’s being within 12 to 18 months of death.
People can have this misapprehension that your KiwiSaver is going to bail you out, but more often than not, it’s not going to.”
How To Have The Hard Conversations
“I totally get that no one wants to think about their own mortality,” says Nadine. “But it’s a really important discussion to have of ‘what would happen if..’. and if you haven’t got a plan, and you can’t answer that question, then there’s probably a need there. There’s a problem that you haven’t solved, that you need to solve before it becomes a problem.”
And there’s no judgement here for not already having these conversations, says Nadine. She understands. She admits it wasn’t very long ago that she and her husband got around to sorting out their wills. “How did we not have those?” she says. “We only just recently sorted them out so our kids have a guardian if anything happens to us!”
Nadine says they revisit these conversations, because they’re a central part of what is important to their family.
“One of our values as a family is that we all look after each other, and that means looking after each other come what may,” she says. “And hey, it’s probably even in your wedding vows – in sickness and in health, right? Revisit the wedding vows on your anniversary and say, ‘Hey, babe, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put a life insurance policy in place (or whatever type of personal insurance that you work out is right for you!) because we need to take care of each other and our little family unit if someone gets sick.’
“Don’t go through all of the scenarios, would be my advice, but just bring it back to we really care about each other, and that’s why we have to do it.”
To learn more about life and living insurance visit www.aa.co.nz/life, check out Nadine’s explainer video series or register for a free webinar during AA Life Week on Tuesday 9th June 7-7:30pm
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