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Adviser’s first-hand experience of insurance changing lives Shaun Vining’s brother, Blair, wouldn’t have been able to enact huge changes to New Zealand’s health system without his insurance.
F
ormer teacher and now Queenstown financial adviser Shaun Vining didn’t take much convincing to move into insurance. “I’d been teaching for 20 years and then one of the parents came to me and said ‘if you don’t want to be teaching anymore you’d be great at this … everyone trusts you, you’re great with people’. Two weeks later I said ‘let’s do it’.” Vining said, while he loved teaching, it was hard to survive on a teacher’s salary in Queenstown with a mortgage and four children. 026 | ASSET JULY 2020
BY SUSAN EDMUNDS
“I could move to Invercargill or I could get another job. I got another job.” While he got into the insurance industry with a view to becoming more financially secure and helping local families, it was two years later, in 2018, that the importance of what he was doing really hit home. His brother, Blair, who was one of his first clients, became his first claim. He had a rare bowel cancer that had spread to his lymph nodes, lungs and liver, without having had any major symptoms. He was told he would not see a specialist in the public system for eight
weeks – but he had only eight to 10 weeks to live. Blair Vining had health insurance through an employer group scheme that enabled him to get an appointment with a specialist through the private health system quickly, but it provided only $10,000 of cover for the non-Pharmac medication he needed. The drugs cost $35,000 for one month alone. That meant he had to tap into his life and trauma cover, which had been intended to pay down debt. But Shaun Vining said the insurance money paid for drugs that extended his
