adding UK friendly society insurance policy

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>Would this be one of those unit-linked policies that are only nominally 
>"insurance" and really a savings vehicle? So that the only "value" you're 
>interested in is the cash-in value?
>
>If so, this may be best treated as an "investment" of type "mutual fund" 
>(or "stock" - I don't think it makes any difference) denominated in a 
>suitable "Commodity". You need to define the commodity to Gnucash (it 
>couldn't conceivably know about every possible one in advance), and if 
>it's publicly quoted you can fetch current prices using the "Price 
>Editor" tool (provided you set the quote source and symbol correctly). 
>GnuCash can then turn the number of units into a current valuation.
>
>  
>
However there MAY be complications related to the insurance coverage 
portion, depends upon the contract details, and in any case I wouldn't 
be able to help much with interpreting those for UK "insurance" (though 
I would be familiar with pretty much all the US forms). There are a 
number of forms that were marketed as if they were primarily a "savings 
vehicle" with and insurance component BUT (and this might be a big but) 
that they would effectively function in that way could depend on a 
generally rising market. Not what we've seen lately, eh? I rather 
suspect that at the moment there are many policy holders pretty upset by 
their "universal life" contracts who wished they had instead bought 
"traditional" type policies.

Michael D Novack