Clientèle Life, Sanlam and their subsidiaries are collecting about R143 million every month through funeral policy deductions made from Sassa grant payments, underscoring how a large share of grant income is being diverted to insurance premiums before beneficiaries can spend on essentials. The core news event is the concentration of funeral policy deductions from social grants in the hands of two major insurance groups, highlighting both the scale of the market and the pressure on low-income households’ cash flow.
For a grant-dependent household, the immediate direct cost is straightforward: every rand deducted for a funeral policy is a rand less available for food, electricity, transport and airtime on payday. Even a modest monthly premium can materially reduce a grant’s purchasing power because grants are designed to cover basics and often support more than one person in a household; the deduction happens automatically, so the family feels the shortfall immediately, not at the end of the month.
The broader cost-of-living impact is that automatic deductions can deepen reliance on informal credit to bridge gaps between grant day and month-end, especially when prices of staples and prepaid utilities are already high. While funeral cover can be valuable protection against sudden, catastrophic costs, the trade-off is that ongoing premiums reduce day-to-day resilience, and concentrated dominance by a few insurers can limit competitive pressure on pricing and product suitability for very low-income consumers.
Grant beneficiaries should treat funeral policy deductions as a priority item to verify, the same way they would check a prepaid electricity receipt: confirm what is being deducted, who the insurer is, and whether the cover matches the household’s needs and affordability. If a policy is unaffordable, duplicated, or was never knowingly agreed to, the practical consequence is that cancelling or correcting it can immediately raise the money available for groceries and utilities in the next payment cycle, restoring a portion of monthly spending power without needing additional income.
