Aes well as helping you secure a mortgage for your dream home, an integral part of the process is to ensure that no matter what life throws at you, your home and your family are adequately protected.

Your mortgage is likely to be your largest single commitment and it is important that you protect yourself and your family from the eventuality of either being unable to pay the mortgage payments due to an Accident, Sickness or Unemployment or in the event of Death or Critical Illness.

Our experienced Advisers will tailor the right protection package for you by understanding what is the most important to you and your family and help work within your budget.

Critical Illness Cover

Critical Illness Cover is an insurance policy that helps protect you if you become critically ill during the policy term. It pays out a tax-free lump sum that you can use however you like, whether that’s to pay off your mortgage, help cover health-related costs, monthly expenses, or lost income while you get better.

Critical illness insurance pays the benefit on the diagnosis of a range of specified critical illnesses, such as some forms of cancer, heart attack, kidney failure, stroke and Multiple Sclerosis. The range of diseases covered has increased over the years and is dependent upon the provider, anything between 25 and 40 conditions may be covered in a policy.

Critical Illness Cover provides you with a single lump sum benefit allowing you to use the funds as you see fit during your time of need.

Term Assurance/ Life Insurance

Life insurance helps give your family financial protection should you pass away within the policy term. It is designed to pay out a lump sum, helping your loved ones maintain their living standards or pay mortgage costs.

You don’t have to have a mortgage to be in need of life cover. There is often a need to insure yourself to provide the family with protection beyond any mortgage you may have.

These types of policies can either be level, increasing or decreasing depending upon the type of cover you need. They will run for a specific term and will pay out a lump sum specified if death occurs during the term of the policy. The benefit is then paid to your estate free of income tax but possibly subject to inheritance tax. For single life policies to ensure the right person receives the benefit we always recommend you write your policy in Trust.

Income Protection

Income protection insurance offers financial support against loss of earnings due to an accident, illness or injury. For most people, experiencing a sudden loss of income due to illness or injury could be devastating for them and their family.

Whether you are employed or self-employed, Income Protection is designed to protect your income if you are unable to work due to an accident, injury or illness. This type of cover will provide you with a monthly amount, usually 50% -70% of your annual income and is paid out as tax-free income, after a deferred period (you determine this eg. 13 weeks) and to a selected retirement age. The benefit is paid to you until you are well enough to return to work or the retirement age of the policy.

Many employers provide such cover so you should first check what sick pay benefits you receive from your employer. This can determine when you need to policy to pay out and this could help reduce the cost of the policy you need in place to ensure you are covered fully.

The policy can be indexed so that the cover goes up in line with inflation, to take advantage of this the premiums similarly will increase in line with inflation.

Family Income Benefit

Family income benefit insurance is a type of term life insurance that will give regular financial support to the family of a policyholder if they die or are diagnosed with a terminal illness. This provides a regular monthly income that could be used to pay your mortgage, school or university fees or simply ensure you are able to maintain a standard of living you and your children are accustomed to.

This is considered one of the cheapest and best forms of cover to provide your family with added protection. With the soaring cost of school fees often our clients want to insure against themselves protecting their children’s education. The advantage of this type of policy is that as each year passes the benefit reduces helping keep the cost down.

For example, 2 children aged 4 expecting to be at school to 18 at a cost of £3,000 per term each gives a total cost of £252,000 for their school fees. The policy would need to run for 14 years with a total benefit requirement of £18,000 per annum.

As each year passes the benefit reduces by £18,000 hence the cost of cover is cheaper than having a policy covering a level sum of £252,000 for 14 years.

With this type of cover, you can insure against inflation and similarly your premiums will increase each year, but this enables you to protect against the ever rising cost of school fees.

Private Medical Cover

Private Medical Cover (PMI) is where you can insure you and your family to receive Private Medical treatment in the event of requiring further medical treatment after having consulted your GP for an initial consultation.

There are different levels of cover that you can consider and each provider will use their own terminology for these plans. The cover offered will differ from each provider and split into Inpatient Care, Outpatient Care and Other Care:

Inpatient Care would cover costs such as hospital charges, consultation fees, diagnostic tests, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

Outpatient Care would cover costs such as consultations, MRI, CT and PET scans, other diagnostic tests, physiotherapy, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

Other Care would cover alternative therapies, maternity cash benefit, nursing at home, private ambulance, parental accommodation and NHS cash benefit.

What does your plan typically not cover?

Any non-UK treatment, emergency treatment or visits to your GP, pregnancy or childbirth, self-inflicted injuries, cosmetic surgery, organ transplants, any day to day management of chronic conditions, medication and dressings, fertility, infertility and menopause related treatment, experimental or unproven and unregistered treatment, routine dentistry, refractive eye surgery and treatment related to development problems, learning difficulties or delayed speech disorders.

Once again this is a type of policy that may be available from your employer so please ensure you look at your employer’s hand book in the first instance to see what cover you have available to you.

Many Private Medical providers are now offering schemes where you can be rewarded for good health in the form of vitality points. For example, some providers will reduce your gym membership fee if you use your gym on a regular basis (please note this can be with selected gyms only, depending on the provider).

Private Medical Insurance allows you to avoid the lengthy queues under the NHS, so if you don’t have this type of cover and your employer does not offer it, this is an excellent way to insure you and your family.

Business Protection

If you are self employed and a business owner being unable to work due to long term accident or illness or even death can have severe consequences for the business, your business partners and shareholders and your family.

Dependent upon the structure of your business there are a number of different types of cover where you can protect Directors, Shareholders and even Key Individuals to help ensure the business does not suffer from business interruption.

Shareholders should ensure they have shareholder agreements in place and then put in place the appropriate cover to ensure that the wishes of each shareholder can be carried out.

It would be common for a Shareholder to pass his shares in the event of death to their spouse, however, in reality the spouse really wants the monetary value of the shares and the business wants the shares to enable them to bring in a replacement to the business, with the correct business protection and share holder agreements in place this will ensure that those wishes are carried out.

Business protection can be complex and needs expert advise so please contact us if you want further information on how this may suit your business.