Income Protection
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Our Service Standards
The Income Protection Market
Mortgage / Rent Linked Cover
Income Linked Cover
Long Term Income Linked Cover
How quickly can I get cover
Can I buy more than one type of policy
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Our Service Standards
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| As you are reading this, you will know exactly what you mean and want by the phrase “Income Protection”. We have come to realise that there is a big difference between what people within the financial services industry call income protection and what the majority of customers actually want. We want to give you every opportunity of buying a policy that does exactly what you want it to do. We therefore offer all types pf policy that could be considered by the general public as income protection. This website is packed full of information about those policies and how they work.
If you have not yet used it, our calculator above will give you a good indication of what policy is likely to be most suitable for you. Obviously the choice is yours. Once you have identified the type of policy you want you can click to get a more defined quote and more information on your selected policy type.
We care about your privacy, unlike many other internet companies we are able to provide you with quotes without you requiring you to enter personal contact information.
As we are a fully independent financial services company we could offer you a range of policies from all the leading providers and hope that you buy one, however we like to add some value buy indicating policies which we believe a good quality polices that will do what you expect them to do. We therefore only feature one policy of each type. We are keen to point out that we do not receive enhanced terms from these insurers for featuring their policy. This of course gives us the ability to instantly offer a different policy if we feel it is better that the one we are currently offering.
In some instances we will need to substitute our main policy for an alternative. We will only do this if for some reason you are not eligible for our main product. A good example would be income linked cover for somebody aged over 50. Our featured policy will not allow new applications from people over this age, we therefore substitute the next best policy for such cases. Our price promise is to always offer the cheapest policy first.
Ultimately what policy you buy is down to you, it is not possible for us to offer an advice and recommendation service via a website. We do however provide complete information on each policy so you can make an informed decision before you buy.
Below is some general information on the income protection market and the key features of the three product types you can use to protect your income. Each of the product pages is also full of important information about your policy, as well as links to policy documents and other information. |
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The Income Protection Market
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| When people in the financial services industry discuss income protection they are invariable referring to a product known as “Permanent Health Insurance” (PHI). This is a policy that could pay you a percentage of your income, if you are unable to work due to accident and sickness. The policy has the potential to continue paying you an income until you reach retirement age. We feature such a policy under the “long term Income Linked Cover” heading. Our experience is that most people want to protect their income against unemployment and redundancy in particular. Permanent Health Insurance polices do not cover unemployment. Therefore to achieve their goal of protecting their income, customers may buy a mortgage protection policy and an income linked accident and sickness policy.
This means that they may have not purchased an “income protection policy” but nevertheless they have bought a policy that protects their income in a way that meets their needs. If we look at all of the various insurance policy types you need to consider to protect your income, it becomes clear that there are three distinct product types.
For some people, only one of these policies may be appropriate while for other people it could be possible to buy all three.
Many sites which claim to offer Income protection only offer one of these policy types. We offer all three.For your information the three policy types are :
Accident, Sickness and Unemployment Insurance linked to your mortgage or rent
Accident, Sickness and Unemployment Insurance linked to your income
Medically Underwritten Accident and Sickness Insurance Linked to your income
Our calculator will help you decide which of these product types is most likely to be appropriate to your needs. |
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Mortgage / Rent Linked Cover
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| For many people this will be the cheapest option. If you are looking to include unemployment cover then you should take as much cover as possible on a mortgage linked policy. Many mortgage linked insurance policies will directly link the amount of benefit you can have to your mortgage payments. Typically they will let you insure all of your mortgage related costs (mortgage, buildings and contents, life insurance etc) and increase this amount by at least 25%. However if your mortgage payments are £400 per month, this would mean that you could only buy £500 of cover. If you wanted £1,000 you could not cover it all on the policy (although you could use the income linked policy as a top up). Our policy provider does not link the cover you can have to your mortgage or rent. As long as you pay something towards mortgage or rent you could have as much as £2,500 cover. The insurer will limit your cover to £2,500 or 75% of your gross annual income, what ever is the lower. This means you can insure your whole salary before tax and other deductions.
It is important that you do not take more insurance than you require for your regular monthly expenditure. Even of your income would allow £2,500 of cover, if your regular expenditure is only £1,500 the insurer will only cover this amount. While you can cover all kinds of regular direct debits and subscriptions, you would not be able to claim for money spent of holidays or taking the family to the cinema, even if this was a regular monthly expense. |
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Income Linked Cover
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| If you are looking to insure yourself against redundancy and have no mortgage or pay rent then this will be the only cover available to you. There are surprisingly few policies in the UK that will allow you to insure yourself against unemployment if there is no associated liability such as a mortgage or similar loan.
At the time of constructing this website we are only aware of three such policies in the UK. While we have access to all three, we do feel that there is a clear leader both in terms of policy terms and conditions and price.
Our featured policy will allow you to insure up to 60% of your gross income up to a maximum benefit level of £1,500 per month.
Our featured income linked insurance policy is only available to new customers if they are under the age of 50. For those clients over 50 we offer an alternative policy. This policy has very similar terms and conditions to our featured policy except that the insurer will not allow customers to buy unemployment cover only, all policies must either be purchased as full accident, sickness and unemployment policies or as accident and sickness insurance only. |
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Long Term Income Linked Cover
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| As previously discussed this type of insurance is also known as Permanent Health Insurance. These policies can be held for many years and could pay a benefit for as long as 40+ years. Therefore before these polices are sold comprehensive medical questionnaires need to be completed. These policies cover accident and sickness only. If you are looking to insure yourself against accident and sickness you should consider this type of policy first as it has the potential to pay you for many years.
The other polices above have a short maximum pay-out period, typically a year. As previously stated this type of policy could pay out for many years. For example : A 25 year old person buys a policy. When they are 30 they have an accident which results in them never being able to work again. Assuming they have bought the most common type of policy, the insurer will pay them a monthly income until they are aged 60. A 30 year pay-out period.
It is also possible to increase the benefit in line with inflation. In the example above, the value of the benefit being paid would seriously erode in value in real terms, if it remained at the same level.
In the event of a claim the policy will continue to pay out until you either. Return to work, retire, recover (and choose not to return to work), the policy term ends or you die.
For more information please see out long term income linked cover. |
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How quickly can I get cover
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| In the case of the two short term policies, it is possible to set the policy up within a couple of days and in many cases much quicker. Once we receive an application we log it on to the insurers systems within 24 hours. In the vast majority of cases the insurer will accept the policy.
The long term policy can be set-up instantly but most cases will take a little while. Once you have completed your medical questionnaire it will need to be assessed by an underwriter, depending on how busy the insurer is this could take anything from a couple of hours to a couple of weeks. If the underwriter accepts the case then the policy can go live, however it is common for them to write to your Doctor to access your medical records. In some cases they may even pay for you to undergo a medical.
This means that in the worse cases it could be a couple of months before the policy goes live. |
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Can I buy more than one type of policy
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| Yes as long as you are not over insured. Many people may buy two or more policies to get the cover they require. Most insurers, and certainly the ones we use on this website, will allow you to run a series of policies in tandem. In our experience there are two main reasons why people will run policies in tandem. The first are people whose income is greater than could be covered on just one policy. The others are people who want the benefit of unemployment cover as well as long term accident and sickness cover. In this case they would take a short term redundancy policy and a long term illness policy.
When more than one policy is bough it is again important to make sure you are not over insured. We are happy to calculate this with based on the policies you have selected. |
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