Protection & Insurance

Building and Contents Insurance

Building and Contents Insurance can be purchased separately or together. A buildings insurance policy covers both the structure of a property and its permanent fixtures and fittings such as baths and toilets, fitted kitchens and bedroom cupboards.

Contents Insurance covers your household goods and personal belongings in the home, in your outbuildings, even your garden, (all replaced as new).   If you choose the personal possessions extension you can cover items that you take away from your house too — things like watches, jewellery and sports equipment*.

Mortgage Payment Protection Insurance (MPPI)

What would happen to you if you were made redundant or suffered a serious illness or accident which prevented you from working for some time. How would your finances bear up under the strain? What is more important, could you continue to make your mortgage repayments or would your home be at risk?

Mortgage Payment Protection Insurance (MPPI) is designed to provide a level of assistance with mortgage and associated repayments if the insured person is unable to work through illness, injury of involuntary unemployment. The monthly benefit payments under the Mortgage Payment Protection Insurance policy are paid out up to a maximum period of benefit which is usually either 12 months or 24 months.

For a competitive free no-obligation quote, please contact us and an adviser will get back to you, so what have you got to lose?

Life Insurance

 Life & Critical Illness Insurances are arranged through some of the largest and most competitive companies in the industry.  Our panel comprises Legal & General, Friends Provident, Scottish Provident, Norwich Union and Bright Grey. 

Taking out a life insurance policy is a simple and popular way to protect your loved ones financially.  The length of time you choose to be insured for is called the 'term'.  If you die during the term, your policy will pay out a lump sum of money.

You choose how much life insurance you buy. People often want their policies to pay out a multiple of their salary, or you may have dependants to think of, or loan to cover.  The amount you must pay on a monthly or annual basis is the premium.

The life insurance policy includes Terminal Illness Cover at no extra cost. This means that the policy will pay out if you are diagnosed with a terminal illness for which you are eligible to claim within the time period specified in the plan.

For a competitive free no-obligation quote, please contact us and an adviser will get back to you, so what have you got to lose?

Critical Illness Insurance

Have you considered how you would look after yourself or your family if you were unable to work due to illness? We are far more likely today, to survive illnesses that may have killed us a generation ago. While medical advancements have boosted our chances of recovering from a serious illness, sometimes illness can still mean that our lifestyle or way of working has to change.

Ironically, given that life-threatening diseases like typhoid and dysentery have been beaten, we are faced with critical illnesses which can sometimes be attributed to the stressful lives many of us live, especially when we drink, or smoke or fail to exercise. The most common illnesses today are heart disease, stroke and cancer.

One way of ensuring we are financially secure should we fall victim to a serious illness is to take out critical illness insurance.

The statistics speak for themselves:

One in three people in Britain will have a cancer diagnosed at some time during their life. (1)

Every year, around 300,000 people have heart attacks. For 150,000 people, it is their first. Half of all heart attacks are fatal. (2)

Of those women who are diagnosed with breast cancer, 62% survive five years or more. (3)

Even if you do recover from your illness, while you are ill or recuperating the need to cover bills and look after the family are worries you don’t need. You may go back to work, sooner rather than later, or you may have to change your career, to one less demanding.

Just think of the bills you will still have to meet, even if you are not working. These will include:

• The mortgage
• Gas, electricity and phone bills
• School fees
• The weekly food bill

You may continue to receive your salary from your employer, but this won’t go on indefinitely. Also state benefits may not meet the level of salary you were receiving.

Then there are extra costs, which you may not have budgeted for. You may also need to make adjustments to your home, for example, installing a chair lift or moving a bathroom downstairs. You may need to pay for help in the home. All this costs money you may not have spare from your income.

The last thing you want to have to do is to use your hard earned savings, to supplement your income, when you had been planning to use them to go on the dream holiday, or pay for your child’s wedding.

Who should buy critical illness?

You should consider critical illness cover, whatever your situation.

If you are single, without dependants you may feel cover is unnecessary, but in a way it is more important to you than life assurance. If you become seriously ill, who will support you. Life assurance, as we have discussed, is only of use to dependants when you die.

If you are the family breadwinner, you will need to make some provision to feed, clothe and house your family if you are unable to work. It is an irony that your surviving a serious illness may put them in a worse position financially than if you were not to survive.

Even if there is more than one income coming in to your household, your lifestyle will reflect those incomes and will be affected if one income were to disappear or reduce.

How critical illness works

A critical illness policy is an insurance policy, which pays out a tax-free lump sum on diagnosis of a serious illness. The lump sum you receive is for you to use as you wish. Some policies will pay out an income instead of a lump sum.

All you need to do is decide on the lump sum you are likely to need. Sometimes this is easy to work out because you are using the critical illness policy to cover a particular liability, for example, your mortgage.

You may have life assurance attached to your mortgage, but this will only pay out if you die. If you survive, you still have your monthly mortgage payments to contend with. Critical illness will pay out to you when you are alive and need the money.

Critical illnesses covered

Most critical illness policies will cover the most common critical illnesses: Heart Attack, Cancer, Stroke, Kidney Failure, Major Organ Transplant, Coronary Artery By-Pass and Permanent Total Disability.  Other illnesses that most policies will also cover include:

• AIDS and HIV
• Alzheimer’s Disease
• Benign Brain Tumour
• Coma Cover for Children
• Cruetzfeld Jacob Disease (CJD)
• Loss of a limb, sight, speech, hearing
• Multiple Sclerosis
• Paralysis
• Parkinson’s Disease
• Motor Neurone Disease

You will need to check the small print of any policy you take out. For example, AIDS and HIV are often covered in certain circumstances only, for example, if you contracted it through your work.

Permanent Total Disability is intended as a cover-all clause, provided your disability is permanent. However, providers of critical illness policies have three definitions to choose from:

• Inability to do any occupation;
• Inability to do your own occupation, or any occupation to which you are suited, with your education and training taken into account;
• Inability to perform your own occupation.

Some policies will only pay out if you cannot perform any part of your occupation, while others will only allow a claim if you can manage no part of your occupation.

Flexible Cover

Critical illness policies have developed over the years and can be applied in various ways.

Term insurance linked: the cheapest way of obtaining critical illness cover, protection is for a set number of years only, for example, 25 years to cover a typical mortgage term.

Whole of Life linked: provides cover for life.

Decreasing term insurance: critical illness can also be arranged on a decreasing term basis, ideal for covering debts, that decrease over time, for example, a repayment mortgage.

If you think that your critical insurance premiums could be the equivalent of the amount spent on a meal once a month, it makes sense to secure yours and your family’s finances. You and your family will have lots to think about should you become ill - don’t let money be one of them.

Sources: 1. Imperial Cancer Research Fund. 2. The British Heart Foundation. 3. Imperial Cancer Research Fund, Five year survival figures for England and Wales, patients diagnosed in 1981.

For a competitive free no-obligation insurance quote, please contact us today.
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