July 2020

Life insurance puts money in the hands of those who need it when a person dies. There are many reasons why this money might be needed. It’s not just for parents with young families. A need could arise at any age and the nature of that need could change as you get older. As such, regular reviews of your financial protection needs are essential.

If your income would stop upon your death, and you have people who depend on you financially, you should have life insurance cover. If you live with a spouse or partner and their earnings would also stop at death, they too should have insurance cover. However, if you do not have financial dependents, you may not have a need for life assurance.

Quantifying the need for life insurance

The life insurance needed to cover a loan is relatively simple to assess. You need enough insurance for the amount of the loan, and the cover should last for the time that the loan is outstanding. If you pay off some of the loan, you should be able to reduce the amount of cover earmarked for this purpose. However, if you take advantage of loan or mortgage repayment holidays as a result of Covid-19, you’ll need to review the cover you have in place as it may no longer be sufficient, unless you subsequently make overpayments. Most people also need insurance cover to replace their income if they were to die. The same principles apply but the calculations are a little more complicated.

Example – calculating needs
David and his wife Penny have a son of five who is about to start school. They have decided to send him to a fee-paying school and expect him to be there until he is 18. David and Penny are now considering life insurance to ensure that the fees could continue to be paid for the next 13 years. The first thing to do is therefore to quantify the total cost of school fees over the next 13 years, taking inflation into account.

The approach to insuring other needs is roughly the same. For example, you could calculate how much your family would need to cover the general household and other expenses, and how long they would need the funds for.

You can arrange for life cover to pay out a series of annual amounts over a set period, which is a simple approach to replacing an annual income, but most life cover pays out a lump sum. If you want a lump sum to provide £1,000 a year for 10 years, you would need life cover of about £10,000 because even if you invested a lump sum it wouldn’t have long to grow before you needed to spend it. If you needed the income for 20 years, however, you might only need about £18,500 because you could invest some of this for the longer term and benefit from growth and income.

It is sometimes hard to work out how much life cover you would require for your family, because of the difficulties of assessing your family’s needs after one or both parents have died. Your usual pattern of expenditure provides a good starting point for these estimates. Then you would have to consider the other costs that might be involved, like childcare. It can be especially difficult to assess the potential financial impact of the death of a parent who spends most of their time looking after children and the household. A good starting point is to estimate the costs of buying in these services.

Over time, your circumstances will change. Children grow up and mortgages and other loans are repaid. Your income may rise or fall, stop and restart. The same goes for your expenditure. You may take on more debt. It’s therefore a good idea to review the amount of cover you have on a regular basis, to ensure that it is still appropriate for your needs and that you are not under or over-insured.

The Right Life Insurance Policies for You

Term assurance is the right sort of life cover for most types of family protection needs. It can provide insurance at the lowest cost for the period that it is required.

It is rare that you would need other types of life insurance for family protection, because they generally involve much higher costs than term assurance for comparable levels of cover. Whole of life assurance provides cover for the whole of your life, as the name implies, and its main use is in inheritance tax planning and provision for funeral expenses. Whole of life policies can have substantial investment values that you can cash in, unlike term assurance policies.

Term assurance is the simplest form of life insurance, working in a similar way to your home insurance. The policy will pay out if you die during the term, but if you survive to the end of the term, the contract simply ends and there is no pay-out.

The cost of term assurance varies considerably according to factors such as your age and state of health. The cost of 10-year term assurance for a 30-year-old is about a tenth of the same cover for a 60-year-old. A person’s state of health is also important; poor health could mean increased premiums or even the possibility that the individual cannot be insured. Although term assurance is a simple product, there are variations that suit different needs.

Types of term assurance

Life cover from your employer or pension scheme If you are employed, you may well have life cover from your employer and you might want to take this cover into account when deciding how much insurance you need. However, you need to bear in mind that you will probably lose this cover if you leave your employer. At which point, you’d need to consider taking out additional cover.

Relevant life policies Employers can take out these policies on the lives of employees. They are not part of their pensions, but they have many of the same tax advantages.

Joint life policies There may be situations where you would want to take out a policy on more than one life. The policy could then pay out after both the insured people have died – this is sometimes used for inheritance tax planning. Alternatively, the policy might be arranged so that it pays out when the first of the insured people dies. This could be suitable for financially interdependent people, but would mean that the second person would no longer be covered by the policy after the first of the couple dies.

Ensuring the right people get the money

Generally, the best way to ensure that the proceeds of a life policy are paid to the people you intend to benefit is to arrange for the policy to be in a trust. Some types of trust give the trustees discretion or flexibility about how they distribute the benefits, but it is a good idea to get advice about this. If you die, the policy proceeds will be paid to the trustees and then the beneficiaries, not into your estate. This arrangement could save them IHT and should speed up the payment to the beneficiaries.

There are other ways to set up life policies. The person you want to benefit could take out the policy themselves – the so-called life of another basis. In some circumstances this can be a wise arrangement, especially if the potential beneficiary wants to be certain that the premiums on the policy are being paid. But mostly it is preferable to arrange for a policy to be in trust.

Covid-19 and life insurance

Many life insurance providers are reassuring those with existing policies that they will pay out in the event of a claim resulting from a coronavirus-related death. However, because each insurer has different terms and conditions, you should check your policy to ensure that pandemics are not excluded.

Applications for life insurance from new clients are being accepted, but if an applicant is currently experiencing Covid-19 symptoms, the insurer is likely to postpone processing their application until they have fully recovered. Telling an insurer that you are in a good state of health when you are not will invalidate your policy, meaning that it will not pay out in the event of a claim.

Please do give us a call if you wish to speak to one of our Financial Planners about your life insurance requirements. We have good relations with reputable providers and can possibly make preliminary enquiries with underwriting teams about certain conditions to gain an understanding of how an application may be considered.

This article is for general information and is not intended to be advice to any specific person.

The purpose of health insurance is to provide some money if you fall seriously ill or have an accident, potentially affecting you for many years. In this case, you would probably stop earning, although your financial needs might well be greater than ever. The state benefits you would receive would be relatively low and would be most unlikely to provide sufficient income to meet your needs, especially if you have substantial rent or mortgage payments to make. You might also need capital, for example to make adaptations to your home or to pay off debt. A rainy day fund can help in the short term here, but it’s not a complete solution. The precise level of fund required can vary from person to person, but, as a minimum, three to six months’ expenditure could be used as a guide.

Virtually everyone who is working therefore needs some kind of health insurance to provide financial protection if their earnings are affected by serious illness or disability. Even if you have no financial dependents, there is a very strong chance that you will need health insurance if you are responsible for paying your own bills.

Income Protection Insurance

Income protection insurance – sometimes called permanent health insurance – pays a weekly or monthly income if you cannot work because of illness or disability. You may think that you do not need to worry about this kind of cover, but the fact is that in the UK there are nearly 14 million people with a limiting long-term illness, impairment or disability. The prevalence of disability rises with age. Around 8% of children are disabled, compared to 19% of working age adults and 45% of adults over state pension age.

You can generally be insured to receive a monthly benefit of up to about half to two-thirds of your pre-tax income. If you have no income, you may still be able to take out a policy, but the maximum payout will be limited, generally to an income of about £20,000 a year.

Some employers provide income protection insurance, but a very large number do not. Employers are only legally obliged to pay employees, in the form of statutory sick pay, for the first 28 weeks of their being unable to work because of an illness or injury; even then not everyone will qualify, and the employer does not have to pay the full salary. It is worth specifically checking the position with your employer. If your employer provides cover, the benefits generally continue to be subject to income tax and national insurance contributions, at least initially, but you won’t usually have to pay tax on the premiums. If you take out the cover yourself, the benefits are tax free.

Income protection insurance pays after a waiting period on each claim and can usually continue to pay you up to retirement age, unless you recover and return to work sooner. The cover normally lasts until you are aged 60 or 65, but you can arrange the insurance for much shorter periods – say five or ten years – and this cover is much cheaper because it is substantially less valuable. The chances of having a serious illness or disability increase substantially as you grow older.

During the Covid-19 outbreak, insurers have experienced a rise in queries regarding income protection insurance. Generally people who are simply self-isolating are unlikely to be covered. However, a small number of providers will consider claims for self-isolation where it is medically advised. Those with severe coronavirus symptoms that continue beyond the waiting period will start to receive their monthly payout if those symptoms mean they meet their insurer’s definition of incapacity (e.g. they are unable to work at their own occupation). Some providers are restricting cover for respiratory conditions for new customers.

Income protection can appear relatively expensive but can be very valuable if you fall seriously ill. If you are considering taking out a policy these are some of the things you should consider.

Example David works as an IT manager. He earns a good salary and he lives a comfortable lifestyle. In the event of being unable to work due to illness, he would receive full pay for up to four weeks, but would then only receive statutory sick pay and, later, state benefits if he is eligible for them. He would not be able to continue to meet his commitments and may have to sell his flat should the illness continue into the long term. David might consider income protection to provide an ongoing income after his employer stops paying him. This could continue until his selected retirement age or, if he wanted to keep premiums down, for a limited term of, say, five years.

Critical Illness Insurance

Critical illness insurance pays a lump sum if you are diagnosed as suffering from a specified illness. Over 30 conditions may be covered, including serious cancers, heart attack and stroke. Some providers may cover significantly more – even up to 100 different conditions.

The advantage of critical illness insurance is the benefit is paid very early, shortly after diagnosis of the illness, without any significant delay – unlike the usual longer waiting periods of income protection. It is also in the form of a lump sum that can allow you to make rapid adjustments to your lifestyle and pay off loans. The main drawback is that this type of health insurance only covers a limited set of conditions. These are common disabilities, but critical illness insurance generally does not cover some important conditions, such as musculoskeletal pain and most mental illnesses.

People often take out critical illness insurance to cover a mortgage or other loan. Because you are significantly more likely to have a critical illness than die whilst you are of working age, it is more expensive than life insurance. But this reflects the likelihood of needing to claim on the policy.

Critical illness is an important and valuable addition to income protection, but it should not normally be regarded as a replacement for it.

Whereas an income protection policy will pay out to those suffering from severe Covid-19 symptoms beyond the waiting period where the insurer’s definition for incapacity is met, Covid-19 itself is not covered by critical illness policies. However, if the coronavirus leads to one of the conditions listed on your policy, for example a heart attack or a stroke, and you survive the waiting period, the policy would pay out.

Again if you would like to discuss your income protection requirements in more detail, please do give us a call.

This article is for general information and is not intended to be advice to any specific person.

Private medical insurance (PMI) pays for private health treatment. Depending on your budget, you choose what you want covered – just in-patient or day-patient treatment, or out-patient consultations and medical tests. PMI pays for the treatment of acute conditions only. It does not cover chronic conditions (except, generally, at onset) and pre-existing conditions may also be excluded. As part of the response to the Covid-19 outbreak, providers are continuing to delay non-urgent treatments to free up beds for the NHS. Treatments will be delivered and funded by the provider once the beds are no longer required.

Health cash plans pay for everyday health costs, typically 75%–100% of costs for dentistry, optical and consultation costs, plus a small sum for each day spent in hospital, subject to an annual limit. Other dental options include capitation (maintenance) plans, which are agreed with your dentist and cover likely costs over the next year, and dental insurance. Plans may require an initial waiting period to stop people taking out cover for known treatment then cancelling the policy.

We can assist you in obtaining medical insurance by researching the marketplace for the most suitable cover. So, if you wish to discuss this area of protection in more detail, please do get in touch.

Financial resilience is the ability to recover quickly from an unexpected financial shock. Many of us insure our homes and cars without really thinking about it, but far fewer insure their lives and incomes. And yet, if you were to pass away, how would those you leave behind be able to manage financially? If you were unable to work due to illness, how would you find the money to pay your household bills? Savings can and do help in the short-term. But what happens when they run out? What happens if an illness goes on for three, six, or even 12 months? What then? Covid-19 has focused many people’s minds on the need for an adequate rainy day fund and financial protection. While nothing can ease the emotional distress the virus has and is continuing to cause, it is possible to lessen its financial impact on those affected and their loved ones. Life and health insurance protection underpins most good financial planning.

Insurers are constantly looking at new ways to meet people’s needs, such as through life insurance that includes critical illness and/or income protection insurance, which may be cheaper than taking out separate policies. It is important to look at your options – what do you need most now? How much cover do you need? Can you defer some cover until a future date? What can you do to protect yourself and your loved ones financially in light of the Covid-19 pandemic?

Our role is to do four things:

• Know enough about you to make the right recommendations. We take the time to understand your financial situation, your needs, preferences and views. Whether for example, you would feel comfortable accepting that premiums may rise, or if you want a guaranteed solution.
• Help you to identify your priorities. If you were insured against absolutely everything, like most people you may find premiums unaffordable. We don’t expect you to be an expert on life insurance, but we need to know your attitude to risk. Working out how things might change in the future and prioritising matters could be a sensible thing to do.
• Recommend solutions to meet your needs. The right policy is important, but a will or writing policies in trust could be too.
• Review. Your financial protection needs change over time. Regular reviews are essential to ensure your plans continue to meet your needs.

If you would like us to assist in finding the most suitable protection for you, we will be happy to help!