Protection advice

Protection advice: cover that pays for the life, not the policy

Nobody wants to buy this. Everybody wants to have bought it.

Protection is the part of a financial plan that only proves its worth on the worst day, which is why it gets postponed, underbought, or arranged once and never looked at again.

Our job is to work out what would break if your income stopped, then cover that. Not more, not less.

What actually stops people working

The picture most people carry is dramatic. A diagnosis, an accident, something you'd tell people about.

The reality is duller and more common. ABI figures for 2024 (https://www.abi.org.uk/news/news-articles/2025/7/record-8bn-paid-out-in-vital-protection-claims-during-2024/) show musculoskeletal problems, neck and back pain, were the leading cause of individual income protection claims, accounting for around a third of claims paid.

A bad back doesn't sound like a financial event. Ask a self-employed builder, a dentist, or anyone whose income depends on turning up.

The four questions we work through

If you died, what would your family need? Not a round number pulled from a mortgage statement. The mortgage cleared, the years of income replaced, the school fees seen through, the inheritance tax bill covered so nobody sells the house to pay it.

If youcouldn't work for two years, what happens in month three? Statutory sick pay is a fraction of most incomes and employer cover rarely runs long. Income protection replaces a proportion of earnings until you recover or retire.

If you were seriously ill but survived, what would it cost? Critical illness pays a lump sum on diagnosis. It's the money that pays for adaptations, private treatment, or a partner cutting their hours to look after you.

What have you already got? Death in service, an old policy from a mortgage in 2011, cover your employer provides that you've never read. We count what exists before recommending anything new. Sometimes the answer is that you're already covered and should keep your money.

Do insurers pay out?

This is the objection, and it's fair to raise it.

ABI figures (https://www.abi.org.uk/news/news-articles/2025/7/record-8bn-paid-out-in-vital-protection-claims-during-2024/) show the proportion of individual protection claims paid has stayed at or above 97.9% over the past decade. The most common reason for a declined claim is non-disclosure: something not mentioned on the application, often years earlier, often not deliberately.

Which is where advice earns itself. Getting the application right is most of the work. A policy that pays is worth more than a policy that's cheap.

Waiting, and what it costs

Health insurance is the cover people think about when a waiting list has a number on it and the number is measured in months.

Policies range from full private treatment to plans that pay a set amount towards medical bills. What suits you depends on what you'd want to skip the queue for, and what you'd be content to leave to the NHS. We help you draw that line before you need to know where it is, because cover bought after a diagnosis rarely covers the diagnosis.

Written for the life it's meant to protect

Cover arranged once and never reviewed drifts out of shape. The mortgage shrinks. The children leave. A business starts, or sells. The policy that fitted at 34 rarely fits at 52.

We review protection alongside everything else, so what you're paying for still matches what you'd need.

The same goes for the everyday policies we don't arrange, home, contents, travel. Premiums creep up for no reason other than loyalty, and the cover that fitted the house you bought in 2015 hasn't kept pace with the extension, the bike, or the laptop your work now depends on. It's worth a look every couple of years, and if yours hasn't had one, it's overdue.

Cover has exclusions and conditions as well as benefits. We'll make sure you understand what a policy does and doesn't do be