This month is a bit of a detour from the normal ramblings on the mortgage market to a much more important subject, our health.
Our Founder and Director, Gary Oxborough, has been self-employed for more years than he cares to remember.
He says, one thing that I’ve always, jokingly, said is that “self-employed people are the healthiest people in the country”. This is not a statement of fact but is based on that we simply can’t afford to be off work sick. Put simply, if you are self-employed, you don’t work – you don’t get paid.
Thankfully, for me, I’ve never had any periods of ill health that have seriously impacted my work but the last couple of weeks have brought the importance of this home. I returned from a nice holiday in Italy and immediately on landing at Manchester Airport started to feel cold and shivery.
I put this down to moving from 30 degrees of Italian sunshine to a typically drizzly Manchester. However, this wasn’t the case, and I had brought an extra “souvenir” back from my holidays in the form of “Italian Man Flu”. This has completely drained me for the last couple of weeks.
I’m quite fortunate in that the job I do, I only need a phone and a laptop, so I can at least keep on top of things if I’m away from the office, and we now have an excellent team who are more than capable of holding the fort without me.
However, this got me thinking about how we would cope if my absence were longer than a couple of weeks and I wasn’t able to do any work at all remotely?
Sick pay for employees is an extremely valuable benefit and provides a reassurance that you can at least pay your bills should you be off work for a prolonged period. If you are fortunate enough to have a good workplace sick pay scheme, then that’s fantastic, but if you don’t, or are self-employed, would having your own “sick pay” arrangement be something you should investigate?
This is where income protection comes into play. This is an insurance policy that will provide regular income should you be unable to work through illness or injury. For a small monthly cost, you can guarantee that you are financially covered in sickness and in health.
I’m reminded of something I was taught a long time ago about income protection. If you had the option of taking one of 2 jobs, both with exactly the same roles and responsibilities, but one had a good basic salary, say £40,000 pa, with no sick pay arrangements, while the other paid a slightly lower basic salary, of £38,000 pa but guaranteed your income through to retirement, even if you couldn’t work due to ill health, which job would you take?
If you’d like to know more about income protection, or insurance in general, please contact our Protection Specialist, Jade Winstanley at Barlow Irvin.