Insurance against Loss of Income
This insurance has been designed to overcome the consequences
of unemployment or disability and to provide the following
unique benefits in the event of loss of income. This basically
means that if for whatever reason you are made redundant
or become seriously ill or have an accident then you will
receive money from your insurance plan. Simply click below
for an instant online quote.
Insuring your income is a must in modern day UK.
Please read below to see some of the figures quoted and
to also see how trends relating to the income insurance
market are going.
The optimists conclude that income protection cover
which has failed to fulfil its
true potential for so long despite consistently being ranked
above other
forms of health insurance in consumer surveys, has finally
reached take-off
point now that individual critical illness cover is
experiencing much
publicised problems with online rate increases.
Fragmented pockets of anecdotal evidence can be used to
support the view
that once new income protection figures become available
they could show an
even stronger year-on-year increase.
UK Based Income Protection Insurance Trends
Few who work in the income protection field disagree with
the old saying "If
it ain't broke don't fix it" But it is far from clear
if income protection insurance
is broke or not. Those who see the glass as being half full
are revelling in
the strong new insurance business growth enjoyed last year
and it looks as if this trend is planned to continue. According
to Swiss Re, the 245,063 income insurance policies sold
last year represented a 19.9% increase over the year before.
The Health Insurance Shop, a low-cost specialist
income protection
intermediary based in Mere in Wiltshire, estimates that
its income
protection sales increased by between 20% and 30%
during the last year
whilst Pioneer Friendly Society quotes that the income protection
plan product
it brought out this June is providing it with "record
month after record
months".
Phil Calvert, national sales manager at Pioneer Friendly
Society was quoted as saying
"We do not plan on doing
any more advertising than normal and have only a very small
broker-consultant field force but we have come up with a
good income
protection product, particularly for the self-employed.
IFA's seem to be
dealing in more income protection business generally during
recent months
and there has been a significant increase in selling income
protection to
blue collar workers and the self-employed."
UK Unemployment, Illness and Disability
Insurance Research
The "half-empty brigade", on the other hand,
only have to point to the
£ 130billion income protection gap diagnosed by Swiss
Re in March. This
supposedly "conservative estimate" represents
the difference between the
level of income protection cover held by UK consumers
and the amount of
insurance that should be in force throughout the working
population.
Other reasons to get depressed include the realisation that
last year's online
income protection sales increases were ominously linked
to the mortgage
market in England, Wales and Scotland.
The Swiss Re research shows that mortgage/expenditure related
income
protection showed an annual increase of 48.5% during 2002,
whilst non
expenditure/non mortgage related income protection showed
an annual decrease
of a fraction of 1%. There is, therefore, an obvious risk
of a housing
market collapse upsetting the applecart.
The prosperity of any field that suffers the withdrawal
of one of its main
players must also be questioned, especially when no-one
seems to want to buy
it! Swiss Life, which had the largest share of the IFA market
for individual
income protection, has been administering its own run-off
operation since
July 2003.
Click below for an instant online quote.
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