Hi everyone and welcome to this week’s protection update.

This week we ran the second of our ‘Protecting Incomes’ webinars and it was good to see some of you there.

Essentially, it was a play on words.  Protecting Incomes was about Income Protection.

But each week when I think about what to talk about in my protection update; the need to protect incomes was early on.

But I read the really sad story about Johnny Irwin in the papers.

If you don’t know who Johnny Irwin is, he’s a presenter for tv shows such as ‘A place in the sun’ or ‘Escape to the country’.

He’s been presenting on television since 2004 and if you’ve watched one of those shows; you’ve probably seen him.

The sad part of the story I mentioned is that fact that Johnny has gone public and revealed his stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis.  This has now spread to his brain and he’s essentially got just a few months left to live and its terminal.

He’s got a couple of very young children and a wife.

Now this week it was revealed he has been ‘axed’ from the channel 4 show.

That sounds quite dramatic but when I looked a bit further into the news stories, I do not think Channel 4 had much of a choice because they couldn’t secure insurance for him whilst he is gravely ill.

Either way, he has lost his job which means he has lost his income.

Now I imagine he was the main earner in his house?

And with him being terminal, he is expected to die in the next 6 months.

The whole thing is incredibly sad and very sobering.

We arrange a lot of life cover connected to the mortgage which is a good thing because if we arrange big mortgage debts which are secured on people’s homes; it’s appropriate to make sure that our clients have adequate protection to repay these loans back in the event of death.

But what about income?

We have different ways of addressing that problem and unusually (when you think about it); we typically sell lump sum products to cover the lifestyle needs – that means maintain the costs of living which we pay for from our income.

That’s ok if you’ve worked out how much the lump sum needs to be in order to generate the income needed and there are different methods to do that.

The alternative is an income-based solution for an income-based problem – Family Income Benefit.

It’s very affordable and its very easy to understand what it does.  But we do sell very few of these across the market.

A good habit to create in your business is to have diary notes to review your customers on a frequent basis of your choosing – every year, every 18 months, every 2 years – you decide.

But create that habit.

Don’t leave a client without booking them back in for a follow up appointment.

Most clients do not have the protection they need so that is a perfectly good reason to catch up with them again in the future.

Those clients that do have good levels of protection; are we saying this never needs to be looked at again?

Things always change in life and there are always things to review.  Circumstances change, products change.

Protection is a big opportunity for you to keep your business ticking along nicely, even when there are other factors at play in the world and with the economy.

Now, coming back to the theme of protecting incomes being about income protection; I caught up with British Friendly earlier this week and Adam Shipton gave me an update on the market as they see it and some of the great opportunities when it comes to income protection for sickness.

I’ve included that podcast just below this update, so click on it and take a listen.

A Smarter way to underwrite IP – Weds 30^th November @ 10am

And this is your last chance to book onto our final protection development webinar of 2022.

It’s happening next Wednesday 30^th November and it’s called ‘A Smarter way to underwrite IP’.

It’s a collaboration between The Exeter and UnderwriteMe and of course, I will host that session.

It will be a shorter webinar (just 1 hour) and it’s going to give you a good insight about how to overcome the challenges of underwriting income protection products.

So that is it from me once again.  Shorter update because of the podcast…

Have a great weekend and I will see you soon.

A Smarter Way To Underwrite IP – November 30th – Register Now!