Long Term Sick Pay

This helps meet your monthly mortgage payments if you are off work long term due to accident or illness. It is usually set to start as soon as your employer stops paying you and pays out a monthly amount until you are able to return to work.

Although you can use this plan just to cover your mortgage payments it is primarily used as income protection therefore you can cover up to 65% of your salary and the income is tax free too. Most people will work out how much they would need to pay their mortgage, bills, regular commitments and food and use that amount.

The cover is deferred to start from when your sick pay cover provided by your employer ceases and it is usually to set the term to your planned retirement date or the end of your mortgage. The longer that your company pay you for the later the policy will start to pay an income to you so therefore the cheaper the plan will cost.

Premiums are also based on your occupation class and this will depend on whether or not you job is considered high risk. For example an accountant would be low risk but a brick layer would be higher risk.

Waiver of premium or premium protection is also an important option as this ensures that, for a few pence increase in the monthly premium, if you were unable to work due to accident or illness after a certain period say 6 months the premiums would be covered. This means that you are not in the position where you have to cancel valuable cover when you may need it the most because you can't afford the premiums. In effect you would be paying the premiums back out of what you were claiming for.