How to protect your income.
You insure the phone, the car, the holiday — and leave your ability to earn uninsured. If your income stopped for six months, what breaks? The cover that fills that gap, explained.
People insure the things that would be annoying to lose — the phone, the holiday, the car — and leave uninsured the one thing everything else depends on: their ability to earn. It's a strange blind spot. Your income pays the mortgage, the food, the life. Ask yourself honestly: if it stopped tomorrow because of illness or injury, how long could you keep going? For most people the answer is uncomfortably short.
How long could you last?
Statutory Sick Pay is modest and time-limited, and many people have little more than that to fall back on. Savings help, but a serious illness can stop your income for months or longer — far beyond what most emergency funds are built for. The gap between ‘my income stopped’ and ‘my bills stopped’ is exactly what income protection is designed to fill.
the question worth sitting with: if your income stopped for six months, what breaks?
The three main types of cover
- Income protection — pays you a regular, replacement income if you can't work through illness or injury, usually until you recover or retire. The most useful and most overlooked of the three, because it protects the actual mechanism — your earning.
- Life insurance — pays a lump sum if you die. Matters most when other people depend on your income: a partner, children, a mortgage.
- Critical illness cover — pays a lump sum on diagnosis of a serious, defined condition, which can cover a period off work or adaptations you might need.
What you actually need depends on your life
You don't need all of it, and you should be wary of anyone trying to sell you all of it. The right cover depends entirely on who relies on you and what would break if your income stopped. A single person with no dependants and a good savings buffer has very different needs from a sole earner with a mortgage and two kids. This is genuinely a personal calculation, not a one-size product.
Before buying anything, check what you already have. Some employers provide death-in-service (a lump sum if you die while employed) or sick pay well beyond the statutory minimum. There's no point paying for cover you already hold — so find out what's there before you top it up.
Choosing and arranging the right protection — the type, the amount, the provider, the small print on what's actually covered — is regulated financial advice, and worth getting right because the details decide whether a claim pays out. That's a conversation for Buzz Financial Services, not something to guess at.
You can't do everything at once, and protection often sits behind the emergency fund and clearing debt in the queue. But the question — if my income stopped, what happens? — is worth sitting with today, even if the answer is a plan for later. It's the one risk that, left uninsured, can undo everything else you've built.
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