Protect what's important
Insurance is the part of a financial plan nobody enjoys arranging and nobody regrets having. The job is not to sell you the most cover; it is to work out what you need to protect yourself and your loved ones in the event of something unforeseen and balance this against the affordability of cover.
Is this you?
If more than one of these lands, it is worth a conversation. None of them are unusual, and all of them are fixable.
This is the clearest case there is. The question is not whether you need cover but whether the cover you have would actually clear the debt and keep the household running.
Default cover is a starting point set by your fund, not an amount calculated against your circumstances. It is frequently a fraction of what a mortgage and dependent children would require.
No employer safety net means your income stops the day you do. Income protection is doing a different and more urgent job for you than it does for a salaried employee with accrued leave.
A policy sized before a mortgage, a second child or a business is sized for someone else. Cover does not update itself when your obligations grow.
What we actually do
No open-ended retainer and no vague scope. You know what you are getting and what it costs before we begin.
We work out what would need to be covered: debt cleared, income replaced for how long, education funded, final costs met. Then we arrive at a number before looking at any product.
Life, total and permanent disability, trauma or critical illness, and income protection each solve a different problem. We recommend only what earns its place, and say plainly where you are already adequately covered.
Whether cover sits inside super or outside it, and who owns the policy, changes the cashflow, the tax treatment and who receives the money. We structure it deliberately rather than by default.
We manage the application and medical underwriting so it does not stall, and if you ever need to claim, we deal with the insurer alongside you. This is the part of the job that matters most and gets advertised least.
Worth understanding
Not a sales pitch: the handful of things that genuinely change the outcome, including the ones that are expensive to discover late.
A TPD policy that assesses you against *any* occupation pays only if you cannot work in any job you are reasonably suited to. One assessed against your *own* occupation pays if you cannot return to the specific work you were trained for. The second is far more likely to pay a skilled professional, and two policies with an identical sum insured can behave completely differently at claim. Read the definition, not the headline figure.
Premiums paid from your super balance leave household cashflow untouched, which is often the difference between having cover and not. The cost is a smaller retirement balance, and some cover types are not available or not tax-effective inside super. There is no universally right answer, only one that fits your cashflow and your priorities.
How long you wait before benefits start, how long they are paid for, and how the insurer calculates your income all matter more than the monthly benefit on the front page. A long benefit period with a longer waiting period is frequently better value than the reverse, particularly if you have leave or savings to bridge the gap.
A replacement policy is not in force until it has been formally accepted, and acceptance depends on your current health. Cancelling first leaves a gap, and if underwriting turns up something unexpected you may find you cannot get back what you gave up. We always overlap the two.
Common questions
General information only, and not personal advice. What applies to you depends on your circumstances.
Start from obligations rather than a multiple of salary. Typically: enough to clear the mortgage and other debt, replace your income for as long as your household would need it, cover children's education, and meet final expenses, less any assets and existing cover already available. That produces a specific number for your situation rather than a generic rule.
Get started
Tell us where you are with personal insurance and what you would like to sort out. If we can help, we will explain exactly how and what it costs.
