Where to start with protection

Four risks, in the order they're most likely to happen — and what people usually get backwards.

Most people's protection is the result of whatever they were sold at some point, usually alongside a mortgage. It rarely reflects what they'd actually lose, and it's rarely in the order that matches the risks.

The four risks

You can't work for a while. Illness or injury stops your income for months. Bills carry on.

You become seriously ill. You survive, but there are costs — adaptations, treatment, time off, someone giving up work to care for you.

You die while people depend on you. A partner, children, or anyone whose life is funded by your earnings.

You need long-term care. Late in life, expensive, and largely uninsurable in the UK.

The order people get wrong

Ask most people what protection they have and they'll say life insurance. Ask what they'd claim on first and the honest answer is almost never that.

Being unable to work is far more likely than dying during your working life. It's also the risk people are least covered for, because life insurance is cheap and visible and gets sold with mortgages, while income protection is more expensive, harder to buy, and nobody brings it up.

If you're going to insure one thing, the case for income protection is stronger than the case for life cover — unless you have dependants who'd be in real trouble without your earnings, in which case both matter.

The one exception: if you have young children or a partner who couldn't manage the mortgage alone, life cover is genuinely urgent and genuinely cheap. Don't let the argument above talk you out of it.

Work out what you'd actually lose

Before looking at any product, three numbers:

Your monthly essential outgoings. Mortgage or rent, bills, food, transport, childcare, minimum debt payments. Not your full lifestyle — what you'd need to keep the household running.

What arrives if you stop earning tomorrow. Employer sick pay, and for how long. Statutory sick pay after that. Any state support. Savings you could run down.

The gap between the two, and how long your savings would cover it.

That gap, and its duration, is the entire protection question. Everything else is product detail.

Start with what you've already got

A surprising number of people buy cover they didn't need because nobody told them what they already had — six months of full employer sick pay, death in service worth four times salary, a critical illness policy attached to an old mortgage.

Equally, people rely on cover that doesn't exist, or that ends the day they change jobs.

What you already have covers how to find out. Do this before buying anything.

Then fill the gaps in this order

Income protection, if you'd run out of money before you'd run out of illness. This is the foundation for most working people.
Life cover, if anyone depends on your income. Usually the cheapest cover per pound of benefit, and the easiest to get.
Critical illness cover, if the lump sum would genuinely change how you'd cope. Useful, but more expensive and more conditional than either of the above.
Put policies in trust, which costs nothing and is skipped almost universally. See Putting policies in trust.

The three excuses

"It's too expensive." Some of it is. Life cover generally isn't — for a healthy non-smoker in their thirties, meaningful cover often costs less than a streaming subscription. Get a quote before deciding it's unaffordable.

"They never pay out." They overwhelmingly do. Industry claims statistics consistently run around 97–98% of protection claims paid. The failures cluster around one cause, which is non-disclosure at application — covered in Buying protection.

"I'll sort it later." Protection is priced on age and health. Both move in one direction. The cover you can buy easily at 35 may be expensive or unavailable at 50, and a diagnosis in between can close the door permanently. This is the one area of financial planning where delay has a hard cost.

What about care?

Long-term care is the fourth risk, and there's no meaningful insurance market for it in the UK. What exists is largely about funding care once it's needed rather than insuring against it in advance.

Planning for care is therefore a savings and estate question rather than a protection one, and it's covered in Working out what you actually need.

This article is for general education only and isn't personal advice.