Loan insurance can give you an income if you should become unable to work due to suffering an illness, accident or unemployment. Loan insurance can give tax-free payments that allow you to continue meeting your debt repayments without worry. This allows you to concentrate on getting better and getting back to work, or finding another job, with the security of knowing you do not have to struggle to afford your loan repayments each month.
Loan payment protection can start to pay out once you have been unable to work for between 30 to 90 days. Once your policy has started providing you with the security of an income it then continues to do so for between one to two years. While this is usually enough time to get back to work, those who remain unable to work would have to consider how they would continue repaying their loan or credit card debt once the policy had stopped providing.
Loan protection has been branded as nothing but a rip-off after the Office of Fair Trading revealed that mis-selling was widespread in 2005. But the majority of mis-selling occurs among the high street lenders that sell loan protection alongside a loan at the time of borrowing. Often very little information is given out to those buying cover, which means they cannot decide if they are eligible to claim. In fact, there are exclusions in the cover which mean it would be impossible for some people to claim. Those individuals who are self-employed, retired, suffering from a pre-existing medical condition or who do not work full time would have to check the terms and conditions very carefully. Those with an illness could only claim if they had not had a re-occurrence of the illness within two years prior to taking out a policy.
One of the biggest problems associated with the loan cover is the selling of policies by those who have little or no experience in payment protection. The protection can be a very valuable asset to have, but the policy holder must be sure that they would be eligible for a payout. An independent provider of payment protection will offer advice and information before you take on the cover and this is the safest way to buy. Along with this, going to a standalone provider is also the cheapest possible way of taking out a policy.
Quotes for the products vary considerably depending on where you choose to look. Loan insurance taken from a specialist can save you as much as 80% in comparison to the quotes high street lenders provide. One way that the high street lenders rip-off the consumer is by working out how much payment protection would cost and then adding it onto the cost of the loan before calculating the interest. It is though that this practice adds £4 billion to high street lenders' profits each year. An ethical standalone specialist, on the other hand, will give you a quote based on the amount of your loan repayments each month and your age.
Simon Burgess is Managing Director of the award-winning British Insurance, a specialist provider of loan insurance, mortgage protection insurance and income protection insurance.
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