Personal risk insurances to consider include:
- Life Insurance – pays a lump sum on the death of the insured.
- Income Protection Insurance – replaces your income if you are unable to work due to sickness or injury. It provides a monthly payment of usually up to 75% of your pre-tax income. You can generally choose the waiting period (this is how long you must be unable to work before the insurance begins to pay you) and the benefit period (how long the policy will pay you if you are unable to work).
- Trauma Insurance – pays you a lump sum on the diagnosis of a specified non-pre-existing illness or injury, generally including heart attack, stroke, cancer, and paraplegia. This can be taken as a stand-alone policy, or attached to a life insurance policy. This insurance was created when it was realised that medical advances were resulting in patients increasingly surviving major health problems, but that the financial cost of survival was prohibitively high for patients (e.g. medical costs, medicine, time off work, rehabilitation etc). In other words, patients didn’t lose their lives… they lost their life savings instead.