Key person insurance financial products right now: Relevant Life Policy: A highly tax efficient way of offering life cover for company directors. Can now also cover illnesses with the optional employee significant illness cover. Written in trust to ensure tax free payouts. Key Person Income Protection Insurance: Long term illness of a key person can affect both the income of a business and also in many cases the employee also needs paying. Key person income protection can cover the business for loss of income whilst the employee is not working. See more details on Key person insurance.
Who can have Key Person Insurance: Any business looking to protect their business from, life cover, terminal illness, critical illness cover (covering illnesses such as heart attack, stroke, cancer). As will as the typical limited company businesses key person cover can benefit sole traders and partnerships. As mentioned above it is important to get the right level of cover, set up in the most tax efficient manner to give peace of mind, protect the business profits and reduce business risk from the loss of a valuable employee. It gives a much needed cash injection to give cash flow by means of a lump sum payment.
The business itself can act as the proposer of this kind of policy if it’s set up in a Ltd format, or each individual owner can take individual policies if within partnerships and sole traders setups. It’s important for businesses to take this kind of measures into consideration when taking out large loans as it helps protect not only the people involved but also their investments should something go wrong throughout repayment period. Making sure everyone involved understands their responsibilities and is aware that there are ways to protect their finances should adverse circumstances arise will help provide peace-of-mind during stressful times.
One common scenario where this protection becomes important is when one shareholder faces higher premiums due to their age or health condition compared to their younger and healthier counterparts. Equalizing premiums ensures that each shareholder contributes fairly towards the policy without incurring an unexpected tax bill in the future. The importance of Shareholder Protection Premium Equalisation underscores the need for careful financial planning and consideration while executing business trusts, ensuring legal compliance while safeguarding shareholders’ interests against unanticipated costs down the road.
Shareholder Benefits: Above we looked at how the insured persons spouse or family would benefit but how about the remaining shareholders of the limited company? If we look at the above we mentioned that the insured person’s spouse now owning 33% of the shares that they cannot sell they might instead want to get involved in the business. For the remaining shareholders this can cause a problem as they might not get along with the spouse, the spouse might not have the experience, knowledge and might not be a good fit for the business. This situation can be a threat to the business success.
When an individual or couple take out a mortgage then in most cases they will protect their mortgage with life insurance or life and critical illness. The same principle should apply for business that have loans, overdrafts or other type of commercial loans. However many business owners overlook and forget to cover any outstanding loans. Business loan protection is very similar to key person cover but rather than the sum assured amount covering the loss of income from the death of a key employee instead it covers outstanding debts.
The most common way for insurers to calculate key person insurance premiums and benefits is based on salary multiples; however, sometimes more complex formulae are used. In order to determine an exact amount of coverage that is necessary for a particular business situation, advice should be sought by someone who understands the value of what would be lost with the key individual gone. This may require researching factors such as how hard or easy it would be to replace them, an estimation of how long this process may take and what kind of losses might occur in the meantime regarding profit. Ultimately, with enough consideration and thought given to these issues prior to purchasing key person insurance, this process will remain simple and straightforward. Find even more details on Relevant Life Policy.