Having been around business for over 20 years working either on the coal face of businesses or managing aspects of companies, we have accumulated plenty of experience navigating the market.

One thing that is coming clear is it isn't often the quality of staff or even the stability of a business that dictates when a company might restructure and lay off a whole bunch of staff, or even just one person.

With this, we have a feel for what goes on with job ebbs and flows, and we are entering a cycle where the likelihood of disruption that forces job changes on people is higher than what we would consider normal.

The reserve bank has released their latest update on the cash rate and dropped it earlier than expected. 

Some have suggested that this was expected by economists later in the year, others it's a surprise.

What does it really mean for you?

A good question and one that is often misunderstood when it comes to income protection.

It’s also been coming up in conversations more recently, suggesting there’s some job security sentiment developing.

In New Zealand there are five situations that impact your ability to earn an income.

Obviously, if you are laid off, but when is it going to be the most use to you?

Often there are comments redundancy protection is expensive relative to the cost of income protection. For those looking at income protection under the age of 40 this is often the case. Income protection pays up to age 70, redundancy protection only pays up to 6 months, with redundancy protection sometimes costing more than income protection for those under 40. Cost is relative, for a 50 year old it can be less than 25% of your overall cost of income protection even though redundancy protection premiums are the same for all ages.

Let's have a closer look at this picture.