As a home based worker, insuring your income can be a bit of a challenge in some situations.

The question is what do you do and how mobile do you have to be to do it? 

To be clear, I'm talking about those people who earn an income rather than those who are in unpaid occupations. The later is another article.

I'll be exploring a few situations and the insurance approach for paid home based workers, to give you a bit of an idea about how you can protect your income if you work from home.

Over the phone and online insurance deals make it easy to buy insurance……but there are some pitfalls.

Guest blog from insurance advice.nz

Interesting research out of Australia, yes I know Aussie. However, as our closest neighbour, most research has some value for insight or application in our market too.

What is interesting with this, is the insurance uptake across all products is generally better in Australia, with house car and contents being the most similar to us.

This research was specifically about insurance literacy, most of the time these reports are on investment or financial literacy or subject matter and insurance is treated as a by-line. Which for those relying on it, it is far from a by-line.

It seems there is plenty to write about this week. 

Russell Hutchison has said the following on his blog moneyblog this week.

An Australian man whose daughter went to live in Syria claims she did nothing wrong by going there, and was misled into the venture which was supposed to be for humanitarian purposes. Headlines describe her as a "Jihadist." But her motivation is not the point as far as the insurance claim is concerned.

It seems I'm destined to write an article about this time every year about breast cancer and the challenges people face with their insurance company's getting breast reconstructions done.

This year it is this article in the New Zealand Herald, 11th Hour Shock, for Anna Jobsz who is having a preventative mastectomy and breast reconstruction. This follows on from the high profile treatment Angelina Jolie had when she found out she was exposed to a high chance of developing breast cancer.

Diana’s Clements recent article on heart attack definitions in trauma insurance and the situation of a claimant in Australia, not getting paid for his heart attack, has put the spot light on the definition of a heart attack in trauma insurance here.

Looking into heart attack definitions in the market, from what you can presently buy, the quality level across heart attack definitions is quite surprising.

There has been plenty of contention about Sovereign heart attack definitions over the years. The rating for this would suggest it’s somewhat founded, with a 21% gap between it and the best rated heart attack definition.

As our largest life insurer, Sovereign also has the largest number of trauma policies on their books.

The following is a school speech my youngest daughter delivered recently. I'm proud of her position and writing on this, all herself and a quite mature view from a 15 year old.

The speech was marked as a Merit overall for NCEA 1 and the writing as an Excellence. I felt it was worth sharing. Financial literacy is an area, us kiwi's, haven't had a great deal of success with. 

If I gave you $20,000 today, what would you do with it?

Something we are told about, and sometimes think about, but do we actually take the time to do?

I was browsing the Pak'nSave website planning this weeks grocery trip, and came across a section of their website that frankly, is just good advice. Not financial advice, though there is a link to budgeting services if you need it, good advice on better managing your money when it comes to the weekly shopping spend. 

I was reading a policy working recently and it had a definition of death in it that I found humorous. Not that dying is humorous but the way it was written was.

Death/Dies - Means irreversibly dead with no possibility of resuscitation.

It was along the lines of doh! yeah already, it’s life cover, you’re dead it pays, what’s hard about that.

Thinking about it, we’ve had stories reported in the media about people being pronounced dead, then waking up in the morgue or the autopsy table, some hours/days later.

Self-employed? Yup.

Sick of hearing about ACC and health and safety? Yup!

Ok sorry I've got news for you, neither is going away in a hurry. Actually the health and safety bit is going to get worse. I'll talk more about that in another post, as there's a few things going on in the background I'm looking at for clients.

Back to the self-employed and ACC thing.

You've got a fairly steep learning curve going on and ACC has just thrown a spanner in the works. It's a spanner in the works because ACC isn't intuitive and you're short on time and don't have time to figure this crap out right now.

If this resonates with you, you need to read this, it will short cut this for you.

Let's start with the simple things you need to understand first.

If you are self-employed the answer is you should! We don't joke about this, restructuring your ACC will give you more certainty if you are disabled through an accident and if you have talked to a financial adviser and arranged income protection, you will have more certainty for non-accident disabilities as well.

Let me start at the beginning. You started your own business and you have been doing your thing for a few years, you have no income protection because you have got by this long without it.

Offsets are one of the most contentious and least understood provisions of an Income Protection contract with policy holders.

Why?

Simply it's not a selling point so it's glossed over in the advice discussion.

Keep in mind, having some cover is better than no cover, but having the right cover is even better.

I'm going to explore offsets in this article so you have a better understanding of what this may mean to you.

This question gets asked from time to time, and the simple answer is to help people. Which often gets a 'say what' sort of look, then 'but you sell insurance?' Yup, that's what I do.

Those in the industry understand my answer intimately, those outside often don't understand it so much.

I'll try and explain.

Those that have been reading my blog and social posts on a regular basis will have seen I’ve got a particular bee in my bonnet about unfunded medicines. Partly driven from my view insurance advice needs to improve but also ensuring you have access to the best treatment possible when you really need it the most.

This blog article was updated and reposted here on the 3rd of October 2016. I have left this here for comparison purposes to show the impact of Sovereign's announcement on the 30th of September.

As I wrote in this article, unfunded medicines the real risk to you, if you’re a Southern Cross policy holder you have about a 6.3% risk that if you develop cancer you’ll have to find money to pay for your cancer treatment. If you’re with another provider who doesn’t have any contribution to your unfunded treatments, you’ll have a 15% chance you’ll have to contribute to your treatment.