critical illness cover

[zookeeper]

I'm newly single and am paranoid now about what will happen should I get sick and not be able to work. I'm not so worried about dying (!) as the dcs would go to their dad.
Can anyone recommend any good policies/companies? What should I be looking for and what should I avoid?

You probably need to consider permanent health insurance (which pays a monthly sum out starting form 3,6 or 12 months after you first become sick) in priority to critical illness (which pays out a lump sum for a limited number of typically terminal conditions), though we have both.

With permanent insurance the things that vary the quote is a) how quickly it starts (so you need to consider how long your company will pay sick pay), the monthly level of income you will need, and how this gets indexed. You also need to consider whetehr you want the policy to pay out if you cannot do your current job, of if you cannot do any job (the former cover being mroe expeinsive).

With critical illness coveryou need to consider which illnesses are covered.

thanks ladymuck - are there any companies you would avoid/recommend?

just a note - we took out redundancy cover too and boy am i glad we did...!

look at moneysavingexpert.com. There is lots of advice on their about it.

I took a redundancy/illness mortgage payment protection policy and had no problems claiming on it. Company was very easy to deal with and very professional. Can highly recommend it. It was St Andrew's group through Paymentshield. It was about £50/month however.

Worth noting that you can only claim for as long as you are claiming IS or JSA with many of these policies. So if you are getting contributions-based JSA, once those contributions run out, you can't claim further monthly payments through your policy. If you are a single parent though, you'd probably get income-based JSA. I was limited to about 6 months payments because my NI contributions 'ran out', although my policy was for 12 months.

I'm dubious about critical illness policies (although we have one with bupa). recent story about NU not paying out due to non-disclosure of totally unrelated and insignificant medical conditions. apparently some companies are starting to publish their stats on non-payment?? worth googling, but I think I'm cancelling mine. It's nearly £95/month.

The online deals are good for this stuff, but I would recommend speaking to an IFA because if you cock up your application forms, you could face non-payment when you are really relying on it.