Mortgage Advice Bureau (MAB) protection proposition director Andy Walton has revealed how failing to properly rearrange his income protection (IP) cover for a new job hit him hard when he fell seriously ill.
As a result, Walton is advocating that “every adviser needs an adviser” to ensure they take care of themselves as well as their customers.
On the second day of the Income Protection Task Force’s (IPTF) Income Protection Awareness Week, Walton told his story about falling ill in March 2019 with a gastrointestinal bleed which caused him to lose half his blood and left him in hospital for two weeks.
Walton (pictured) revealed while he had a critical illness policy in place, gastrointestinal bleeds were not covered.
“I’m living, breathing proof of being an idiot,” he said.
“Because when I left my previous employer, they paid me for 12 months and I set an IP policy with a deferral of 12 months because that fitted with in with the benefits.
“When I joined MAB, they don’t pay me for 12 months. They pay me for a lot less – three months in fact. So, what I found personally was why didn’t I go and review after I’d left the previous company and joined MAB?”
Walton further revealed that his wife called him a “crazy idiot” for failing to reorganise his income protection – especially as he works in the industry.
“I actually think every adviser needs an adviser,” Walton continued.
“It’s a bit like builders. Their houses generally are a wreck. But they build amazing places for everybody else.
“And even though I’ve got quite a lot of protection I hadn’t rejigged the IP, and what I found was that when MAB stopped paying me – it’s a horrible destabilising feeling because I didn’t know when I was going to go back to work.
“I genuinely didn’t because [the doctors] said, ‘we haven’t found the cause of the problem – all we know is you will be off work for quite some period of time’.
“The other thing I found is that it takes a long time to save money but a lot less time for it to suddenly pour through my fingers at a rate of knots, because not one single bill stopped during those six months I was off work.”