Insurance

Meridian Money offers you access to a very broad range of insurance services to ensure you are never financially at risk as a result of an unfortunate or accidental event or find yourself underinsuredat a time of need.

Whether Key Man, Life, Income Protection, or Trauma insurance, we can provide the products to suit your client's individual circumstances.

Types of Insurance

Keyman/Key Person Insurance

This type of policy is designed to protect a business from the loss of a key person within the organisation.

For large organisations it assists them to overcome the loss of a key person, which can often affect profitability.

For smaller companies with partners, it is perhaps even more important as it protects each partner. If a partner of a firm dies, often the other partner or partners have to buy the shares from the deceased family. Insurance helps easily facilitate this with correct buy-sell agreements in place.

The amount of cover varies greatly and depends on your circumstances. It could range from $500,000 up to $10m of cover.

Income Protection Insurance

Income protection insurance is an important yet often forgotten form of cover that is beneficial for all working people. Income Protection can pay a percentage of your salary for a period in circumstances where you are temporarily unable to work due to sickness or injury.

The length of time for which you may receive payments depends on the contract term; which could be two years, five years, or up to age 60 or 65. This varies depending upon the amount of cover you are willing to pay for.

Income Protection is designed for situations where it’s more important to meet the costs of 'living' rather than ensuring family members receive a payout after your death.

Term Life Insurance:

This provides a cash lump sum in the event of death.  This type of insurance provides excellent value for money considering the potential payment amount and is strongly recommended for most people who have dependents. Usually these policies will also pay the amount of cover if you are diagnosed with a terminal illness and have less than 12 months to live.

This type of cover is easy to understand, with the only real exclusion being suicide in the first 13 months. Any payment under such policies are tax free if it is a non-superannuation personal policy.

Note that these policies do not have any cash value.

Total and Permanent Disablement Insurance (TPD):

Total and Permanent Disability Insurance (TPD) is often taken as an add on to a term life policy, butmay also be taken as a stand alone policy. This insurance cover provides a lump sum payment in the case of total and permanent disablement. Policies are very similar and you can usually claim if you are unable to work for 6 months, and it is likely that you will not return to work.

There are generally two types of cover, own occupation, which pays out if you are unable to perform your occupation (this is important for specialist occupations), or more commonly, where people have a any job definition, you can claim if you are unable to perform any occupation that you are suited to by education, training, or experience.

The number of claims are rather small and if financing the premiums is a concern, you could consider dropping this insurance.

TPD Buy Back

Note that if you have life & TPD on a linked policy, any claim on TPD will reduce the amount of life cover that you have available. For example if you have $300,000 life and $100,000 TPD and you claim on TPD, after such claim only $200,000 life cover will remain. Sometimes a buy-back may be offered, reinstating your Life cover to full value after 12 months at an extra cost.

A method of avoiding this issue is to take a stand alone TPD cover

Trauma Insurance

Trauma insurance is also known as critical illness cover, medical emergency cover or recovery cover. The policies are all designed to provide a lump sum payment for specific medical events. It is designed to help cover possible medical bills, or to provide general financial relief by reducing mortgage and other debts. Given the nature such payments, the amount of cover required is lower than life cover. Trauma cover can be an expensive form of insurance, and most often, people will take between $50,000 $150,000 cover (depending on your particular circumstances)

Payment is made upon diagnosis of the condition. Some companies offer basic trauma cover to cover 5 events. When considering trauma cover it is essential you take a high quality policy to ensure you have a sufficiently high level of cover for up to 45 events.

For more information, call us on 1300 137 426 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it