Scottish Equitable for instance charges 2
Scottish Equitable, for instance, charges 2.5p for every pounds 1 covered, while Axa levies 3p for every pounds 1 As for credit cards, each issuer has its own protection. For instance, Barclaycard will pay up to pounds 1,000 a month on outstanding debt for up to 12 months, if a customer has been off work for 14 consecutive days. But what if you simply want to cover things such as loans, credit card bills and pension payments?Pension providers will almost always offer "premium waiver", whereby your payments are paid if you are unable to work because of illness. GRIP's charge is pounds 3.50 a month (with six months' free cover thrown in) with a 60-day notice period.Financial advisers, however, remain unimpressed by ASU policies, arguing that they are too confusing in terms of who is covered and who is not, for them to be useful to many people. Colin Fitch, a financial planner at Corporate and Personal Planning, fee-based advisers in Colchester, says: "The danger with unemployment policies is that they may not offer much cover to people who are self-employed.
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Generally, our advice is to have an emergency fund that would tide you over the first few months if you lost your job. For sickness, permanent health insurance (PHI) is more suitable."Of course, income replacement policies such as PHI make sense. GRIP, whose cover is underwritten at Lloyd's, charges pounds 5.50 a month, subject to 60 days' notice.What if it's just unemployment you are worried about? Both Berkeley Alexander and GRIP offer unemployment-only cover. Berkeley charges pounds 2.75 per pounds 100 each month, again with a 90-day exclusion. Earlier this year, Hilary Armstrong, the Housing Minister, appeared to lambast the mortgage industry for not selling enough of these plans - despite protests from lenders that she risked sparking off a new mis-selling scandal to rival the one surrounding personal pensions.It is possible to obtain cheaper cover. Berkeley Alexander's Premium Mortgage Contract charges pounds 4.75 a month per pounds 100 of outgoings for unemployment and disability cover, subject to a 90-day waiting period It also offers 25 per cent of additional benefits free.
A second reason is that lenders have indicated they are prepared to take a reasonably soft line with borrowers who will be entitled to state benefits after nine months, merely adding the interest owed to that person's outstanding capital debt.Even so, ASU insurance remains the Government's preferred route to self- protection. Indeed, quite a few make many of their deals conditional on taking out ASU. While there may be some exceptions, the average cost of such policies runs between pounds 5 and pounds 7 a month for every pounds 100 of monthly outgoings. Take- up remains low, however, despite changes in October 1995 in the way mortgage interest benefits are paid to people who lose their jobs. Any home loans taken out since that date do not qualify for state benefits for the first nine months a person is out of work.Cost is one reason why many borrowers fail to take out ASU cover. It's the user who should determine how the phone is used, and not all bosses have the same attitude towards them..
Here is a question to strike fear into the heart of anyone with a sizeable mortgage, a loan, a huge credit card balance or a pension: if you fell ill or became unemployed, how would you pay off your debts? One answer is accident, sickness and protection insurance (ASU), available from mortgage lenders. These should determine regularity and hours of use of the equipment, and reasons for its use. This will stop the boundaries becoming blurred later on.Establish which - if any - colleagues and clients really do need to have access to the telephone number.Discuss alternative ways of communication, such as a pager or good old- fashioned memos.If it's your own phone, remember that you have the same rights to it as to your home telephone line.Try not to be put off if you have a bad experience of mobile phones in the workplace. That happened quite a lot."Evetts remains quite cheerful about her overtime duties, but Metcalf's current PA, Stephanie Webb, forewarned and forearmed, drew her boundaries at an early stage, and she relishes the free time it allows her."I don't feel any need to have a mobile for work, and Julian respects that," Webb explains.Such pre-emptive action simply illustrates the fact, agreed by all experts, that overdoing it on the loyalty front is detrimental in the long run, particularly when it comes to mobile telephones.Lines of CommunicationESTABLISH WITH your boss exactly why you need a mobile telephone and suggest drawing up together a written set of guidelines on how it will be used. Succumb, and you may regret it.Beaky Evetts, a former PA to Julian Metcalf, of Pret a Manger, should have known she was asking for trouble when she passed her number on to Metcalf."He would call me from places like a yacht in Bermuda at 8.30pm when I was at a dinner party, and say: `Quick, write this idea down, it's great!' And I'd have to write with lipstick on a napkin. She respects the fact that my free time is my own."Like many of the more astute employers of the pre-millennial office, Roddick believes that allowing her staff quality free time means that they are happier at work, and that a happy worker is a good worker. Some companies, such as certain departments of British Airways, even pay their secretarial staff a set call-out charge if they need to telephone them out of hours - a recognition that they are, in effect, demanding overtime.If you own a personal mobile phone, you are under no obligation to reveal its number to your boss.
"Just as she never expects me to work past 6pm unless there's a crisis, Anita calls only in a true emergency. Karen Bishop believes that the answer is to choose the right boss - in her case, Anita Roddick, co-chairman of The Body Shop and champion of abused minorities."Her philosophy means that having the phone is never a burden," says Bishop. Alun Jones, MD of Highfield International, watched his daughter, who is PA to a film producer, go through the grief of having her honesty questioned after her phone failed to ring while she was in a restaurant with her dad: "[The boss] became very angry, accusing her of switching it off."Having seen how such a misunderstanding can occur, Jones agreed with his own PA that they would forgo mobiles and rely on other forms of communication.But when it comes to mobile etiquette, the golden rule is to remember that it's the caller and not the equipment that is the intruder. As any mobile user knows, instant contact on mobile phones isn't guaranteed, particularly when the phone fails to pick up a signal, a common occurrence. "Particularly since it wasn't just the boss calling, but all his clients, too - often with really trivial queries."When Smith protested at the invasion into her private time, her boss retorted: "No phone, no job." Smith promptly resigned.Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, sympathises: "Mobiles can seem like a benefit, but really they can be a nightmare," he concedes.Cooper argues that increasing the demands on secretaries should lead to an increase in their status and salary, because giving a PA a mobile phone is often like requesting free overtime - the equivalent of a gift- wrapped bomb.Other mobile-related problems that can arise between boss and mobile- carrying employee tend to revolve around the quality of the equipment, and whether or not the phone includes automatic voicemail.