Hi everybody, I hope that you’re all well and getting close to having completed most of your CPD for the year, but have no worries I will still be here to help you get that extra  IDD CPD in. In the most recent episode of the podcast I am focusing on how sports and hobbies can affect applications for protection insurance.

One of the most interesting things that I find about sports and hobbies, is that people that do then, don’t tend to think that they should be any concern to the insurer. They do them and do them very safely, but ultimately they are in an environment that is not as safe being at home curled up with a cuppa on the sofa.

The key takeaways:

• Insurers often want to know about scuba diving, sailing, motorbike riding, private flying and more, even horse riding!
• Insurers like to ask a catch all question about any extreme sports not listed – how are you meant to know what these are?
• Sports can lead to the highest type of rating for life insurance and are some of the key reasons that income protection applications have exclusions or are declined

I will be back next time with some insights into GP reports. GP reports are currently a key part of many insurance applications in the UK, they can really support your client 

Remember, if you are listening to this as part of your work, you can claim a CPD certificate on our website, thanks to our sponsors PlannerX.

00:11

Hi everybody! I am back with season 12, episode six, and I hope you’re ready to go for some protection CPD today. Today I’m going to be focusing upon sports and hobbies and how they can influence your applications for protection insurance. This is the Practical Protection Podcast. So when it comes to sports and hobbies, it’s one of the areas that I find really, really interesting when it comes to protection insurance because there’s such a difference between what insurers see as risky and what our clients see as risky. And I think one of the biggest things about it is because of the fact that so when you say to people, “Oh, do you do any kind of like any sort like high risk sports or anything? A lot of the time, people just go, “Nah, nothing at all. But then when you actually start going into like the really the proper application questions, you can suddenly be hit with something that you just weren’t expecting. And insurers do treat sports as pretty high risk if they do ask about that particular sport, and sort of the risks that they would associate with it. So it can be really, it can really change the outcome in terms of the pricing that you might expect. So one of the things that I tend to do when I’m asking people, because I always do the way that we work at curas. That we do like an initial find where we’re not asking every single application question, but we’re asking like the broad question sets to try and then be able to trigger, figure out if there’s anything going to change the price, so we can give the clients the idea what that end price will be, rather than just the basic price that you see in a comparison. So I tend to say to people, “Oh, do you do anything like high response for anything? And just you know, they even sometimes think of things of like horse riding, you know, motorbike riding, sailing, scuba diving, anything like that, because those areas are ones that I’ve specifically and definitely know lots of people who’ve been caught out by that, where people haven’t told me stuff like that, and all of a sudden it’s like, oh, okay, right, we’ve only application, this is happening, I need to completely stop here and rethink everything, and I’ll explain why. Because I’m going to give you some examples of the costings later, just to sort of like show how much it can change, and it’s it can be a really really big change. So, specifically looking at those ones I’ve just mentioned, you know, let’s take a look at them. So, you know, if it’s something like a one-off scuba diving or one-off skydive, things like that. It’s very unlikely that that will affect applications for life insurance, critical earnings cover, or income protection. But it’s really important to check and don’t make assumptions, because as well, it can be really different if it’s somebody doing that as a hobby and a sport, or whether or not they do it as an occupation. So I remember really specifically doing an application for a couple, and they did skydiving. And one of the lives was a skydiving instructor, so they were jumping out of that plane, skydiving all the time. It was so much; it was ridiculous, and then the other person-it wasn’t their occupation, but they did it as a hobby. You know, they’d go up together, and you know they’d both drum together. Now, when I did the application with an insurer, what was really interesting about that is, and obviously with this, the time that I did it, I could do them both with the same insurer. But obviously, you always double checked and assumed that you might be better putting them with different people. The insurer was far more favorable to the person as their occupation rather than the hobby, and so the occupation it didn’t even cause any influence to the outcome of the application. But the person with the hobby, it was a big difference in terms of the pricing. So, and again, I will show you that as we’re going to be going along.

04:08

I think a really key thing as well to be very aware of whether or not your advisor or somebody who’s trying to arrange your insurances yourself is a bit of a catch-all question, which I class as a really red flag question, which is that insurers often give out a list of sports that they want to know about, and it’s really important to be careful as to double check what is being asked or not asked to say. Like a really good one there is that sometimes they’ll say sailing other than inland. So if you’re sailing inland, then you don’t need to say yes. But the sailing, if you’re outside of England, then you would need to say yes. I’m doing that. So the red flag question for me is when they turn around and say any other extreme sport such as base jumping. Now base jumping is the one where I can’t imagine people know the kind of get like that. Is that that sugar glider, sort of like the flying squirrel suit? Things on, and they’re jumping off a mountain and just fluttering down on a really thin piece of fabric. Now, I think all of us, and even the people who do base jumping, are generally pretty. Yeah, this is not. This isn’t as safe as being curled up on a sofa and having a cup of tea at the weekend. But what? Who’s to decide what is fitting in that question? You know, in a sense, if if it just says a catch-all of extreme spots, well, who says what an extreme spot is? The insurer is the one that is meant to be letting us know what they need to ask. That’s a really important part. Protect insurance applications is the rules and the regulations on the insurers are that they need to ask the questions that they feel irrelevant to them, and if they don’t ask it, then you don’t need to volunteer it. But this is really open and catch all this extreme sport question. Now, the only way to really know is to ask the insurer. So that’s why somebody like an advisor can come in and be really helpful because instead of saying, “Oh, I’ve put this application to you. This is all the person’s details on by the way they do. You know, well, a really good example here would be downhill mountain biking. Now, a lot of people, and probably like people listening, were thinking on downhill mountain biking. That’s well, the mountain biking. Yeah, but downhill mountain biking is seen as extreme. So you can always do like a Google search to say, you know, is this an extreme sport? And say what you’re wanting to put in, but that’s not a failsafe. You know, sort of like to say exactly what the insurer wants to know. Not know. So as advisors, obviously, we can speak to the underwriters and just go very anonymously. Right, I’ve got somebody. They do this. Do you cross that as an extreme sport? And then we will know. It’s really quite tricky. I think. If you are just a general consumer who is doing an application yourself, to have that confidence to know that you’ve answered that correctly, correctly, because the insurer will say, you know, it’s any extreme sport, and it’s it’s up to you to then obviously, as I say, determine if it fits in there. And the only time you’re really going to know whether or not they agree or not is if you have a claim, and probably primarily if the claim was in relation to the sport that you’re doing, that would probably the time that it would really stand out to them. They might not know otherwise, but inherently, you if you are doing in a sport that would be seen as extreme, it’s probably higher risk that it would happen while you’re doing it, so we just need to be really, really careful when we’re looking at those questions, especially those catch-all questions. Now, the reason that we need to be super careful as well is because of the fact that sports can trigger what is known as a different type of rating to the premium, which would be a per mill loading.

07:44

So the per mill loading basically means that for every 1000 pounds worth of insurance that’s being taken out, so this is obviously primarily your life insurance that we’re looking at. Every 1000 pound you’re taking out, they’re going to put almost there as a cash extra. There’s so many technical words and jargons and everything like that. So just basically per mill means for every 1000 pound, you’re going to pay a little bit extra. Now that can at times be can be quite extreme that price increase. Now it really comes down to how much insurance you’re taking out. So as an example, if you were taking out 50,000 pounds, so there’s 51,000 pounds there. So 50 times 1000, 50,000 pounds. So they’re going to put 50 extras to the premium, and that premium is then generally figured out on an annual basis. That’s then divided into 12. It gets very complicated, and to help matters, different insurers do it in different ways. So it’s really hard to sort of like forecast and calculate it. So brilliant. If you do have somebody though that you think you’re going to have a permal rating, if you do speak to the insurer, you can create things to sort of give you sort of like rough estimates. But it’s probably easier for a lot of people, um, to just speak to the insurer and say, can you tell me what the price of this would be with this per mill rating? But so say, like I said, for 50, you know, you’re going to get 50 of these extras, and but then if you’re doing like 500,000 pounds, then you’re going to have 500 of these extras, which can make a massive difference. Now, we generally, obviously, we do tend to see it. If there’s a sport, it does tend to become a per mill rating. But we also see these per mill ratings when it comes to health disclosures as well. So it’s quite common for some cancers, depending upon timings, depending upon staging and grading, for them to become a per mill of sorts. Now, per mills can be anything from one pound per mill, so an extra pound for every 1000 pound that’s taken out. You can go potentially two pound per mill, five pound per mill. You can even go to 10 pound per mil. Now that is when it’s getting very very costly. But let’s just have a look at each thing as we’re going along. So I’ll come back. To a bit of the pricing and a bit, so to just give you some example based upon the ones that I have said so far and kind of giving you a tip as to what you need to know. But so horse riding, I did mention that that’s one of the ones that I say to people as I say when I’m saying just in general any hazard sports such as horse riding because the majority of people don’t see horse riding as anything to be concerned about, so that usually triggers people to go, oh, oh, they even want to know about horse riding. Oh, wow, you know. And then you’ll start hearing things like, so some people go, I go on long walks, I I do a bit of you know kickboxing, and I go to the gym three times a week. Is that you know? And you go stuff like that. Now the kickboxing potentially will come in depending upon the insurer’s question set and depending on what level they are doing. But let’s look at some of these ones that I’ve just mentioned that that tend to be the ones that get caught out where people don’t think to say yes, I’m doing that. So horse riding, if someone is just wandering around on a horse, that’s not generally going to be a concern to the insurer, and it’s probably not going to need more research. Other things, so you’ve got things like you know, I think you’ve got dressage. I can’t remember any of the other names of different things, but there is lots and lots of things. Especially, I have to say, if there’s any kind of competitive element to them, that on the sports is a really really big thing, and on any of the sports and the competition side of things is very tricky, especially if you’re looking at income protection.

11:32

So, top of my head, because I did this for somebody recently with the horse riding, I’m only where one insurer. Where if they wanted income protection, there wouldn’t be an exclusion for horse riding, and you know actually that’s quite a bit of an exclusion because obviously if you come off the horse, it’s gonna yeah hurt and you’re probably gonna be hurt for a bit. But the competition aspect can really throw things. So even if it’s just like their local get together, and it’s anything generally. It’s it’s often if there’s like a prize of some sort, especially if there’s a cash prize. Now, what you tend to find as well in when it is more to do with a hobby rather than doing a professional aspect of it. Because obviously, professional sports people doing these things completely different thing, completely different. So we’re not. I’m just literally talking this from a sports and hobbies aspect for all of these things, and like let’s say just you know people are just doing it very amateur basis, but they might just with their local local club be doing like little cash prizes. Even that can be seen as the insurer saying, “Oh, you’re part of competitions, yeah. We’re going to look at this slightly differently. So, horse riding, anything other than wandering around in a field or on the roads, just having a little bit of a a mooch, that is probably something where you want to ask a few more questions. Now, as always with this kind of thing, if you go on the website Care Insurance, I’ve written loads and loads of disclosure pages. There is a specific section for sports and pastimes. Horse riding is in there. Well, anything I’m mentioning today is in there, and it will give you a set of questions that it could potentially be helpful to to look at if you’re going to have a client and ask them about that. We then have motorbike. Now, motorbikes used to be it used to be actually more intense than it is now. It used to be how often are you on the road? Are you just doing it once a year as a passenger rather than as the actual driver? How many miles are you doing? You know what size engine things like that. It’s it’s gotten a lot better, but in general, it’s a case of if you’re going to disclose that someone’s on a motorbike, you absolutely can do. But there’s a lot of insurers that don’t even ask about motorbike riding. So for simplicity’s sake, it’s probably easier to go to the ones that don’t ask about it. If they do ask about it, you are probably going to get some kind of price increase for the fact that they are on a motorbike. Now I know that people who ride motorbikes are themselves incredibly safe. Obviously, the majority of people incredibly safe. They take it very, very seriously, and you know, road safety for everybody and themselves is is obviously very high. But the the sort like the reality from from the insurers is obviously that if you are in an accident, you are far more likely to have something very very serious happen if you’re on a motorbike versus being in in a car. So that’s why that concern is there. And sailing. So again, and I find this I have to say with a lot of people, the sailing and the skiing. I have to say, a lot of people who would be considered by a lot of interest to be more high net worth. So people, and again, they don’t necessarily think of it as anything risky because it is just that they usually have not a massive boat, but you know, a nice sized boat, and they just go out. A little bit, not too far, but they just like to go out for a little bit. So not not going transatlantic at all. So it can be very strange when we start asking lots of questions to them. They can think, why are we doing this? But we do need to check things. So things like you really want to know the size of the boat, the amount of the crew that’s on the boat. Do they always have sight of land, or are they doing transatlantic at all?

15:21

A lot of the time it is more if they’re going transatlantic that the insurers would be cautious. But again, it’s you know if you’ve got someone asking are you sailing at all versus are you sailing other than in land, then you probably want to go to one that’s saying other than in land in a sense because they’ve got the the better questions set there. Now competitions for sailing are very intriguing. So I had this very specifically with a client the last couple of years, and they had obviously they’re part of a yacht club. There’s lots of sail clubs all around the UK. We even have one in Filey, which is lovely. And you know, I said, “Do you ever do any competitions? And they’re like, “No, no, no. Oh, but you know, in terms of like what we do as a club, well, there’s like a little boy so far out, and what we’ll do is like once every now and then we’ll have a thing where we all kind of like race each other to the boy and back, you know, and see who gets there faster. Now, some of the insurers are like, well, that’s a competition. I was like, oh come on, seriously, it’s not. It’s not like it’s not the competitions that we’re on about here, where you know it’s it’s proper going for it. And they’re like, no, no, it’s a competition. I was like, wonderful. And they they wouldn’t budge on that. So even though like with that one, I don’t think there was a cash prize with that one, but just still the very nature that they were doing that, and it was such a small area. You know, it was incredibly safe. You know, there was obviously people all around in the sense of if anything had happened to the boat, there’d be people right there. Then, you know, actually, that’s just made me think. Actually, going off on a side tangent about like triathlons, because when we talk about extreme sports, so in terms of like safety and things like so, Alan, co-director, husband, he’s done. I’m going to say mini triathlons because I’m not allowed to say just triathlons. I’ve forgotten what the proper term for them is, but it’s the one where it’s like instead of doing like the full marathon, the full swim, the full bike, it’s like the half amount. So I’m just going to say mini one. I’m sure I’m saying the wrong word. Apologies to anyone I’m offending, because it’s still obviously a huge thing to do. There’s no way I could do it. But say like with that, in terms of like the areas he’s been, there’s been quite a few where in the swimming thing people have unfortunately passed in the swimming. So you know it’s even that we would need to check: is that an extreme sport? I’ve diverted. I’m going to come back. Right. So obviously, with the sailing, we do really, really want to to know that detail again because the very nature is because it, in my experience, it does tend to be people who do have a higher value estate. Then we’re possibly looking more into IHT levels, which means that we’re naturally going to higher summer shorts, which then means if there is a per mill, it’s going to be a higher jump. And scuba diving, oh my word, scuba diving! If it isn’t just a one-off, the amount of stuff you need to ask-you know-is it open water? How? What’s the depth that they’re going to? Are they using mixed air? Are they going into wrecks? If they are wrecks. Are they an actual wreck, or are they a man-made wreck, deliberately wrecked to be used by divers if they’re going into them? Or sorry, do they just stay on the outside? Do they go in? If they go in, do they have sight of the exit? Do they do cave exploration if they go in? Are they going out? You know, obviously, do they have sight of the exit at all times? Are they in a group? What qualifications do they have? There is so much to ask. Now, you people who are scuba diving more than just a one-off on holiday will very likely have all that information to hand, which is incredibly helpful. But like I say, it can make a huge, huge difference.

18:56

And also, as well, then not just that with scuba diving, but then sort of like where are they going as well? Because obviously a lot of the very very key dive sites aren’t your usual destinations, which then means you could start going into the travel questions as well. So it all gets a little bit jumbled up and mixed up, but there is just so so much to know, and it really any one of those things, especially in scuba diver, can make a huge difference. And then we go up to skiing, which is another one that they potentially ask about, and to be honest, the only thing that really stands out is if they go what’s known as off-piste. So majority of the time, people are going to be skiing in your usual resorts. So it can be useful. I was going to say I was trying to get out the word worthwhile and useful at the same time, and it just didn’t work. So it can be useful to double check. Well, are you just going to your usual resorts? So that would be your Europe, your North America, your Canada type places. And most of the time, the answer will be yes. So again, you just probably want to know how many times per year, and then if it’s off pieced or not. And most of the time, especially when I’ve looked at them recently, it is just the off piece thing that. Been standing out, so the off piece just basically means you going on a slightly more adventurous route. Let’s put it that way. And again, any competitions you would just want to be mindful for. So let’s have a quick look. I’m going to go back to the pricing side of things because what does it actually mean? I’ve been whittering on and you know saying about all these per mills and things like that, so I’m going to give you some examples. And the first thing as well to say is, well, you can potentially, with some insurers on the life insurance side of things, potentially opt to exclude rather than include. That can make a huge difference to the price. Absolutely huge difference to the price because you’ll go from like the basic premium with an exclusion to the higher premium, but it’s covered. Now, from an advice point of view, I would say the significant majority of the time, I would be saying pay the price, don’t get the exclusion, and because of the fact that, as I said, the very nature is is that these sports, these hobbies that are being done do put you in a high risk situation, and you really don’t want to have that situation where it’s it’s going to be declined because of the exclusion. It wouldn’t be pleasant for anybody involved in that, and it’s you know the policies they’re not going to do what obviously you intended it to do in the first place. So so yeah, but it is sometimes available with some insurers, depending upon the insurer, depending upon the risk, and it might be, you know, if it’s a case of well, they really need that insurance, there is absolutely no way whatsoever that they can afford that higher price, that you turn around and go right. So either what we do is we either reduce the summer short to an area that it’s far more affordable, or we go with the exclusion. Better to have something rather than nothing. Right then, so let’s have a look at what this actually means as an example. So let’s look at I’ve done a 250,000 pound life insurance policy, and let’s just assume that the base price is 10 pound per month. Now, if you’re an advisor, you’re probably quite familiar at some point of, especially with the health condition, of receiving what’s known as a percentage increase. I have done this before on a previous episode where I did more dedicated time to it, so please do go back and have a listen if you want to. So let’s say base price is 10 pound per month, and there’s a 50% increase on the premium. So what you do is the 10 pound is seen as 100 100% of the premium. So 50% of that is five pound. It’s added on top, so the premium goes from 10 pound to 15 pounds per month.

22:31

I hope that makes sense, everybody. And say refer back to an older episode if you if you need to go through that a bit more. So, I’ve done some very very rough calculations. Okay, so let’s have a look and let’s say that this person who wants to do this and get 250,000 pounds of life insurance is being given a one pound per mill rating. So 250,000. So that means there’s going to be 250 extras, one pound extras, because we have done 250 of the 1000 pounds. So that means on a one pound per mill, that would be a minimum extra of 20 pound per month on the premium. So the premium goes from 10 pounds to 30 pound per month. So that is quite a jump, and ultimately this is one of the reasons that we say, especially I advocate in protection insurance is not to just say to somebody, you know, to just do a comparison and straight away go, oh look, it’s 10 pound. Here you go, to really speak to them first, find out as much as you can, even as I say, just asking the broad questions like any health conditions, any sports, any travel, just even those generic ones, so you can start to build that picture, because encouraging someone to take protection insurance a lot of the time it is something that we need to encourage people to do because of the fact that you know insurance is boring. Let’s face it, and you know it’s something that we’re hoping that people will pay for that they’ll never need to use. So a lot of people can be a bit about it, and there is still that attitude a lot of the time that insurers will do whatever they can to not pay out, even though the statistics and the millions upon millions are paid out each year in protection insurance, they just still don’t seem to be getting past that mindset of of insurers not paying out. So anyway, so encouraging people to try and pay for something, they’re never hopefully going to use for something that they see a lot of bad press about as well. So we definitely have our work out for us. So if I say to somebody, “Oh, it’s 10 pound per month, and then it comes back to us, “Oh, it’s actually at 30, that immediately, I mean, no matter who you are, that you immediately going to go, “What? Why is it? Why is it gone up by three times? And then you’ll be like, “Well, I don’t want to do that? I’ll go somewhere else. Are basically like, no, why should I? You know, that’s and you get that kind of thing. Whereas if you’ve gone in straight away and said, look, it’s 30 pound per month, that’s much easier to actually say, do you know? Well, let’s go for this at 30 pound per month rather than sorry, you need to pay an extra 20 quid, which for a lot of people, and I know people. Can say it’s only 20 pound. It’s less than having a coffee every day. It’s you know Costa or wherever, and blah blah blah blah blah. It’s less, you know. It’s a well, depending on where you live in the country, it’s maybe one drink on a night out or something, or I don’t know. I live in the north, so we’d probably get quite a few for that. But that’s it. There’s a difference between what people are prepared to pay for insurance and and what they’ll do for something that gives them that enjoyment, that bit of a dopamine hit now. So yeah, we just want to be careful with that. But then let’s have a look at two per mill, two pound per mil. Okay, so an extra 250 of those two pounds. So that means there’s a minimum extra of 40 pound per month. So we’ve gone from 10 pound per month to 50 pound per month. Again, that is a big jump, and something that isn’t going to feel great to a client. And ultimately, as well, it’s probably going to make them question your entire recommendation, whether or not it’s just protection insurance, whether or not it’s other things. They’re going to probably think, well, hang on a minute.

26:02

If you’ve got it that wrong, and it you told me 10 quid, and it’s now 50, I’m not sure I trust the rest of what you’re saying. Which we really want to avoid, obviously, because it’s not you. It’s the way that the insurers are obviously assessing the risk. But in some ways, it is kind of you because you’ve not preempted that. You’ve not been able to do the fact find beforehand, and it might be that you can’t due to time constraints, due to resources, but then there is also then that mindset going. Well, this could save you a long, if a lot like a little bit extra at the beginning could save you a lot of wasted time in the long run. Okay, and I did mention before about the occupations versus the hobbies. So as I said, I mentioned the skydiving. Another one would be, as an example, would be pilots. So you know, if you’ve got someone who’s a pilot who’s working for Iron Air, EasyJet, going around, you know, sort of like from the UK to Europe, that’s not going to cause an issue when somebody is applying for their insurances. But if they’re private flying, that is going to cause some extra research. Let’s put it that way, and you’re very likely to see a per mill rating. So it is very, very different depending upon the context, depending upon where you answer those questions. Yes, in the application as well, being parts of official bodies and clubs, and can be as you think. Oh, another one that’s sorry, another one that’s popped into my head in terms of sports and hobbies was somebody, and this was really fascinating. I helped someone quite a few years ago now, and they were a I want to say filmographer, be videographer, wouldn’t it? Videographer for some very popular wildlife documentaries on some of our well, our key national broadcaster in the UK, and it was fascinating because it was like, right, where have you been in the last three years? And that travel question, and they had to stand in front of a map to then list off everywhere they’d been, and it was a case of where are you going to go in the next two years? And they went everywhere. I literally can’t say it will be everywhere. So that in itself, just to travel, was fascinating. We then had what do you do for sports? And again, this comes down to occupation. So for this person, for the sports, there was everything. There was skew diving. There was ice climbing. There was potholing. There was caving. Every single, I think there was in terms of the list of questions that was asked for extreme sports by the insurer. I think the only one we didn’t say yes to was the martial arts, and obviously I’m going through this as the advisor, thinking, “Oh wow, this is going to be this is going to be a really fun one to research, and you know what? It was an amazing month of research. It was so fun, and the great thing was, but again, versus hobbies versus occupation, in terms of the occupation, because it was that linked. The insurer that we ended up going, most insurers were like, absolutely not. We’re not going to be able to insure this person, but we did get an insurer in the mainstream who was able to look at it because they said, well, actually, they work for X Y Z. We know that that means that they’re using this many safety protocols. There’s this people on hand to help in terms of medical emergencies and all this stuff. And they were like, okay, then we’ll offer it, and and that was great. And I was very very happy with that. And I believe it wasn’t done with a per mill either. So I was, yeah, I was thrilled with that. But again, that shows the difference because with a lot of those things in terms of the sports, it’s very likely that the insure most insurers, if they’d done, if you had to tick everything to a yes, they would have probably turned on and said, “We’re not going to offer cover because we just think it’s too risky.

29:36

And actually, you know, we the the price that they would have to charge would just be so astronomical that they’re not even going to put it forward. Almost there. So the other thing to bear in mind is that the question of what are you, what do you plan, what are you doing, and what are you planning on. In the next 12 months, so they are very, very different. So, as an example, I had somebody who was a private flyer, and they hadn’t, they were, they hadn’t renewed their pilot’s license because it had come to an end. They’d literally just had a kid, and I was like, right, are you going to do it again? They’re like, well, in the future, yeah, but you know it’s going to be at least this long because I won’t do it while my kid is young because I won’t do that risk. So in the question of you planning on doing it in the next 12 months, I could say no and very you know very securely say no. And they obviously had that thing of well I don’t even have my license you know so or anything so it’s it’s absolutely fine. But then, are you planning to? And it’s left quite open. That’s tricky. And I think the other thing as well, because you often hear people say, “Well, what does that mean? Does that mean if I want to go scuba diving when I’m on holiday in Greece, that I can’t? In this case of, well, no. But if you don’t have a holiday right now booked to Greece or anywhere, and you’ve not specifically been looking at scuba diving stuff, and you have no intention to right now, then just like a pipe dream of maybe going scuba diving at some point isn’t going to be a concern to the insurers. And I mean, especially as well, if somebody’s had no training and they’re literally going to be going down a few meters in sort of like a little cove. I did that by the way in Greece. It was very nice. We were meant to try and spot seahorses, and I couldn’t see anything. I’ve got a very good picture of me at the bottom of the ocean with Alan. I say the bottom of the ocean. It was the bottom, but it’s just that it wasn’t very deep there. But I still feel like I’ve really achieved a goal by doing it. Anyway, again, I’m going to stop digressing. Just really keep an eye out. Those time frames are really phenomenal, and it it can be tricky to sort of like talk it out with a client, but just you have to do to the best of your knowledge. And the other thing as well is just make sure that you know. I mean, if somebody turned around and said, “Well, I am going to go scuba diving in 10 months’ time, but you know, it’s 10 months, not 12 months. Let’s just say no, as an advisor, especially obviously if you’re a consumer, don’t do that. But as an advisor, no, that’s where you turn and say, “Well, I can’t do that. You know, I would need to say yes and say that you’re going scuba diving in 10 months. And then if they’re really insistent, then at some point you’re just going to have to turn and say, “I’m going to stop this, and I’m not going to do the application for you because this is non-disclosure territory. And it’s really hard when you’ve put in that much work, that much effort, and especially if you’re sort of like doing other things as well, like mortgages or other. And to then say to somebody, “I’m not going to do this for you because you’re asking me to non-disclose. It’s really, really tricky to do that. But obviously, it is something that you must do. Um. So coming to an end, then. So obviously, life insurance. Expect that we’re mainly going to be seeing per mills. If there is a hobby that needs to be declared, be super super careful of those question sets in terms of what the client is doing, and plans to do, and the way the policies, the questions are worded. And for things like income protection, be very very mindful.

32:59

You know, it’s very easy for an income protection policy to go from it’s available to actually we’re going to decline because of the sport. So do the research first. Make sure you know what you’re doing. The last thing you want to do is go through an app, suddenly come across something, and realize you have to start all from scratch again. Thank you everybody for listening. I hope you found this useful. Next time, I am going to be back, and I’m going to be discussing GP reports and how they help with protection insurance applications, and maybe sometimes how they don’t help as well. Do feel free to listen to other episodes and get your CPD certificate at the website practical-protection.co.uk. And as always, a big thank you to PlannerX for providing our CPD certificate. Thank you. Bye.

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Episodes of the Practical Protection Podcast include a transcript of the episode’s audio. The text is the output of AI based transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors and should not be treated as an authoritative record.

We often discuss health and medical conditions in relation to protection insurance and underwriting, always consult with a healthcare professional if you are concerned about any medical conditions and symptoms we have covered in any episode.