Business protection insurance products by Advice4Directors: Key Person Life Insurance: How would your business cope with the loss of a key person? We help protect your business from the death of its key people. Shareholder Protection Insurance: The death of illness of a minor or major shareholder can lead to massive business problems. Help give shareholder dependents a fair sale price of shares and help remaining shareholders retain the business shared with these important policies. See even more details at Key Person Income Protection Insurance .
Who can have Key Person Insurance: Any business looking to protect their business from, life cover, terminal illness, critical illness cover (covering illnesses such as heart attack, stroke, cancer). As will as the typical limited company businesses key person cover can benefit sole traders and partnerships. As mentioned above it is important to get the right level of cover, set up in the most tax efficient manner to give peace of mind, protect the business profits and reduce business risk from the loss of a valuable employee. It gives a much needed cash injection to give cash flow by means of a lump sum payment.
Options Available: When it comes to running a business, financial security is key. That’s why it is important to consider how best to manage funds for insurance policies, such as Business Loan Protection. One option might be to write the policy into a trust – but this may not always be necessary or advisable. A trust is a separate legal entity from your own business and can be used for various purposes such as inheritance planning, or tax mitigation strategies. In some cases however, a trust would actually complicate matters if you needed to make a claim on the policy, since the payout could be held up while in the trust. Therefore, unless there is some specific reason why you need the money to be placed in trust first (for example, if there will be tax due when paying out), it makes more sense to arrange for the payout to go straight to your lender so that they can quickly settle any outstanding debt.
In order to ensure smooth business operations and protect against unexpected events, it may be necessary for shareholders to enter into an explicit agreement. This agreement should state that in the event one of them dies or suffers from a critical illness, the remaining shareholders will have the option to buy their shares. This protects each shareholder’s interests and ensures that there will not be any significant disruption or loss of value within the company. Having clear and concise agreements such as these in place helps guarantee continuity within an organization even during unexpected events.
Tax Implications: This form of succession planning is quite complex and you should seek financial advice, legal advice, tax advice and bespoke advice unique to your own situation so the guidelines below will just give a brief overview of what company owners need to watch out for. So it will be very likely that the spouse could not sell the shares at all or sell them at a massively discounted price. With a shareholder protection policy in place it would provide a lump sum payment to the remaining shareholders. The sum assured would be pre-agreed by the business owners. This would allow the individual shareholders to buy the spouses company shares at fair price.
Why have Business Loan Insurance? For businesses, protecting their investments is paramount. Taking out a loan to either begin or expand a business venture brings with it a heightened level of risk, because the ability to repay the loan often rests on the performance and health of only a few key staff members. To help manage this risk, it is essential that any significant loans taken out by businesses are protected with insurance.
The most common way for insurers to calculate key person insurance premiums and benefits is based on salary multiples; however, sometimes more complex formulae are used. In order to determine an exact amount of coverage that is necessary for a particular business situation, advice should be sought by someone who understands the value of what would be lost with the key individual gone. This may require researching factors such as how hard or easy it would be to replace them, an estimation of how long this process may take and what kind of losses might occur in the meantime regarding profit. Ultimately, with enough consideration and thought given to these issues prior to purchasing key person insurance, this process will remain simple and straightforward. See even more information on https://advice4directors.co.uk/.