11 April 2025
Protection advice: beyond the mortgage
When you think about protection products today, why do people need them?
Essentially, there are 2 reasons: paying off debts or maintaining lifestyle.
Our industry writes lots of mortgage-related cover because buying a new home or remortgaging is a great platform to start a conversation about risk and the need to protect against the financial impact.
When you think about lifestyle, it’s more difficult to quantify. This is because every client is different, and their desired lifestyle or standard of living will be based on their interpretation of what good looks like and how they choose to spend their money.
But if you ask yourself the basic question, what’s more important out of these 2 options? If the worst was to happen… and you could only choose one outcome?
- Pay off a mortgage debt?
- Maintain your lifestyle and keep your standard of living?
Personally, I’d choose lifestyle. If I can have the lifestyle which is important to me and my family, and I can afford to pay for it – that’s my preferred outcome.
Lifestyle-led: review income and expenditure
To understand your client’s lifestyle and their desired standard of living, we need to start by getting a picture of how they choose to spend their money and where they spend it. We need to understand both their income and their normal outgoings.
Which items are necessities? Which are luxuries?
And what your client tells you can help you shape your advice, but more specifically, the amount of cover they’ll need, should the worst happen.
If something is a non-negotiable ‘must have’, it’s fundamental and we can attribute a monetary amount which helps us understand a baseline minimum requirement for how much cover they might need should the worst happen. These could be items such as rent, mortgage, electricity, water, gas and food.
But what about other outgoings? For example, broadband, car payments, Netflix or Amazon subscriptions, hobbies or days out.
How many of these are luxuries? How many are necessities? It depends on your client, which means it’s important to have a conversation to understand their point of view.
Framing the need: your ideal-case protection plan
If you agree that personal protection does 2 things – pay off debts or maintain lifestyle – this is a good starting point to frame the long-term protection objective that you can help your client work towards.
Let’s call this the ideal-case protection plan. Talk to your client about ‘a plan to protect you and your family, and it’ll make sure that (should the worst happen) you can pay off your debts and you can maintain your lifestyle’.
That framing should make sense to all clients, and whilst it might not be possible to achieve every part of this long-term ideal objective in one protection review, it’s the plan we’re working towards and need to pay attention to over the long term. It also gives you a reason to set up regular protection reviews in the future.
Prioritising the objectives: keep it simple and understandable
If protection provides funds to repay debt or use to maintain lifestyle, we know there are 3 scenarios where protection can provide cover: death, terminal or critical illness, or being unable to work due to illness or injury.
That means we have the basic framework to illustrate the long-term protection goal for every client. And we can show this as a simple tick box.
| In the event of death | In the event of terminal or critical illness | In the event of being unable to work due to illness or injury | |
| Pay off mortgage/pay mortgage |  |
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 |
| Maintain lifestyle/standard of living |  |
|
|
After the protection review meeting with a client, you’ll be able to mark a tick or a cross in each scenario to help your client appreciate where they have cover in each risk area, and where there are still gaps.
In this example, we’ve made a good start in terms of covering their mortgage, but there is no protection in place to help this client maintain their lifestyle in any of these 3 protection risk scenarios.
We can also see that there is no protection in place if they’re unable to work due to illness or injury.
Conclusion: look beyond the mortgage
Buying protection is a good common sense idea which most clients will appreciate.
But to get it right, clients need good quality advice underpinned by good processes to help them understand the need and then buy into the solution.
We hope that these simple ideas, about framing the conversation beyond the mortgage, will give advisers more protection talking points and needs to address in the future.
Discover how our product features can support your protection conversation here.