If you are self-employed the answer is you should! We don't joke about this, restructuring your ACC will give you more certainty if you are disabled through an accident and if you have talked to a financial adviser and arranged income protection, you will have more certainty for non-accident disabilities as well.

Let me start at the beginning. You started your own business and you have been doing your thing for a few years, you have no income protection because you have got by this long without it.

Last year your accountant said to you, you have to start paying ACC levies to ACC, which is based on your taxable earnings, which you have been paying. You find them a pain as they draw on your income and you're fit and healthy so what do you need it for? Right?

This may be the situation for the short term but the statistics say 2 in 5 people will be disabled for at least 6 months though accident or illness during their working life.

What you have managed to do, without necessarily planning for it, is to put yourself in the situation where your income for your family and the viability of your business is at risk. How is this you ask?

As you have paid ACC levies there is some cover if you are disabled through an accident, but what about if you are having a bad year this year and you're disabled. ACC will only pay you what you can prove as a loss in income because of your disability. The trading loss is your problem even though you may have paid levies on a higher amount.

What about another possible disability situation, business has been so busy you haven't been eating as well as you should and you haven't been sleeping properly. This results in your blood pressure becoming elevated and you have a cardiac event. This may not trigger a trauma claim but it will put you off work for 6 weeks. Now what? ACC won't cover this.

Another common situation is the business has gone well and you have restructured it to accommodate for growth, but this has come at a cost to posted profits. You may have taken on a partner, relocated the business or added additional staff but the financial returns are yet to kick in. You have something disable you, now what? You now have difficulty proving your loss in income as a result.

By restructuring your ACC cover we can improve your accident outcome and be relatively cost neutral. Add good income protection to that and we are often able to reduce what you pay in ACC levies and improve your overall insurance protection. We do this by adding accident & non-accident disability income protection insurance alongside your ACC cover. Even if your premium & ACC Levies come out the same, you will have much better coverage. Add to this we can make both the ACC and income protection agreed value, meaning you won't have any financial surprises at claim time, if your business has had a poor couple of years.

I'll qualify that last comment here. In my experience over the last 15 years with income protection claims for self-employed people, which is in excess of 60-70 of them, the financial history of the business often highlights the declining health of the business owner well before they are even aware they have a problem. This can often take a number of years. If it takes a few years for a condition to reach the point where you put in a claim, your business income may have eroded from where it is now to something you can't financially survive on at claim. We can avoid this by utilising agreed value, to give you security your income now is protected.

Give us a call and have a chat, we're here to help you protect your business and survive financially.