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The Kilkenny Observer Friday 20 May 2022
kilkennyobserver.ie
Your Money BY JOHN ELLIS FINANCIAL ADVISOR
Income protection is the most tax efficient means to provide an income should you become ill or have an accident and be unable to earn. Who would pay for your mortgage, gas, electric, phone, food, children’s education, car payments, holidays, insurance, pension, home repairs etc, if your income dried up tomorrow? Do you think your salary is protected by another insurance product eg. mortgage protection, loan repayment protection and critical illness cover? Well, it’s not in most cases! Less than 10% of us have any form of private salary protection. Income protection, a form of disability/sickness insurance, can help you stay on top of the bills that matter, even if you are unable to work for three months or more due to illness, injury, or disability. The cover can be provided up to age 65 and, if you wished, you could cover off your pension contributions each month. So not only are your bills not building up, but your pension provision need not suffer either while you are recovering With income protection, you take control of your financial security. By paying
An income protection plan that works for you
a monthly premium, which is determined by your employment and health status, you will receive a regular income for the complete duration of your illness until you return to work or retire. Not only that, but the Revenue within certain limits will also give you the same level of tax relief on your premiums that they give to pension contributions. So your costs could be reduced by up to 40% with tax relief at source. Imagine if you were lucky enough to have savings of
€50,000. Suppose you get sick. Think! You have no income protection. Your salary ceases nearly immediately. You become dependent on social welfare. Not to worry you have savings. You begin to use your saving at a rate of €3,000 per month. Your savings are gone in 17 months! What then? Fortunately, there’s a way of ensuring that in the event of an injury or illness that leaves you unable to earn, your financial commitments will be met, and your lifestyle protected, thereby giving you
peace of mind to focus on your recovery. The cost of an income protection plan depends on the option you choose. It’s dependent on your age, your occupation and your health. It is very easy to fit a plan into your budget that you can review as your circumstances change. With new entrants coming into the income protection market offering discounts on premiums and price matching other companies offerings there is great scope
for to effect a meaningful plan within your budget. Here are two examples... Philip is a quantity surveyor currently earning €50,000 a year and is 30 years old. He has chosen to protect 50% of his salary ie. € 25,000 a year until his retirement age of 65. He selects a six-month waiting time and chooses to index-link his premiums. Now consider this.... If Philip were to claim on his policy in two years’ time (aged 32) and his claim lasted for
the average duration of five and a half years, he would be paid over €156,259 in benefits. If he were unable to return before retirement, then over that 35-year period he would be paid a total benefit of €1,460,000. Fiona is a 35-year-old sales rep currently earning €72,000 a year. She has chosen to protect 50% of her salary ie. € 36,000 a year until her retirement at age 65. She selects a sixmonth waiting time and chooses to index link her premiums. Now consider this.... If Fiona were to claim on her policy in two years’ time (aged 37) and her claim lasted for five and a half years, she would be paid over €224,000 in benefits. If she were unable to return before retirement, then over that 28 year period she would be paid a total of € 1,639,636 in benefit. In each example they both get the protection of a regular income during difficult times, tailored to their needs and circumstances. It is flexible, customisable and packed with features. You need to review your income protection plan at least every three years to be sure you have the most suitable plan in place and you make be pleasantly surprised with a premium reduction. john@ellisfinancial.ie 086 8362633
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust BY NED EGAN
DUST. We are surrounded by it. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if God doesn’t get you, the Divil must,’ we used to sing at school playtime. There’s a great book called ‘A Handful of Dust.’ Then there is the dust of our ancestors, dead and gone. The dust of a thousand million meteorites and rocky inanimate asteroids, racing through time and eternal space until they crash at last into the forming ball of our Earth, helping to make it, to grow it - maybe to destroy it. Then there’s the dust of my tiny son Ned, his unseeing baby eyes staring forever at the blue sea by which he was buried, the Mediterranean. A victim, an innocent infant who was only granted a few short days on this lovely planet. On a sun-bleached island, little Ned never even saw the blue blue sky during his tooshort days. Sixty years ago. He is now just a few indelible grammes of diamond dust. I was deathly afraid; like TS Elliot wrote “I will show you
fear in a handful of dust.” But I couldn’t show fear or hurt. In those tough times. But my heart was broken - still is. He took a big part of me with him. The military doctors were kind, but they told me Ned would never see, nor would he hear, or walk. There was only a few bits of him there. Nobody knew at the time that the little fellow was part of the wreckage and devastation inflicted by Thalidomide. One top doctor – a good but rather insensitive character – said to me: “Egan, he won’t have the life of a crab”: It hurt, but it was true. I talk about Ned as if I knew him – but they wouldn’t even let me see him. “For your own good, Egan – you’d never be any use again.” Military days then – and when the head medic quietly suggested “we might let him go?” – I knew what he meant. Was I right to nod wordlessly? The way the doc put it – a religious man himself - “We all pass through deserts and ice fields during our life, before the Almighty claims us – this little fellow is only taking a shortcut – avoiding all the hardnesses and disappointments that befall so many, on the way to the grave”. Was I a coward? Maybe. Aren’t we all, about many things? Now, when I see
a particularly beautiful sunset, I think of little Ned, and him being part of it. Molecules may be all we are. Specks of carbon in the limitless Universe. The huge space rock that wiped out dinosaurs and most other species all those millions of years ago, threw up enough
dust to blot out the sun for ages, and so doomed any survivors of the impact and fireball.. Some of that dust will still be up there in the stratosphere, mingling with interstellar fragments that fall towards us every day. The winter nights of my youth, 70 years ago. I would
be out in the cold dark fields trying to catch something to eat – rabbit, hare, pigeon, pheasant.. Overhead – in those times of no electricity, and few motors - the luminous silky scarf of the Milky Way wrapped our nights in its eternal ransluscent mantle, letting us humans know that we hadn’t come all that far from the stone age. Occasional tiny flecks of galactic dust would hit our stratosphere, and burn out at huge speed, and provide a fireworks display, all for me alone, standing in some lonely field, thinking I was looking at “Shooting Stars”. An odd speck of cosmic dust would get through, on those silent nights in old Kilkenny County. The only sounds would be the love-sick howling of a vixen {mostly responsible and blamed for the dreaded Banshee’s scream.} If there was ever the odd Fairy Woman, she certainly was closer then. And now I look back at those lost times, and long for them. The same as the old horse used to look at the Creamery car, and wish he was useful again, after tractors doomed a million of his kind… Atoms of dust in the skyworld are also made too of
the remnants of my lovely daughter Noreen, who would still be with us but for the hands of another. I don’t often talk about her. I’m unable to. She lived an uproarious and dangerous life, always close to the edge. One terrible night, the black beast of death came for her. And you cannot ignore that awful reaper. Now she is but an atom in the ionosphere, circling unknowingly the planet of her loves and misfortunes. The day she was consumed by fire and sent up a huge tall chimney was one of the worst days of my life. And I’ve had a few.Will I ever find her? Will a speck of my future dust pass near a speck of Ned or Noreen? That’s all I hope for, in the long dream-filled nights of my old age. Heaven would be out of the question for all three of us, for different reasons. That is a place for religious, and rules are rules. Here’s to the future, folks. Make what you will of it. Ned E DISCLAIMER The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of The Kilkenny Observer.
