Income Protection For Screeders

Every kneeling trade damages knees. This one does it more than the others, and the reason is simple exposure time.

A tiler kneels to set tiles and stands to cut. A flooring fitter kneels in sections. A screeder kneels continuously across an entire floor area, on a hard abrasive surface, for the whole pour, and then does it again on the next one. Kneeling boards and pads help and do not remove it.

The predictable progression is bursitis, then cartilage damage, then osteoarthritis, and it tends to arrive in the forties rather than at retirement. That matters for when to arrange cover, because by the time there is a diagnosis there are usually already physiotherapy notes and often imaging on record. Underwriting is based on what is known when you apply.

There is a commercial feature of this trade that changes how urgently benefit needs to start.

Screeding is typically priced by area and paid when the floor is done. An employee off sick loses wages from that week; a screeder off sick part way through a thousand square metre floor may have done a fortnight's work and have nothing to invoice for it.

That argues for a shorter deferred period than the annual income alone would suggest, and for being realistic about what the household actually has behind it. It is also worth sizing cover against a defensible annual figure from accounts rather than a good run, because benefit is normally measured against actual earnings at claim.

Self-employed screeders have no death in service, so the household has only what has been arranged privately.

The business does not help either. A screeding business is a van, a pump or a mixer, and the person who can lay a floor flat, and the last of those is the part with the value.

So the sum worth covering is the plain one: the mortgage, finance on the van and plant, and the years of income a household would need.

This trade ends with knees that will not kneel, usually in somebody in their forties or fifties with no other qualification.

Income protection covers the absences and the operations on the way there. What it is not designed for is the permanent drop once somebody is judged fit for suitable alternative work, which standing work generally is.

A lump sum turns that into a choice. Screeding experience moves into estimating, supervision, flooring contract management, and selling or specifying screed systems for manufacturers, where the knowledge is worth money and the knees are not involved.

Plenty of screeders employ or sub-contract a couple of people, which changes what an absence costs.

The gang can often keep laying floors without you, which is genuinely useful, but the pricing, the setting out and the relationship with the main contractor are usually yours alone. Those are the parts that stop.

Cover can be sized to include continuing costs such as plant hire and wages as well as personal income. Where you trade through a limited company, executive income protection lets the company pay for it, which is normally more efficient than funding it from taxed income.