Freelancers must make sure they’ve got it covered

There’s lots to think about when making the leap into self-employment. Insurance isn’t always foremost in folks’ minds but it’s still vital. 

Insurance giants Aon drew up this handy guide for workingdads.co.uk for anyone starting out on their own.

Insurance 101

These days more and more workers, particularly dads, are discovering the joys of working for themselves, moving on from traditional workplaces to become self-employed or start their own small businesses.

Whether you’re self-employed and work alone, or self-employed and employ a small team, it’s down to you to ensure you have adequate insurance cover.

If something goes wrong it could not just be you on the hook but your whole family could feel the impacts without the right protection in place.

Where to start with this can be confusing, so we’ve highlighted the most common types of insurance cover purchased by the self-employed to help you make an informed choice.

Office contents insurance

Cover for your office contents and workplace equipment to make sure you’re not out of pocket in the event of a loss, such as theft, fire or water damage.

Professional Indemnity insurance

An important cover for freelancers and the self-employed who give advice or provide a professional service to clients. It can pay for compensation claims and legal fees that may arise if a client suffers a financial or professional loss due to negligence in your work.

For example, if you’re a web designer and a client gets sued by image owners for using unlicensed pictures on their website, the client would sue you but your insurance would pay out to cover these costs.

Public Liability insurance

Provides cover against claims made by members of the public who have suffered an injury or damage (including to their property) in connection with your business. For example, if you have clients at your office, it is important to ensure you have protection in place should they trip over a piece of your equipment and injure themselves. This can also apply if you visit them on their premises and, as an example, damage some of their property.

Employers Liability insurance

If you have employees, contractors, casual workers or temporary staff, you are required by law to take out employers’ liability cover, to deal with any claims from employees who’ve been injured or become seriously ill as a result of working for you.

Cyber insurance

For freelancers and the self-employed, who regularly travel with portable laptops and emails on their phones holding data about their clients, the risk of losing that data has increased. At the same time, cyber criminals are becoming more aware of the value of this data and increasingly looking for easy targets. This type of cover protects you if you lose data, even if you were negligent, or are subject of an attack by a malicious hacker that affects your computer systems. It also covers the response costs, such as notifying everyone whose data has been lost.

Directors & officers liability insurance

If you are a director of your business, this covers the cost of compensation claims made against directors or key managers by shareholders, investors, employees, regulators or third parties.

Legal protection cover

Finally, legal protection insurance covers you against the cost of taking legal action should a situation arise, for example, if there’s a commercial dispute and a client or employee takes you to court.

Setting up on your own means taking on more responsibility and insurance is part of that. But it doesn’t have to be hard and it doesn’t have to be expensive. Most importantly it provides peace of mind so you can crack on with building up your business.

Click here for more information from Aon

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