What my employer already insures me for

I wrote a risk register a while ago with an entry for redundancy (mitigation: an emergency fund) and an entry for poor health (mitigation: exercise and eat your five a day). Both mitigations were things I do myself, entirely independent of my job. It hadn't occurred to me to check what my employer already covers before deciding what I still needed to cover myself. So I went and actually read the benefits page properly, for the first time since the day I skimmed it during onboarding.

What's actually in there

Four separate things, it turns out, not one vague "benefits package":

Income protection, which pays out a majority of salary if illness or injury stops me working — but only after a waiting period measured in months, not days or weeks. Nothing happens in the short gap; the cover exists specifically for the long one.

Life assurance, a lump sum paid out on death, worth a large multiple of salary, held in a discretionary trust with beneficiaries I'm meant to nominate myself and never had.

Accidental death and dismemberment cover, on top of the life assurance, for a narrower set of circumstances.

Business travel accident insurance, specifically for injury while travelling for work — a category I hadn't separately considered existed until I saw it listed.

What this actually changes about the register

The redundancy and poor-health entries both assumed I was starting from zero — no income at all, the day something goes wrong. That's not the real gap. The real gap is narrower and more specific: the period between the event happening and the income protection actually starting, which runs to months rather than being immediate, and even once it starts, it replaces most of salary rather than all of it. That's a properly sizeable emergency fund, but it's a bridging fund with a known, calculable endpoint — not the open-ended "what if I'm never paid again" fund I'd been quietly picturing.

The risk that wasn't on the register at all

Death itself never made the original list, which in hindsight is a strange omission for a document that's meant to be honest about what could go wrong. There's a real payout attached to it, sitting in a trust, waiting on a beneficiary nomination I'd never actually filled in. You can't mitigate the risk. You can make sure the money goes where you'd want it to, which is pure admin, costs nothing, and takes about ten minutes once you sit down and do it.

That's the actual output of this post: not a decision to buy more insurance, but a reminder to go and read the page you were sent on your first day, and to update the one form on it that nobody chases you about.

Not financial advice — I'm not qualified to give any. I've deliberately left out the specific cover amounts and my employer's name; the mechanics described here — a waiting period, a percentage of salary, a beneficiary nomination sitting unfilled — are common to large-employer benefits packages generally, not particular to any one firm.