home insurance when you work from home

jediquigley

Good Evening

i wondered if anyone can help me. i will be qualified as a nutritional therapist in a few months so plan to start my own business in August working from home, seeing clients for nutritional therapy consultations.

my home insurance is up for renewal in a few weeks and i was looking for a new policy at the weekend, on stating that i will be working from home many insurers wont quote or they question whether this is clerical work...i am not quite sure what they mean by this?!? can anyone help......who do other people insure with?

many thanks for your time

Laura

Greatgimp

The critical thing is whether people come to your house or you go out to them.

jexygirl

As greatgimp says it all depends on the type of work you will do from home and if clients come to you. If you go to them, that will affect your car insurance.
I find that as with most online quotes, its often better to call them, as the drop down box has limited options
Jex

Greatgimp

The car insurance premium should hardly be affected, and I buy it every year. It's clearly best to declare it to the insurance companies though.

Pennywise

You havn't said exactly "what" you're going to be doing at home.

If it's basically sitting at a desk on your computer or writing, etc., then there's unlikely to be any problems in any area.

BUT, if you're going to be having clients regularly visit your home, then it's a whole different ballgame and insurance is probably the least of your problems.

You'd have to investigate building regulation and planning permission requirements as you may need change of use from residential to business and your premises may not be up to the required standards for people coming to see you to do business - areas that I know have caused problems for others have been fire prevention measures meaning you have to do risk assessments, have fire extinguisers, marked exit routes, fire doors etc., and the other big area is disability discrimintation in that you have to make reasonable changes to your premises to allow for disabled access. Washing and toilet facilities are also needed, potentially again requiring reasonable modifications for the disabled. It really is a minefield so you need to talk to your local authority planning department before you go any further to see what, if anything, you have to do.

Also with the local authority, you may well become liable to business rates, but if so, you should go down a band or two on your council tax. If any area is wholly for business (i.e. a treatment room in a spare bedroom) then you come into capital gains tax territory when you come to sell your house - probably nothing or very small amount of tax to pay, but it's a pain to have to do the complicated calculations and claim the reliefs etc.

The above is why it's far more common for "therapists" and the like to rent a room/table in, say, a gym or salon, and there are some buildings with several rooms to rent out for various businesses, such as hypnotherapy etc.

None of the above will be relevant if your "home" is basically somewhere for you to sit at a computer and do paperwork etc - it's when you regularly have people coming to your home for business purposes, or where you're storing significant stocks etc at home, that the whole load of local authority bureacracy falls upon you.

debbie42

Just to add my recent experience with this:
My work is very much sitting in front of a pc, with no clients at home. I did contact my insurance company to let them know, but they said it wouldn't affect my premiums as I wasn't storing stock or seeing clients at home.

becbec1982

jediquigley wrote: »

Good Evening

i wondered if anyone can help me. i will be qualified as a nutritional therapist in a few months so plan to start my own business in August working from home, seeing clients for nutritional therapy consultations.

my home insurance is up for renewal in a few weeks and i was looking for a new policy at the weekend, on stating that i will be working from home many insurers wont quote or they question whether this is clerical work...i am not quite sure what they mean by this?!? can anyone help......who do other people insure with?

many thanks for your time

Laura

I am not an expert, but if you do have clients visiting the property, I expect you will have problems obtaining home insurance through a standard home policy. We only do clerical work, ie. no clients visit us, so we are OK.

Business Link is helpful in finding out what your responsibilities are - since I am a newbie, I cannot post links but if you go to the business link site > finance and grants > insurance > get the right insurance for your business, you can answer the questionnaire and that may give you some guidance with respect to public liability, professional indemnity etc.

window_cleaner

This is the nearest thread I could find to my topic, so hope it's ok.

If I work from my office, tapping away at the computer and taking and making phone calls, am I right in thinking I have no need to notify anyone, council, my home insurance provider etc?

In fact, this is what I do now, and have done for five years.

But what if I want to take deliveries of stock, and work on the stock (it's in pieces that need assembling) in my garage? And then call couriers to take things away for delivery to customers. What are my responsibilities?

Savvy_Sue

I'd have said you should have told all those people by now, and it should not have been an issue.

but deliveries and stock and use of garage as a workshop may be issues.

do you rent from the council? if so speak to your HO.