You wouldn’t rewire your own house

You wouldn’t let an unqualified electrician rewire your building and hope for the best. Most directors wouldn’t dream of it. Yet plenty sign a personal guarantee on an online loan form in under five minutes, without anyone walking them through what they have just agreed to.

That is your house. Your savings. Everything you have built outside the business. On the line if it goes wrong.

Here is the part nobody says out loud. A guarantee doesn’t get called on a good day. It gets called when you are in the middle of a nightmare. When the business is under pressure. When the phone calls are getting harder. When you have just told your family the holiday is cancelled. That is exactly when it lands.

Nobody believed Northern Rock, one of the UK’s biggest mortgage lenders, could collapse less than twenty years ago. It did. The Titanic was unsinkable too. If institutions that size can go under, anything can. The point is not to be pessimistic. The point is to make sure you know exactly what you have signed before you need to find out.

Apply direct online and nobody mentions personal guarantee insurance to you. Why would they? That is not their job. The form is designed to be quick and easy. Well it would be, wouldn’t it. The easier it is to sign, the less time you have to think about what you are signing.

A good broker walks you through all of it. The options, the alternatives, ways to cap what you are actually exposed to, and the insurance that exists specifically to protect you if the worst happens. None of that comes up on a five minute online form.

Give me a call instead. Talk it through before you sign anything, not after.

I am Mark Smillie. 07710 466166.