Because before your advisor can make you rich, I have to keep you from becoming poor!

Disability income insurance (DI) protects the most important thing you own - your ability to provide an income.
Should you become disabled due to accident or illness, your income will go away and your savings soon follow.
Yet, your monthly expenses for the mortgage and/or rent, utilities, car loans and leases, food and clothing will
all continue, and may increase to cover any uninsured medical expenses and convalescent care!
Saving for your vacation, for children’s college and retirement will all take a back seat to simply surviving the month.

The government provides little in the way of Social Security, state disability and worker’s compensation, and you
won’t like anything about the process. Your own DI plan can provide a monthly check according to the specifications
of a policy that you and I create.

Some of the most important features include a “your own occupation” definition of disability, determination of the
length of time the coverage is needed, the amount of the monthly benefit, coverage for partial disability, recovery benefits, options to buy additional coverage, inflation riders, and elimination period. 

Of course, the number one feature is an experienced agent who can explain the other features!

No.

First and foremost, people change jobs all the time. Your LTD is almost never “portable”, so if you leave your job,
you lose your coverage.

Second, the “definition of disability” is often not as favorable to you as with your own individual policy, especially
after two years. Please see the “Own occ” section below.

Third, most group policy benefits are usually reduced by amounts you can collect from Social Security or Workers Compensation and the like. They call it “offset”. I call it awful. Many people who actually review the details of their
group coverage are shocked to find out just how poorly they are protected.

The “own occ” definition of disability - the single most critical item in a DI contract - is the standard the insurance company uses to determine whether you qualify for benefits. “Own occ” means that you qualify for benefits if you
cannot perform the main duties - as we define them in your policy application - of your occupation and aren’t
working in another occupation.

Most group Long Term Disability plans limit the “own occ” definition to two years. And they define your occupation
rather broadly. After two years, the plan won’t pay further benefits unless you cannot perform the main duties of any occupation for which you are qualified by education or training. Well! There are many jobs for which you are qualified
for by education or training, but would you want to spend your day doing something you didn’t want to do?

If your benefits end after two years, it may not be a matter of “want”, it may be a matter of “need”: You would need another job to earn a living, since it’s a lot less likely that you would collect benefits after two years under that kind
of policy. 

I provide the type of policy that offers the most best chance to collect benefits for as long as you need if you become disabled.

When we meet, I will explain the tax treatment of your DI policy (and any group LTD you have), and provide you with
any information you or your accountant or attorney needs to determine this.

You “qualify” for benefits by being unable to perform the duties of your job, as specified in your policy application.
Your claim reviewer compares your condition against the kind of work you do, as described in your application.

During the application, I’ll have lots of questions about your job: 
Do you work at an office, or at home?
Do you travel?  Where and how often?
How regular is your income?  Are you on salary, bonus or both?

You’ll typically provide evidence of your income via a W-2. If you own a business, we’ll also need to document
how your business would (or wouldn’t!) operate in your absence from work. A disabling condition may make seeing
or speaking or standing or long periods of concentrated thought impossible. I usually try to analyze your workday
by time spent on different tasks (and, yes, I know you do a hundred things everyday!) and whether they have to do
with your speaking, your hearing, your seeing, your thinking, your walking, etc.
 
Some agents don’t go into this kind of detail, but I do. I think it’s that important for you.

Because we develop an extremely detailed activities description in your policy, if you were to become disabled,
it would be readily apparent why you qualify for benefits. If your agent simply wrote down, “Manager” as your job description, the burden would fall on you – at the worst possible time - to explain what you do each day, and why
you believe you qualify for disability benefits. 

Why put yourself in such a bad position?

Most executive and professional positions qualify for DI. Certain trades and crafts may qualify as well.
Some carriers will not cover certain occupations, deemed to be riskier or difficult to monitor, but it is likely that
I can get you the best type of coverage the industry offers. 

We can determine whether or not it is likely that you will get coverage.

DI is concerned with morbidity, not mortality. Fancy language. What that means is, the DI underwriter has to be especially concerned about your health history, because illnesses have often result in people being unable to work.
For example, osteoarthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome and cataracts are rarely fatal, but could prevent a person from working, and that’s a major concern in DI. 

We’ll discuss how this can impact your coverage.

Insurers have analyzed historical DI claim patterns, and believe that the higher the proportion of a person’s income
is covered, the longer the person stays out on claim. It’s a sad fact of human nature. The carrier wants you to remain motivated to return to work as soon as possible, if possible, and limiting the available benefit is one way they do so.

They would tell you they wish they had bought their own policy, even a small one.
They would tell you that state plans can be inadequate, and can be extremely difficult to qualify to receive benefits.  They would tell you that claims for Social Security are denied in almost a third of the cases, and that it took them
years to fight Social Security.
They would also tell you that they never received as much as they could have received from a private policy.

Because they have been there. It is so difficult for those in good health to conceive of the unthinkable, that they
might be unable to walk, or speak clearly, or even breathe normally. Of course, once their circumstances are tragic, they become older and wiser, but it’s too late for them. Learn your options before the underwriting becomes a challenge. 

Call me to discuss it!