Living Benefits

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Disability Insurance

What is your greatest asset? Take a moment and pause to think about it. Your house. Your car. Perhaps your new television?  Your greatest asset is your ability to earn your income. Without an income, it would be challenging to maintain your lifestyle unless you have adequate and significant resources to draw upon.

Did you know you are a millionaire in the making? If you are 35 years old, making $ 40,000 a year and assuming you get a 2% raise until age 65 – your earning potential is $ 1,848,151.  How do you protect this income against a disability? Answer: through disability insurance which would Protect Your Finances.

Disability insurance is an income replacement plan. It protects your income against a disability.  According to the 1985 Commissioner’s Disability Table A (experience table) – the odds of becoming disabled for at least 90 days are greater between the age of 25 – 50 than as opposed to later in life.

Disability insurance is available through individual and group insurance. Different contracts have different features, so it’s very important to understand what you are covered for and not to help you make an informed decision.

Disability insurance has different definitions (which defines disability). So it’s critical to understand what the definition is, and how it meet’s your needs – before a disability should happen in which it’s too late.

Critical Illness

Did you know that critical illness was invented by a doctor? Critical illness was invented by Dr. Barnard from South Africa. He had performed the first open heart transplant, and saw first-hand that his patients were surviving. Disability was not enough, and he saw the financial stress that was being put on his patients in recovery. As a result of this, the concept of critical illness was born.

Critical illness is living life insurance. Just like life insurance when personally owned, it provides a lump sum amount of money when you survived to the beneficiary tax free – which is you the survivor.

As life happens, people get diagnosed with life threating cancer, a heart attack or stroke to name a few. What critical illness does is Protects Your Finances at a time needed most. Critical illness is a compliment to disability insurance, and life insurance within your overall financial plan.

Long Term Care

It’s difficult to comprehend that a healthy, independent person could have a health status change that now requires specialized, ongoing care from someone else. Most people think of long term care for the elderly, but circumstances could happen where a younger person’s life is now changed and long term care is required. A debilitating illness/accident could require around the clock treatment of care for people of all ages.

Long term care Protects Your Finances by providing protection when you are unable to care for yourself because of a chronic illness, disability, cognitive impairment or other conditions that prevent you from managing a number of activities of daily living without assistance.

Different long term care plans exists which include a reimbursement style plan (a pre- determined amount is determined) and reimbursed for expenses and an income style plan – which offers a pre-determined monthly benefit amount. When deciding on your long term care protection, it’s important to understand the type of plan you have and the definitions for the plan.