Can You Afford to Overlook It?
When someone says “insurance,” what comes to mind?
With all the headlines about health care, you may think of medical insurance… Or your homeowners or auto insurance… Or the tried-and-true foundation of most financial plans, life insurance. After all, the need for life insurance is so easy to understand, and other types of insurance protection
Disability, a fact of life.
No one likes to think about it, but the chances of becoming disabled are actually much greater than the chances of dying until quite late in life. The table above shows how much greater. In short, that means your need for disability insurance is even higher than you need for life insurance.
Why protect against disability at all?
Because the financial consequences of disability can be devastating to a family’s lifestyle, even more devastating than the death of a breadwinner. Consider just one statistic: according to a 1989 Government Housing and Home Finance Agency report, 3% of all mortgage foreclosures are caused by death, while 48% of all foreclosures are the result of disability. The reason for this difference: many more people have protected themselves with life insurance than with disability insurance.
Asking the right questions
Here’s a valuable exercise you can perform right now. Rough out your family’s current monthly living expenses. Then, in the next column, trim as many of those expenses as you can to determine your minimum cash needs in the event of a disability. Then answer these questions:
- If yours is the sole income, how long could your family meet expenses before savings were used up?
- If you have a spouse who works, could his or her income alone meet these expenses?
- Would you still have to give up saving for college expenses or other important, long-range goals in the process?
As you can see, disability poses some difficult questions. But because it’s a topic that people usually avoid, the question too often goes unanswered. So especially if you’ve never considered disability insurance before, you owe it to yourself and your family to learn more. Your insurance advisor can help you analyze your specific income replacement needs and recommend a plan to meet them.