Are you selling disability income insurance or critical illness insurance? It isn’t a pleasant topic to discuss with your clients, and many believe that they don’t need these products, but disability and its accompanying expenses are real.
Disability is the number one cause of home foreclosure and bankruptcy. Plus, if you think about it, what good is all of your financial advice if a premature disability prevents your client from any further investing?
Statistics show that the average cost of DI can range from 1 to 4 percent of annual income, and benefit payments can range from one year to life. With that in mind, coupled with keeping the due diligence monkey off your back, you should be actively selling DI insurance.
If you do disability planning with your client, critical illness insurance is a natural combination sale. Ken Smith, director of health insurance at Assurity Life, says a good way to calculate how much CI insurance your client needs is to take his monthly mortgage payment, multiply it by 24 (two years) and add $5,000 to cover health insurance premiums and uncovered expenses. Two years makes a lot of sense, but your client isn’t limited to that amount.
So where do you begin? There are national associations—the International DI Society (www.internationalDIsociety.com) and the American Association for Critical Illness (www.criticalillnessinfo.org)—that have unlimited educational resources as well as membership lists, should you decide to do joint work with a specialist in either DI or CI products. Another good source is the Plus Group (www.plusgroupus.com), a national marketing group of disability specialists, whose membership spans the United States.
If you need a little more persuading, go to the Council for Disability Awareness website (www.disabilitycanhappen.org), where you will find as much information about DI as you will ever need—and you can send your clients to that site.
Since 2005, the Council for Disability Awareness (CDA) has conducted a proprietary annual review of long term disability claims among the U.S. working population. Here is just a sample of the information available.
If you check out some of these sources, you will see how easy it is to join the DI and CI brigade! [SAC]
