It is not a coincidence that the Agent Best Practices issue contains our annual DI Forum. I have long held that any insurance advisor—life or annuity producer, health agent, worksite benefits specialist, financial advisor, registered rep, estate planner, and even property and casualty agent—should have the income protection conversation with each and every employed client. For the vast majority of consumers an extended disability would be very disruptive if not catastrophic to virtually every aspect of their well crafted lives.
Without the ability to fund plans and pay bills, estate and legacy plans are eroded. Premiums on life, health, home and auto coverages go unpaid and policies lapse. Private school tuitions and college funding plans become unrealistic. Mortgages, utilities, food and clothing needs become suddenly problematic. Even with medical insurance, the attendant costs of the illness or injury are myriad and drive families deeply in debt. You lose commissions on current and future sales, renewal income and naturally referrals. And if, as a conscientious advisor, you grow to care deeply about the wellbeing of your clients you lose sleep.
LIMRA, along with Life Happens, conducts an annual Insurance Barometer Study, and produces a very useful fact sheet each year for Disability Insurance Awareness Month. The 2016 version repeats the statistic that 7 in 10 working Americans understand the importance of disability insurance, yet only one third have coverage. A clue lies in the middle stairstep of this research: 72 percent of respondents believe most people need disability insurance; 33 percent say they own disability insurance; but only 55 percent say “I need disability insurance.”
Theories abound surrounding the disconnect with the public: The idea that “it won’t happen to me”; human nature and procrastination; the idea that DI isn’t affordable for many; the old “but what if I never use it?”; and many others. The very disconcerting fact that comes from many conversations with DI devotees, and from several of Life Happens’ Real Life Stories, is that many consumers relate that simply no one had approached them about buying an income protection product or had a meaningful conversation with them about the very real risk of a disability and the potentially devastating effects.
This, in my opinion, is both our industry’s great shame and our most easily correctable ethical error.
Also no coincidence is that October is the month chosen for the annual conference of the International DI Society (IDIS)—this year’s meeting (the group’s 12th) to be held October 15-18 in beautiful Charleston, SC. The group’s mission statement: The International DI Society is an organization dedicated to growing the disability insurance industry through education, awareness, promotion of high ethical conduct of the membership and increasing the knowledge base of the agent, producer, company and carriers. Member benefits include: the annual conference, industry information, a company directory, DI Coach Referral Action Program, education and disability insurance designations, IDIS study groups, a LinkedIn discussion group, producer videos, affiliate associations and societies, available publications for purchase, and a speakers bureau.
I encourage each of you to join the International DI Society and attend the annual conference—either to further hone your income protection sales approach or to perhaps solidify a commitment to better pursuing this crucial protection for all your clients and prospects. I ask you to look at your family, your home(s), your car(s), your clothes, the summer vacation photos on your phone, and the plate of food in front of you—have you personally taken the steps to protect these by insuring your own income? And most important—your clients bought all these things for you. Don’t you owe them at least a diligent effort on your part to protect their incomes so that they can continue to enjoy these same things themselves?
To find out more about the International DI Society, visit www.internationaldisociety.com or email info@internationaldisociety.com.[SPH]
