Disability Insurance

Protect your ability to earn an income.

In simple terms, disability insurance provides you and your family with income should you become unable to work due to illness or injury. However, disability insurance is one of the most complex and misunderstood insurance products there is.

Why? Think about life insurance. It’s fairly clear when a life insurance policy pays a benefit. But, when a disability occurs there is often ambiguity in the degree of your disability and how that impacts your ability to perform your job. There are illnesses and injuries that result in obvious severe disabilities that are uncontestable. However, many disabilities are not so clear and therefore a determination has to be made by the insurance company as to what your real ability is to do your job, and that sometimes leads to a disagreement between you and the insurance company. How disabled are you? What duties in your job can you perform? How long can you perform them? These are all questions that have to be answered.

With over 20 years of experience, we can help you understand and develop a policy specific to you. Contact us, or read through some the key provisions in a disability policy below.

Definitions of Long-Term Disability

The contractual definition of disability varies among disability policies. The strength of the definition is the key aspect of a policy that determines whether your injury or illness qualifies you for a claim and for how long.

Residual Disability Benefits

If you are disabled but able to work, and your income is reduced because you cannot fulfill all the duties of your occupation, residual disability benefits can help make up the difference in income. This feature is standard in some policies and added as an optional rider on others. Please note that some employer group or association policies require you to be totally disabled prior to being eligible for residual benefits. Individual, own occupation policies generally provide total and residual benefits regardless of the timing.

Cost-of-Living-Adjustment Rider

This policy option increases benefit payouts by a specified percentage after each year of disability. This feature only begins after the first year of disability. Therefore, it is important to monitor your coverage level through the years while you are not disabled.

Future Increase Option

An optional feature that allows an insured to purchase additional amounts of disability insurance in the future, with a requirement of only financial (but not medical) insurability.

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Contact us for a no-obligation free quote.