Insuring Your Income
Life Insurance
a life insurance policy that ends in a specific time frame for example, 30 years.
a life insurance policy that provides cover and if you pay the recommended premium may be the same premium until you are age 100.
a life insurance policy that covers you to death as long as you pay your premiums. This policy builds cash value and is considered an asset. This policy usually has the highest premiums for life insurance.
may be part of the life insurance policy or may be a rider to the policy. These are benefits paid to the insured while still alive. Also known as living benefits.
a whole life policy available to those who are over age 55 and younger than 80. This type of policy usually has limited benefits the first 2 years, but often doesn’t require underwriting.
Long-Term Care (LTC) Insurance
Long-term care insurance pays for an individual who needs assistance with activities of daily living (ADL), but not necessarily needs a registered nurse. This includes at-home care, senior day care, assisted living facility or nursing home facility. A doctor must certify that the individual needs assistance with two or more of the six ADL or have a cognitive impairment. A portion of a long term care insurance policy premium may be tax-deductible.
Some states protect the estates of policy holders to the amount of long term care benefit payments. Policy holders do not have to “spend down” the amount of the benefit paid for long term care in order to be eligible for Medicaid long term care. Some states participate in the partnership program and some don’t.
Some insurance companies offer Annuities, life and other types of long term care benefits with a rider or additional premiums. These policies pay benefits for long term care according to the policy contract. If you never need long term care, the policy pays other benefits according to the policy you purchased, such as life insurance.
Fixed Annuities
Insure against living too long – outliving your resources
An immediate annuity requires the policyholder to “annuitize” the money within a year. Annuitize means taking regular payments from the annuity until you die. As a security against dying sooner than expected, you can also ask for a “period certain” for the payments to be made to your beneficiary if you die before the period certain expires.
This means you defer the annuity payments for a period of years or do not annuitize at all. The policies usually have an early withdrawal penalty if you decide to withdraw funds before the deferred time is completed. Deferred annuities also defer tax payments until you actually take the funds out of the policy to use.
This is an annuity contract that follows a specified stock market index and allows the policy holder to participate in some market upside without having risk of losing the principal.
We are NOT securities licensed. We do not give financial advice for the stock market nor do we sell variable annuities.
Disability
These are policies that replace a portion of a person’s income if they are unable to work for a specific amount of time. Generally, the government allows 65% of your income to be replaced by disability payments
Short term disability may have a waiting period of 0 days to two weeks before payment begin for illness or for accident that causes the employee to be unable to do their work. Most short term disability policies pay for a maximum of 13 weeks but some pay for as long as six months. Disability policies are usually group policies, but individual policies are available. Disability policies only cover the policy holder’s paycheck, not the family’s income.
Long-term disability covers an individual for a disability for up to Social Security age except for mental illness. Mental illness usually pays only for 2 years. The benefits usually work with short-term disability for their start date. So, either a 13 week or 26 week elimination period then payments begin.
Disability benefits may be taxed income or may be tax-free depending on the premiums. If the policyholder pays tax on the premium amounts, then the income is generally tax-free.