Income Protection Journal Podcast

A business owner deducted a disability insurance premium one year, then stopped for the next two once a back injury made a claim look likely. Three years later, an IRS audit reached back and found the year the premium had been written off. Mark Clark did not write the policy, but he watched what happened next from inside his own office. The audit did not catch a client hiding money. It caught a client who assumed that skipping the deduction in the years he expected a claim would undo what he had

Most practice owners have never priced what it would cost to keep a practice's bills paid if the owner could not work. In 2020, Maxwell Schmitz's mother needed a lung transplant. For decades she had run the underwriting and case-management side of the family's insurance agency, the person who reviewed every application before it went out the door, and her family had to decide, in the middle of that, what happened to her paycheck. I talked through that decision with Maxwell Schmitz, President of

For an attorney relying on a law firm’s group disability plan, coverage for the exact same injury can play out two completely different ways depending on how long the disability has lasted. Most group long-term disability policies define disability one way for the first two years of coverage, and a different way after that. For those first 24 months, you qualify as disabled if you cannot perform the material and substantial duties of your own occupation. After 24 months, the definition typically

Michelle L. Roberts has represented disability claimants since 2005. She explains what a new employer's group plan does with a condition you already have.

An owner who runs a practice or a company as an S corporation pays themselves a modest base salary, takes the rest of the year's profit as a K-1 distribution, then enrolls in the group long-term disability plan and treats the income question as settled. Most group disability plans never saw that distribution, because they define covered earnings as W-2 wages and stop there. Under that definition, the largest number on the owner's tax return was never insured. Grayson Owen has spent more than 12

Alkeme Insurance EVP John DePinto, 30 years on the property and casualty side, on the one policy the state, your bank and your job never make you buy.