Episodes

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.

An employee signs up for disability coverage during open enrollment, checks the box, and assumes the benefit will stand in for a paycheck if illness or an accident ever stops the income. It does step in, but the check that arrives replaces less than half of what the household was taking home, once the formula, the cap, and the tax treatment all land. Most people never learn that math until they are already on claim, which is the worst possible moment to discover it. I hear that assumption in alm...

Most attorneys who buy disability coverage believe own occupation guarantees their benefit the day they can no longer practice law. It is an umbrella term with tiers, and the version inside a group plan, or an individual policy bought without the right rider, pays very differently. Which tier an attorney owns decides whether the disability claim pays in full or drops to a fraction the moment it is filed. Ethan Abramowitz has watched that decision play out from both sides of the table. He spent n...

Group long-term disability through your employer typically pays $2,000 to $15,000 a month before tax, far less than what high-income working professionals actually earn. Independent insurance broker Analisa Cleland explains the four-part group LTD trap, the worksite-product portability path for the uninsurable, and why 92 percent of brokers licensed to sell disability insurance don't.

Gretchen Rosenberg has watched agents at her brokerage get sick, stop working, and find out how little income protection they had. When that happened, colleagues sometimes stepped in. They covered showings, managed contracts, and kept deals from unraveling. What they could never replace was her paycheck. Five years ago, Rosenberg launched a foundation at Kentwood Real Estate that provides emergency grants to employees and agents dealing with cancer, car accidents, and medical crises. It has made...

A doctor who could no longer practice medicine after a neurological diagnosis started painting watercolors and selling them to make up what his disability benefits did not cover. His policy had been sufficient when he first bought it, but his income had grown beyond what the coverage was designed to replace, and no one had reviewed it in the years between. Bob Herum was a young agent at Provident at the time, delivering benefit checks to that doctor’s door, and one of those watercolors has hung ...

A physician with fifteen years in clinical practice and a dual household income had the financial plan most parents assume they have. She had started a 529 college savings account before her daughter was born, carried benefits through a large integrated health system, and expected a pension to grow alongside her career. Then her marriage ended when her daughter was five, and the plan she had counted on needed to hold for one. Two incomes had been doing the work of one plan. Individual life insur...

He was 41 years old litigator who just made partner at his firm. His career was on the ascent. Then, out of no where, he suffered a massive stroke. A partner's earning power is the asset at risk. Disability insurance for attorneys is underwritten on health, and a stroke at 41 ends any chance to buy it on ordinary terms. He survived. But the left side of his face was partially paralyzed, and his speech — the tool on which his entire legal career depended — was slow and hard to follow. How clients...

When people apply for insurance, they expect a straightforward process. Fill out an application, answer a few health questions, and wait for an approval. But in many cases, something else happens behind the scenes they never see coming. That review is standard practice. Underwriters for disability income insurance read the medical file before they price a policy, which is why the timing of an application matters as much as its contents. During a recent conversation on the Income Protection Journ...

Dentists spend years mastering precision, technique, and patient care. What they often underestimate early in their careers is how quickly a physical injury can interrupt that work and place an entire practice under pressure. During a recent episode of The Income Protection Podcast, I spoke with Dr. Eric D’Hondt about the moment he realized the physical demands of dentistry could suddenly threaten the stability of both his career and his practice. The practice keeps running on someone else's han...

When Steven Crawford told me about the hospitals on probation, he actually got a little choked up. He was trying to choose his words carefully because what he was about to say has real consequences for thousands of medical residents and fellows who assumed the offer sitting in their inbox would still be valid when they clicked on it after Match Day. Early last year, Guardian Life Insurance pulled guaranteed standard issue programs from 3 teaching hospitals, according to Crawford, with zero advan...