Income Protection Journal Podcast: Latest on Disability Insurance, Life Insurance & Long-Term Care Insurance with host Jamie Fleischner, CLU, ChFC, LUTCF
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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 years in the insurance business, and he now works in a corner of it most buyers never see. He is a d
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 almost every first conversation I have with a working professional. To pressure-test it, I sat down for
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 nearly four years defending insurance carriers at Kirwan, Spellacy and Danner before joining Mark F.
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 real difference for a number of people. It is not income protection for self-employed professiona
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 in his hallway ever since. The shortfall is the story. Disability income insurance replaces a percen
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 insurance is priced on the earner it names, so a household that loses one salary discovers what the other
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 defected. And plying his trade in the courtroom was no longer a realistic option. “He spent all thi
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 Journal Podcast, I spoke with Steve Eskoz about the moment many applicants realize the process is more co
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 hands. Disability insurance for dentists replaces the owner's income while an associate covers the chai
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. Program instability changes the calculus for a resident. GSI disability insurance is underwritten on training status, so a program's accreditation trouble can affect the window to buy. Early last year, Guardian Life Insurance pulled guaranteed stan
She had survived a college mass shooting. She was taking PTSD anxiety medication that required frequent adjustments. She'd had multiple pregnancy complications in her medical chart. She was also a resident physician at a hospital with one of the most valuable GSI disability insurance offers in the country. This was guaranteed standard issue coverage that would have protected her income with no medical questions asked, regardless of her medical history, until her retirement. Then, unbeknownst to her, she inadvertently made the critical mistake so many medical residents and fellow make after mat
When I spoke with board-certified trauma surgeon Dr. Nii Darko, DO, MBA, FACS for this episode of The Income Protection Journal Podcast, he started with a moment humiliating in its simplicity. The hands are the whole coverage question. Disability insurance for physicians turns on whether a policy insures the surgeon's own specialty or merely the ability to work somewhere, and that language is chosen at purchase. He was cutting up a hospital mattress his town's local rubbish service wouldn't pick up, put a little too much tension on one finger, and felt what he described as a rubber band snappi
Disability coverage for veterinarians is often treated like something you think about later, after the practice is stable, after the loans feel manageable, after life quiets down. In my conversation with Dr. Michelle Custead, a board-certified veterinary medical oncologist and practice owner, what stood out was how rarely “later” arrives on schedule — and how quickly an ordinary day can turn into a career interruption that no one planned for. Disability insurance for veterinarians is income protection built around one fact: a veterinary income depends on a specific set of physical abilities, a
I went into this conversation expecting to talk about claims the way most people imagine them: paperwork, delays, frustration, maybe a denial that needs to be appealed. What I didn’t expect was how quickly the discussion shifted to something more unsettling—the realization that many people buy disability insurance believing they’re protected, only to discover years later that the policy language quietly gives the insurer a way out. A policy is only as good as its definitions. Individual disability income insurance is written provision by provision, and those provisions decide a claim years bef
