Topic: Obtain Disability Insurance

Obtain disability insurance for yourself. You want to make sure that you protected yourself and your loved ones in case something should happen to you. When you were at an employer, they may have included disability insurance as one of your benefits, but now that you’re on your own, you want to make sure that, if for some reason, you can’t work, that you won’t go into poverty.

In Episode 157 of Unleashed, I go into a bit more detail about obtaining disability insurance including the process that I went through. But here’s the short take. There are two types of disability insurance, short term, and long term. Short term disability insurance starts paying benefits as soon as you are disabled but they only run for six months. Long term disability starts at some period in the future, it could start at six months or nine months or 12 months, and it runs for a much longer period. It could run for the rest of your life or until say, 65, retirement age. Those are different variables, but it runs for a longer period.

When I researched it, what I found was that short term disability insurance didn’t make sense for my financial situation. The cost of the policy was pretty high and the relative benefits were relatively low and it would make more sense for me to just save that money for a couple of years, that I would have paid in premiums and, after about three or four years, I would have saved that much money as I would have obtained in premiums over the course of six months. So that policy didn’t make sense.

But for me, long term disability made a lot of sense. So I recommend that you shop around to different providers to figure out what’s going to be the best policy for you. What you can expect is that before you actually get issued the policy you’ll have a medical examination. Often they’ll send a nurse to your home to draw a blood sample, take your blood pressure, give you a quick physical, and then it may take a couple more weeks for the actuaries to finalize and approve your policy. So, the whole process from end to end took about six weeks, for me.

So, Episode 157 of Unleashed if you want to hear more. I also recommend the website of Policy Genius, policygenius.com. Very useful website for information on how to obtain insurance and they also have a directory of insurance providers that you can think about going to quotes for