Group Life & Disability Insurance

As an employer, you have the opportunity to provide important protection benefits of life, disability and long-term care insurance to your workforce. Providing these valuable benefits to employees can help round out your benefit package making working for your company even more attractive for current and prospective employees. In some cases, there may be minimum employee group sizes to offer certain benefits.

Whether you already offer these employee benefits or are considering them, our employee benefit specialists can help you to evaluate your options and design a program that fits your needs.

Group Life Insurance

Providing life insurance for eligible employees provides them with a valuable benefit to help protect their loved ones with the flexibility of selecting or changing beneficiaries as needed. As an employer, it can provide you benefits:

• Increased loyalty and reduced turnover of workers
• Tax-deductibility of premiums paid by employer
• Additional attractiveness of overall benefit package

Life insurance and key employees

You may want to consider other ways that life insurance can be used as an employee benefit that can increase loyalty, make overall compensation more attractive for key employees and protect your business.

• Consider offering select key employees a special life insurance plan as an additional incentive for staying on or as a bonus.
• Consider purchasing life insurance with the company as beneficiary on key executive or other employees if their death could have significant economic impacts on the company’s performance.
• Consider life insurance as a means of funding a business continuation plan to fund purchase of the company by family members, key employees, etc, who may otherwise not have the financial assets or funding to do so.

Group Disability Insurance

Many employers offer disability insurance for their employees; however, the plans vary greatly, and some may not offer adequate coverage. Furthermore, any disability payouts from an employer’s policy are subject to taxes, while payouts from individual policies are not. Individual disability coverage is generally much more expensive than employer disability coverage; nevertheless, you should review any policies your employer has taken out, and consider purchasing individual coverage if the policy is insufficient.

Disability insurance comes in two types: short-term and long-term.

• Short-term disability – This coverage replaces a portion of lost salary in the event the policy owner misses six months or less of work. The coverage typically begins after all sick leave is exhausted, and replaces close to 100% of wages for the first payouts. If the policy owner remains unable to work, however, the payments will eventually drop, often to 60% of wages. The length of coverage and payment percentage vary from plan to plan, but these numbers are typical.
• Long-term disability – Some experts contend that Long-Term Disability Insurance is the most important insurance you can purchase. This can be partially attributed to advances in medical care; some diseases and injuries are now disabling rather than deadly, meaning that the incapacitation can be lengthy.

Typically, long-term disability insurance can be purchased to replace 50-70% of salary. Some employers allow employees to purchase extra insurance from the same company, sometimes raising the total to 80%. The “salary” is set at the time the policy is purchased, and you will likely want to increase the value of the plan as your compensation increases.
As a business owner or executive, you share the same concerns as your workers over what would happen to you and your family if you should become disabled. The risk of disability is greater than most people think, and most individuals don’t consider disability insurance on their own. Having group disability insurance that provides income for eligible employees, who are partially or completely disabled due to an injury, pregnancy, disease or other covered disabling illness, is of value in many ways.

Group Long-Term Care Insurance

Spending a long time in a nursing home, or under home care, is not something people like to think about; nevertheless, as medical science increases the average life expectancy, a growing number of seniors are finding themselves unable to live independently. At the same time, extended nursing home and home health care is becoming extremely expensive. Long-Term Care Insurance covers these expenses, and is something people in their late 50s to 60s should seriously consider purchasing.
Providing a group long-term care insurance benefit can:

• Distinguish your company from others to help you attract and retain the best employees.
• Provides financial security for employees helping them to maintain their quality of life.