http://www.benefitspro.com/2016/05/23/how-voluntary-insurance-helps-workers-of-all-stage
Life Happens: This Moment Made Possible by My Paycheck.
February 17, 2016 by
https://www.lifehappens.org/videos/this-moment-made-possible-by-my-paycheck/
SSDI: Still on track to go broke in late 2016.
July 27, 2015 by
Managers of the fund that supports the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program say it’s still on track to run dry in “late 2016” — around election time.
The trustees of the SSDI trust fund and the main Medicare Part A hospitalization trust fund talk about the funds’ finances in new annual reports.
The SSDI program should take in enough revenue to cover about 81 percent of claims if Congress makes no changes, the trustees say. SSDI’s reserves now amount to less than 40 percent of the program’s annual costs, the trustees say.
The actual results could be worse than the projections, because the trustees assume that real, inflation-adjusted interest rates on fund assets will be about 2.4 percent to 3.4 percent. The average inflation-adjusted rate for the 10-year period ending 2012 was just 1.33 percent.
The actual real interest rate on fund assets was negative 0.75 percent in 2011 and positive 0.32 percent in 2012, the trustees say.
“These swings partly reflect volatility in energy prices,” the trustees say.
The trustees of the main Medicare hospitalization fund say that fund will be empty in 2030. The trustees gave the same Medicare fund depletion date a year ago.
If Medicare Part A costs are high, the fund could be empty as soon as 2022, the trustees say.
When the Medicare Part A trust fund runs out, the program could collect enough tax revenue to pay about 86 percent of its claims.
The Medicare Part B physician services and Medicare Part D drug programs rely on premiums for a given year to pay the claims incurred during that year and do not use the kinds of large trust fund programs that the SSDI and Medicare Part A programs use.
Over a 75-year period, the Medicare Part A fund’s actuarial deficit should amount to about 0.68 percent of taxable payroll, down from a projection of 0.87 percent of taxable payroll given a year ago. The fund looks better partly because it seems as if health care costs could grow more slowly than expected, the trustees say.
But the real gap likely will be bigger than projected, because Congress requires the trustees to assume that Medicare will be able to hold down provider reimbursement costs, but Congress has not demonstrated much ability to let laws that could hold down Medicare provider reimbursement costs take effect, the trustees say.
Disability Insurance: The Overlooked Employee Benefit.
June 8, 2015 by
Disability Insurance: The Overlooked Employee Benefit
Does your pay stub include the cryptic three-letter code LTD with a tiny dollar amount that’s deducted each pay period? It stands for long-term disability insurance, and it pays to have it to provide for your family when you can’t work because of an injury or an illness like cancer. But many employees go without it. In fact, despite the fact that more employers are offering long-term disability insurance as an employee benefit, the number of employees insured is dropping.
That’s the troubling trend that the Council For Disability Awareness, a group representing 19 member insurance companies, found in its latest annual review of claims data for 2013. More than 213,000 employers offer long-term disability insurance through those companies, a slight increase for the second year in a row, after declines from 2009 to 2011. Yet the number of insured employees declined roughly 1.5% to 32.1 million last year (in 2009, 34 million employees had coverage).
There are a couple of reasons for the changing disability landscape, according to Barry Lundquist, president of the Council. One factor is that employers are focused on compliance with the new Affordable Care Act’s health insurance provisions—so employers and agents/brokers are saying they’ll deal with other benefits like disability insurance later.
Another factor is that when employers are adding disability insurance as a benefit today, it’s more likely that they add it as a voluntary benefit. That means the employee pays the full cost. Historically, the employer has paid the full cost, or at least for coverage up to a certain level. With employer-paid plans, employees are automatically enrolled. Sometimes you have the decision whether to make salary deferrals to increase your coverage. But with voluntary plans, enrollment hovers around 40%, Lundquist says.
You May Need Disability Insurance.
May 27, 2015 by
Needing disability insurance at some point in your lifetime is not as far-fetched a possibility as you may think. Disability doesn’t have to involve a career-ending catastrophe — it could simply involve a bad accident from which you need several months to recover. If you do find yourself out of work for a relatively short or long period of time, you may find yourself wishing you’d lined up sufficient disability insurance.
Take a gander at the table below. It shows how likely you are to become disabled for various periods of time before you reach age 65, depending on your current age:
| Age Today | For Six Months | For One Year | For Two Years | For Five Years |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | 35% | 22% | 17% | 13% |
| 30 | 33% | 21% | 16% | 13% |
| 35 | 31% | 20% | 16% | 13% |
| 40 | 28% | 18% | 15% | 12% |
| 45 | 25% | 17% | 14% | 11% |
| 50 | 14% | 12% | 17% | 10% |
Source: 1985 Commissioner’s Disability Income Table
As you can see, even if you’re 40, the odds are nearly 1 in 5 that you’ll be disabled for an entire year. The higher odds for younger people might surprise you, too. (Remember that childbirth and recovery can be considered medical disabilities for women that can last six months or more.) Disability insurance is a dangerous thing to ignore.
The Need For Income Protection.
May 1, 2013 by
This two-minute video shows the importance of income protection. It discusses what one’s income provides, the real-life risks we face and how people can protect their incomes against the chances of being too sick or hurt to work.
Protect Your Paycheck.
May 1, 2013 by
You protect your car and your home with insurance, but are you protecting an asset that is more valuable than either of those—your paycheck? Tom goes a little over the top with his protection methods, but has made the right choice to protect his paycheck properly.