4 minute read
Employer disability insurance policies, also known as group policies, and individual disability insurance policies are very different when it comes to reliability for income protection.
There are four major downsides to relying only on your employer's group coverage:
With your current plan, the monthly benefit you would receive is 63% of your eligible earnings. If you were to become disabled, your income would go from 100% of current earnings to 63% of your prior earnings.
When you consider that 63% of earnings would be taxed, your net take-home pay would suffer a substantial loss to you and your family.
This means that you can’t take them with you if you decide to leave your employer.
If you’re early in your career, chances are that you will move to a different employer before the end of your career.
If you do, you won’t be able to guarantee that you’ll have disability insurance at your new position.
If you opt-out of getting an individual policy and switch employers, this could leave you in a bad position.
You’d no longer be insured through the employer policy and chances are your rates would have gone up over time, leaving you with an expensive premium.
Your individual disability benefit is not taxable, but your employer benefit is!
This means that if you should have to use your employer policy, the money you’d receive would be taxed, leaving you with way less than your current take-home pay.
This would impact your current lifestyle as you’d have to adjust to a much lower take-home pay if relying only on employer disability coverage.
It is important to remember that an employer policy is not owned by you, meaning your employer has complete control over the policy.
If they wanted to cancel or change it at any time, there is nothing you would be able to do.
If in the future your employer cancels the physician group policy, and you were relying on that policy, it could leave you in a bad situation for getting your own policy if your health has changed.