You may need to supplement your employer sponsored life insurance. Here is why….

Having life insurance that is sponsored by your employer is definitely a great benefit. That being said, is it enough? Not always. Here are some problems with employer sponsored life insurance.
If you lose your job, leave your job, are laid off, or are reduced to part time you could lose your benefits. Which would mean you would also lose your life insurance. If during the years you were working that job you had found out you had some sort of medical condition that would make it hard for you to get life insurance or not able to get it at all what would you do? A lot of times employer plans do not transfer to an individual plan so if you leave your job you lose your life insurance. Even if you don’t lose your job or leave your job, what if your employer stops offering that benefit? It happens. Then you are left without any coverage.
Usually your employer offers a small amount of life insurance for free or for a very small price and you can buy more. Usually you cannot buy enough. Most experts say that you should have more than six times your yearly salary in life insurance. The higher end of that recommendation is 10 to 12 times your yearly salary. Most employer sponsored plans do not offer this much.
If all you have is employer sponsored life insurance and you lose that coverage would you be able to get coverage on an individual plan? I have a great real life example for you. I have been an insurance agent for years and years. So, obviously I had life insurance in place. In 2015 or 2016 I found out I had a genetic heart disorder. If I had waited until 2016 to get life insurance I would not be able to get it with most carriers and with the very few carriers that would allow it, they would not cover me for enough coverage to support my family.
One of the biggest issues I see on a regular basis is one member of the family is the primary breadwinner and another member of the family is a stay at home parent. Sometimes your employer sponsored plan will offer life insurance for your spouse but usually it’s not enough. Stay at home parents are probably the most under insured people there are. If the primary breadwinner has to all of a sudden start paying for daycare, house cleaning, someone to drive the children, someone to do meal prep, run errands, etc. how much would all that cost you? The answer is a lot. There is no dollar amount you could put on that but we sure can try to figure out a number that would be helpful. (I think stay at home parents are absolutely irreplaceable).
Employer sponsored life insurance is usually pretty cheap but the cost usually goes up as you age. If you get life insurance at a younger age when it is less expensive an individual plan there are usually options where the premium does not change the entire time during the plan so in the long run it’s actually not much cheaper or if at all. We can help you compare and do the math. There was one type of Insurance that is pretty much always guaranteed to be less expensive when you are younger. That is life insurance. The sooner you get it the better off you will be.
So what should you do about it? You should supplement with a individual policy. There are options for minimal underwriting. There are options for different solutions that we can help you come up with. We are not saying do not take it vantage of your individual plan we are saying let us take a look at it and see if you have enough and help you get a plan that will be in place even if your circumstances change.
-Melissa Probst
Owner-Sincerity Insurance Solutions
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