How a Disability Insurance Plan Saved My Family, Part II
In the last post I talked about how I started my career with little money and only a desire to stretch my paycheck as far as it would go. Like most young people in this position, I was largely unconcerned with those things I considered to be “down the road” financial decisions – retirement, disability, increased life insurance, etc. It wasn’t until my frank sit-down with a financial planner that I discovered just how vulnerable I was without having these important things put in place. And so, following our meeting I set about to make more responsible financial decisions including contributing to my company’s 401k plan, choosing the best health insurance plan available to me, increasing my life insurance, and choosing disability insurance.
In terms of disability insurance, I opted to take part in one of my company’s disability insurance plans; but I also purchased private disability insurance in order to make sure that any gaps were covered. It turns out that this decision saved my family significant financial stress.
About four years after I got disability insurance – I was now married with two small children – I was in a car accident that left me severely injured. I was in the hospital for six weeks and faced many more months of intensive rehabilitation. Work was out of the question and I quickly enacted my disability insurance policy through my job. But it turns out the wait time for policy payments was several months and without that money my family would be behind in everything from the mortgage to the utilities. My husband, who was taking significant time off from work himself, was barely able to cover the bills.
But our private disability insurance policy had a much shorter wait time and we wound up starting to receive payments within a few weeks. This covered the time that I had to wait for my company’s disability insurance to kick in.
Today I am back to work and feeling much stronger. But I know that without that disability insurance policy my family would have had double the stress – caring for me and dealing with the repercussions of our financial situation. Thankfully, because I made a good decision, that was not our story.
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