Do You Have an Illness, or Does it Have You?

Do You Have an Illness, or Does it Have You?

After yesterday’s blog about health care reform needing to address bankruptcy caused by medical expenses, I wanted to make clearthat you have hope and you can be in control of your future. There is nothing inevitable about having a major illness send you to financial ruin.

Careful planning can cover these exposed gaps – and this is an example of where the “Living Benefits” solution I discussed in an earlier blog could prevent this ruin.

Then yesterday my dad sent me an article about Bill Trewin, a Canadian man with Parkinson’s disease. He had been running marathons before he was diagnosed with PD, and found that he was in danger of stumbling if he kept up his normal running.

Did he give up and go crawl in a hole? No, as Bill says in the article, “I have Parkinsons…it does not have me.”

He moved on to a different sport, Nordic walking, which allows him to get the same great exercise, but also gave him the stability of using poles while he walks. If you check out the Nordic walking site, you’ll learn how great this is for your bones, back, and posture, and can provide a workout of any intensity level.

It is important to find solutions with the help of a team or community. Working with others, often experts in the fields, we can have problems and not let them have us.

A Comprehensive Insurance Solution

“Living Benefits”

What is wrong with life insurance?

Traditional life insurance has the drawback of covering only 1 emergency – your passing away. And with term insurance, the vast majority of policies will never be paid because they are outlived. But the leading causes of death in America are also the primary causes of disability, the need for long term care, and ultimately most cases of financial struggle.

Every 29 seconds someone suffers from a coronary event, and 45% of heart attack victims are under the age of 45.

Every 45 seconds someone suffers from a stroke.

The chance of developing cancer during your lifetime is 1 in 3 for women, and 1 in 2 for men.

Of all Americans who reach age 65, about 60% will eventually need some form of long term care.
There are so many challenges a family faces long before the worst possibility of losing a loved one. What is wrong with life insurance is that it doesn’t address all these risks.


What is wrong with disability insurance and long term care insurance?

Disability insurance is very important for the breadwinner of the family to have, for how many months can your family live without that income? And yet, disability insurance will never pay the full amount of the income, and often comes with waiting periods.

Long term care insurance is another valuable protection, because the costs of long term care are so high that it protects your assets from being depleted in the event you need this care. However, many people hesitate to get it because they don’t know for sure that they’ll use it. Or what if you have a heart attack or stroke, but recover enough that you do not trigger the long term care because you can still perform the activities of daily living?


A Comprehensive Solution

The solution to these shortcomings of traditional, separate insurance policies is to get one policy that will provide “Living Benefits” as well as death benefits.

It is now possible to get such a policy through a 150-year-old, A-rated mutual company. The one policy will pay in three ways:
· Acceleratd living benefits
· Retirement income benefit
· Death benefit.

We can design a policy to cover disability, chronic and terminal illness, and long term care. In addition, you will be able to access the value for retirement or other needs.

We all have multiple risks to insure against, and it is hard to know which one we will need first. A “Living Benefits” life insurance policy provides one combined, affordable solution to all of these needs.