Insurers, Distributors Keep Up Disability Insurance Awareness Fight
What You Need to Know
Life insurance and retirement planning have soaked up mind share.
The COVID-19 pandemic has complicated underwriting,
Many marketers are emphasizing that disability insurance can protect the income needed to support retirement planning efforts.
Life Happens and other groups are trying to remind consumers — and insurance agents, and retirement planners — that just about all positive financial decisions depend on a worker’s ability to earn a paycheck.
The groups began the 16th annual Disability Insurance Awareness Month outreach campaign Sunday.
Life Happens is offering financial professionals and other campaign supporters access to a free package of education support materials, including flyers, brochures and social media-friendly graphics.
For organizations that pay for a subscription, the nonprofit group is offering access to a bigger library of disability insurance content, along with videos featuring real people who have used disability insurance to keep their families going through difficult times.
Life Happens is working on the campaign together with two other nonprofit groups: the Council for Disability Awareness and the International DI Society.
“Disability insurance is arguably the most misunderstood of all major insurances,” Devin Pascoe, Life Happens’ marketing director, says in a guide to the group’s 2022 awareness month resources. “Chances are, if you live long enough, you will most likely experience a disability in your lifetime. That’s why disability insurance is so important. It provides a portion of your income if you’re unable to work.”
Campaign participants are emphasizing that workers’ compensation protects workers against only a small percentage of the health issues that lead to disability, and that the main public support program for people with disabilities, the Social Security Disability Insurance program, has an average monthly benefit for most beneficiaries of just $1,358 per month.
Another Income Planning Tool
Pascoe and other campaign supporters have also been trying to drive home the point that disability insurance is as much an income planning tool as an annuity is.
Many of the agent and distributor campaign supporters are supporting a social media outreach effort that shows the tag line “May is Disability Insurance Awareness Month,” with the word “disability” crossed out and replaced by the word “income.”
Bryon Holz, an RIA with SagePoint Financial, is an example of a financial professional who is using the image on Twitter.
