Archive for the ‘Life Guard Podcasts’ Category

Protecting Your Largest Asset – Your Income – With Income Protection Insurance

PPI Solutions Video about Income Protection Insurance

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCLH-HyXtEI

Many people consider their largest asset to be their home. Actually your largest asset is your ability to earn an income.

Imaging if tomorrow you couldn’t earn an income. How would your lifestyle change if tomorrow you couldn’t work and provide for your family?

Many people don’t think about a life changing event happening to them, however, the risk of becoming disabled is far greater than you might think. As you age the risk of becoming disabled changes.

But what if you could reduce that risk and design a program to fit your needs? What if it cost only a portion of your weekly income to protect the rest of your annual income?

This is the promise of income protection insurance

Income protection insurance is designed to protect your income when you are too sick or injured to work.

Let’s look at your home again. You have insurance on your home. This year just 1 in 1200 homes will burn down. You also have insurance on your car, but the chances of destroying your car in a catastrophic crash are only 1 in 240.

You stand a much greater chance of becoming disabled and unable to work. The chances are 1 in 5! As you age the risk of becoming disabled increases.

Let’s assume you are 40 years old and planning on retiring at 65. During the next 25 years you have a 48% chance of suffering a disability lasting longer than 90 days. That’s almost 1 of every 2 working Canadians.

If you’re disabled for longer than 90 days there is an almost 60% chance you will be disabled for more than 5 years. If you’re no longer able to work, where will your income come from?

• Your savings
• RRSPs
• A line of credit

How long could you financially survive? Months? Weeks? Days!!

Your income is your largest asset – by far!

You can protect your income and insure your family’s future with income protection insurance.

Where do you start when planning for income protection insurance?

You need to ask yourself 2 questions:

1. How much money will you and your family need to maintain your current lifestyle?

• • For example, you’re age 40, earning $50,000 per year. By age 65, if your income increased by just 3% per year, you would earn $1,822,963 over the next 25 years.
  • This is a very large sum of money you would need to replace to maintain your current lifestyle and build your retirement fund.
  • If you have children, this income can be used to help fund their education.
  • You would use this income to go on family vacations.

1. Where’s the money going to come from?

• • Let’s look at some potential sources of income. If you saved 5% of your income each year for 10 years it would only take 6 months on disability to eliminate your entire savings.
  • What bank would you be able to borrow from? Would they consider lending you money when you are unable to work because of a disability?
  • Will you be able to pay your bills and maintain your lifestyle on one spouse’s income?
  • Would you be able to continue to save for your children’s education or your retirement?

You may be able to sell assets, but what if market conditions weren’t favourable? Would you be able to recover from this kind of a loss?

The most logical source of income during a period of disability is an income replacement plan, if you qualify. It’s a secure source of money in the event of a disability and it can fund liabilities that occur due to long term injuries or sickness.

The cost is extremely affordable. Typically, with a portion of your weekly income, you can fund the remainder of your annual income.

If you don’t have an income protection plan, there has never been a better time to start one.

Contact Life Guard Insurance today to get connected with an insurance advisor to design income protection insurance tailored to your specific needs.

The article was written by Mitch Reynolds+. If you found this article interesting or it made you think, please feel free to share your comments below. Liking us on Facebook, giving us a +1 on Google or Tweeting this article about income protection insurance would be very much appreciated.

Podcast #2: What Makes Life Guard Insurance Website Different

 

 

Welcome to Life Guard Insurance. In this podcast I would like to talk to you about what makes the Life Guard Insurance website different. Whit most other insurance websites out there they are providing a little bit of content and information but really they are just trying to give you a quote to capture your name and phone number to then market directly to you.

I don’t believe this is the right way to run a website in today’s internet age. I think the website should have a huge amount of content. I am constantly adding new articles and new pages of content where you can learn as much as you want about; term life insurance, whole life insurance, or universal life insurance, disability insurance coverage, critical illness insurance or even insurance company’s investment products like segregated funds and annuities.

When it comes time to research what the price should be for a life insurance policy there are lots of tools available on the internet. Lots of companies are giving you access to their online quoting tool but they are usually asking for your name and phone number first in order to market to you. I don’t believe this is right. You might want to do a lot of research and get multiple quotes for different types of term life, whole life or T100 sorts of products. If you want to do quoting Life Guard Insurance gives you unlimited access to our online quoting tool. We do ask that you become a member of the website. This also allows you to receive the monthly newsletter, post comments on the site, and we will even give you three free special reports about life and health insurance once you become a member.

If you take the time to fill out form to become a member you can then access the quoting tool as much as you want. You can generate multiple types of research into life insurance. Then, if you are interested in pursuing it further, after you know more about what you want, and feel empowered to make the right decision, feel free to contact us. There are different types of contact forms all over the website. When you contact Life Guard Insurance we will respond within 24 hours, but only if you want us to.
Thanks very much for visiting Life Guard Insurance. Feel free to browse the website as much as you want, get as much information as you need, become a member and quote as often as you want. Thanks very much and take care.

Group Insurance and Private Health Services Plans

Hi, and welcome to Life Guard Insurance. My name is Mitch Reynolds, and this is our first ever podcast for our life insurance weekly update. We will be doing this every week, talking to you about some issues that are current, relevant and on the table to what we are dealing with at Life Guard Insurance.

What I would like to talk to you today about this week is group insurance and Private Health Services Plans. At Life Guard we have partnered with arguable the best Group Insurance provider in Calgary and Southern Alberta. The company is called The Benefit Specialists Corp. They are brokers for group insurance and they can access the entire group insurance market to not only find you the best price but build a plan that access different parts of group insurance from different companies. For example, disability insurance from RBC Insurance, health and dental benefits from Manulife and life insurance from Sun Life. By packaging it together into a specialty group insurance plan they can find you the best price.

But price is not everything when it comes to group insurance. You must think about service, ongoing communication, administrative support, and planning usage because premiums change. Group insurance has only a one year guaranteed premium, so your price can change every year. If you have a great deal of usage premiums may go up; i.e. you’ve never had a group insurance plan before and after putting it in place all employees get their teeth done (dental work), you can expect that next year the premiums will go up because the usage of the plan might far exceed the amount of premium collected by the group insurance company. They will ask for more money and it can be steep.

A good group insurance broker, like The Benefit Specialists Corp. will keep you updated throughout the year as to how your group is doing with usage.

Plan administration is also important. If you’ve never had a group insurance plan before or have experience poor administrative support you really want a brokerage company that is going to help you enrol new employees, make sure the benefits they choose are implemented within the 31 day grace period, and get the plan rolling smoothly so that it doesn’t eat up a lot of your company’s administrative time. Our partner, The Benefit Specialists Corp focuses on small to medium sized businesses and takes a lot of the burden off their shoulders.

You can access a great deal of information about designing group insurance plans, contacting us for a quote, etc. through our Group Insurance Link under Educentre. It will take you to our pages on group benefits insurance plans.

Another thing to consider if you area small corporation, like a consulting business or a small team of professionals, is a Private Health Services Plan (PHSP). This is a way of getting tax free health benefits to you. It is a pay as you go plan, also called a Cost Plus plan. By setting up the administration of your PHSP plan through our partner, Beneco (run by the same people as The Benefit Specialists Corp., Paul Hauk and his team) the Private Health Services Plan administration company.

What you are basically doing is putting all your personal health and dental expenses through your corporation, thereby making those expenses a tax deductible expense to the corporation and a tax free benefit to you. So, instead of spending your own money as after tax dollars for your health and dental expenses you run it through your corporation. A tax free cost to you to pay for your medical expenses and a tax deduction for the corporation.

There is extensive information on the website under Private Health Services Plans.

In conclusion, here at Life Guard Insurance we are not the specialists in group benefits insurance or setting up Private Health Services Plans but we have partnered with the best – the best team in Calgary and across Alberta (The Benefit Specialists Corp and Beneco). If you need help, you can always contact us or look at the pages on group benefits insurance and Private Health Services Plans. You can request a quote for group insurance also, where you can fill out more information about your company and exactly what you want for your group insurance.

Thanks for listening to our podcast on group insurance and Private Health Services Plans.

Check out our YouTube channel at InsuranceCalgary.