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What are your thoughts on taking or not taking voluntary employee benefits like short term disability and accident insurance and critical illness insurance (cancer, stroke, heart attack, etc)? The insurance we are looking at is provided through Unum. For the short term disability you can elect 7 day, 14 day or 30 day elimination and you can select a certain amount of your salary that you want to replace if you can't work. For the accident benefit it pays a set amount for each diagnosis - like a broken bone $1000.
I'm not really sure about any of these. But we are in our 50s and I worry about regretting it if we don't take the elective insurance. Of course, in the case of critical illness insurance, if one of us got cancer or stroke or heart attack, then it would be too late to add it on after the fact.
They also offer supplemental life insurance, but it's whole life. I'm pretty sure we don't want that.
Seems like kind of a lot of money, especially the short term disability and critical illness ($80 and $70 a month respectively to cover both my husband and I).
A large number of those policies are much better for the insurance company than the insured. Unless you are facing a good chance of needing it you may be better off increasing your savings and passing on the insurance.
they are big money makers. why? the odds of you contracting cancer or any of the other things companies like aflek protect against while still in the work force are very slim.
they count on the fact most will be retired by the time these things strike.
i believe our state forbid single disease insurance from being sold for the longest time.
they eventually opened it up to those policies but very few pay off.
they are only worth it if you are the miniscule group that something happens to.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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If offered, the one you should consider is long term care. Through employers it's inexpensive, with no health evaluation or exams, and the younger you are when you start the less the premium is. In our case it's locked in and will not go up as we get older, so even if we don't need it until 85 we can afford it on a pension. With an elderly in law we have seen that an adult family home or assisted living facility runs $4,000-$6,000/month.
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