Insurance Just Isn’t Insurance Anymore
When people hear the word insurance, they tend to immediately think life insurance – usually to cover their mortgage. But insurance isn’t just insurance anymore, and it really hasn’t been for a long time. There are many types of personal insurance with many different features and benefits and most are completely customizable to you. It’s not always about what happens if we died; it’s about how we can ensure our families are protected if anything untimely were to happen to us. It raises the questions: what is the impact to my family if I became disabled or incapacitated and couldn’t work? What if I developed cancer, had a stroke, or developed some other critical illness, or worse, I died?
Insurance can be the best way to protect us and our families from any undue financial stress should something drastic happen and adversely affect our ability to take care of them financially. There are four (4) common types of coverage that can assist you and your family: Disability Insurance, Critical Illness Insurance, Life Insurance, and Long Term Care Insurance.
Disability Insurance protects our greatest asset: our ability to bring home an income to ensure that bills are paid, the heat and lights stay on, and food is on the table. This insurance protects us from a disability caused from either an accident or sickness that will take us away from our work for an extended period of time. It can pay us a monthly income while we are recovering and relieve us from the stress of wondering how we’re going to pay for the essential things. Most people don’t realize that most disabilities are caused by an illness such as stress or depression rather than an accident on or off the job.
Critical Illness Insurance can provide a lump sum – just like life insurance – to us and our families so that we can take the time off work, treat and cope with the illness. These illnesses can come with significant and unexpected costs. The three big and most common critical illnesses are heart attack, stroke, and cancer. However, there are other illnesses (up to usually 22 depending on the insurance provider) that are covered such as Multiple Sclerosis, blindness, coma, Parkinson’s, kidney failure, bacterial meningitis, and numerous other conditions.
Life Insurance, the most common and well known type of insurance; this will provide your beneficiaries a one time lump sum payment at your passing. It’s usually used to cover mortgages, lost wages, children’s education plans, retirement savings, funeral and burial costs, income taxes that are due and so many other things. What most people fail to understand is how to use it, what coverage is appropriate, and the different types of life insurance. We can help with that.
Long Term Care Insurance, the least discussed type of insurance. No one likes to think about it. But all of us might reach a point when we’re not able to take care of ourselves and need long term care such as nursing care, personal care and home services (cleaning, laundry etc.). Long Term Care Insurance is the coverage to deal with this. You may know of someone or you may have experienced it yourself having to care for a loved one during a time of need, you know the toll it can take on quality time spent with your family, your energy level and quite possibly your pocketbook. Unfortunately, many people believe that provincial health care plans fully cover long term care, or that their employee benefit plans include long term care coverage. They’re surprised when they learn that government programs are not comprehensive and Canadians have to pay for much of their care. And very few employee benefit packages cover long term care.
There are intricacies with each of these insurance types and there can be a lot of questions as to why or why not you may want any of these, or do you need any one of these. At Ostic Financial Group we will help distill the complexities down to simplicities and help you decide if the coverage is right for you. We want to help you ensure that you and your loved ones will not have to experience the potential serious financial set back if anything unforeseen should occur that you haven’t prepared for.