DIAM: If You Are Not Offering, You Should

It doesn't matter what your primary insurance sales consist of, your clients depend on their income to pay their bills (which includes premium payments) and maintain a lifestyle. Help them keep their financial life in balance with disability income insurance. If helping your clients isn't enough incentive, advisors who offer disability insurance to their existing clients earn 30% more income than advisors who do not.

May is Disability Insurance Awareness Month (DIAM), and it's the perfect reminder that disability insurance is often an overlooked part of your clients’ financial plan. If you are not currently offering it, you should be. Not only for the reason that it will increase your income, but also because most working Americans couldn’t last a month without their paycheck; maybe six months if they have savings socked away. Nevertheless, the average length of a disability is 34.6 months, any savings they have isn't going to last long. Which is probably why medical issues are the number one reason cited for bankruptcy filings in the US as 90% of disabilities are due to illness not accidents.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that our income is extremely important. We pay for insurance to cover many things: Our cars, pets, cell phones, vacations…So why are we reluctant to insure our most important asset that pays those premiums? 

As 67% of them do not even have long-term disability insurance through work, ask your clients what they would do if they lost their income because of an illness or injury. Get this DI Starter Kit to help begin the conversation. 

"But, You Said..."

We have all been there with a life insurance applicant. We want to believe that because our client looks healthy (and says they are), they will definitely qualify for the Preferred Best underwriting classification. So, we quote it. We compare all of the premiums, and the client chooses to go with the least expensive. We submit the application without giving it another thought.

Until... the underwriting process uncovers something that is not a big deal in day to day living but is a concern from a mortality perspective.

So, now your client has lost confidence in the process, and is upset because of the additional underwriting that takes additional time. Plus, the premium is now higher than expected!

Less than 10% of life insurance applicants qualify for the best classification, and we can help you work smarter by quoting the right classification the first time. We have a questionnaire that you can use at the front-end of the sale with your clients and prospects to avoid unrealistic hopes and limit the resulted disappointment. 

Use our Underwriting Criteria Questionnaire to quote the right classification the first time without setting unrealistic expectations for the underwriting outcome.