So I get the insurance topic, which is never the most pleasant one. So I'm curious, how many of you are familiar with the various benefits you've got with your employer, short-term, long-term? It's kind of what I expected, iffy at best. I'll give you just some stats about the importance of disability insurance. I saw this statistic just the other day when I was looking at this. So three out of 10 workers between the ages of 25 and 65 will suffer some type of accident or illness, which results in them being out of work for over three months, so 30%. And what's really interesting about this is that over 60% of those injuries or illnesses occur outside the workplace. So workers' comp doesn't cover any of those claims, and that's where your short-term, long-term disability come into play. And generally, the short-term benefit that your employer is going to offer, it will start somewhere one to 14 days after the incident that causes you to be out of work. Generally, you'll be required to use sick days before your short-term benefit is going to kick in. It will vary plan to plan in terms of who pays for it. Some plans, the plan I'm at in my law firm, the employer pays for most of it, employees chip in. In terms of your eligibility, you generally have to work for a certain period of time at your position before the short-term disability kicks in. You generally have to be a full-time employee to have that benefit. In terms of what it pays, it will pay somewhere between 50% to 70% of your monthly salary. Average, I would say, is a 60%, but keep in mind, it's not covering everything. It's just over half. The duration of the short-term, generally 10 to 26 weeks, and that's when your long-term policy will kick in. Again, generally paid for by the employer, although there may be a partial pay with the employee. Same type of benefit in that it should pick up 50% to 70% of your monthly salary, average is 60%. In terms of duration, this will vary plan to plan, and this is something you want to look at in your own plan. There are some employer plans that will have a very limited duration. It could be 5 to 10 years. Others, they'll pay the benefit until you're 65, but you want to know that and want to know if you're subject to your long-term disability coming to an end. Something to think about is with long-term disability, you know you're going to have this shortfall of let's say 40% of your monthly salary. Do you need to supplement that with your own individual disability? The more senior you get in your profession, that may become a more important consideration to the extent you've got more dependents. Again, that's another thing to think about, should I be supplementing my own disability? Let me move on to umbrella insurance. All I can tell you is this is a good idea, and it's cheap, and do it. This provides you with additional coverage when you get a claim or injuries that implicate your home insurance policy, your car insurance. I'd say there's three kind of principal advantages here. Number one is you're buying additional coverage. $100 million in coverage costs you a couple hundred bucks. You're also getting coverage for additional defense costs, and that can get pretty expensive the bigger the claim against you. The nice thing about umbrella insurance too is it often covers claims that your auto policy or your home policy don't cover. For instance, you're on vacation, you rent a boat, and God forbid there's an accident with the boat, someone gets very seriously injured. That may not be covered by your home owners or your car insurance policy. The umbrella will often step in in that type of situation to cover that. Again, it's cheap, and you can't have enough of it. Here's another warning. You never know who it is you may wind up injuring. It could be it's a celebrity. It could be a professional baseball player. The severity of that claim and the income that that athlete is out results in a real serious claim. Having that umbrella will give you peace of mind. It's cheap. Do it. Life insurance. Your employer almost always has some type of life insurance for you, but you're going to want to supplement that. You have two options, basically. You've got a term insurance policy, which provides a designated benefit should you die within the term of the policy. Most of those policies have a renewal clause, so that if it's a 10-year term, you have the option of renewing the policy. Whole life is a contract. You are paying. It's a contract. You're putting down a premium, and at some point when you pass away, the insurer is going to pay that benefit. The issue with life becomes how much do you need, and that's going to be different from where you sit right now 15, 20 years from now, but some factors you're going to need to think about when you're determining how much should I supplement with life. One is how much debt do you have? You're going to have a mortgage. You're going to have credit card debt. You might have car loans. Think about how much debt do you have, because you're going to want to have enough life insurance to cover all that. You got to think about income replacement, so you're going to want to think about what's my annual income from everything, and then you factor in how many times your annual income do you want. Depending on where you are in your career, it could be five times your annual income, could be 10, but it's going to grow the further you proceed in your careers. And then think about your future obligations. You'll want to pay for your kids to go to college. You want to pay for marriages, things like that. All that you build into how much life insurance you want, so again, it's not something your answer to that question today is probably going to be a lot different than 15 years from now. Another thing to think about with life insurance is, if you want to protect those policies from creditors, you can move all those policies into a trust. And in some states, that's a better idea than others, but keep that in mind, because that's something you may very well want to do as you move on in your career.

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