Sofía Suarez Only For Adults

  photo Sofia Suarez For Adults Only

It’s 11:00 p.m. the night before your open enrollment, and, once again, you have waited until the last minute to check the boxes for next year’s benefits. Every year, I help hundreds of clients review the corporate benefits they get from their company. As the booklets get larger and the benefits more complex, one of the biggest mistakes that I see employees make is not doing a shopping comparison with their voluntary group life insurance.

- Although the company may give you some life insurance that you get for no cost, if the insurance is more than $50,000 you’ll get something on your pay stub called imputed income. You see GTL (group term life) as taxable income on your pay stub. - When it comes to voluntary term-life insurance and you choose four times your salary, there is actually a cost. Since term-life insurance usually costs a certain amount of cents (or dollars) per $1,000 of coverage, it is important to actually analyze that amount of cost. - You need to see how often the cost bands change. Typically, (not in all cases) group term-life insurance cost per 1,000 will go up every five years. - Determine if the coverage is portable. Can you actually take it with you when you leave? The analysis that is hardly ever done: comparing a 20-year term-insurance policy against the next 20 years of cost through an employer plan. The failure to do a proper side-by-side comparison on this could leave you paying more today for the voluntary life insurance you buy at work and potentially a lot more in the future. Not to mention that if your health changes and you lose your job you may not be able to get outside insurance. Take a close look at this so you don’t make the same mistake in 2015.