I love to work. It kills me not to work. And, the reality is, as a single female without a trust fund or wealthy husband (or ex-husband) to take care of my financial needs, I need to work so that I can eat, live and survive.
My creativity, business acumen, communication skills, and a variety of talents make me a valuable employee. While at work, my employer receives 100% from what I have to offer. I can analyze difficult business problems, come up with creative solutions, and identify a variety of options to explore when faced with difficult challenges. I can multitask on a variety on different projects, all in various phases and stages.
The problem is though I really want to work, I can’t. In my case, morphine and the office are not a good mix. Clients would not be receiving the value they’ve come to expect for their billable hour. An example - where in the past it might have taken me 30 to 45 minutes to write this post, it has taken over six hours.
So, obviously, not working means I have no income.
Fortunately, while I have six months of savings set aside for living expenses in case of emergencies just like this, my employer got us disability insurance about 18 months ago. We didn’t have it before, but a few people really lobbied for it.
There is much to be done to start a claim if it becomes necessary (I still haven’t made the final decision): however, when we got this policy for the office, my boss did a few great things:
First, each person paid for their own premium out of their paycheck with after tax dollars. What this means is that when you file a claim and get payments, the payments are not considered taxable income.
Second, when I got the paperwork I was pleased to find out that I can file my claim at 90 days. I thought it was 180 (6 months). This is great because the monthly benefit is approximately 60% of my gross pay. Before went on my leave, I was contributing to my 401(k) and HAS – between taxes and those contributions what I receive in benefits could be the same as what I was taking home previously from the office.
My hope is that I won’t have to completely deplete my emergency savings and am able to live with in budget allowed by the disability insurance.
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Disability insurance is huge. For most people, it's a low priority, they get insurance for health, life, auto, and home long before thinking of disability insurance. But we're all actually pretty likely to need it at some point in our careers. I'm glad you have it in place. Hopefully you'll be able to go back to work and won't need to use it, but it's nice to know it's there if you do need it. Good luck!!
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