Income Protection Journal Podcast: Latest on Disability Insurance, Life Insurance & Long-Term Care Insurance with host Jamie Fleischner, CLU, ChFC, LUTCF
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Lung Transplant Tests Business Overhead Expense Insurance Policy
Tuesday, September 29, 2026 • Duration 39:38
Most practice owners have never priced what it would cost to keep a practice's bills paid if the owner could not work. In 2020, Maxwell Schmitz's mother needed a lung transplant. For decades she had run the underwriting and case-management side of the family's insurance agency, the person who reviewed every application before it went out the door, and her family had to decide, in the middle of that, what happened to her paycheck.
I talked through that decision with Maxwell Schmitz, President of Yetworth Insurance Solutions, a wholesale disability brokerage his family has run for three generations out of San Rafael, California, and a past president of the International Disability Insurance Society, on this episode of the Income Protection Journal Podcast. His mother's own individual disability policy meant the agency never had to pull her salary out of the business to cover her. That money stayed in, and the family used it to hire someone new and automate some of the work she used to do by hand. What her family did not have, and what most business owners in the same position still do not have, is a second policy built to cover everything else a practice needs to keep running while the owner is out.
The Difference Between an Individual Disability Policy and a Business Overhead Expense Policy
Maxwell told me the mix-up he runs into most often is between two products that sound alike but pay two different bills.
Key person typically denotes that this is going to be a non-owner employee, and then that you know, if they go down, if that non-owner employee goes down, the benefits are paid to the business to then find a replacement... The key person policy, whereas a business overhead expense policy is designed to just protect the business owner. If that person can no longer operate the business, then it will come in and pay the salaries, the benefits, keep the lights on, the mortgage or the rent, you know, and any other sort of regular equipment that the firm or practice or clinic needs to keep operations running smoothly.
Maxwell Schmitz, President of Yetworth Insurance Solutions, a wholesale disability brokerage his family has run for three generations, on the Income Protection Journal Podcast
The distinction matters because owners often assume one policy does both jobs. It does not. An individual disability policy, which is what covered his mother, replaces the income the owner would have earned. A separate overhead expense policy for the practice pays the practice's own bills instead, rent, payroll, malpractice premiums, and equipment, while the owner recovers. Maxwell has watched the two get confused often enough that a business owner ends up asking a carrier for what is really a key person benefit, and the reverse happens just as often. They are not interchangeable, and a practice that buys only one of the two still leaves the other side uncovered.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBiGPHSsfdY
What a Solo Practice Loses Without Overhead Expense Coverage
Maxwell walked me through why overhead expense coverage matters most for small, owner-dependent practices, the kind with one clinician and a small staff behind them.
If you can't have the dentist seeing people, then of course revenue is going to dry up, and when revenue dries up, you can't pay the employees, and those employees are going to have to go work for the dentist down the street.
Maxwell Schmitz, past president of the International Disability Insurance Society, on the Income Protection Journal Podcast
That is not a hypothetical for Maxwell. His own family's agency runs on five people, and he watches the same math inside his own business. A practice does not lose revenue gradually when the person who generates it stops working. It stops close to immediately, and staff without a paycheck do not wait around to see whether the practice recovers before they take a job somewhere else.
Why the Individual Disability Policy Comes First
Given how much of Maxwell's own work is designing overhead expense cases for advisors, I expected him to lead every conversation with the product he sells the most. He told me the opposite is true.
Instead of leading straight to the business overhead expense conversation... What gets overlooked, I think, in the BOE conversation is how relevant and important the individual disability insurance policy is.
Maxwell Schmitz, MSFS, CLTC, DIA, on the Income Protection Journal Podcast
His reasoning traces back to his own family's experience. His mother's individual disability policy did more for the business than either of them expected going in, because it meant her paycheck never had to come out of the agency's revenue in the first place. Business overhead expense insurance is worth what it costs, Maxwell said, but it solves a narrower problem than most owners assume, and it should never be the first conversation a practice owner has about disability coverage.
Maxwell's family found out, in the middle of an actual medical crisis, exactly which policy did what. Most practice owners find out the same way, after something has already gone wrong. If a practice's disability coverage has never been checked against the specific bills an overhead expense policy is built to pay, rent, payroll, malpractice premiums, and the loans and equipment leases that do not pause just because the owner is out, that is the conversation worth having before there is a real deadline attached to it.
Benefits Stop When Definition of Own Occupation Becomes Any Occupation [Podcast]
Wednesday, September 16, 2026 • Duration 42:01
For an attorney relying on a law firm’s group disability plan, coverage for the exact same injury can play out two completely different ways depending on how long the disability has lasted. Most group long-term disability policies define disability one way for the first two years of coverage, and a different way after that. For those first 24 months, you qualify as disabled if you cannot perform the material and substantial duties of your own occupation. After 24 months, the definition typically shifts to any occupation, meaning any occupation you could reasonably do given your training, education and experience. Nothing about the underlying condition has to change for the benefit to stop. Only the definition does.
I explored exactly why that switch happens, and why it doesn’t happen under every policy, with Edward Dabdoub of the Dabdoub Law Firm in Coral Gables, Florida, on this episode of the Income Protection Journal Podcast. Edward has spent years studying how disability insurance policies define who qualifies as disabled, across every profession he represents.
The Own-Occupation-to-Any-Occupation Switch, and Why It Applies to Attorneys Too
A law firm partner or associate on a group plan faces this identical mechanism. Coverage holds at the own-occupation standard for the first 24 months, then converts to the broader any-occupation test, whether or not anything about the underlying condition has changed. Edward’s clearest illustration of how that conversion actually plays out came from one of his clients, a dentist who developed a tremor severe enough that dental work was no longer safe to perform.
For two years, the dentist’s policy paid a full benefit, because it defined disability as being unable to do the specific work of dentistry. Then, on schedule, nothing about the tremor changed, but the payments did. A dentist who can no longer hold instruments steady can often still teach, consult or manage, and the moment an insurer decides that’s true under an any-occupation standard, the group benefit ends. The definition switched. Nothing about the dentist’s hands did.
That’s the mechanism every attorney on a group plan needs to check for in their own firm’s certificate, and it’s the switch Edward has watched play out again and again with clients like the one above.
So if that dentist had an own occupation insurance policy, an individual insurance policy, they would be able to find another occupation other than dentistry, and continue to get paid a full total disability benefit and essentially reinvent their career doing something else. They don’t just have to stay. I tell my client, you don’t have to stay home watching reruns of Oprah all day.
Edward Dabdoub, managing partner of Dabdoub Law Firm in Coral Gables, Florida, on the Income Protection Journal Podcast
Under an individual, true own-occupation policy, the definition Edward is describing never changes. What’s insured is the ability to perform your own occupation specifically, not some other occupation you could theoretically be retrained for. That single difference in policy language is the entire reason two professionals, a dentist and an attorney alike, can face the identical disability and end up in two entirely different financial positions two years later.
Edward has seen the group-plan version of that story more than once.
The group insurance policy is different because after 24 months, the insurance company will likely terminate those benefits because they would take a position that well, there are other things you can go and do now, and many professionals were wired a certain way where we don’t want to stay home if we’re disabled, and we want to reinvent our careers. And so my clients were dentists. Some of them going to teaching, but if you have a group insurance policy that has that definition of disability change from own to any after 24 months, well, when you move into teaching, you’re not going to continue getting paid after 24 months.
Edward Dabdoub of Dabdoub Law Firm, who has spent years studying how insurers write disability definitions, on the Income Protection Journal Podcast
Notice what actually disqualified those dentists from further group benefits. It wasn’t that they recovered. It was that they found a second career, exactly the kind of resilience a group plan’s own-to-any definition treats as proof the benefit is no longer needed.
https://youtu.be/dXe05mgp7yQ
What This Means If a Firm’s Group Plan Is Your Only Coverage
Attorneys hear this dentist story and assume it doesn’t apply to them, because practicing law rarely depends on fine motor skill the way dentistry does. But the definition-switch mechanism Edward described isn’t written for one profession. It’s built into the policy language of most employer-sponsored group long-term disability plans, including the ones law firms buy for their partners and associates. An attorney disabled by a condition that keeps her from trying cases or negotiating at the pace her practice demands can qualify for the full benefit for two years under the own-occupation standard, then lose it once an insurer decides she could reasonably do a different kind of legal or non-legal work instead.
A law firm partner who has never looked past the group plan’s summary page usually assumes coverage is coverage. It isn’t. The same 24-month definition switch that reclassified Edward’s dentist clients into teachers applies to a partner who could plausibly shift out of the courtroom and into compliance work, or an associate attorney who could move into a different practice area. Because the group plan’s benefit is typically capped as a percentage of salary and tied to the firm’s own group contract, a partner or associate has no ability to negotiate that definition individually. It comes with the plan, own to any, at 24 months, whether the attorney knew that going in or not.
Solo practice presents the opposite problem. Without a firm behind them, there’s no group long-term disability plan at all, own-occupation or any-occupation, unless a solo attorney has bought individual coverage separately. For a solo practitioner or a partner who wants the definition of disability tied to their own occupation to hold for the life of the policy rather than for exactly 24 months, an individual disability policy is the only structure built to do that.
What to Check Before You Buy or Renew
This is the question worth asking before you buy or renew any policy, group or individual. Does the definition of disability in this contract change at any point, and if it does, when and to what. It’s a short question to put to a broker, and it’s the difference between coverage that protects your ability to practice law specifically and coverage that only protects you until an insurer decides you could do something else instead. It’s also the exact comparison we walk through when an attorney is comparing disability insurance for attorneys, definition by definition, carrier by carrier.
Edward put the stakes plainly when I asked him what he’d want every law firm partner who assumes the firm already has this covered to hear.
I think it would be individual disability insurance is king, right? Relying on group disability insurance means you’re both underinsured and not going to have the worth at all that you will on with an individual insurance contract. These are two completely separate insurance policies.
Managing partner Edward Dabdoub of Dabdoub Law Firm in Coral Gables, Florida, on the Income Protection Journal Podcast
They are two completely separate insurance policies, and only one of them keeps its promise on the same terms two years, ten years or twenty years into a disability. The dentist who lost his benefit at month twenty-five didn’t lose his tremor. He lost his definition. Before you assume your own disability insurance for attorneys will hold up the same way ten years from now, find out which definition you actually have.
Pre-Existing Conditions in Group LTD Coverage [Podcast]
Wednesday, September 2, 2026 • Duration 01:00:46
Michelle L. Roberts has represented disability claimants since 2005. She explains what a new employer's group plan does with a condition you already have.
Executive Disability Coverage Blind Spots with Grayson Owen [Podcast]
Wednesday, August 19, 2026 • Duration 01:08:20
An owner who runs a practice or a company as an S corporation pays themselves a modest base salary, takes the rest of the year's profit as a K-1 distribution, then enrolls in the group long-term disability plan and treats the income question as settled. Most group disability plans never saw that distribution, because they define covered earnings as W-2 wages and stop there. Under that definition, the largest number on the owner's tax return was never insured.
Grayson Owen has spent more than 12 years in the insurance business, and he now works in a corner of it most buyers never see. He is a disability income wholesaler at DI Broker East, which means advisors across the Mid-Atlantic, the Southeast and the rest of the country route their hardest income protection cases through him, the executives, partners and owners whose earnings a lot of other people depend on. He told me S corp owners make up most of the business owner files that reach his desk.
Covered Earnings Definition Inside S Corp Owner Disability Insurance
Covered earnings is the single line in a group long-term disability contract that sets the ceiling on any benefit it will ever pay. Most employer plans define it as W-2 wages, sometimes averaged across a stretch of months before the disability began. Profit distributed out of the S corporation sits outside that definition unless the plan was deliberately designed to reach it. The replacement percentage printed on the front of the plan document, usually 60 percent, gets applied to whichever number the definition allows.
That modest salary line has a reason behind it. The Internal Revenue Service requires an S corporation officer who performs services for the company to be paid reasonable compensation as wages before non-wage distributions are made, and owners and their accountants typically set that wage at a defensible floor and route the remaining profit through the K-1. That is ordinary tax planning. It is also the number a group carrier reads when it calculates a disability benefit.
Owen sees the result of that arithmetic in six and seven figures.
"A lot of the S corp owners might have very significant six figure, even seven figure K-1 distributions. That's basically their business profit, how I understand it. I'm not a tax advisor, but K-1 is a type of income that the S corp owner distributes usually at year end, and those earnings may or may not be covered under the group plan depending on how they design it."
Grayson Owen, a disability income wholesaler at DI Broker East who has spent more than 12 years in the insurance business reviewing owner-employee disability cases for advisors, speaking on the Income Protection Journal Podcast
"May or may not" is the operative phrase, and it is settled inside the plan document long before anyone gets sick. Almost no owner-employee has read that answer. The percentage is the number they remember, because the percentage is the number the enrollment material leads with.
If you own a dental practice, a law firm, a medical group or a construction company organized as an S corporation, this is your plan too. Most owners approve the group disability plan once, when it is first installed, often back when the company was smaller and the salary line was closer to the whole paycheck. Profit grows after that. The distribution grows with it. The covered earnings definition does not move.
Owners also miss it because the group plan reads like the more generous of the two products. Sixty percent replacement sounds close to whole. An owner drawing a $100,000 salary against a much larger K-1 hears 60 percent and pictures 60 percent of what the household actually lives on. The contract is measuring wages, and the household is spending income, and those two words point at very different numbers on the same tax return.
Here is the arithmetic I walk owners through. Say the owner pays themselves a $100,000 base salary and takes $900,000 in distributions, a common shape for a profitable single-owner professional company. Under the group policy, only that $100,000 counts as covered earnings, while the household is running on the full $1 million. An individual disability policy is what reaches the rest, because individual carriers underwrite total earned income and will issue a benefit that sits on top of whatever the group plan already pays. The group plan will not pay on the $900,000 no matter how the claim is filed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKgx8b3Eeto
Individual Disability Insurance for Business Owners Picks Up the K-1 Income
Individual policies reach the distribution because they measure income differently. Financial underwriting on an individual contract looks at total earned income, which for an S corporation owner-employee means the W-2 line and the K-1 line read together, usually across two years of returns. That is the number the benefit is built on. It is also why the application asks for tax returns rather than a pay stub.
There is a second route Owen spends much of his executive time on, and it changes who pays. A company can install a layer of individually owned coverage on top of the group plan for a defined class of people, issued with limited or no medical underwriting. Carriers will generally look at a class as small as five lives, and Owen said most of the private-company cases he manages run somewhere between five and 40 people, frequently family businesses with a core management team. Some designs true everyone up to the same replacement percentage. Others carve out a class by title, so anyone hired or promoted into it becomes eligible on arrival. Those policies are individually owned and portable, which matters more than most executives realize on the day they leave.
The reason so many owners never learn any of this, Owen argues, is that the conversation stops one question too early. An advisor asks whether the client has coverage at work, the client says yes, the box gets checked and the agenda moves on.
"We want them to say, 'Hey, do you have coverage through work?' The client's going to probably say yes or no or I don't know, and then after that, would you mind if we review that plan for you to make sure you're okay?"
Grayson Owen, who spent nearly a decade as a consumer-facing insurance broker before moving to the wholesale side, where he now runs disability coverage reviews for advisors and their clients, speaking on the Income Protection Journal Podcast
That second question is where the review actually starts. Reading the plan document is what surfaces the covered earnings definition, and that definition is what decides whether an owner is insured on a salary or on a paycheck. Nobody finds it by asking whether coverage exists, because it does exist. It just does not reach as far as the owner believes.
So the practical move for an S corporation owner is narrow. Pull the certificate of coverage for your group long-term disability plan and find the covered earnings or covered monthly earnings definition. Read whether it says W-2 wages, base salary or total compensation, and whether the plan document mentions K-1 distributions anywhere. Then set that number next to what you actually reported as income. When I build income protection for small business owners, that comparison is the first page of the analysis, because everything downstream depends on which number the contract agreed to insure.
Timing decides the rest of it. Individual coverage is medically underwritten, and the owner who waits until the practice is at peak profit is also the owner who has accumulated the health history that shapes the offer. Owen made that point about himself on the record, naming his own diagnoses.
There is more in the recorded conversation than fits here, including the two medical policies another broker wrote without residual disability or true own-occupation language and what it took to rebuild them, what happens inside underwriting when a file was never pre-screened, and the one line Owen would put on a billboard for every owner who assumes the business will simply keep paying them. That conversation is on the Income Protection Journal Podcast. What stays with me is that the definition nobody reads is the one that sets the check.
Did You Know More People Insure Their Cars Than Themselves? [Podcast]
Tuesday, July 28, 2026 • Duration 01:03:24
Alkeme Insurance EVP John DePinto, 30 years on the property and casualty side, on the one policy the state, your bank and your job never make you buy.
What Your Employer Disability Coverage Actually Pays, Explained by the Actuary Who Priced It
Monday, July 20, 2026 • Duration 45:04
An employee signs up for disability coverage during open enrollment, checks the box, and assumes the benefit will stand in for a paycheck if illness or an accident ever stops the income.
It does step in, but the check that arrives replaces less than half of what the household was taking home, once the formula, the cap, and the tax treatment all land. Most people never learn that math until they are already on claim, which is the worst possible moment to discover it.
I hear that assumption in almost every first conversation I have with a working professional. To pressure-test it, I sat down for the Income Protection Journal Podcast with Andy Schafer, Vice President of Workplace Benefits Solutions at Principal Financial Group, who spent 24 years as an actuary pricing disability risk before moving into product development for Principal's Specialty Benefits Division.
His job for more than two decades was to calculate, across millions of insured lives, how often working people lose their income and what it costs to replace it. When someone who priced that risk for a living tells you what the payout actually looks like, the number is worth sitting with.
Andy walked through the arithmetic without softening it. Employer-sponsored coverage typically replaces 60 percent of pre-disability earnings, and that replacement is calculated on pre-tax income, not on the take-home figure a professional actually lives on.
Why Most Disability Claims Are Sickness, Not Accidents
The other assumption Andy spent years watching the data contradict is the picture people carry of what a disability even is. Insurance marketing leans on crutches, wheelchairs, and hospital imagery, which trains the public to file the risk under accidents. The claims experience runs the other way.
"Accidents are only 10 percent of the disabilities that we cover. The other 90 percent are sicknesses."Andy Schafer, Principal Financial Group, on the Income Protection Journal Podcast
That ratio reframes the entire buying decision. A professional who reasons "I work on a computer, so I can push through an injury" is answering the wrong question, because the medical conditions that actually drive disability claims are cancers, cardiac events, autoimmune disease, and the cognitive fog that arrives with serious illness.
Andy made the point that being physically able to sit at a desk means little when illness makes it impossible to think, concentrate, or stay awake through a working day. The 90 percent share belongs to sickness, and sickness is precisely the risk people talk themselves out of.
Sitting with the claims data for a career also taught Andy how rarely the event arrives at all, which is the second half of the psychology.
"About three and a half to four out of every 1,000 people that we insure actually file a claim."Andy Schafer, Principal Financial Group, on the Income Protection Journal Podcast
A frequency that low feeds the sense of invincibility that keeps professionals from acting. Andy was candid that the "I will never need it" instinct is statistically true for most people in any given year, and that the industry has leaned too hard on fear to sell against it.
The rarity is real. So is the size of the loss when the rare event lands on one household instead of a thousand.
What Individual Disability Insurance Adds to a Workplace Policy
Two forces have quietly lowered how often working people file. The pandemic normalized remote and hybrid work, and Andy described how that reshaped the risk.
A worker recovering from a stage-two cancer diagnosis who once would have filed for short-term disability, because coming into an office was impossible, can now often keep contributing part-time from home. People return to work faster, and sometimes never leave it, which pulls claim frequency down and, in turn, brings the cost of income protection down for everyone in the pool.
That good news for pricing does not fix the shortfall inside a single household when a serious sickness does stop the income. This is where I spend most of my time as an advisor.
After three decades placing coverage for professionals, the same correction comes up again and again, and Andy landed in the same place from the carrier side: take a hard look at the benefit summary before you need it, and if the employer-sponsored replacement leaves a household living on less than half its prior income, that is what individual coverage is built to close. An individual disability income policy stacks on top of the group benefit, can lift total replacement toward 70 percent of pre-disability earnings, and moves with the professional from job to job rather than ending the day they change employers.
Portability is the piece that Andy, who spent his entire career at one company, flagged as the modern blind spot. Most working professionals now change jobs several times, and each move resets the group coverage. A new employer may offer a weaker benefit, or none, and a health change in the interim can foreclose the chance to buy individual coverage on good terms.
That is the argument for purchasing young, while insurability is intact and premiums are lowest, and for owning a policy the employer does not control. The full conversation, including the soundbite round where Andy names the odds a 35-year-old actually faces, is worth hearing in his own words on the Income Protection Journal Podcast.
Own Occupation Decides Whether an Attorney’s Disability Policy Pays [Podcast]
Thursday, July 16, 2026 • Duration 01:18:21
Most attorneys who buy disability coverage believe own occupation guarantees their benefit the day they can no longer practice law. It is an umbrella term with tiers, and the version inside a group plan, or an individual policy bought without the right rider, pays very differently. Which tier an attorney owns decides whether the disability claim pays in full or drops to a fraction the moment it is filed.
Ethan Abramowitz has watched that decision play out from both sides of the table. He spent nearly four years defending insurance carriers at Kirwan, Spellacy and Danner before joining Mark F. Seltzer and Associates, a national practice representing highly skilled professionals in private and group disability matters, where for more than 13 years he has represented physicians, dentists and attorneys whose claims were denied or stalled.
Admitted in Florida, Pennsylvania and California, he meets these professionals years after the policy is signed, at the moment the carrier says no. I brought him onto the Income Protection Journal Podcast to work the story backward, from the denied claim to the contract language that caused it.
Own-Occupation Coverage Separates an Attorney's Full Benefit From a Modified Trap
The phrase attorneys think they understand is the phrase that fails them most often. True own occupation, sometimes called regular occupation, pays the full monthly benefit when a sickness or injury stops you from practicing law, even if you go earn a living doing something else.
A modified own-occupation definition pays only while you are not working at all. Step back into any paid work and the claim collapses into a partial or residual analysis, the reduced benefit paid when you can still work but earn less.
Own occupation, it's an umbrella term, and underneath that, there's different tiers of coverage.
Ethan Abramowitz, a disability insurance attorney with Mark F. Seltzer and Associates for more than 13 years, speaking on the Income Protection Journal Podcast
He watched the difference cost one physician most of her income. An OB/GYN in her late 30s developed rheumatoid arthritis, lost her clinical career and accepted a medical directorship with the residency program she had trained in.
Because her individual policy carried a modified own-occupation definition rather than a true one, her earnings from the new role were offset against her benefit. The monthly check fell from $15,000 to two or three thousand. A true own-occupation policy would have paid the full $15,000 alongside her new salary with no offset.
Attorneys assume this is a doctor's problem because a surgeon's disability looks obvious. It is not.
Abramowitz has represented lawyers with Parkinson's disease, traumatic brain injuries and visual impairments who could no longer tolerate the physical and cognitive load of the work, the ability to sit for 10 or 12 hours, read voluminous records and hold a trial schedule together. When a lawyer with that kind of condition wants to teach or consult instead, only a true own-occupation definition lets the benefit and the new income coexist.
If I can't be a lawyer, but I could go teach at a law school as an adjunct professor, I can do that and earn a living and do something I'm passionate about. Without the true own-occupation definition, I can't do that without having an offset.
Ethan Abramowitz, who represents policyholders in disputed disability claims, speaking on the Income Protection Journal Podcast
Group Long-Term Disability Converts an Attorney's Own-Occupation Term After 24 Months
The group plan a firm provides is where most attorneys assume they are covered, and it is where the definitions quietly turn against them. An individual policy weighs the material and substantial duties of the occupation as you actually perform it, examining your billing records and your day-to-day work. A group long-term disability plan leans on a national-economy standard drawn from reference works like the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and O*NET, generalized rubrics that ask what a lawyer does, not what you do.
The costlier problem sits deeper in the contract. Most employer plans limit own-occupation protection to the first 24 months, then shift the standard to any gainful occupation. When the policy does not spell out a replacement-income formula, that phrase defaults to the Social Security definition of disability.
I always joke that if you can be a barista at Starbucks, no disrespect to them.
Ethan Abramowitz, a former insurance-defense litigator who spent nearly four years defending insurance carriers, speaking on the Income Protection Journal Podcast
Then the carrier can argue you are not disabled. A greeter's wage clears the bar. Group plans answer to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, a federal statute that tilts the burden toward the carrier and forces a denied claimant through an internal appeal before any courtroom is available.
Covered monthly earnings compound the shortfall. Many group plans count only base salary and exclude bonus, incentive and production pay. Abramowitz described an orthopedic surgeon earning about $800,000 who returned to work at half time.
His individual policies paid a 50 percent partial benefit. His group plan, measuring only base compensation, required a 60 percent loss of total earnings before it paid anything, so it paid nothing. Attorneys on a modest salary and a large bonus face the same arithmetic.
Four Attorney Disability Policy Features That Decide the Claim
Asked which single feature he would refuse to give up on a policy of his own, Abramowitz did not hesitate. The true own-occupation definition comes first, followed by residual disability, a future increase option and a cost-of-living adjustment. Roughly 60 to 70 percent of his cases involve some component of partial disability, and only about 10 percent of disability claims trace to an accident, so the provisions that pay while you are working less matter far more than most buyers expect.
Attorneys rate among the most favorable occupation classes for pricing, alongside architects, accountants and engineers. When I build individual own-occupation coverage for attorneys, I treat that pricing advantage as a reason to add the strong features rather than to buy the cheapest contract, because the group plan the firm owns can be cut or canceled at any renewal and does not follow you when you leave. Abramowitz put the same point on a billboard.
No attorney should sign a disability policy until they have read the fine print.
Ethan Abramowitz, who has represented physicians, dentists and attorneys in denied disability claims for more than a decade, speaking on the Income Protection Journal Podcast
The same math decides it for solo practitioners and firm partners, the attorneys with no group plan behind them at all. On the r/personalfinance forum, a self-employed single parent asked whether an own-occupation policy is worth the higher premium, and whether a benefit that runs to age 65 makes sense. Abramowitz did not hedge.
Absolutely. If you're self-employed and you're a single parent or a single income household, you're the breadwinner. You need to protect your income.
Ethan Abramowitz, who has litigated insurance disputes from both the defense and policyholder side for more than 15 years, speaking on the Income Protection Journal Podcast
The full conversation, including his account of a surgeon who kept operating with tremors because he could not afford to stop, and the elimination-period and pre-existing-condition traps that decide a claim before it is filed, is on the Income Protection Journal Podcast. What stays with me is that the outcome of a claim is usually written years earlier, on the day the policy is bought.
Editor's note: I refer clients to Ethan Abramowitz when a disability claim is disputed, and some of the professionals he represents hold coverage I placed. Neither of us pays the other for referrals, and he received no compensation for this interview.
She Was Talked Out of a Disability Policy. Here’s What It Cost Her.
Friday, June 26, 2026 • Duration 44:15
Group long-term disability through your employer typically pays $2,000 to $15,000 a month before tax, far less than what high-income working professionals actually earn. Independent insurance broker Analisa Cleland explains the four-part group LTD trap, the worksite-product portability path for the uninsurable, and why 92 percent of brokers licensed to sell disability insurance don't.
CEO Shares Lessons Learned Watching High Earners Lose Everything [Podcast]
Tuesday, May 19, 2026 • Duration 29:31
Gretchen Rosenberg has watched agents at her brokerage get sick, stop working, and find out how little income protection they had.
When that happened, colleagues sometimes stepped in. They covered showings, managed contracts, and kept deals from unraveling. What they could never replace was her paycheck.
Five years ago, Rosenberg launched a foundation at Kentwood Real Estate that provides emergency grants to employees and agents dealing with cancer, car accidents, and medical crises. It has made a real difference for a number of people.
It is not income protection for self-employed professionals. And Rosenberg says not enough of her agents carry one.
Rosenberg is President and CEO of Kentwood Real Estate, a luxury brokerage serving communities across Colorado’s Front Range from Denver to Boulder, Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, and into the mountain communities of Summit and Grand counties. Kentwood is Colorado’s exclusive affiliate of Home Services of America and one of the largest residential real estate companies in the country. She started her career as a single mother, spent six months without closing a sale, and built her way to leading one of the state’s largest brokerages over nearly 30 years in a production-only industry.
I sat down with Rosenberg on the Income Protection Journal Podcast to talk about what she has observed across those three decades: what commission earners assume will protect them when something goes wrong, why those assumptions often fail, and what she did about her own income when she was just starting out and could least afford to be unprepared.
Commission Income Has No Floor and No Benefits
Real estate agents are independent contractors. Nearly all of them file 1099s, pay their own taxes, and carry no employer benefits. No health insurance.
No life insurance. No 401K unless they build one themselves.
“The agent is responsible for paying all their taxes, all their insurance,” Rosenberg says. “They have no benefits, they have no health insurance. It’s all on them.”
What makes this particularly difficult is the gap between perception and reality. Television shows about real estate create the impression that agents are uniformly wealthy. The reality, Rosenberg says, is that most agents pay listing marketing costs out of pocket before they know whether a house will sell.
Every deal is speculation. Every paycheck is earned from scratch.
Commission income does not come with a floor. It comes with cycles, market shifts, slow seasons, divorces, and bodies that eventually wear out.
Rosenberg has watched agents navigate all of those. What carries the successful ones through, she says, is almost never what they assumed would.
“They’re out there protecting their clients, and they forget to protect themselves,” Rosenberg says.
What Illness Actually Does to a Commission-Based Income
When I asked Rosenberg what she has seen happen to agents who fell ill or were injured and could not work, her answer was direct.
“I’ve seen some really sad things happen, and it’s because they’re unprepared,” she says. One agent Rosenberg knows lost her home to IRS liens after spending a commission check before setting aside her estimated taxes. Others who were struck by illness had no reserve to carry them through a year of reduced or no income.
The Kentwood Cares Foundation fills some of the gap. But a grant to get through a rough month is a different instrument than coverage that replaces months or years of income when a medical condition prevents someone from working. Most commission earners Rosenberg knows do not have the second thing.
“Not enough think about it,” she says, when I asked whether agents in her firm protect their income. “I think they think, ‘I’ll always be able to sell a house.’”
That mindset is understandable. Real estate attracts people who believe in their ability to hustle. It is also, Rosenberg says, a physically demanding job.
Agents pull up carpet corners at inspections, climb stairs at showings, and work weekends and evenings for clients whose timelines rarely align with anyone’s preferred schedule. The ability to do that work is not guaranteed indefinitely.
What High Earners Assume Will Be Enough
A common belief among high-earning self-employed professionals is that savings or investment portfolios will carry them through any disruption. The most financially disciplined agents at Kentwood, Rosenberg says, do invest well and are genuinely prepared. Most are not those agents.
Housing equity is at an all-time high nationally. But equity does not replace income when someone cannot work. It takes time to access, selling under duress is rarely good timing, and drawing down assets is not the same as having coverage that pays a monthly benefit during a disability.
Rosenberg’s advice to anyone transitioning from a salary into commission-based work is to have at least $25,000 to $30,000 in cash reserve before starting. Even after closing a deal, the commission may not arrive for months.
“That’s why we have insurance,” she says.
I work with self-employed professionals and independent contractors on individual disability insurance built around the income their work generates. The policies that protect commission earners are structured differently from group plans, and understanding those differences matters before something goes wrong.
Rosenberg got her own policy in the early months of her career, when she had no income and no certainty about when she would close her first sale. She was a single mother starting over. She has never needed to file a claim.
“I’m always grateful I have it,” she says.
The specifics of what Rosenberg has seen happen to commission earners who prepared and commission earners who did not, and the conversation she and I had about the gap between earning well and being protected, are in this episode of the Income Protection Journal Podcast. It is a conversation worth hearing before the need arises.
Disability Insurance Awareness Month with CDIA President Bob Herum [Podcast]
Tuesday, May 5, 2026 • Duration 55:01
A doctor who could no longer practice medicine after a neurological diagnosis started painting watercolors and selling them to make up what his disability benefits did not cover. His policy had been sufficient when he first bought it, but his income had grown beyond what the coverage was designed to replace, and no one had reviewed it in the years between. Bob Herum was a young agent at Provident at the time, delivering benefit checks to that doctor’s door, and one of those watercolors has hung in his hallway ever since.
The shortfall is the story. Disability income insurance replaces a percentage of prior earnings rather than all of them, and that gap is what sends people looking for a second income.
Herum is the president of the Council for Disability Income Awareness, a nonprofit whose mission is to make sure working Americans understand what income protection is before they need it. He entered the disability insurance business in 1986 after eight and a half years of military service, spent fourteen years as a vice president of sales and marketing at Provident, one of the country’s largest disability carriers, and has spent the past two and a half years rebuilding the CDIA after the organization went through a difficult leadership transition. The CDIA, which recently added the word “income” to its name to distinguish its mission from general disability services, now reaches nearly 40,000 agents and advisors and has expanded its membership to include Munich Re, major general agencies such as Ash Brokerage and DI Brokers East, and carrier members including Principal, Unum, and Lincoln Financial.
I sat down with Herum on the Income Protection Journal Podcast during Disability Insurance Awareness Month to talk about the painting, the doctor, and what he has observed across four decades watching what happens when working Americans are covered and when they are not. It is a conversation I plan to return to.
The Gap Most Workers With Group Coverage Have Never Thought to Check
The story of the watercolor doctor is not unusual. The disability does not always arrive with drama.
It comes from a neurological issue, a cancer diagnosis, a hand injury, a joint that stops cooperating. What makes it costly is the gap between what a worker assumes their coverage does and what the certificate of insurance actually says.
Most workers with employer-provided coverage have never read that certificate. Herum spent ten years marketing group long-term disability and short-term disability products, and he is direct about what most of those plans do and do not cover. The benefit is typically 60 percent of base salary, calculated only on compensation from that employer.
The portion the employer pays is taxable as federal income tax. And the coverage does not follow the worker if they change jobs.
“Do you realize that if you leave that employer, that coverage stays with the company? It doesn’t travel with you,” Herum says.
Most group long-term disability plans also include a provision that, after an initial period, shifts the definition of disability from inability to perform your own occupation to inability to perform any occupation at all. For a physician, attorney, or specialist whose income depends on a specific set of skills, that shift matters.
Herum’s consistent message is not that group coverage is inadequate across the board. It is that very few workers have taken the time to understand what they actually have.
The organizing idea behind the CDIA is that most people do not make a conscious decision to leave themselves unprotected. They make an unconscious one.
They receive an enrollment form at work, they mean to look into it, and they never do. “Their lack of planning becomes their plan,” Herum says.
The statistic the CDIA returns to is not an abstraction. A Milliman study confirmed what Herum first encountered in 1986: one out of four working Americans will experience at least a 90-day disability during their working career. “If I knew that there was a 25 percent chance that when I crossed the road, I was going to get hit by a car, I probably wouldn’t cross the road,” Herum says.
The problem is not that people reject the risk when they confront it. The problem is that most people never confront it clearly enough to make a real decision.
The Resources the CDIA Makes Available to Agents and Working Americans
The tools the CDIA produces are free and available at cdia.org. For agents and advisors, there is a database of nearly 40,000 professionals receiving regular outreach, a library of more than 900 blog articles organized by coverage topic, training sessions focused on specific policy mechanics, and marketing materials designed to support client conversations year-round. For the working American who lands on the site, the CDIA is building video content designed to help answer a basic question: what do I actually have, and is it enough?
One newer program certifies employers whose disability benefit offerings meet a defined standard. Herum envisions the database becoming a tool workers use when comparing job offers, letting them see which employers have built a real disability program rather than a nominal one.
The first certificate was awarded days before our conversation. Carriers including Unum are already marketing the program to their employer clients.
I work with high-income professionals and self-employed individuals on individual disability income coverage built around the specifics of their occupation and income. The coverage I place is structured differently from what most group plans provide, and understanding those differences before something goes wrong is exactly what Disability Insurance Awareness Month is designed to prompt.
Herum’s framing is that every month should carry that prompt. May is the annual occasion to raise the conversation. The CDIA’s job is to make sure the conversation keeps happening in June, October, and January as well.
The full conversation, including Herum’s account of a second claim story from his early career in Columbus involving a dentist who redirected his career to managing practices after his own disability, and his view on why only four out of every 100 licensed agents discuss disability insurance with their clients, is available on the Income Protection Journal Podcast. The resources he describes are at cdia.org.
