Do I Need Disability Insurance In Canada?

Often it does strain family relationships, unfortunately. You know, you do want to help that sick spouse, but you know, when their finances get involved, as we know, money can do funny things in family relationships. And we know the biggest reason for divorces is often finances. And that's really where disability helps. Again, we're going to basically replace that lost income.

And Jonathan's been in the financial services space for 19 years, and the last 15 have been specializing in living benefits protection. And having worked with hundreds of advisors over these past 15 years, he recognizes firsthand the value that income protection gives families. He's familiar with dozens of situations where living benefits products have staved off financial ruin due to unforeseen health crises. Jonathan, take it away. The stage is yours.

Yeah, well, again, thank you for having me. And really what I'm going to chat about today is what I'm going to focus on. My presentation here for the rest of our time here today is going to be a little bit more broad because what I'm going to be talking about is health issues or health crises that perhaps aren't necessarily potentially terminal but could impact your ability to work and earn an income. So my conversation today is going to be obviously much broader. And why don't I start with one question here? To start with, what do you think is the number one area of claim for disability insurance? What area of health do you think we get the most claims? When you think the number one area, cancer, is actually not cancer.

Mental health. So actually, that is correct. Our number one area of claim is actually mental health for disability insurance. So with that, I think, Jason, what I'm going to do is hopefully this is all going to go well. I'm going to bring up my slide deck and I'm just going to go through sort of my presentation here. I'm going to sort of add in some stories as I go. So that's the first question I wanted to ask. So again, a lot of what I'm going to be talking about today, so a few things just to be aware of with disability insurance. Really what I'm talking about today is a health issue that would impact your ability to work. The disability insurance is a little bit different. We're really doing is we're working your ability. We're looking to insure you basically as you're working. So basically from 18 on to basically really about age 60 is what we're looking at and ensuring. But just a couple things here to sort of start off with, just to sort of lay the foundation again, I'm going To be focusing much more broadly on sort of all of the other things that could impact your ability to work. So a couple things to be aware of right now, one in seven Canadians have some form of disability. Now for some of those people it's knocked them completely off work. And for others it's to a degree they might be working reduced hours. They might have an impact on their ability to earn their full income. So perhaps they're working, still doing all of their duties, but perhaps instead of working five days or only working three days, or they might only be working say two hours out of an eight hour day. The other big thing to be aware of is we do know that one in three Canadians prior to age 65 will suffer a disability of some sort, a health issue that's going to impact their ability to work. Of those one in three people.

Once it goes beyond 90 days, we know the average duration of that disability will be anywhere from two to three years. But if you take a look here at the little pie chart here, as I mentioned, mental disorders, now these numbers were from 2018. Now with COVID the mental health has actually risen and we're definitely seeing a rise in our mental health claims, 16, 12% respectively. Cancer accounting for about 16% of disability claims, 12% cardiovascular. So that's basically your, you know, your heart attacks, your strokes, that type of thing. So again, these are very complementary products. And we often get asked this question, well, is it possible both policies could pay out? Absolutely. Both policies could pay out. A big thing that a lot of people think about with disability. If I mention that to say someone off the street, they think, well, if I'm disabled, it's, if I get physically hurt, well, it's more than that. It's really any health issue that could impact your ability to work. So yes, injuries are part of that. But as you can see here, only about 8% of our claims are actually physical injuries. The rest are sort of these other conditions like mental health, cancer, cardiovascular. And then of course we have your musculoskeletal diseases like arthritis, gender, disc disease, that's about 5%. But the other big piece of pie is really other. And I really don't care in my world what the underlining health issue is. The question is, again, does it impact your ability to work? Either that it knocks you completely off work, or there's degrees that it can knock you off work. Perhaps you're down to modified duties, what we would call a partial disability, or it has a reduction on your time that you can work, or it has A reduction on your earning ability. These are all ways that people can go on claim. We know that broadly speaking, 43% of working Canadian households have had someone take off time due to a health episode. And again, as we mentioned earlier, one in three Canadians will be off work for at least 90 days or longer. And of those people that are off work 90 days or longer, we actually know the average duration thereafter is typically on average about two to three years. Here's some other sort of big stats here. We know that 48% of Canadians are not financially prepared to be off work. And we saw that glaringly with the pandemic. 78% of Canadians, you know, they're all seeing their finances were tight. Now that's even more acute with inflation these days. And of those that weren't able to work because they had a health issue or, you know, perhaps they were laid off, they were upset about it. Most people, they do want to be working. They do want to be doing something useful with their time. They don't want to be sitting at home, you know, watching Netflix. You know, at some point you're going to get bored and run out of content. Most people want to be doing something useful with their time throughout the day.

Now, when someone is off work, of course it causes stress to not only the person that is ill, but to the rest of the family. So as you can see here, 76% said it was stressful for the entire household. Often it does strain family relationships, unfortunately. You know, you do want to help that sick spouse, but you know, when their finances get involved, as we know, money can do funny things in family relationships. And we know the biggest reason for divorces is often finances. And, and that's really where disability helps. Again, we're going to basically replace that lost income. And of those that did have in a family situation, someone was taking time off, 31% said their able bodied partner had to find extra work to make ends meet. That is incredibly stressful. Not only perhaps are you looking after your sick spouse, but now you're working extra hours, probably not enough hours in the day to get everything done. And also, perhaps also look after yourself and maintain your own health. So again, a lot of stress there on the family. Where's the money going to come from? That is always the big question. We know that 29% had to dip into their savings, pay for these expenses, 17% borrowed from money for family and friends. And they might help out initially, but you know, how long can they help out? You know, sometimes we get this response, well, you know, My family will help out. Okay, maybe a month, maybe two months. But can they help you out for, you know, six months, a year? Probably not. 17% took on more debt. 9% said they cashed in RRSPs. But again, all of this can have a long term effect. What is your retirement going to look like if you're taking money up today to pay for these expenses? In particular, for a lot of you who obviously have our participating whole life policy.

There'S a limit to how much you can take out of the policy. And then if you take too much out of the policy, that can obviously have a lot of stress on that policy because at some point potentially the policy might implode. So we want to also avoid that. Okay, so here's another interesting stat, and this might surprise some of you on the line here. 48% of Canadians, so these would be people who are employed. These aren't self employed people. Canadians have workplace disability coverage. Now what you might be surprised to know Is that was down 9% from 2015. So these numbers are 2018. We actually know that number is actually even less today. It's roughly around, I believe 46% have workplace disability coverage. We've been seeing a lot of trends with businesses in terms of trying to trim costs and obviously this pandemic economic uncertainty, particularly in Alberta with the oil patch, we've seen a lot of this companies just getting rid of their group plan. And so for those of you who perhaps might have had a group plan or still have a group plan, great. You're lucky to have coverage through work because a lot don't. And as you can see here, over 52% of Canadians who are employees don't have coverage through their work. And of that 52% that don't have coverage, the vast majority have done nothing about it. They did not buy private coverage. And often it's because perhaps they haven't been talked to about it. The other big thing we know, and I'm sure a lot of you are, you probably know this already, the vast majority of Canadians would be in serious financial difficulty if they had their income stopped for three months. You know, they don't have enough cash reserves to take them over that three month hump. And then we go beyond there. You know, it's only a matter of time before, you know, there's a knock at the door because you perhaps you haven't paid the mortgage and you know, there's the repossessions and things like that. You know, just because you're sick and just because you can't work. You have a health issue that's precluding you from working. Doesn't mean the bills stop. You still need to make your mortgage payment. If you have mortgage payments made, you have rent, you have utility payments, you have insurance premiums, you've got to eat, you've got to put clothes on your back. All these living expenses don't go away just because you're, because you're suffering a health episode. So the big question is, who needs coverage? And the need for disability insurance is really rather simple. And one of the questions you can ask yourselves is, can I retire today? Do I have money to retire today? If that answer is yes, good for you, you don't need disability coverage. But if the answer is no, I can't retire today, then you need coverage. So if we break it down and we'll expand upon this further in my talk here today, so if you don't have coverage and you're reliant on your income, then you really need to explore your options in terms of getting some coverage. There. You have some group LTD coverage, but perhaps it's not enough. So one of the big things, and we'll show this in another slide, you don't have enough protection at work. You might need some more enhanced definitions. Perhaps the definitions are rather restrictive. You might have some association coverage. Now, one of the things with the association coverage is you might not have necessarily the correct contract definitions that you might want. So you might need something a little bit more robust. You know, obviously those are conversations you can have with your advisor. And often those questions also get filtered up to me where we're happy to, you know, take a look at exactly what you have. Perhaps you do have some individual coverage. You know, one of the big things we always need to do in financial services is revisit what we already have. Is what we have adequate? Is what we have still suitable for our situation? Have things changed? And as things change, maybe we need to augment what we have. You know, perhaps you've had a big, a big pay increase and, you know, you had adequate coverage, but now it's no longer adequate. So again, we might need to look at topping that up Again, perhaps you need a contract that's going to give you more, greater flexibility to go on claim. These are all things that we can take a look at. So there's sort of the broad areas of, you know, again, who needs, who needs coverage? Okay, so a couple of the important questions to ask about income protection, and I'm going to list off a few questions that you might want to answer for yourself. One of the big questions that you might want to ask yourself around protecting your own income. What plans do you have in place if you became disabled? So let me repeat that question. What plans do you have in place if you became disabled? If you had a health episode that precluded you from working? An individual's most valuable asset is their ability to earn an income. Have you protected your ability to earn an income? How would it impact your retirement if you had to access your current retirement plans to supplement your income in the event you became sick or injured? If you took a three month unpaid vacation from work, how would you budget to maintain your current expenses? That was actually kind of an interesting one. I think a lot of us have always wanted to perhaps take perhaps a sabbatical and take a few months off and travel the world. But if you're going to do, say a world tour, take a trip for say three months. Now the thankfully Covid is somewhat rescinding. You're going to travel to several countries or maybe do go all across Europe. Well, maybe not these days, what's going on in Eastern Europe? But let's say you wanted to go to an area of the world, you really wanted to spend a lot of time there, say a few months. What would you do to make sure you had enough cash to pay for all of that? It's really no different than if you're looking with your own income. And you'd have to plan for that, obviously. So next let's talk about protecting your family. How would your children be affected if something happened to you? How would your children be affected if your income was impacted because of a health issue? Some of you might have children, some of you might not have children, and some of you might be wanting children. So let me ask you this, tell me who is or may be dependent on your income, both now or in the future? An individual's most valuable asset is their ability to earn an income. Have you protected your ability to earn an income? Now this one, it's a little bit harsh, but you know, think about this for a moment. What would create greater hardship for your family? Death or disability? That one's a little bit hard there. And then also around protecting your business. For those of you who are in business, what are you doing to ensure your business continues if you can't work? What would be the income producing ability of your business if you weren't there to direct it? What is the impact to your business if your key employees do not come to work tomorrow because of death or disability. So again, these are some questions you want to ask yourself around income protection. Okay, so another way to look at this. If I were to ask you what do you think your most valuable asset is?

My property to earn incomes. My health.

Correct. Yeah. Wonderful. Small town I grew up, I'm in Edmonton. But the small town I grew up is town called White Court. And if I ask that question, I might get a response back. Well, it's my pickup truck. People spend a lot of, a lot of money on their trucks. But again, getting back to this, your most valuable asset, again, most people will say, you know what, it's my home. Well, what I insure and what we insure with RBC insurance is really the golden goose. And the golden goose it's you and your ability to earn an income. If you really don't have your health, in many ways, you won't have your wealth. Let's take a look at a person's income and take a look at it between now and age 65 and these are some examples here that we want to show because it's really your ability to earn an income that pays for your home, your vehicles, your vacations, the food in your belly, the clothes on your back, the vehicle that you drive. So if we took an example here of for example, say someone earning $60,000 a year who's age 40 and we extrapolated that income out to age 65, assuming about a 5% increase in their income each year, well, that income earning potential is $2,863,626. Let's take someone earning 84,000, age 40. Well, it's over 4 million. That's ultimately what we're ensuring with income protection. We're ensuring a multimillion dollar asset and that is you and your ability to earn earn an income. So even if your income is perhaps a little bit more modest, let's say it's 36,000, you're age 30, that's still 3.2 million. Well, maybe you're age 50 and let's say you're still earning 36,000. Well, that's still, you know, three quarters of a million $776,000 between now and age 65. You know, that's a lot of potential lost dollars. So this is what we're looking to ensure here. So again, some other stats, and you've heard me kind of talking about this earlier. Again, there is a high probability, we Talked about this 1 to 3 chance between now and age 65 Someone will be disabled. So if we take a look here, probabilities of disability, and these are for the ones based on their age when they're coming, 50% between now and age 65 will be disabled 40. And again, the big thing here is take a look at the average duration of those claims. So if you have a 25 year old coming in and they're off work for at least 90 days or longer, we know the average duration is 2.1 years, age 35, 2.8, 53.1. The good news is, and this is the good news, the vast majority of people who do get sick, do have a health episode, are going to get back to work. But let's think about this. If you're off work for two years, two and a half years, three years, and you don't have adequate income protection, you don't have adequate resources to capital now, what's going to happen to your financial situation? Let's say we have a, you know, because again, her stats were there. A lot of these cancer claims are people in their, in their later 40s. So let's maybe take someone, let's say who is say age 45, they have cancer, maybe they're not off three years, maybe let's say they're off two years. What we're going to do is we're going to place that monthly income. So the way disability insurance works is we pay out a monthly benefit and then with critical illness insurance, you get that nice lump sum, whether it's 100,000, 200,000, whatever you choose, and they don't integrate. So for us, we're going to make sure that regular cash flow comes in so you can continue to pay your mortgage, you continue to pay for the groceries, you continue to pay for very high price of gasoline, you can pay for your kids sports, all of those regular expenses. Let's say you do have that cancer and now you need to pay for those extraordinary drugs. Perhaps your spouse is taking a leave of absence. I mean, there's all sorts of things that can happen. That's where that nice extra infusion of lump sum cash comes in. And again, these products are again highly complementary. They don't compete. And in an ideal world, in a perfect plan, you would have both. Okay, the next big area I want to talk about is around group coverage. One of the big things we often get answers back is, well, you know, I've got coverage from work. Okay, that's great. Let's actually take a look and see exactly what you have at work, what people think they have at work and what they actually have at work are often two very different things. I've been with RBC Insurance now over 15 years and this is what I do. I spend a lot of time. This is what all I do really is talking about disability insurance. And I see this all the time. What clients think they have and what they actually have are two entirely different things. And in many ways, the devil is in the details. One of the big things that we see, one of the things you will see on these group long term disability plans is what's known is called a non evidence maximum. The maximum amount of disability protection a client can get without evidence of insurability and maybe that's $2,000, it might be $3,000. It really depends often on the size of the company you're working for. So if you're working for a smaller company, again, getting back to the long term disability, there's always that maximum on the plan. So let's say, for example, in this slide, let's say for example, you have a group plan that will pay 66 and 2/3 of your salary to a maximum of 5, $5,000 a month. And it's based on your base salary. So if you were earning say for example 150,000, you would be covered at 64% of your net income. But what you'll notice is as your income gets higher and higher, the percentage of your income being replaced gets less and less. And this is something we call in my world, reverse discrimination. Basically, the highest income earners in the business often have the least percentage of their income covered. The other big thing to be aware of with these group benefits plans is they often cover only your base salary. So if you have significant variable compensation, often that variable compensation is not covered. Let's say you're an hourly employee. Typically your base hours are covered, not overtime hours. So that can be a big deal. And if, for example, you have a lot of variable compensation or you're working a lot of overtime, often that extra income is not covered. So big things to be aware of. And if you're not sure exactly what you have, please go to your HR manager, ask for a copy of your group handbook, take it to your send advisor. We can certainly take a look at it and see exactly what you have. The big thing is it's often good to dust that off and see exactly what you have, because the worst thing you want to find out is that time of claim. Well, here's actually what you have. And it's like, well, I thought I had this. Well, well, no, it's this. And if we could be proactive about actually taking a look to see exactly what you have, and if there's gaps in coverage, we can certainly plug those gaps. But often, again, and I've been doing this a long time, what people think they have in their group benefit plan and what they actually have are two entirely different things. So good idea to really take a look at your group plan and see what you have in place. Okay, let's take a look at it another way. And again, I put in here the pickup truck, because I'm from Alberta, and let's just say that pickup truck is worth 4,500. Let's say you have a house that, say, worth about 400,000. But let's say we project your income out to be about 3 million between now and age 65. Let's say you have a decent driving record, and your insurance cost is about $1,200 a year. Your house is about 1,000. Okay, so look at it this way. You've got total assets of about $445,000, and you're paying about $2,200 a year to insure them now, give or take. But you have a $3 million asset, and perhaps you've done nothing about that, and that's your future earning power. Now, we often get the question is, well, you know, what is it going to cost me? That type of thing. So a general rule of thumb is the premium costs should be between about 1 to 3% of your annual income. Typically, what I like to try and do is I like to keep that at 2% or less. And there's a lot of ways that we can structure disability contracts to make sure that's going to comfortably fit within your budget and still be able to maintain all of those other things that you want to do. Obviously, you need to fund your par contract and you want to take vacations, and you want to do all sorts of things in life, you know, pay down perhaps some debt that you have and all sorts of things. So a big thing that we try to do is make sure that that premium dollar amount is not too high and make sure that you get can kind of comfortably afford that. So again, the general rule of thumb is 1 to 3%. Personally, I like to keep it at about 2% or less. I think that tends to be a little bit of a better sweet spot. And that's what we'll go from. Okay, so another way to kind of look at it is this is a job, a job B. And if I'm sitting Down, perhaps with a young person and say, look, I'm going to offer you two jobs and job A or job B, Job A, you're going to get $60,000 a year. But look, here's the deal. If you get hurt or sick at job A, you're going to get nothing. Or you could get job B and it's going to pay you $58,000 a year. But should a health issue occur, you're not able to work. If you will have a disability with job B, you're now going to get $39,000 a year, tax free. Which job would you like? And of course, if you reverse engineer this, that difference is really basically the cost of insurance. So in this case it's on a little bit of the higher side. But again, we can certainly shave that down. But again that's really it great way to think of this. Again, all we're going to do is basically take a slice of your income to ensure that if you can't work, we're going to replace that lost earnings. And again, so this is $58,000 obviously taxable and then the 39,000 is tax free there. Okay. Another big area that we get questions on is I have government benefits. And yes, if you're an employee, yes, you do have government benefits. But let's talk about that. The first one that you would kick in it would be employment insurance. So let's say you have a health issue, you're not able to work. Really the way to look at EI is probably the government's form of short term disability insurance kicks in after 14 days, pays it up to a maximum of 120 days. It pays out 55% of your insurable earnings. Right now the maximum is roughly, I'm a little bit off on this is roughly around $580 a week. Do you think the benefits you get from employment insurance and Canada pension plan, do you think they're taxable or non taxable? Again, the question is, do you think Canada pension plan disability benefits, employment insurance benefits, do you think they're taxable or non taxable? So after employment insurance ends after about 120 days, then potentially Canada pension plan disability benefits could kick in. They pay out up to age 65. Right now my number is a little bit off, but it's approximately about $1,400 a month is the maximum you would get from Canada pension plan. Again, it is taxable after age 65. It basically just goes into regular CPP payments. Now another area of government benefits is workers compensation. So Depending on the province you're in, it could be different acronyms. So in this, because this slide deck came From Ontario, there's WSIB, Workplace Safety and Insurance Board. In Alberta, it's WCB. If you're in BC, it's WorkSafeBC. And there's all these Darius versions. Unlike Canada Pension Plan and Employment Insurance, which are federally run, WCB is provincially run. So the maximums are different depending on the province you're in. And Dan, I believe you're out in Lloydminster, are you not? Jonathan?

He is.

He's from Lloyd.

Yes. Okay. Okay. So I'm going to pick on Dan here a little bit. Okay, so if anyone's been to Lloydminster, half of the town is in Alberta and half of the town is in Saskatchewan. And basically the border, obviously, it runs north to south, and that's basically also Main street in Lloydminster. Now, let's say, for example, you're a worker and you get hurt just on the Saskatchewan side. The maximum that you would get in Saskatchewan under WCB is $65,130. That's the maximum amount of income that would be insured in Saskatchewan. Now in Alberta, just across the road, it's 95,300. So I kind of make this joke. If you're, you know, if you're just on the Saskatchewan side and you get hurt at work, you might want to crawl to the other side because there's a $30,000 difference in what is covered. And basically, the point I'm trying to make here is it's a bit of a hodgepodge. What's on going covered across the country. Alberta tends to be a bit on the higher side. Saskatchewan tends to be slightly on the lower side. For example, in Ontario, the maximum covered is 85,200. BC it's 78,600. And every province is slightly different than the next. So again, just because what you're covered in one province isn't necessarily what you'd be covered in another, because again, each province has their own WCB board. Okay. Some other questions you might want to ask yourself if you do. If you are fortunate to have benefits of work. And again, if you do have benefits of work, you're of the minority because Only roughly about 48% of working Canadians who are employees actually have coverage. So the first question you might want to ask Yourself is coverage 24, 7 or just business hours. And what I mean by that is, if it's just business hours, basically what it means is all you have is WCB Coverage because with WCB you're only covered at work, not covered driving to work, you're not covered driving home from work. It's only on the job that you get yourself hurt. So with group, it's going to pay 24, 7. Doesn't matter where you get hurt or sick. And that's the thing we want to make sure that we're, we're looking at. So that's where you'll look in your group handbook and see exactly what you have or for that matter might not have. Is there a maximum monthly benefit amount? Yes, there should always there. For most group plans outside of government, there typically will always be a maximum amount that is covered. Now as I mentioned earlier, typically if that's a larger business that you work for, that maximum might be higher. If it's a very small business that you're working for, it might be rather low. And it can really range all over the board. It might be a low as say 1500 all the way up to perhaps 12,000, for example. The next one. How is disability defined? Now, what you'll typically find with some group plans is to a certain extent they are somewhat restrictive in the definition. That is done by design. The definition is often what we call total disability. And what that means is you're completely gone from work. And for many people this definition, that's fine, that's reasonable for them. For others that might not be. I do spend a lot of time working with some executives and that just doesn't give them the flexibility to go on claims. So sometimes with executives, leadership teams, we sometimes augment their coverage to give them more robust. But for the vast majority of people, a total disability definition is somewhat satisfactory. Are bonuses covered? Is variable compensation covered? Often it's not. Sometimes it is, often it's not. You'll know if you look inside your group handbook, there will be what's known as the definition of earnings. And that's what you want to scrutinize. What earnings is covered, what earnings are not covered? Is the coverage portable? Often it's not. So for example, if you leave your employer and let's say for example, you have some group life insurance.

With your former employer, typically you have 30 days in which to basically take that group coverage and put it in into an individual contract. That's not typically the case with disability insurance. Some carriers allow it, the vast majority don't. So again, just because you're leaving your employer often again, you're not going to be able to port that coverage with you. But it is important to obviously have coverage wherever you're going in the future. Okay, I have coverage with another insurance company and great, fantastic. You have some coverage. How long ago did you buy it? Is the coverage up to date? Is what you bought several years ago? Is it suitable for your current situation? So again, we might want to dust off that contract. Let's see exactly what you have in place. Were all the underwriting considerations fulfilled? So one of the big things that we run into in our world is a thing called creditor protection. Often creditor protection, for example, if you have disability coverage on your loans or your mortgage, often what that coverage, how that coverage is assessed, is that time of claim. It's what's known as post event underwriting. So they don't assess you at.

When you purchase the coverage. They assess you once you need to file a claim. And if for example, you had some pre existing conditions.

It might be questionable whether or not it's going to pay out. So not to scare you all, but it is something to be addressed. So if you are paying for that, perhaps some of that creditor protection really might want to encourage you to reach out to your ascendant advisor and let's perhaps talk about getting you some more robust coverage there. Okay, so I'm going to finish this off here with basically these two questions. What is the likelihood of the event happening to me or to you? And if it does happen, will it result in a major financial loss for you? So as we talked about earlier, you know, we know that there's a 1 in 3 chance that between now and age 65, probably going to be off work for a period of time. Again, it could be up to two to three years. And what kind of financial loss will that look like for you? Often we insure things, for example, like the extended warranties. Like for example, let's say you buy a television at Costco or at Best Buy, they're always going to ask you if you want to purchase that extended warranty. But let's say, for example, you didn't purchase that extended warranty and let's say your TV did break down. What big what's the impact to you financially? Well, you have to buy another TV out of pocket. But you know, in the grand scheme of things, you know, you know, how much dollars are you going to really be out, if you will. But if you can't work for several years now, what's going to happen and what impact is that going to look at your family? Pick it up with Jason.

Awesome. Jonathan, thank you so much. And to all of our clients. You made the right decision to be here today. I want to encourage all of our clients in attendance, all of our clients who are viewing this in the future, connect with your advisor and have the conversation. Alternatively you can expect follow up from us. We will be in touch with all of you. We are going to be launching an Ignite campaign in our second quarter and our advisor team are going to be proactively reaching out to clients to open the conversation to really understand what questions you have, what additional clarity that you need and then examining what would be a perfect complement to what you're already doing financially so that you can be even better prepared, heaven forbid if you became disabled, if you experienced a critical illness or worst case scenario, both.

What about self employed with no coverage and no WCB coverage? Or it says no coverage and then just says WCB coverage. So I'm not sure if that means there's no wcb. But point is self employed person with no coverage.

Yeah, this is a great question because we do ensure a lot of self employed people. So maybe I'll give an example here. One of the big things we run into is guys who are on contract but they work in the oil patch. So you know, perhaps they're subcontracting like for example like with CNRL or one of the other big oil companies, Suncor, Imperial, Shell, what have you. Often they have to have WCB coverage just to get onto the job site. That's a requirement. They don't care if you have individual coverage. The oil companies don't care. You must have WCB to be on their job site. But again you're only covered while you're on the job site. So you really need to have coverage outside of that. It's going to cover you 24 7. So that's really where an individual contract will help out. So for those people who are self employed.

And you have an incorporated company and perhaps you pay yourself dividends, we look basically at your corporate financials to basically determine your income. So I guess I'm getting a little bit farther down the road here. But that's one of the big questions. That's the reason why I'm asking it because a lot of self employed people say well I just pay myself dividends and don't worry, we can look at that and make sure that you're adequately covered.

Jonathan, May I chime in just because we're on the topic of self employed people. Often what happens is we get chatting with people and we discover that you know, last year they were employed but they Had a great opportunity and they decided to become self employed. And now they say, hey, now that I'm self employed and I have my business, I don't have group benefits anymore. Gosh, I'd love to get some critical illness and disability in place. The challenge with that is obviously the income.

Right.

We need to have some, some track record of income.

Yeah.

I just wanted to preface that by saying what if that exact same scenario happened? I'm employed today, but I do have a disability policy, so maybe I'm considering becoming self employed. Is there any benefit to me maybe looking at getting a disability policy while I have income and then can that policy be taken away should I decide to become self employed later and now I don't have an income to protect on paper?

Yeah, it's a great question. It's a big question and there's a lot of facets to that. So start off with yes. If you're say for example in employee and you're perhaps considering or contemplating becoming self employed, perhaps starting a business. Yeah. You might want to proactively look at putting in place a policy without getting into all sort of the technical details. There's ways that we can perhaps structure it perhaps a little bit to start with and then we can grow it once you leave the business. Now there are situations where they've already left their employer and now they're into their new business. And we do have limits on what we can give. While they're basically in their first year of business, we take a look at a lot of factors. So for example, is it a continuation of what they were doing previously? So we see this all the time in the oil patch, for example, they're doing this job and now they're on contract and essentially a continuation of what they were doing previously. They're just now on contract versus being an employee. So typically we can use their last year's worth of income to go based off of that. It's not different if it's a brand new business, like a completely different area of industry for that we might have to give a lower limit initially until we have like at least a full year under our belt. So there's kind of ways to kind of mesh things together. But as you have those scenarios definitely kind of obviously talk to your Senate advisor, give us the details. We can certainly look at putting in place what we can. Another area to perhaps talk about with those business owners is, is I always look at. You have basically two sides of the coin. On the one side you have your income, basically you have your home responsibilities, your personal financial obligations. But business owners also have another set of obligations, and that's obviously their business financial obligations. So, again, depending on the nature of the business, we might also there's other policies to cover those fixed expenses of the business. So there's a further conversation to be flushed out there. And exactly what is that business going to. To look like? What expenses are you going to be looking at down the road? Are you going to be in a partnership situation? There's all sorts of things. Further financial bonding to be had. But again, reach out to your Senate financial advisor.

Thanks, Jonathan. So the point is the importance of having personally owned coverage, because once I own that coverage, it can't be taken away. Is that a fair.

Yes, that is correct. That is correct. Once you have it, we can't take it away. And even if there's a job change, I mean, it does happen. I mean, we insure some doctors and then they don't like being a doctor anymore, decide to open up an Airbnb or something like that, it doesn't matter. Once that coverage is enforced, they change things. You know, we can't go back and change things. It's locked. Yeah.

Thanks, Jonathan.

Excellent. Thank you.