Tanya Hughes breaks down VA benefits for veterans and spouses, explaining the difference between SGLI and VGLI life insurance, how VA disability and pension affect survivors, and what monthly amounts families actually receive.
Questions this video answers
BGLI (Veteran's life insurance).
Service-member group life insurance for active service members (SGLI).
About a half a million dollars (spoken estimate).
No — the surviving spouse does not automatically get the veteran's VA disability payments.
About 20% (typical/max stated).
Chapters
You are going to run into a lot of people who are veterans who have served in our armed forces in our country. Very simply, you need to take time to actually learn how the VA benefits actually work. So you can go to the va.gov website to do a little homework to see how they work. Make sure someone says they have VA life insurance. It's very simply, it's called BGLI life insurance, meaning they're a veteran. If they have sgli, it means they are active service. Currently, it's kind of group insurance, like when you work. Right. Typically with sgli, when they're in active service, they have about a half a million dollars and it's basically included, kind of like a work insurance, completely free of charge. You're also able to look up and see if their insurance is going to be going up or what's going to happen to it. Okay. When you're looking at doing benefits for bas, you also want to find out how much disability do they get. With a VA disability, if you have a spouse that gets VA disability and they pass away, the other spouse does not automatically get that. Okay. With VA pension, typically the spouse will get some of that pension, but it's a very small amount, if any. So if you have a husband and a wife and they are married and he was in the military and let's say he's getting 5000amonth in disability and he gets 3000 in VA retirement pension, she's going to lose all $5000 from the disability when he passes away. Now, when with the pension, it just depends. You want to ask them, are you going to get 20% or what percentage are you going to get? Most VA's on the pension, they typically get about 20% at max. So if you have $2,000 a month now, all of a sudden they're going to get about $400. Okay? So the big thing with VA, we work with a lot of veterans. Okay. And I think it's really important always to thank them for what they do for our country too, because they don't just give time, they truly give up their life for us. But it's also important to understand that these benefits that they currently have, how they work, so that you can help educate them and help them make an educated decision.
