TRANSCRIPT
What’s Up Internet? My name is Ian Bloom and this is Nerd Finance. I’m your resident financial life planner and huge nerd!
After the last video you might be saying “Well what about my other benefits?” and in the wisdom of my mentor “Benefits are like air you rarely appreciate it, but when it’s not there you really suffer.” He’s kind of like a Yoda, but if Yoda was less green, and didn’t use the reverse speech, and was taller.
But, anyway so there there are lots of benefits and a few of them are very core to most employers. So we’ll talk about three main ones here and we’ll briefly talk about some others.
Health insurance is the main benefit that most employers that are significant provide their employees. There’s usually terms associated with health insurance called a premium, which is how much you pay, a deductible which is how much you have to pay the health care providers before your insurance company covers anything, and then an out-of-pocket maximum which is the most you have to pay in any given year. Insurance policies are very difficult to evaluate in a couple of seconds, but just know that those are all factors and what you should be using to select your health insurance policy.
But do make sure [to understand] that because the health insurance market is so expensive right now, the health care market is actually more expensive. So since you get taxed anyway I would probably recommend everybody take some amount of health insurance coverage, with very few exceptions.
Disability insurance is the next benefit and it’s kind of a big deal. I mean what if you get your arm chopped off by a Viking in a raid? You’re gonna need to still work afterwards and you might not be able to for some time. So given that, the disability insurance company will pay while you’re recovering whether it’s from – you know – your arm getting chopped off or something less serious. And typically they will pay a percentage of your salary over a period of time. This income can be pretty necessary to help you get back on your feet or if you’re permanently disabled to keep you going.
Then lastly, life insurance is a pretty important one as well it’s usually a token amount that’s given to you for free by your employer. Sort of like putting a bandaid on that viking wound from earlier. Just keep in mind that having some amount of life insurance is often pretty important to how families recover from the loss of an income earner, and usually the amount that’s given to you for free – one or two times your salary – is not gonna cover all of the needs that your family has. So you might want to make sure to evaluate those insurance policies and make sure that you have the right amount of coverage.
For most other benefits offered by employers they’re either optional or they are specific to one employer. So we’re not going to cover most of those, but just know that with things like critical care insurance, legal insurance, and those things it can be a really good fit for certain individuals. Don’t immediately write them off, but in a lot of cases you’ll want to evaluate where those dollars are going and whether it’s worth it to have those insurance benefits.
That’s all for today. This video again [was] probably a review for some people who are very familiar with their employee benefits. But, it’s pretty hard for me to cover a 401k policy and then not say well what are the other benefits that you might have so I wanted to make sure to go over that. If you have suggestions for future videos or ideas that you want to make sure get brought up somewhere, don’t hesitate to reach out. Find me on social media at OpenWorldFP or email me at ianbloom@openworldfp.com. Lastly, there’s of course my website openworldfp.com. If all this seems like a lot to you go there to look at what services we offer that might be helpful. Thanks everybody, have a great day.
