Insurance Solutions to Protect What Matters Most

Insurance can help protect your income, your family, your business, and your financial plan when life does not go as expected. Your need for insurance often changes as your responsibilities grow, which is why it is important to review your coverage at different stages of life.

A useful way to start is to ask: if your income stopped tomorrow, who else would feel it? We will walk through what you would actually need to replace, what coverage you already have — including anything provided through work — and where the real gaps are. Sometimes the outcome of that conversation is that you are already adequately covered.

Life insurance pays a benefit to the people you name when you die. The right amount is the amount that would let them carry on without your income.

A practical way to size it is to add up what would need to be covered — the mortgage and other debts, the income your household would lose, the cost of raising and educating children, final expenses and any tax that may come due on your estate — and then subtract what is already in place, including group coverage through an employer.

From there it is a question of the right type. Term insurance covers a defined period, such as the years until the mortgage is paid and the children are independent, and generally costs less at the outset. Permanent insurance is designed to stay in place for life and can serve estate and business purposes. Many households end up with a combination.

Critical illness insurance pays a one-time, tax-free lump sum if you are diagnosed with one of the conditions listed in the policy and meet its survival requirements. Commonly covered conditions include cancer, heart attack and stroke, though the list varies by policy.

The payment is yours to use however you choose. People use it to cover the gap while they are off work, to pay for treatment or travel that is not publicly funded, to bring in help at home, or simply to take the financial pressure off during a difficult year.

It is different from disability insurance, which replaces income over time, and it works well alongside it rather than instead of it.

A business adds obligations that personal coverage was never designed to carry. If you are the business, its risks are your risks.

The conversations we most often have with owners are about how the business would continue if a key person were gone, how a surviving partner would fund the purchase of a departing partner’s shares, and how a personally guaranteed business loan would be repaid. Structuring coverage correctly, including whether a policy is owned personally or corporately, has real tax and estate consequences and is worth getting right at the outset.