• Odds of a disability are nearly 3 times greater than death between the ages of 25-65
• At age 37, the odds of becoming disabled are 3-1/2 times higher than that of death
• 1 in 3 Americans age 35 to 65 will suffer a disability lasting at least 90 days
• 48% of all home mortgage foreclosures are due to a disability – only 3% are due to a death of the breadwinner
• 1 in 4 families that filed for bankruptcy protection identified an illness or injury in their family as the major reason for the bankruptcy

Despite all this, amazingly, 82 percent of Americans have little or no disability coverage.

A couple of things to look into on your company plan.
1. What is the monthly benefit cap? LTD plans will cap the monthly benefit typically at around $10,000. So, if the policy pays out 60% and you make more than $200,000, the coverage is less than 60%.
2. What is the definition of disabilty? Is it own occupation or any occupation? Furthermore, if it is own occupation how long does that definition apply. Many policies will have a own occupation definition that last for the first 24-36 months of disability and then switches to an any occupation definition. The best policies offer own occupation definition for the full duration of the disabilty.
3. Is there a partial disability benefit? Typically, an individual will slowly deteriorate into a disability. It more the exception that an individual is healthy one day and then completely disabled the next day. It is important to understand if your policy will provide a benefit during this time period.

Having said that, there are a couple of things that you can ask your employer for in order to enhance your benefit.
1. You can ask your employer if you can switch to a “gross-up” method of premium payment. Under this arrangement, an employer will gross-up your salary by the LTD premium amount, take out any necessary tax and then pay the premium from your paycheck. As a result, you have in effect paid for the policy after-tax. The advantage to this arrangement is that any benefit payments are non-taxable. A great product for this is offered by UNUM. Its called Tax Choice and it allows employees to choose whether to the employer pays pre-tax or the employee pays by the gross-up method.
2. Ask the employer if they are willing to up the benefit to 66.6%
3. Ask the employer to look into optional LTD buy-up plans
Hope this helps.

I agree. My best advice here is to join a professional organization of some kind if you can. I joined the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) solely for their unbelievably good rates on long term disability insurance. Even having to pay the $80 membership fee each year puts me way ahead of where I would be with non-group insurance.