LIFE INSURANCE
FOUR EASILY REFUTABLE MISCONCEPTIONS EMPLOYEES HAVE WHEN
Purchasing Life Insurance By JENNIFER GASSAWAY
W
ith enrollment season just around the corner, you may be thinking of ways to refresh your sales approach. The next few months will be a marathon session of in-person benefits meetings, lunch and learn sessions, and one-onone conversations that focus on the need for benefit coverage. But, have you thought about your strategy to help employees understand the need for insurance coverage? MAKE LIFE COVERAGE STAND OUT One product often makes brokers, regardless of their tenure in the business, struggle to find new ways to freshen up their enrollment presentations. Group or voluntary life insurance enrollment often hinges on a broker’s ability to make the need 44 | CALIFORNIA BROKER
for the product well understood to employee groups that have neither a base understanding of what they need, nor time to spend thinking about their coverage gaps. There are a number of misconceptions around the need for life insurance and/or selecting additional voluntary coverage, especially among Gen X and Millennial employees. These employees, who have skipped or delayed typical life “milestones,” such as marriage, home ownership and children, may be unaware of the need for robust life insurance coverage or how it can help provide their loved ones with financial security in the event something happens to them. Continue on to the following page to see a few common misconceptions you may hear during enrollment - CalBrokerMag.com -
meetings this fall, and ways you can help refute them.
MISCONCEPTION 1:
“I SHOULD BE COVERED BY MY EMPLOYER’S BASE POLICY.” Group life insurance is often provided as a standard employee benefit. Employees have come to expect that their health, dental and vision benefits also may come with some type of base life insurance coverage, such as a $25,000 policy. While a $25,000 life insurance benefit may sound like a lot of money, many employees may not know the amount of coverage they should have at-the-ready. A recent study from LIMRA found that 4 in 10 consumers don’t know how much life insurance coverage they actually need or what to buy. Not only that, some employSEPTEMBER 2016