Benefitting from Benefits
Shanna Lehmann Wolf is a financial representative at Creative Financial Solutions, a full service financial planning firm in Fairfield, New Jersey. She helps individuals and families analyze their employee benefits to coordinate them with their personal needs and circumstances.
Each year, there is one chance to make a benefit election that will affect your costs and medical care for the entire year. Particularly when dealing with a recent diagnosis or a treatment plan, planning is important for the year ahead. Open enrollment is your annual opportunity to choose health and insurance benefits that reflect what is going on in your family’s life and what you may anticipate for 2017.
The first element to analyze is how you (and your family) have utilized your medical plan and insurance options during 2016. Then consider what changes have happened over 2016 or you foresee in 2017 that will affect your needs and therefore, elections. During open enrollment, there may be opportunities to purchase life or disability insurance at work. The enormous advantage to this is you are being considered as part of a group so that your individual health history or status is not analyzed, and you are able to take advantage of group underwriting. This could be a prime opportunity to secure insurance coverage that individually would otherwise be challenging or unaffordable for you to obtain.
The cost of participating in a group benefit is usually favorable to the dollars it would cost for you to obtain a benefit individually. Be sure to analyze the array of benefits available to you so you can maximize on your coverage most efficiently and economically. As someone facing a cancer diagnosis, it is helpful to have a discussion with a professional who can educate you on your options.