The Month of May

As you may or may not know, May is national Disability Insurance Awareness Month. Hurray! Huzzah! For some of you, the next 30 days will be a whirlwind of everything disability and centered on income protection. Promotions, conferences, symposiums, webinars, group enrollments and individual sales. For many others, the month of May is just like any other time of year as you go about your usual business of the ordinary and even the mundane; life insurance, long term care, medical insurance and so on.

So why are some of us so impassioned about this month? What makes the prospects of selling more disability insurance so exciting? The answer is that those of us who specialize in marketing DI do so on a daily basis with much more on our mind than simply a commission. Disability insurance is in our blood, it’s our calling because we recognize its great importance to the working American, and we have seen the financial struggles of uninsured families when an income earner loses his/her physical ability to make a decent living. Many of us have heard the stories and witnessed firsthand our clients who have been saved by the benefits of a disability policy. We have seen them keep their homes, pay their bills, send their children to college even though an accident or an illness has taken their ability to work.

In the grand scheme of things the DI industry is simply a minute fraction of personal-lines insurance sales in this country, and it is often lumped together without fanfare under the gargantuan umbrella of “healthcare.” But disability insurance is so important and so much more than most give it credit.

Disablement during one’s working years is as much a reality as dying and as much a reality as getting sick. You would therefore think that this type of insurance would be prescribed as readily as life insurance or medical insurance, but such isn’t so. DI is relatively neglected, and that is why this month is so important to the greater insurance industry and to society in general.

We need to show the people of this country that they are at extreme financial risk without adequate amounts of personal disability insurance. Their businesses are at extreme financial risk without adequate amounts of business disability insurance. And we need to remind the licensed insurance agents and brokers of this country how to promote DI and how to sell it properly.

Organizations like the International DI Society, the Council for Disability Awareness and Life Happens every year put enormous effort and backing into the promotion of disability insurance in the United States, and May is their month to shine. Please check-out their websites for a vast depository of disability-related information, statistics, videos and tools that you can utilize for your own marketing purposes.

Help promote disability insurance. You owe it to your clients and to yourself.