Today on Radical Personal Finance, I'm going to sell you a disability insurance policy. Now hold on. You don't have to hold on to your checkbook too tightly. Unfortunately for me, I dumped my insurance license so I can't actually collect the commissions on it or on the many policies that I would sell if I actually were still selling them.

But I'm going to do my best to actually enforce the concept today because I'm pretty hardcore passionate about disability insurance. I believe it's the most important insurance that you could own. And I promise I'll defend that claim in today's show. And I just think it's something that any intelligent thinking person who works should have.

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you for being with me today. This is the show where we work hard to provide you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while also building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

But you know what? That plan is predicated usually upon your ability to work. So today, a little bit of knowledge about what to do if you can't work. I received an email from a listener a few weeks ago and they said, "Joshua, I've heard you make this statement several times on different shows that you really think disability insurance is important.

In fact, you think it's the most important insurance that I could own. And so I was thinking about getting some. So I went to your website and I was looking through the archives for a show on disability insurance and I didn't see a show on disability insurance. Can you help?" And I said, "Yeah, that's actually my fault.

I haven't actually created that show." So here we are about 350 episodes in and it's time to create this show on disability insurance. And this show will be a series of shows, especially this week and more in the future. I've been remiss in not getting it done sooner, but I'm happy to bring it to you.

And today, we're going to kick it off with the sales job. Because here's the thing with insurance. Insurance has to be sold. I don't know why more people don't think about stuff that could happen and go out seeking for it. But the whole concept of insurance, many people have a grudge against insurance.

They don't like spending the money on the premiums. They love to collect the checks when they come in, but they don't love buying the policies. Most of us, if we had our way, we'd probably skip all insurance and we'd probably skip most of the insurance that we have now if we didn't – hadn't been sold it.

Why that is, I don't know. I share that same feeling. I don't love insurance in the sense that I don't love writing those premium checks. But when the policies pay out, they're useful to have and it's one of those things that you just kind of got to recognize. So because we got to start with a sale, I first got to do my job of motivating you to want disability insurance.

Because if I don't do a job of motivating you to want disability insurance, it doesn't matter any of the technical specifications that we're going to go through. I'm going to go through a lot of them. We'll go through long-term disability versus short-term disability. We'll go through employer-paid – excuse me, group disability at your job versus personal disability insurance.

We'll go through whether or not you should pick up the money for the premiums in your income or not. We'll go through own occupation and any occupation. We'll go through the different terms of disability. We'll go through the different timing of the policies, how long they last. We'll go through a bunch of those things to try to give you a good understanding of the disability insurance marketplace.

But today, I just want to sell you on the concept and I want to talk to you about why I think it's important. I really do believe that disability insurance is the most important insurance policy that you can buy. I mean it. I believe it's the most important insurance policy that you can buy.

To prove that point, I want to start by talking to you about which of your assets are most important to you. So we're going to play a little game here. I'm going to give you a question and you're going to think of the answer. Unfortunately, I can't hear the answer but I'm going to give you time to come up with it.

So here's the game. I want you to stop mentally. If you're driving in the car, you can keep driving. But just think for a moment about all the different assets on your balance sheet. Most of you have listened to the show for a while. Hopefully, you've gone and created a balance sheet so you could pull it up on your phone and show it to me if you wanted it.

So think about all of the different assets that are on your balance sheet. Think of that list of assets on your balance sheet and tell me which of those assets is the most important. Which asset is the most important? I could also ask you the question and say, "Okay, of those assets on your balance sheet, which one is the biggest?" Because when we start to think about protecting an asset with insurance, we want to think about it in the context of protecting the most important assets first.

For example, your balance sheet most likely doesn't have something like a cell phone on it. But most of you have a cell phone. The majority of you who are listening to the sound of my voice right now are gaining that – are accessing my audio file through the use of a mobile device of some sort.

Now most of you probably paid a couple hundred bucks for that mobile device depending on which type it is. Well, that's a useful and important asset. And some of you have insurance on that asset. That might make sense in certain contexts. It might not make sense in other contexts.

But the way that we would figure that out is largely based upon how much we paid for the device. So for example, I have a cell phone. It's a pretty fancy cell phone. It's basically a $1,000 phone. I have an iPhone 6S Plus with the way overpriced Apple memory that they give you, the high end.

So basically it's a $1,000 phone. Well, that $1,000 phone, if that thing broke or became inoperable, I'd be hurting a little bit. I don't like to throw $1,000 around and waste it. So should I put insurance on it? Well, we could make a much higher argument for the benefit of putting insurance on it if I paid $1,000 for it than if I paid $100 for a phone.

It would be a much bigger deal. So should I put insurance on it? The point here is just simply to point out that bigger assets require insurance policies or at least lead to considering more seriously getting an insurance policy. So think back to that list of assets. What asset did you list?

Well, most of you, your house would probably be the largest dollar value asset on your list of assets. So many of you would put your house as number one. Your house is a pretty important thing. It's kind of hard to be without it. It's pretty tough. I've been watching over the last few weeks these fires that have been happening in Alberta, in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, and it's pretty devastating to see thousands of people lose their homes.

Pretty devastating. So the house is obviously important. Some of you might list your car. Maybe you rent a house and you say you don't have that on your balance sheet but you have your car there. Well, is your car the most important asset? Many of you are diligent savers.

You have savings accounts and investment accounts. Perhaps even those accounts are much bigger than your house. So perhaps those are the most important assets. But there are a couple of assets that usually most people don't think to put onto this list. If I were sitting in front of you in a sales situation which I were actually selling you a disability insurance policy, I would have put these assets on the list and I would have asked you to order these assets in order of most important to least important.

I would have written down your house, your car, your savings, and your investments and would have added these two assets, your health and your income. Now obviously these aren't exactly the same and we don't generally write down your health on your balance sheet. Usually you wouldn't accurately at least following normal rules of accounting, you wouldn't actually list the value of your income on a balance sheet.

So it's a little bit unfair of me to phrase the question I did. But are these not assets that should be on a mental balance sheet? I've done this little exercise thousands – not thousands, hundreds of times. I've done this exercise hundreds of times and with many different people from many walks of life and usually when I put this list of five or six assets in front of people and I give them a pen and I ask them to order and rank the assets in order of most important, most people start off with their house just like I did in my example.

And then they get down to that health and that income one and the way I used to do this in a sales presentation was I wouldn't try to – it's not a leading question. I would just say, "What's the most important? Put a one by it. OK. Now what next?

What next?" And I would force people to go through the whole list. After going through the whole list down by the time they reach their health and income, they always stop and they say, "Well, wait a second. Actually, these are important." And almost without exception, people would come out and realize and recognize that their health is their number one most important asset followed quickly by their income.

The reason is because of what your health and your income contribute to those other assets. Your health is what enables you to earn an income. Your health is what gives you the ability to go to work, to go to your job or to run your business. That's all based upon your health.

Without that health, it's hard to keep a job down. So your health allows you to create an income and then the income is what actually pays for all of those other things. Because most of those assets that we list on our balance sheet are actually – if we were to follow Robert Kiyosaki's ideas from Rich Dad, Poor Dad, they're actually liabilities in the sense that they pull money from our budget.

The only exception to that would be savings and investments. But our houses, most of them for most of us, they pull income from our budget. They require upkeep and maintenance and mortgage payments and tax payments. Our cars, they pull income from our budget. Not very fun. So those assets are actually dependent upon our income for us to keep them going.

Now, health is definitely number one for most of us. Health is something that we often take for granted. I'd like to challenge that for a moment and encourage you to constantly consider it. If you have health, you can earn income. If you can't earn income, then you will quickly lose the rest of your things.

Question, would you rather have tons of money and no health or would you rather have great health and no money? Think about it. I magically transport you into a million-dollar mansion on the water and you are financially independent. You have income that shows up, pays all of your bills and you're lying there flat on your back in that mansion with a bald head because you're going through chemotherapy and radiation for cancer treatments and you don't have the energy to get out of bed by yourself.

But you're in a million-dollar mansion and all your bills are paid. So you lie there in your bed and you look out at the water. Would you rather be in that situation or would you rather be fit, healthy, filled with energy, active, vibrant, flexible, strong and just not have any money to your name?

I often go down to the beaches here in the area and I always notice there's some people hanging out at the beaches that seem to be there every day. And you can go down and you can hang out as a poor person and walk on the same beach that the rich person's house overlooks.

If you're active and you're healthy, you can go and jump in on a volleyball game and if you're active and you're healthy, you can bum a little food off of people and if you're an interesting conversationalist, they'll be happy to invite you in and you don't even have to pay for it.

It's a pretty good deal. If I'm active and healthy, I can enjoy the day and the simple pleasures of the day to a far higher extent than if I'm unhealthy. Now I'm not saying that you have to choose between poverty and health. If you have health, you can actually earn money.

And think about how many incredible ways there are to earn money if you're healthy. From time to time in the past, I'd go out and rent a drift boat, go out on a fishing charter here in South Florida where I live. I got a few friends that are commercial fishermen.

I've gone out with them fishing for the day. I think about commercial fishing because on these drift boats where you're basically for tourists and people who want to go out for a day, there are always a couple of deckhands. And it's their job to bait the hooks and help people take the fish off their hooks and just basically be deckhands to help the tourists and the non-fishing natives with their fishing excursion.

I think about things like that. I just think, you know what? That's a really satisfying job to some degree. You're out in the sunshine. You're helping people have fun. You're fishing. You're enjoying the emotion of it. What's required of it? Well, you got to get up early. You got to be out in the sunshine.

You got to scrub the boat down at the end of the day. But you know what? If you're out on a lot of friends' boats and they're out enjoying their expensive boat because they have very lucrative careers and they have a beautiful sport fishing boat, guess what you got to do?

You got to get up early. You got to go out in the sunshine. You got to throw a hook in the water and you got to clean up the deck when you're on your way back and scrub the boat down. So does it really matter whether you're doing it on your own boat that you worked and saved for years or whether you're doing it as a deckhand at a relatively lowly paid job on a commercial fishing boat?

It's the same work. The person who's in good health can enjoy both of those things. So not only is health generally – does that not lead to a better life and a better lifestyle versus sickness. So even if you were poor, it's OK. It's better at least. Better to be healthy and poor than rich and sick.

That's also what allows you to earn money and there are so many great ways to earn money. See, health allows you to create income and income allows you to build wealth. But if you lose your health, people will happily spend every dollar they have to try to get their health back.

You ask a sick person what they want most, it's to get their health back. So there's a little encouragement for all of us to focus on our health and to make that a priority. Now is our health entirely under our control? No, it's not. To some degree, we influence it.

We can make certain choices and decisions that will help but it's not under our control. Man is so incompetent and impotent that he can't even keep himself alive or healthy if he wanted to. Again, you can do your best but you don't necessarily have that choice all the time.

There are things that happen that result in our not having health. Well what's worse than being healthy and broke? Being sick and broke is worse. So what happens if you lose your health and you can no longer earn money? Well, that's where disability insurance comes in. That's the job that disability insurance is designed to do.

It's designed to help provide income to pay your bills if you lose your health. So back to that list of assets, how important is this list? Well let's say I own a house and pretend it's a $250,000 house. Probably have a mortgage on it, have a pretty healthy balance if I were reflective of most people.

That's a sizable asset though. The car, maybe I have a $20,000 car. Maybe I have $50,000 in my savings and investment accounts. But what's the value of my income? People often neglect to calculate the value of their potential income. Let's pretend you're 35 years old and let's pretend that you intend to work till 65.

So you've got a 30-year career ahead of you. Assume you're earning $60,000 per year and that you anticipate a 3% increase each year to keep pace with inflation. Do you know what the actual value is of that income? The answer is $2,854,524.94. We'll round that to just under $3 million.

Almost everybody listening to this show has a potential income of perhaps $2 million. Some of you it's a million, some of you it's two, some of you it's 10 or some of you it's 50. But just about everybody has a potential income of at least a couple million. Even if you were to go to work at 45 or 50 years old and work for a decade or two, you still are looking at a million or $2 of income.

That's a huge, huge dollar figure. So if we actually write that on the income, on the list of assets, when you write down $3 million, for most of us, that totally dwarfs everything else. When I used to do this face-to-face with prospective clients, I would first love to point out the fact that – because I always created the balance sheet and then I would point out the value of this income.

I would say, "Listen, you are going to earn $3 million over the course of your lifetime. Now you're looking over here and you got $10,000 of credit card debt and you got $14,000 that you owe on your car and you got $22,000 of student loans and $142,000 mortgage. And you're feeling really upset and frustrated about that.

That's okay. But look, you've got $3 million over here that I expect you to earn over the next 30 years. $3 million." Now do you think that it's possible that you could put some of this $3 million and clear the credit card debt, clear the car payment, clear the student loans, pay off the mortgage and possibly save a few hundred thousand or a million or two bucks?

I mean you put it into context, yes. The answer is always yes. You could do that. So what stands in the way? Well, behavior, which is the most challenging thing for all of us to control, behavior. Because in order for me to actually do that, to pay off the car, I have to not go and immediately finance a new car.

In order to do that and pay off the credit cards, I have to not immediately go and put more money on the credit cards. But when you look at it in the big picture and compare the $3 million to the things that stress us out today, that should give most people some hope.

Now let's talk about it financially. Think about the amount of money that you pay to insure these things. The way I used to do this with clients and I invite you to picture it in your head was I would draw a little picture of your car on the left-hand side of a paper right in front of you.

Draw a little picture of your car and I would know by this time in the discussion, I would know how much your car were worth. So let's say it's worth $20,000. Ask you how much you're paying for car insurance. Paying $100 a month. So I would write $20,000 over the car and I would write $1,200 underneath it, $1,200 a year.

Then I would draw a picture of your house and by this time in the conversation, I know how much it were worth. So I'd write down $250,000 and ask how much you're paying for homeowner's insurance, $3,000 a year. So I'd write $3,000 a year under that. Then I would keep both of those pictures pretty small.

Then I would draw this huge box, this big, big box and I would write in there and I would do the math for them, $60,000 times 30 years, 3% to 5% increase in annual pay and I would put a range on there. But I would write down $3 million.

I'd do my best to make it comparative, to show you how huge your income is compared to everything else. Then I'd draw a little line under it and I'd ask my good sales question, "How much is that worth to you to protect?" I invite you to consider it because you pay $1,200 a year to insure a car and you do that because the government makes you do it.

But the car is worth $20,000 and you pay $3,000 a year to put insurance on your house. You do that because the mortgage company makes you do it. But yet you've got a $3 million asset that you don't have insurance on? Seems a little silly to me. Now that should, I hope, set the stage for you to consider the value of disability income insurance.

There are lots of other statistics and things that you could go to. When I was a new insurance agent, I memorized all these numbers about the rates of morbidity versus the rates of mortality. Morbidity means getting sick and how likely you were to get sick and hurt at any specific age and I memorized all these things.

I used to use all these charts and graphs. Finally, I threw all that stuff away and just drew pictures for people. I hope that I've drawn a mental picture for you to simply demonstrate that it's really important. Again, what's worse than having no health? Having no health and having no income.

Because you're spending your money trying to get your health back, well how are you going to live? That's why I personally believe that if I could only choose to have one type of insurance, I would choose long-term disability income insurance over any other type of insurance. Because that's the one that will make the biggest difference in my life if I face a worst case scenario.

Let's talk about it. Let's say that I get diagnosed with cancer. I've had for a long time, I've had an outline here of doing a show. I haven't done it but basically it was inspired by a listener who about a year ago wrote to me and said, "Joshua, I had heard you talk about getting disability insurance.

I never did it. I just want to let you know I have cancer." We corresponded a little bit and he told me all the details of his life. I've been intending to do a show, what do you do when you get diagnosed with cancer? He's a young man, similar in age to me.

Thankfully, he's doing better now. Cancer seems to be in remission, just finished up the final stage of his treatment. But it's been a difficult road for him. Let's talk about that. Let's say that I all of a sudden found out that I were diagnosed with cancer. Let's start with the simple ones.

I have a house and I have homeowner's insurance on it. Well, if I'm going through cancer, how am I going to pay the homeowner's insurance if I don't have income? Even if I have homeowner's insurance, I can't even keep it because I'm not going to be able to make the payment if I don't have income and don't have savings.

Same thing with car insurance and those types of property insurances. If I don't have income and I have cancer and I can't work, and this listener of mine was an accountant, he couldn't work. I'll cover the objections, people, reasons people don't get disability insurance in a minute. But he was an accountant, he couldn't work.

So it's kind of pointless to have property insurance when I can't even keep the property insurance in force and I probably can't even keep the property if I don't have any income. So car insurance and homeowner's insurance are pretty easy. Well, what about life insurance? Would I rather choose to have life insurance or disability insurance?

Frankly, if I could only choose one, I'd rather have disability insurance. Here's why. If I get sick or hurt and I die, is that going to be tough on my family? Without question, yes. That will be very tough on my family. If I have no savings and no insurance, it will be very, very difficult.

If I have a wife and young kids, it would be tough. But you know what? They'd make it. How do I know that? Well, there's people who face this all throughout history, who face it all the time. My wife would go and get a job. There are hundreds of thousands of single moms supporting single-handedly, either because they were abandoned by their children's father or because their child's father's children's father died.

There are hundreds of thousands of single moms working and supporting children. There are social support structures that would step in and help out. There would be a social security widow and orphan payment for my children, guaranteed. So they would have some minimum level of income. Because I'm dead and gone, my family can work out whatever living arrangements need to be worked out in order for them to be able to make it financially.

They could sell the house if we owned a house. They could move to a cheaper apartment. They could move in with family. If my wife had to move in with her parents or my parents or a family member of some kind, this is normal. This is how these situations work.

Because I'm dead and I'm gone, she's free to step in and take over the work, take over the financial responsibility. She can do that. And because I'm dead and gone, my expenses have stopped. She doesn't have to feed me. She doesn't have to clothe me. She doesn't have to cart me around.

She doesn't have to have an extra car for me. Simple. Now, let's flip it. Let's say that instead of me being dead, I'm just simply pretty sick. Well, now what? Well, now none of those things happens. I forgot to say my wife could remarry. She could find someone else and marry somebody else who would be able to help support her and the children.

Well, if I'm sick, she can't do that. She's still stuck with me. My wife and I kind of made an agreement that until death do us part, so she's stuck with me. We said in sickness and in health, so she's stuck with me. What about our living expenses? Well, it's kind of hard to sell the house when you're dealing with a sick husband.

Kind of hard to move apartments when you've got to figure out how do we take care of this person's medical care. There's no income coming in. Is it possible to get social security disability? It's possible. I highly recommend you never, ever plan on getting it. You've got to be really, really disabled to get it.

You've got to be disabled for a while and there's got to be almost no chance of you're ever getting better. I have worked with some people in social security disability claims, people who are without question utterly entitled to those benefits the way the law is written. It has been a nightmare to get it.

Guess what? When you get it, it ain't much, especially if you're young. A friend of mine that tries to live on about $600 a month to support herself because she got social security disability, fought it for years to finally get it. If anyone is disabled, she is disabled. Very difficult situation.

So let's just assume there's no social security disability payments. I could get into the technical reasons of why if those of you who want to nitpick me about that, but just take my word for it. You've got to be very disabled. You've got to be totally disabled, unable to do any gainful employment for an expected period of a very long time.

So what are the options? If we have no income, how is she going to – she's got to go to work? Who is going to take care of me? Who is going to take care of the kids? Well, family can step in and that's always what happens. But the point is it's far easier on her if I'm dead and gone than if I'm simply disabled.

Disability is much more difficult on her because now she goes and gets a job. Family steps in, takes care of me. Well, guess what? She's got to go take a job and then when she comes home, she's got to take care of me and she's got to take care of kids.

So instead of two kids and a husband to help her with, now she's got two kids and a third kid, meaning me, who's more work than any of the kids. Very, very difficult. So I'd rather have disability insurance than life insurance if I could only choose one. What about health insurance?

Well, health insurance is really useful. And if you have great health insurance, it's possible that that could entitle you to great medical care. But you know what? If you're broke, we've got a whole system of Medicaid that's designed to pay for that. Is it going to be the best care that you could possibly get?

It's always been a hard question for me to answer. My experience has been you're going to get care no matter how broke and bankrupt you are. And we've decided this is an important program. The program is there. It pays for it. So you're going to get Medicaid even if you don't have any money.

You're going to get medical care if you don't have any health insurance. Let's say you don't get Medicaid. Let's say you just pile up a million dollars of medical bills. There's bankruptcy courts to help you get out of those debts. Or after you get better, you can work with the creditors.

You can work to negotiate them and you can work to pay them back. So if you have giant bills, giant medical bills, you can deal with those things. But you know what's really difficult to deal with? A landlord. He's kicking you out of an apartment. A mortgage company that's foreclosing on your house while you're also dealing with the medical bills because your income is not just for you.

Your income is also for your family. You might be in the hospital or you might not be in the hospital. But if you're not in the hospital, how are you going to pay your rent if you can't work? You're just trying to recover at home. So if I had to choose between health insurance and disability insurance, I'll take the disability payments.

The health insurance I can deal with at a future time. The health bills and all those things, I can deal with those. When I'm better or if I'm not better, I can't deal with them. And I'll say thank you very much to the creditors. I can't pay you. What can we do?

And I'll work that out. But if I have at least $3,000 a month or $2,000 a month or $20,000 a month, whatever the number is of disability, then I can possibly keep my mortgage paid and keep from getting foreclosed on. I can possibly keep some rent coming in. I can possibly have enough money to buy some groceries.

I could possibly have enough money to keep the car going to be able to maintain some semblance of normal life. And the cool thing about disability payments is legally in most states, they're going to be entitled to protection. So your creditors are not going to be able to come after disability payments in most states that I'm aware of.

However, practically, it's pretty easy to evade those who would seek to attach that money. If you just have an income, that's a contract between you and the insurance company. You can get that income and you can pay your bills the same day, the bills that you need to be able to stay in your house and you can be in good shape.

So I'll take the disability insurance. What else? Long-term care insurance? These usually function and complement. Disability insurance usually goes away and long-term care insurance kicks in at the end of life. But guess what? If I'm needing long-term care, I'm disabled. I'm disabled. So if I need long-term care as a 30-year-old, that's a situation that would pay out under the context of a long-term care policy or also under a disability policy.

So I truly believe that disability insurance is more important than all of the other insurances. Now the cool thing about insurance is generally, it's pretty inexpensive. Disability insurance costs more than term life insurance, usually not nearly as expensive as health insurance. It varies depending on how you compare it to long-term care insurance.

It's going to come out to be 1%, 2% or 3% of your income depending on what type of policy you buy, what policy design constraints you put into it, what type of occupation you have, safe occupation, not safe occupation, etc. So it's super, super important. I hope that's persuasive to you.

That is probably more important than some of the other insurances that you have. Now does everybody need disability insurance? My answer, no, absolutely not. People who are financially independent don't need disability insurance. If you or your family is not dependent on your income to maintain your lifestyle, you don't need disability insurance.

You might still choose to have it. I think there's a compelling argument to be made to have it, especially when you get into it from the perspective of trying to protect very high incomes. People who have invested years of work in their education and years of work in establishing their career to build a very high income usually have an appreciation for the value of that income.

Usually this comes in with highly compensated physicians, very knowledgeable and very inclined to have disability insurance, highly compensated professions like attorneys, things like that. These people are usually open and much more interested in having disability insurance. For physicians it's generally considered to be mandatory, perhaps because they work with a lot of sick people, who knows.

But it's a big deal to have it. But you don't need it if you're financially independent. So if you are retired or you could retire without any impact to your lifestyle, you don't need disability insurance. The rest of us need to think about it. Now why don't people get disability insurance?

There are a few reasons. First, many people can't get disability insurance. They can't get disability insurance because of medical reasons. They might have had a previous situation that resulted in them being sick in the past. Disability insurance underwriting can be very challenging. All kinds of little things can come into play.

I had many, many people declined. I had many people experience problems in underwriting because they have to be very, very careful. You have the possibility – the probability of adverse selection against the insurance company. So people who have been injured in the past are much more motivated to get the insurance than those who haven't.

Same problem they face with health insurance. People who have been sick in the past are the first people to sign up and say, "Yeah, give me health insurance." People who are healthy usually don't want to spend the money. So they got to deal with adverse selection. It can be difficult for some people to get with a medical history.

It can also be difficult to get with certain occupations. There are many occupations that are simply not insurable for disability insurance, at least not by commercial companies. You have to work really hard sometimes to get certain types of coverage. Now a knowledgeable insurance broker should be able to shop – if you are looking for disability insurance, a knowledgeable insurance broker should be able to shop you around to a bunch of different companies.

What you will find is that there are different companies who specialize in different occupations. There are some companies that will not accept anybody in this occupation. But there are other companies that will do a great job in that occupation. You would be surprised at where these lines fall. For example, when I was with – the company I was with didn't insure chiropractors, just flat out refused to accept chiropractors.

So you get into certain medical specialties and these jobs are simply not insurable. So many people have trouble because of their occupation. Many people have trouble because of their hobbies, their avocations. If you're jumping out of airplanes or flying airplanes, things like that, those can result in difficulty getting disability insurance.

Many people have trouble getting disability insurance because of financial qualifications. That can be a few things. First, you have to qualify based upon your income and some people have group benefits, things like that. So they are going to deal with what they have at their group. Many entrepreneurs and self-employed people have a very difficult time getting disability insurance.

They can't get disability insurance right now, new business. New business has to – you have to show your earnings record. One of the challenges that entrepreneurs face and people who are business owners is the amount of income that they show on their tax return and the amount of income that they actually experience are usually two different numbers.

The disability insurance underwriter is going to go based upon your profits. So when we talk about strategies to show a lower income in order to save on taxes, that's really great when it comes to taxes. But that hurts you when you go to apply for a mortgage and it hurts you when you go to apply for disability insurance.

But many times, the reasons people just don't buy disability insurance is because they're apathetic. They've already spent and allocated the money to something else. It's very challenging to get a normal middle class family to – who's not accustomed to buying disability insurance to happily and eagerly fork over $250 or $300 or $350 a month.

Very challenging from a sales perspective. Many people, even though they buy everything that I said and they said, "Yeah, I get it," and you can look at statistics until you're blue in the face. It doesn't matter. That's why I just don't even bother going to the numbers. But you can look at those things until you're blue in the face and it's $300 a month or it's $200 a month or it's $150 a month.

Then what's often is men. Men are the worst and I get all these stupid excuses. The standard two excuses is that men give. Usually women are much smarter. In fact, women are much more likely to get – excuse me. Men are like – yeah. Women are more likely to get disabled than are men.

Men are less likely to get disabled. Men die sooner but men are less likely to get disabled than women. So for women, your disability insurance actually will cost you more than for men. For men, life insurance costs more than for a woman. For a woman, disability insurance costs more.

But for men, the standard two things is, "I'll work even though I'm sick." You heard it every single time. "I'll work even though I'm sick." If you're a man and you're listening and you have that consideration, I just ask you, have you ever been sick and not felt like going to work?

Most of us have. Sometimes you just can't work. Sometimes you do your best. Sometimes you can't work. You got to acknowledge at least – you would have to at least acknowledge it intellectually, whether you admit it emotionally or not. That's up to you. But you got to at least acknowledge intellectually that it's possible to get in a position where you're still alive and you're still functional to some degree but you can't work.

The second thing is usually men will make some motion that involves an imitation of a cocked gun pointed to their head and they'll say, "This is my solution." I never had any idea that so many people were suicidal until I started working at the disability insurance marketplace, which, man, is utterly absurd.

You're going to take the fact that you're disabled and just the fact that you're disabled means that you can't go on living and you somehow expect that you're disabled but your wife is going to leave a gun in the drawer next to you? She's smarter than that, buddy. You're going to do that to your family?

It's nonsense. So those are just the two objections that always annoyed me that every single man would present to me and I – anyway, it just always annoyed me. But that's the background on disability insurance. That's my sales pitch to you. So I urge you to consider it. I urge you to consider the value of it.

I urge you to consider what you have, what you don't have. We'll talk more about that in coming episodes. But I hope that it's somewhat compelling to you to at least look into it, to at least be open to it, and to at least think about it. What happens is disability insurance is not sold as aggressively as it should be.

That's why I don't get into a lot of the debates about – people want to get into debates about what insurance agents should do and what insurance agents shouldn't do. One of the things that people who comment, the biggest debate is term life insurance versus whole life insurance. Often, I want to pipe into that debate.

It's like do you understand why life insurance agents sell whole life insurance? Because people want to buy it. When you talk about term life insurance and whole life insurance, people want to buy whole life insurance because they get their money back. Oftentimes, these very intelligent financial people who have run all the numbers and run all the math will go through and say, "Why do people – why are the majority of life insurance policies sold whole life insurance?" Because people want to buy it.

They don't want to buy term life insurance with throwing their money away. The sad thing is that – well, not a sad thing, but the reality is people buy what they want to buy. Insurance agents find it easier to sell into a willing marketplace. But here's what I would beg of you.

First, please consider buying disability insurance if you're a consumer. If you're a life insurance agent, please work really hard to sell disability insurance. One reason I never got that involved in the whole life insurance thing is usually if I work with a young family, the first sale I'm going to make is disability insurance.

I would frankly often keep from talking about life insurance because if I – until the disability insurance was either sold or rejected, until the prospective client had made a firm decision yes or no. I knew that most people at this point are convinced that they're going to buy life insurance.

Most thinking parents, young parents, they know they need to get life insurance. They'll go ahead and get some term life insurance. But I always worked really, really hard to get disability insurance put in place first because it's more important. Usually by the time you use up your budget, you look at the amount of dollars that are available and those dollars get sucked up by disability insurance and a term life insurance policy.

You don't have any time or money to get on to anything different. That's the reality. So I urge you, please be open to it if an insurance agent talks to you about it. Investigate it if you haven't. You will find a difficult time finding insurance agents who are experts in this.

That's what set me on this last thing. Many insurance agents have gotten beat in the face so many times by people saying, "I don't want that. I'll just grab the 45 in the drawer next to me and I'll take care of things," that they give up and they stop pushing through to find out what's right and to push through to what's right.

I've met so many financial advisors who primarily specialize in investments. I talk to them about disability insurance. I can't do it. It's just too hard. People don't want to buy it. So you got to work hard as an insurance agent to do it, to sell disability insurance. I encourage you, please do it.

If you are a listener who's skeptical about disability insurance, go and find an old seasoned life insurance agent, somebody who's been in the business for 30 or 40 years and ask them the number of their clients who have been disabled and who are out on claim or who've been out on claim for disability versus the number of clients that have died and they've paid a death claim.

I've done this. What you find is that many old life insurance agents have a much higher number of their clients out on disability than death at a premature age. Now, the numbers on this are hard to parse and I'm specifically avoiding saying them, but you have a higher probability of being disabled at an early age than you do of dying at an early age, a much higher probability.

So you've got to focus on that. The reason the data is hard to parse is simply because everybody dies. You're guaranteed to die. You're not guaranteed to be disabled. But if you look at even your own personal experience in your own circle of contact and ask yourself how many people have been disabled at an early age versus how many people have died at an early age, I think you'll find a similar fact pattern emerge.

That's my sales pitch for you on disability insurance. We'll get into more details in future shows. I hope this is useful to you. I hope this is encouraging to you. If you agree with me or disagree with me, I'd be welcome to your comments. I have had lots of people that disagree with me on which insurance I think is most important.

But I'm telling you, I'll take it every time. I'll take disability insurance every time over any of the rest of them because the rest of the insurances protect somebody else. Life insurance protects my family. I love them. I want them to be protected. Health insurance protects the hospital and the doctors and to some extent me.

Disability insurance is income and money in my pocket. That protects me. Really feel strongly about it. That's it for my show today. Two quick things as we go. I've had great success with many of you scheduling phone calls for personal consultations with me. I just announced that in the last couple of shows.

If you are interested in speaking to me or consulting with me on something specific, please go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/PhoneCall. That service is now available to you. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/PhoneCall. Things like this would be a great point of discussion. I don't have an insurance license so I won't tell you buy this one or don't buy this one.

If you want to talk about whether you need it or not, I was on a consulting call on Friday and the listener said, "Do I need disability insurance?" I said, "Yes. Here's why." Or excuse me, I said, "No." In that case, I said, "Yes, you need life insurance. No, you don't need disability insurance because of some other extenuating circumstances." That's a great conversation if you want to get on the phone with me and talk about it.

If you want to get on the phone with me, you can put me on the phone with you and your insurance agent or somebody that you're working with. If you just want a second opinion, an unbiased third party who's knowledgeable and experienced in your corner, we can do that.

If you want to have a consultation, I've done a lot of career counseling in the last few days. We've talked a lot about proper job selection, investment plans, how to invest for financial independence, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/PhoneCall. Also, thank you to those of you who support the show and I would wish that many, many more hundreds of you would consider doing it.

If you gain value from the content that I present to you here, please consider becoming a patron of the show. Details on that program at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Patron. A buck a month would be helpful. Ten bucks a month, 14 bucks a month, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Patron. Thank you for listening.