So what if you have disability insurance? - Main question is: Who is your advocate while go go on claim?

What is Disability Insurance and who sells it?

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Yeah, disability insurance is a great thing, but when you have a mental illness and go on claim, who is your advocate? Do you even have one? How do you know? What do you do if you go on claim? This questions still stun me know as a previous financial planner, because it seems like no one really is being your advocate despite the fact that you may be disabled.

I am mentally ill. I sold myself a policy - several in fact. Who is there to help guide me through the claims process now? An 800#? That's what I thought as I sold these policies to customers. I surely wasn't trained in helping them.

I just viewed my policy provisions from my benefits book as an agent and found a clause that they will have to abide by and give me retroactive benefits on because I am still disabled in the eyes of the government. I still receive Social Security and because of this I earn the right to obtain a minimum amount of disability insurance through my previous employer, New England Financial. This amounts to about $1500 since my claim ended back in December 2006. Who would have called me and told me about this? I doubt anyone!! I had to find this out myself. Advocate for myself for years to be able to get on disability with a mental illness and fight by writing letters and such keeping records of all my conversations with all the right people just to be safe and to be better informed than the general public would take the initiative for.

So I found out I had more benefits coming to me, like for the rest of my life or until age 65 at least.....that's a whole lot of money, like $17,400. But who would have called me and told me that I have it coming to me??? No one! This is crazy. It doesn't matter if you have any insurances or benefits from an employer. You gotta do your own homework and read the fine print, especially if you are an agent of an insurance company. You gotta - we all gotta learn to advocate for ourselves. It seems like we end up doing so anyhow, but this is real crap, because we are talking about a lot of money. I don't intend on getting so better that I end up working again, and so I am due this extra income because of it.

I just don't get it. I am really peeved about having to learn that as a financial planner, I barely found out this benefit myself. I kept my benefits package book for over 5 years and found this small quantity of a benefit in my favor because I was still on Social Security disability claim.

Just be careful, do your homework and don't let your life pass you by without reading all the material you were ever given from an employer, those benefits are worth a whole lot more than you sometimes think!

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