It is important as an employer to protect your most important asset, your employees.

Group Life Insurance

There are many plans to choose from and there is no right or wrong answer in selecting a program for your company. You have to think about how you would like to fund the plan, how much you and your employees want to contribute, and how much you want to contribute for your employees, if any.

You can provide term life insurance which is fairly inexpensive and provides substantial amounts of insurance or you can look at a whole life program which provides cash value for retirement purposes.

In Group Life insurance a single contract is issued which covers the lives of multiple persons.  The employer will receive the master policy and the employees will receive a Certificate of Insurance which summarizes the coverage terms and explains the employee's rights under the contract.

Generally, a group plan has a lower cost than individual insurance plans because the administrative, operations and selling costs are much less to the insurance company. The employer either pays the premiums, if the plan is non-contributory, or collects the funds through pay-roll deductions and advances the funds to the insurance company if the plan is a contributory plan.

There are basically two types of insurance plans for group life insurance programs:

Term Life Insurance – an annual renewable term (ART) policy is the most common plan and provides the lowest cost life insurance coverage. Participants do not have to provide evidence of insurability each renewal period.

Permanent Life (whole life) Insurance – there are several variations of the permanent life insurance option:

	Group Ordinary Plan –  if the employees contribute to the plan they are allowed to own the cash portion.
	Group Paid-Up Plans – a combination of term life insurance, paid by the employer, and whole-life insurance, paid by the employee.
	Group Universal Life Plans – the employee pays most of the premium payments; however, they are given certain latitude in selecting the amount of insurance and the premium amount to be paid.

Group Disability Insurance

Group Disability Insurance offers you and your employees a paycheck after an accident or sickness. The waiting period involving this product, usually can be as short as one day for accident, and eight days for sickness. The cost of group disability insurance is usually cheaper than buying it on an individual basis.

Group Disability Insurance provides coverage to each qualifying employee by issuing a certificate to a master plan contract. The coverage consists of the payment of a percentage of the plan participant's wages lost due to an illness or accident, subject to a maximum monthly payment.