Parents have a responsibility to each other and to their children. They can fully utilize benefits given by their employer to help take care of the family. When making benefit elections you should think about life and disability insurance, health insurance, and retirement benefits.
Life and Disability Insurance
Life insurance is foundational to your financial plan. Life insurance benefits will help your family with funeral and medical costs, debt, and income in the event of your passing. Life insurance is important at any stage of life and can help ease the burdens of unexpected costs for your family members. Disability insurance helps protect your pay in the event you become unable to work. There is long-term and short-term disability. Short-term helps for a few months if you become unable to work due to injury or illness. Long-term disability will kick in after short term ends.
Health Insurance
Health insurance is an important piece of benefit elections. This can be especially important when you have children, or plan to have children. Medical care is expensive, so insurance is paramount to taking care of your family’s health. Health insurance is especially important because you never know when serious illness or injury can occur. Health insurance helps to cover expenses, so you are not financially burdened by illness. There are other benefits you can enroll in such as dental care. Dental and orthodontics are essential to your family’s health and much more affordable with insurance coverage. Braces are much more affordable when you have dental insurance.
Retirement
Retirement is an important piece of the benefits from your employer. This will have a great impact on the future and will determine your income during retirement. During open enrollment periods, you should review contributions and make sure your contribution is enough for the full employer match. You may even want to increase your contribution. Even if you contribute 1% more this can have a big impact on your retirement fund. You can make changes to this throughout the year, but open enrollment periods can be a great time to make sure you are getting the full benefit.
Taking care of your family is an important job. There are many benefits you can enroll in to help with this task. When making benefit elections you need to think about life and disability insurance, health insurance, and retirement.
Check out this article on what you need to know about open enrollment!