Questions on DI

[Scottie]

I'll be a new resident in just a few weeks and have been working with an agent to purchase DI. One of my debates has been on he COLA rider. I think I would feel better playing it safe and spending the extra $20/month for a compounded 3% COLA rider. My question for him was whether or not I could drop that rider at a later time. He wasn't sure and seemed to think I couldn't do that. Some stuff I've read on here makes me think otherwise. Could I drop that rider later? And if so, would I have to go through underwriting again?

The other question I have is concerning the participation limits. The limit on the policy with Principal I am leaning towards is $17k/month of individual and 30k/mo with group. The individual limit covers about $300k pre-tax income in my state. So while that is a sizeable amount of money, I'll realistically be making more than that. My question then is, if I want more DI to cover that, how would I best go about doing that? Would I be able to buy more individual DI through another policy in the future? Or is that 17k/month include all DI policies and I would be unable to get more individual DI? The agent seems to think the max I could get is $17k/mo and I would not qualify for more coverage through additional individual policies. I'm not sure if he is correct on this?

[Dreamgiver]

Towards the end of residency add another policy so you can layer them in order to get to where you need to be. It will start getting expensive real fast.

[Scott at MD Financial Services]

Scottie,

You can drop the COLA or pretty much any other rider when you want to.  Some features are embedded even though they look like a rider, Ameritas enhanced residual is required for physicians as an example, so you can't drop that.  You can typically extend waiting period and reduce benefits as well.

As for putting a layer on the policies you can do that.  Just buy it as a combo today, 3/1 or 4/1 to get the FIO features to hit the $25k/$30k based on today's limits.

Personally it sounds to me like the rep you are dealing with does not engage much in the disability business as the answers you are asking are pretty common place for us on a daily basis.

Let me know if we can help further.