Helping clients understand the unseen impact of changing jobs

One of the things I believe consumers really need to understand is that you need to own and control your own benefits outside of your occupation, because you cannot depend on your employer anymore to be married to you for the rest of your life. Whether you divorce them or they divorce you, they still own the benefits. The problem is that when people really begin to become aware that is a problem, they’re in their 50s. Their health has changed. The timeline they had to really begin to use these tools in an effective way is shortened, so it takes a lot more capital to make them occur in a holistic fashion that’s really going to work.

I use a lot of coaching techniques, which is to ask questions: “Travis, I understand you love your job right now. Tell me, how long do you see yourself staying there? Are you going to retire here? Why do you think you’re not going to retire there? What do you like about there? If you left there, what would you have to have at your next job in order for you to go there?” Answers are very different with the millennials than it was with my generation. For those guys, they will say the benefit piece. They actually are looking for benefits, whereas we tended to be the baby boom children — “I’m looking for the money. I don’t necessarily care about the benefits.”

You walk them through the question and have a revelation that the benefit is going to stop. What if your new employer doesn’t have that benefit? Would it be valuable to you for us to put it in place so you own and control it on your own? Then you could make the decision of what job to take based upon the cash, not on the benefit. Would that matter to you? If it does, then that flips the switch on that strategy.

If it doesn’t, then you can begin to have the conversation a little bit of “What do you think you’re going to look like at age 50? Are you going to be as healthy as you are now? Are you going to be as mobile as you are now? What are things going to look like?” So you really try to question them into that revelation as opposed to telling.

From a product place, I think that, through the questioning, you’re going to discover what keeps them up at night the most. Then you drill down on the product recommendation as to that worry. Because if you try to cram critical illness down their throat and their main concern is “I’m the primary breadwinner, what about my paycheck?” then you’ve missed the disability.

Angelia Z. Shay, CLU, ChFC, is a 19-year MDRT member from Glen Allen, Virginia. Hear more from Shay on the MDRT Podcast: