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Infinite Banking in Delta

A great deal of income in Delta depends on a body that works. A thirty-year premium assumes it keeps working, and there is a specific question to ask about that before signing anything.

Three communities, one municipality

Delta is Ladner, Tsawwassen and North Delta, three places with little in common beyond a council. Ladner keeps its fishing village core on the Fraser arm, Tsawwassen runs down to the ferry terminal and the Tsawwassen First Nation lands, and North Delta sits on the slope above the Fraser facing Surrey. Burns Bog, one of the largest raised peat bogs in North America, occupies the middle, and Deltaport at Roberts Bank is the largest container terminal in Canada.

What matters financially is the kind of work: port and terminal operations, trucking, agriculture on the Ladner and Westham Island farmland, trades, and marine work. A great deal of it is physical.

The question nobody raises early enough

This is the page's central point. A participating policy asks for premiums maintained without interruption for decades. Every presentation assumes the income continues. Almost none asks what happens if it stops for a reason other than death.

Most insurers offer a waiver of premium benefit, usually as a rider bought at issue, under which the insurer pays the premium if the insured becomes totally disabled as the contract defines that term. Three things about it are worth knowing before you are shown an illustration.

It costs extra, and that cost belongs in the premium you are deciding whether you can afford. Its definition of disability is contractual and specific, and definitions differ between insurers in ways that matter for physical work: some require inability to perform your own occupation, others any occupation, and the second is a much harder test to meet. And it generally must be added at issue. You cannot add it later when you need it, which is the whole point of raising it now.

Ask three questions before signing. Is the waiver included or extra? What exactly does the contract mean by disabled? And is there a waiting period before it takes effect? A practitioner who has not raised this on a page like Delta has not thought about who is reading.

What group disability coverage does and does not do

Many employers here, particularly at the port and in unionised trades, provide short and long term disability coverage. It is valuable and it is not the same thing.

Group disability replaces a portion of income, typically well under the whole, and often for a limited period. It generally ends with the employment. It does not pay your insurance premium as such. A household disabled and living on sixty per cent of one income will find a long-dated premium is the discretionary item, and that is exactly when a lapse does the most damage: a lapse with an outstanding loan and an accumulated gain is a taxable disposition arriving in the worst possible year.

What the strategy asks

Cash surrender value stays below cumulative premiums for many years, commonly more than a decade, so an early exit is a loss. Dividends are not guaranteed: they are declared annually by the insurer's board based on the participating account's experience, and the scale can be revised downward.

Size the base premium against the income you are confident of, and put overtime and seasonal capacity into paid-up additions. In most contracts the base premium is the binding obligation and additional deposits are the flexible part. For physical work that structure is not a refinement, it is the difference between a plan that survives an injury and one that does not.

British Columbia rules and where it does not fit

Insurance in British Columbia is regulated by the Insurance Council of British Columbia, and a professional here holds a Life Insurance Agent licence. Verify it in the Council's public register and ask how the person is paid. British Columbia has no title protection statute of the kind Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick have enacted, so titles carry less information here than elsewhere.

A household without an emergency reserve, or carrying high-interest consumer debt, should deal with those first, and a household whose income depends on physical work needs a larger reserve than one whose does not. Nothing on this page is advice. No assessment has been made of anyone reading it, and the author is not a neutral party: he is licensed to sell the contracts this strategy uses and is paid a commission when one is placed. Bring your group benefits booklet and read what it says about disability before the first meeting.