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What if the greatest financial threat to your family isn’t dying too soon, but surviving an illness or injury without a paycheck? Welcome to the dibrokerWest podcast. I’m Doug Lenhoff, and this is the show where we ask the question, but what if I don’t die? If you’ve watched TV or streaming video lately, you’ve probably seen the commercial about the healthy young father who has a stroke, passes away, and fortunately had life insurance. But that story overlooks a far more likely outcome, surviving the stroke with a disability that prevents him from earning an income.

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So we ask again, what if I don’t die? Should income protection or disability insurance be one of the first risks that a young father or mother considers? Today, I’m joined by Jonathan Lenhoff, regional representative with dibrokerWest. Jonathan, it’s good to have you on. But I got a question for you today.

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What is a client without an income? I don’t know. What is a client without an income? Well, to a financial advisor, it’s a problem. Very good.

So Jonathan, you work with a pretty specific type of advisor. Why don’t you describe who you’re trying to reach out to? Yeah, Doug, I work with advisors that are very successful in what they do. And quite frankly, they don’t have time to focus on one additional product line.

These professionals are really good at investments, retirement planning, estate planning. Some even are very good at risk management. But disability insurance doesn’t tend to be on that list.

And it’s not because they don’t care. It’s because they’re already stretched extremely thin. So why does disability insurance specifically get left behind? Well, first and foremost, it can appear very complex.

There’s a lengthy underwriting process, you need to know the detailed product knowledge in order to get that client across the line. And there’s ongoing service requirements, year after year after year. For an advisor who isn’t having the disability insurance conversation on a day by day basis, getting proficient within disability insurance can cost real time or can take, excuse me, real time and energy.

For an advisor who’s already highly proficient in the area of business where they focus, doesn’t make a lot of sense to focus on disability insurance. Well, what happens to the client in the meantime? Well, that’s the real problem. Many clients remain financially vulnerable despite otherwise comprehensive planning.

Income protection is fundamental to the financial plan. But if an advisor doesn’t talk about disability insurance, well, there’s an elusive reality that they’re fully protected. And the advisor ends up stuck between some pretty uncomfortable options.

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If the advisor is not going to talk about disability insurance, they have a couple options that they can take. They can either navigate the conversation anyways and risk losing credibility on a product they don’t know well. They could refer the client to another advisor and potentially expose this relationship to another office.

Or they just avoid the conversation altogether and again, give the client this elusive reality that they’re fully protected. For a lot of advisors, these are the only options and none of these options are good options. And that’s where Easy DI Quote comes in.

Tell us where that is. Easy DI Quote is dibrokerWest’s direct to consumer disability insurance platform built specifically for financial professionals. The idea is simple.

Let advisors stay focused on their most profitable and specialized work while making sure that their client’s income is properly protected. We take the disability insurance workload off of the financial professionals plate. And what does that look like exactly? The advisor introduces the need, we handle the rest.

We do the case management. We do the underwriting navigation. We do the application support.

And then we do all of the ongoing service year after year. The advisor doesn’t need to be a disability insurance specialist. They need to recognize when the conversation should happen and hand it off to us.

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Well, I imagine the concern of the advisor when they hear handed off is losing control of that relationship with their client. How do you address that? That’s the first thing that we built this process around. We understand that the relationship between an advisor and the client is extremely important.

And it’s something the advisors want to protect. We protect this relationship by guaranteeing that any additional product needs that come up in the process are always passed back to the advisor. Whether it’s an IUL, an annuity or long term care planning.

We only focus on one aspect and that’s disability insurance. Well, what about keeping the advisor in the loop while the case is moving? Transparency is a necessity. Advisors are included on all key communications.

We include them when the application is submitted. We let them know when underwriting requirements come up that aren’t completed. And then finally, we let them know when the policy is approved and what the policy was approved as.

Nobody gets surprised. And before we ever make a recommendation, we confirm that the proposed solution aligns with the advisor’s overall financial planning strategy, complementing their process, not running parallel to it. What about fee-based or fee-only advisors who have specific compliance considerations? We handle that too.

In fact, we work with a lot of fee-only advisors. And the reason being is fee-only advisors can’t participate within the commission. But they still want to make sure that their clients are properly protected.

With fee-only advisors, we use signed third-party authorization forms that allow us to share case progress information appropriately while keeping everything compliant. It’s a detail that matters a lot in this scenario. And we’ve built the process around it.

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So for an advisor who’s on the fence, what’s the case for making the call? Any successful partnership has to do three things. We have to make the business easier to do, Doug. We have to solve a real problem.

Otherwise, there’s no real purpose in having the conversation. And then we must strengthen the relationship between the advisor and their client. Easy DI quote does all three.

And if we can do all three while providing a small commission to the advisor, then partnering with us is a no-brainer. At dibrokerWest, disability insurance is what we do every day. It’s our specialty.

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It’s our job. And our job is to help advisors address income protection confidently without pulling them away from their work they already excel at. Jonathan Lenoff from dibrokerWest.

And everyone out there, thanks for listening to the dibrokerWest podcast. If today’s conversation made you think a little differently about protecting income, that’s the goal. Life insurance matters, but so does having a plan.

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If you survive an illness or injury and can’t work, if you’re an advisor, this is a great conversation to have with your clients. And if you have questions, we’re here to help. I’m Doug Lenoff.

And again, thanks for joining us. Thanks, Doug.