Disability Insurance and dual income household, increase policy with pay raise?

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Hery
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Joined: Fri Dec 11, 2015 5:37 pm

Disability Insurance and dual income household, increase policy with pay raise?

Post by Hery »

Rewriting this question to see if I can get more of a response, I think my prior post was a little long and convoluted.

Here's the short version:
Husband and I just finished medical training and made the jump to full physician salaries at stable academic jobs we both like. We are living off of one salary and saving the other. We both pay for a very low cost employer based long term disability plan.

What should we do with our individual disability policies that are still at our trainee levels? We bought the policies through Principal 6 years ago as interns, the benefit is around $5k/month per policy with the premium somewhere around $160/month.

Top considerations:
-Leave both policies at $5k/month benefit, as we already are living off of one salary and the second salary enables us to somewhat 'self-insure' the other income, and we still have the employer based policy to boot.

-Increase both policies, but not to full income replacement levels. Maybe double them, to $10k/month each? We can afford the premium increases fine but don't want to be overinsured for disability given it is relatively expensive compared to other kinds of insurance.

Thanks for your thoughts!

Hery
Learning every day.
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