Planning for the What ifs in your life

Cindy Frantzeskos, Director, BDO Employee Benefits, Johannesburg

What if you are faced with the LifeQ of disability? Until you’ve been there, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Sharon’s story

My sister, Sharon, was the breadwinner for her family when she was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. This situation would have been financially detrimental to her and her family if she did not have the dread disease and disability cover provided by her employer as part of her group life risk benefits.

Sharon did not have any other type of risk or life cover in place because she was already struggling to keep her head above water financially, as she also had a disabled son she was looking after.

Fortunately for her, her employer had put together compulsory cover for all its staff, which was automatically deducted from her salary each month.

Her group benefits paid a tax free amount equal to about 75% of her monthly salary to her, which enabled her to stay home and get better. She said that if she did not have this benefit, she would have had to make other more drastic plans while dealing with her health issues, like selling her house and moving in with family. The state disability benefit that many people rely on is only about R2000 a month. This would not have covered even her most basic needs while she was unable to earn an income.

She also received the dread disease benefit of one times her annual salary, paid out as a lump sum amount upon her diagnosis. This enabled her to cover some of her larger medical and other expenses.

Jonathan’s story

The owner of a large media house, Jonathan, asked BDO Employee Benefits to do an audit on his risk cover. Upon review, we advised Jonathan to add dread disease cover to his employee benefit plan, as it was such a small cost for the benefit, but one that could really make a huge difference.

Luckily, Jonathan decided to implement the additional cover, as about a year later he called me and informed me that he had just been diagnosed with cancer. He said the hairs on his arm stood up – remembering what I had said a year ago – and having the cover really helped him on his cancer journey.

Real-life benefits for real-life events

There are so many of these real-life stories that we deal with at BDO Employee Benefits and BDO Wealth. Anything can happen, and the impact of dread disease or disability can be of a temporary or a permanent nature. 

Implementing the risk benefits for employees on a group basis makes it far more cost effective and there are generous limits, such as staff not needing to undergo medicals for underwriting purposes. In contrast, an individual life or risk policy usually has a longer process of medicals, blood work and underwriting, and a more expensive premium.

Becoming disabled hits you on three fronts:

1. Emotionally

2. Financially

3. Physically

Ensuring that you are taken care of financially will impact positively on you emotionally, as well as physically. As an employer, if an employee is not taken care of, it affects the morale of all staff as they might think: That could be me!