EP 63 How to Financially Prepare for the Unexpected Financial Disaster with Tanya Taylor

Are you prepared to cover your bills and expenses if you find that you can't work due to an unexpected life event like a car crash? Well it happened to this week's guest, Tanya Taylor. 

Tanya Taylor, CEO and founder of Grow Your Wealth, shares her personal journey and a three-step plan to help us all be better prepared for life’s uncertainties. She also shares her three-step plan for financial preparedness, drawing from her personal experience of moving to the U.S., building wealth, and overcoming challenges after a car accident. 

Tanya’s story and strategies highlight the importance of proactive financial planning and resilience. By understanding your finances, securing adequate insurance, and diversifying income streams, you can better navigate life's unexpected events

Preparing for the unexpected is not about living in fear but about empowering yourself to handle whatever comes your way with confidence and financial stability.

How to reach the Guest:
Website: https://growyourwealth10x.com/

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Order Tanya's Book: Limitations to Limitless: Seven Proven Strategies to Protect Your Finances From Life's Curveballs

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Chapters

• 0:00 Financial Planning for the Unexpected
• 11:02 Building and Managing Financial Wealth
• 23:05 Navigating Long-Term Disability Insurance
• 29:24 Monetizing Skills and Protecting Finances
• 35:36 Empowering Financial Advice for All

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hola, hola, welcome to the Money Chisme podcast. Today we are going to get into planning for the unexpected. With life having us on the go, with working, family life and just pursuing life goals, sometimes we forget to plan for the unexpected. That can really throw a wrench in our plans. With me today is Tanya Taylor, founder and CEO of Grow your Wealth, to give us her three-step plan on preparing for the unexpected. Hi, Tanya, Thank you so much for being here with me today.

Speaker 2: 0:39

Hi Violeta, Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to our conversation today.

Speaker 1: 0:53

Yeah, so before we get into your three-step plan, I do want to get a little bit of your story, because you did have an unexpected life event, but I want to see the Tanya before that event. So can you give us a little bit of your backstory before that?

Speaker 2: 1:06

Yeah, so my backstory before that is I came to the US at 16. Actually, and as I mentioned to you before, we had some similarities. I came alone, I was undocumented, had $100. And I really just had a goal to escape poverty. My family in Jamaica was very poor, so once I got here, I started to try to figure out how do I build wealth, and some of the things that I did along those lines is at that very early age.

Speaker 2: 1:36

I started budgeting, I decided that I wanted to go to school, so I ended up going to college. But in order to go to college, I had to save. I was undocumented, so there was no student loans. So in Jamaica and across the Caribbean and other countries, we have what's called a SUSU, so I would contribute to a SUSU, save up my money paid for college. So I paid for college in full, graduated debt free, and I had a great career on Wall Street In addition to that, and I had a great career on Wall Street In addition to that, I knew that my job as and I made decent money. I made good money, but I didn't feel like my job alone was sufficient, so I did a couple other things as well. I started doing real estate. I purchased a home, I should say started in real estate. I purchased a home and I did some house hacking.

Speaker 2: 2:22

I did a two family house and rented out two parts of it. I lived on the ground floor and that was able to pay for my mortgage. I also started stock market investment club with some of my colleagues because we wanted to learn to invest as well and we didn't have a lot of money, so we pooled our monies together. And I also started a children's financial education club which I wanted to teach.

Speaker 2: 2:45

For me it was important that once I started learning to give back to the community. So I volunteered in the community teaching personal finance and I also started a children's financial education club because I wanted I feel like we could reach children really early and really start grounding them them. So I did all that and I had a tax practice with my husband. So I had a ton of stuff going on and I really was able to build myself up in a way where by the time I was 48, I already had well over a million dollars in my retirement portfolio. I had saved for my children's for college, so their college education was fully funded and I was living a good life.

Speaker 2: 3:23

I was traveling I've been to about 61 countries so far and then the unexpected happens. I feel like if someone had asked me before the before I had my car accident do you?

Speaker 2: 3:35

feel like you're fully prepared for whatever comes your way. No one can be fully prepared, right. But with everything that I had in place, I felt pretty confident that, no matter what comes my way, I would be able to navigate it financially. And I was in for a rude awakening after the car accident and we can get into that a bit. But I realized how important it is for us to really have strategies in place to help us when we so that, if something unexpected happened, we can navigate it and come out on a good end yeah, I'm glad you pointed that out because you know we were both undocumented.

Speaker 1: 4:17

So we hit the ground running and I feel like a lot of either first-gen or immigrants or similar stories that's what they go for. They start trying to like get the college degree and start learning personal finance and everything. And then you do get to that point because I feel like that's where I kind of am and like, okay, if something happens, I'll be okay, but I'm thinking like smaller things. So I really should start planning if something does happen, like a car accident, especially since I will be moving back to Texas, which is high with car accidents over there. People drive crazy over there. But I want to I'm glad you pointed that out that you thought you were good, you thought you were set, you did all the right things, but then bam, something that you didn't plan for came along. So let's get into that unexplained, that unexpected event.

Speaker 2: 5:17

Yeah. So at the time when I had the car accident it's interesting because I was right at that intersection of do I want to leave my job? I had just started Grow your Wealth, which is my financial education platform, and I was deciding if I wanted to do that full-time, just go all in and just quit my job at the time I worked at the Federal Reserve Bank or do I want to? I was approached by someone who, by a company who offered me a job which is my dream job. It's the job that I said. This is the job I want when I leave corporate America. So I was in the middle of interviewing for that job and I was also. I had also launched my business and it's okay. Which way do I go?

Speaker 2: 5:56

I had over, I had about a year's worth of emergency fund and I'm someone if you ask any of my friends, they would say Tanya has everything rock solid, I have the insurance, I have the emergency fund, I have everything together. And then, out of nowhere, I'm taking my daughter on an errand, A car hits me. I figure, okay, I'll be fine, I was fine after the accident and then I went to the doctor two days later. If I couldn't get out of bed. The doctor told me six weeks and then they'll evaluate me and then we'll see what happens.

Speaker 2: 6:27

Well, it's three years later and I'm still not 100%. So that just goes to show you like planning for six weeks versus living through a disability over three years is. It's hugely different. And the issue as well is that I had a construction project that was going on at my home which I had a large overrun, so I was dealing with that. Then my daughter became ill and her medical condition was not covered by insurance, so that popped up. At the same time, I had a tenant who decided to stop pay rent, and so the income I was getting from that tenant.

Speaker 2: 7:03

She still lives in my house. It's been 21 months and she's still squatting in my house.

Speaker 2: 7:08

So, yes, new York has very draconian laws, so all of those were happening on top of me now losing. I don't know if listeners are aware, but when you become disabled, your job may offer you disability insurance. There are some jobs that do not offer you any disability insurance, or you might get short term and then after a certain time period you get long term, but generally you have to wait at least six months to get long term disability income. So imagine if you don't have anything set aside, you have a car accident and your job doesn't offer the insurance. How are you going to fund your everyday living, even just the necessities, right?

Speaker 2: 7:55

So for me, I was in a situation where I had used up all except two weeks of my short-term disability income at the time of my accident. So I had to wait six months to get any income from my job. So that emergency fund that I had was what I was using, and I'll talk about additional how else you could protect yourself as we go through my three steps. But the thing is, in the meantime, when you're not getting that income in and you have all these expected fees, life expense, expenses that you have every day, plus all this additional expense on top of it, it could really demolish your finances, no matter how prepared you are, and so that's where I was was I had to pretty much be using all my emergency fund within that short window of time just for my regular expenses, plus all those additional expenses that I had tacked on to it which I hadn't expected.

Speaker 1: 8:59

So so yeah oh wow, I can't even imagine how you felt like after that, after working so hard and planning, because it sounds like you're like a planner and I mean everything that you did right and yeah, and bam, one little incident, and there goes everything that you worked so hard for down the drain. So I can't imagine how stressful that would be. And it's definitely. As I'm getting a little bit older, things are starting to hurt, especially, and I'll be like hip issues. My back hurts now for whatever reason, and it's even worse with that. I have a little baby and she's like my back hurts even more. Yeah, but I did want to kind of like go a little bit to your tech talk. You did do a tech talk, which I haven't linked down below, but there was a statistic there that you brought up that I would like for you to share about a disability.

Speaker 2: 9:55

Oh, absolutely, and I feel like it is now my life's mission to start educating people about this, because it was only after I became disabled that I realized the statistics were so daunting, right? So one in four Americans over the age of 20 could become disabled in their lifetime. This is pretty huge, and we're talking about a 20 year old and and older and the disability so mine was from a car accident. It could be from getting some sort of illness, right? You have to be out of work for a long period of time. There are so many different forms of disabilities that you can have, so it's important to understand that even when you're young, you might think that, okay, I'm good, but the statistics and that comes from the Social Security Administration is one in four. That's pretty significant. Administration is one in four, that's pretty significant. And then the other statistics that is also really important is that 44% and the number fluctuates depending on where you're looking at the data, but on average, 44% of Americans who file for bankruptcy do so as a result of some sort of medical issue.

Speaker 2: 11:02

And when I think about it and I look at my case in particular, I could see how easily someone could end up filing for bankruptcy if they become disabled, because when you have all of these expenses piling up at once and you do not have the resources to help you.

Speaker 2: 11:24

The other statistics, what I think most people know about, is that most Americans have $400, barely could find $400 to spend if they lose their job. This came out in COVID when they were saying like $400. It's like the minimum that people have in the emergency fund, if they have any at all. So when you look at each of those statistics, whether individually or just look at it in total, it's really really important that we understand what we're up against and how we can put certain things in place. It is not foolproof, as I could testify to, but at least it could help you to navigate yourself so that you don't end up being one of the statistics that filed for bankruptcy, if you happen to end up being in the statistics of the one in four that end up in a car accident not a car accident, but just end up becoming disabled.

Speaker 1: 12:17

Yeah, yeah, I didn't even think about. Covid was one of those times that maybe you didn't get like although there's people that did get disabled because of COVID but just a pandemic that you couldn't go to work or in loss of income. So things like that can happen as well. So I do want to get into your three step plans. How can people start planning to make sure that they are, or lessen the impact of an unexpected event?

Speaker 2: 12:48

Absolutely, and the first one. It really is something that you're going to hear most people talk about. It's really the first step to even start when you're on a financial journey. It is to really understand what you have coming in and what you are spending, because that's how we can get a true picture of our finances. If you're making $2,000 a month and you're spending $3,000, you're in a deficit every month, so that's either going on your credit card or some other loan, and so you're digging yourself deeper in a hole. It's really important that, at a base level, we're understanding how much we're spending and how much we're bringing in, and if they're not at least equal, then we have to take a good look at our spending habits and start looking at ways to curtail some of our spending habits.

Speaker 2: 13:50

And I'm going to pick from one of your talk that you were talking about for yourself. Like you went out and you bought, let's say, a Louis Vuitton bag or whatever the case is, the question that we have to ask ourselves is do we need? Do we really need? Is that a need or is that a want? And you're going to go through all of your expenses. I would say look at three months of your expenses, and you can do that by looking at your bank account or your credit card bill. What are you spending on? That's not really in alignment with your goal. That also means just making your goals too right. What are your goals really want to achieve, and is that really what you want? And it's not keeping up with the Joneses. So, anyway, once you go, that's exactly what that was.

Speaker 1: 14:31

I'll tell you what it was. I was going to school, young, single, no kids, and I was in the military and they sent me to school and I had an internship, which was a paid internship. So I was like, yes, money. So I was like I was just spending things like my money there. And now it's like why didn't I just put that or invest that? But you know what? I forgave myself. But lesson learned and you learned.

Speaker 2: 14:58

When I listen to you, I really feel like you're a model for many of us, coming up right To look at it and say, oh, I did this, but I understood that maybe I could use this money and do X. And I really believe that if listeners start doing that just looking at their expenses, looking at your income and also, very important, look at your credit card. There is a section in it that tells you the interest rate that you're paying and how long it will take you to pay your debt off If you're paying the minimum. That could be a wake up call as well, Because when you look at the number of years it will take you when you go out and buy something that's on sale but it's going to take you 15 years to pay it off so it wasn't really a sale Then you start to realize so, getting back to like my first step, if you look at what you're spending and you look at what you're bringing in and they're not in sync.

Speaker 2: 15:51

You got to start cutting things out. And I always say to people don't cut out the things that you love, but identify the things that you really it's like. No, I don't really need that. Start cutting those things out and really focus on the things that you need. Also important paying yourself first. I know most people say, oh, I can't pay myself first because my expenses are too high. This is why you're doing this exercise and, automated, when your job sends you that paid, that salary, have them automatically, take a piece and put it into a savings account that you never see it, and that's how you're going to start building your emergency fund, because that's really critical to have.

Speaker 1: 16:30

So that would be my first step.

Speaker 2: 16:33

Yeah, that's a great way.

Speaker 1: 16:36

Yeah, because if you put that like before, it even hits your bank account like I have it for what we have. Ours is called TSP, but it's basically for 1K, so that comes out and everything and I have automatic payments and everything.

Speaker 1: 16:52

So, to be honest, like whenever I'm so used to that and I got so used to like living with the cash that's left over that when I apply for something and they're like, oh, what's your yearly salary? For example, we just purchased a bed because when they asked us that, I was like, wait, I actually have to go back and recalculate because I'm used to this, so it's, but it's not that what is my actual salary? But that's a way to get used to just living a little bit with a lesser salary. If you just go ahead off the bat, just take it and you don't see it, don't count it. And so you were able to save 1 million for retirement. That was your goal, which you ended up hitting that goal, and one of the ways was through your 401k, or how did you?

Speaker 2: 17:41

manage. Yeah, so that's all 401k money. So it's not money that I can touch right now, but some of it from a Roth I could, but nothing that I would want to touch anyway. So, yes, I always had this goal. By the time I hit, I think, it was 45, so it went up a little bit more, but I want to have at least a million dollars and let that continue to grow for when I retire.

Speaker 2: 18:01

And so all all of that, what I started out putting in my retirement plan at 21, and I didn't put the maximum because I wasn't making a lot, I still was learning financially. But what I did and it's another tip that I want to share with listeners is that as I continue to get salary increases, I would pretend like I didn't get an increase and I would keep sacking more money away into my retirement plan until eventually, I maxed out my retirement plan. So, in addition to maxing out my retirement plan on my job, I also started a 401k. Until my income threshold was too high. I could no longer contribute to a Roth because they have thresholds, but I made sure that I contributed. And then the next thing that I did is I became very comfortable with investing. As I mentioned, I started a stock market investment club with a couple of colleagues and I really went out and learned how to invest and how to make my money work. So when I left the job, I would take my 401k plan with me there's a way to transfer so that you continue to have a retirement plan and you don't lose all of the privileges and then I would manage that on my own so that it would grow faster. And I just continued to do that through the course of my career and I was able to hit the million dollar mark For Business Insider.

Speaker 2: 19:19

I had to quantify it and that's when I was like, oh my god, I hit this. Like way before 48. It was a point where I felt like, oh my god, like I really set this goal and I hit this goal. And you would be amazed, like a lot of people don't set goals, they think it's to woo or whatever the case is, but you sit and you set those goals and you start working towards those goals. Yes, and you will be amazed at how, before you know it, when I was 21 and someone said, oh, if you put away this, you'd have a million dollars by X age, it seemed like the weirdest, most foreign, craziest idea to me, like how is that possible? But I went along with it. I was like, okay, at least, if anything, I'm going to have money in in my retirement. That's sort of how I thought about it initially. So I started to grow more in my knowledge and it was like this is actually realistic, I can actually do this. And so I did that.

Speaker 2: 20:09

And even with my children's college it was the same thing where I started out and I was like you know what, if each of my child need, I gave a magic number of 250 at the time, I guess, based on tuition. I was like, if they need $250,000 for college, I would like to send them, give them their undergrad degree without debt. So I'm going to start saving and I started the same process. Most of it was in stock market investing. I did do a couple 529 as well, but majority I just invested in the stock market and I just kept putting money in and because I had knowledge of how to invest, so I did long-term investing. And so I was actually, by the time my children were 16, I had passed that $500,000 mark for them nice, nice, yeah, that that's awesome.

Speaker 1: 20:56

That's where I'm at now. She like I did start a 529 for her and figure out what else I can do to boost that. And I'm at now she like I did start a five to nine for her and figure out what else I can do to boost that. And I'm kind of with my stepson and he has four years left and I'm like what can I do? What can I do to to bump him up? So we're trying to figure out that plan and see how we can help him for his college, especially since he wants to be in california.

Speaker 1: 21:24

I was like really, oh you have to pick one of the most expensive areas yeah, so we're gonna probably work on that plus work on his expectations. I was like you might do like community college first and then go yeah so and scholarships yes, oh, I yeah, I told him it's like you gotta do your part too you gotta do try to get some scholarships and stuff like that as well.

Speaker 1: 21:50

So let's get into your step two, which is get insured, which you were talking about briefly, that which it's one thing. I didn't realize that some jobs offered that like disability insurance. Yeah, let's get into your step two.

Speaker 2: 22:07

Yeah, so this piece. I'm a big advocate of insurance and I like to tell people I've never sold insurance in my life. I have worked for an insurance company and I understand the inner working of insurance products, but never sold it. But I've always been an advocate because I feel like it's the fastest way to build wealth, especially for us who are like first generation, just having life insurance. But in addition to life insurance, there are many other type of insurance products Now in terms of long term disability insurance.

Speaker 2: 22:34

For many jobs they offer both short term disability and long term disability disability Short-term is usually three to six months and it's usually never 100% of your income. So that's something that, off the bat, we have to realize. If we stop working, even if we're getting short-term disability, it's probably going to be a portion of our income. That's why we need the emergency fund to help us to close that gap. Now, once you hit a six-month mark, you now get long-term disability insurance. Once you hit a six month mark, you now get long term disability insurance.

Speaker 2: 23:05

The government, with the exception of a few states, no company is mandated to provide you long term disability benefits, but some companies do. For example, my company did and it's 60% of my salary, and that's what a lot of companies offer, and my long-term disability would be until I'm 65, but there's other nuances to that. Some companies may offer it only for three years. So individuals need to understand what their company offer. And then the next piece that you need is, if your company only offers 60%, if you know that you can't live on 60% of your salary, then you can go out and buy your own private long-term disability policy to supplement the difference. The insurance company may not sell you exactly 40%, because insurance companies are very suspicious and they're probably going to think if you're getting 100% of your income, you're never going to want to go back to work. So when you're buying the private disability, they're not going to think if you're getting 100% of your income, you're never going to want to go back to work. So when you're buying the private disability, they're not going to sell. They might sell you 30% of your income.

Speaker 2: 24:08

So how does that work? Let's say you make $100,000, just easy round numbers. Your company is going to give you 60% of that, if you have one of those companies that do that. So you're getting $60,000, right that? So you're getting sixty thousand dollars, right? You're gonna pay taxes on that and any medical and dental benefits they're gonna deduct from that. Sixty thousand dollars now and in my book I actually do calculations to show you what the big difference is would be in your income. Now you have forty thousand dollars that you have to sell for. How am I gonna get this, especially if you're already living paycheck to paycheck. You become disabled. Where am I going to fill that gap for the 40,000?

Speaker 2: 24:44

So you go out and you buy your own long-term disability policy. I always tell people to shop around, go to at least three companies. It's totally do it. When you buy that insurance policy, you do not pay taxes on it. So if you bought, if you're getting 40,000 for the year, you're going to get that for $40,000. You never have to pay a dollar in taxes on that and it doesn't matter where you go. So if you lose your job today, you still have that policy. And if you buy it with a disability waiver, then when you become disabled you never pay a dollar more in that insurance policy for as long as you're disabled. So that's what helps me.

Speaker 2: 25:25

When I became disabled, I had my emergency fund, so with all the expenses that were coming in for me, even though I wasn't getting an income, I was able to use my emergency fund Right.

Speaker 2: 25:36

And then I had this supplemental disability policy that I purchased on my own.

Speaker 2: 25:42

So when I bought it, when you buy it, you could say let it start in three months or in six months. I had said let it start in three months, so three months into my disability I was getting income from that policy, even though my job policy wasn't paying me for another three months, and so I was able to use that to help to fill the gap. And my policy lasts for five years. You could buy for a longer period of time or a shorter period of time, and that's going to help you to close that gap so that you could continue. You can focus on health and healing. And yes, like for me, I a lot of my expenses, because of some of them were so unexpected. They still exceeded what I was getting from the income from my job and the income from my disability policy. But I was still able to manage because then I went back to my budget and there were things that I was able to manipulate in my budget to help me to do that.

Speaker 2: 26:39

So it's really critical that folks understand that. I know some people like when it comes to insurance, they're like, yeah, it's a scam, it's a this. I call it a necessary evil because when you really need it, it's there to help you yeah, and if I didn't have that long-term disability that I had purchased on my own, I honestly don't know how I would have managed financially over these past three years.

Speaker 1: 27:11

yeah, I'm definitely gonna have to look into that now that my husband cause we're both like military, so we get recovered there, but he's done in October and I'm done next year. So these are things that are starting to I'm starting to think about, and not just for myself, but for my parents as well. They were just talking about some insurance which ended up just being for car, for car accidents, in case of death or something like that.

Speaker 2: 27:42

Oh, accidental death and business, yeah, so I got it.

Speaker 1: 27:46

I have to remind them because I had told them to send me the policies. I could look it over, you know, so I could start researching. I was like I don't know if you still keep that or move on to something else. So insurance is on my to-do list for sure.

Speaker 2: 28:00

And I think I wanted to add one other thing too, because for people who are self-employed, this is so critical, because you don't have a job that's offering you any kind of disability insurance. So think about it If something happened to you right now and I'm speaking to the self-employed individuals now if something happened to you today and you're not able to earn your income, where's the money gonna come from? Because if it's over two year, three year period, your emergency fund is gonna die out. It's gonna be, done so.

Speaker 2: 28:29

unless you are self-sufficient, where you don't need to rely on just your income from your business, then it's really, really important that you get some kind of long-term disability insurance to supplement or to protect you, to protect your income.

Speaker 1: 28:43

Yeah, yeah, definitely a very important step, especially like you said. Matter of fact, yeah, that's what my husband's going to be. He's going to be a 1099. So he's going to be self and that's a whole other beast. We just talked to the tax lady so that way we could figure out what all that means. And so cause we're used to W-2 like on pretty routine. Everything's so simple. So now it's like, oh, we got to figure all this stuff out. So yeah, let's move on to step number three, which is extra income.

Speaker 2: 29:17

Yeah, and it sounds like your husband's going to be doing that. So it's really just utilizing your skill. A lot of us have skills that we don't even recognize that we have. And I think today, with just like technology, there's like so many ways that we can make money. Like for me, I was teaching personal finance as a hobby for years. Right, it was just something that I really felt passionate about and I just wanted to teach others so that they could stop living paycheck to paycheck. And at some point in time I, with the internet, I thought, hey, I could monetize that skill Like there's. So there's such a broad audience that needs this kind of education, why don't I make it into a business? And that's how I ended up turning just the skill set that I had, this passion that I have, into a business and I and if you think about, okay, what am I good at or what maybe I could pick up a little skill at and do and make some money, do it like a lot of times we're afraid to take that step out of our comfort zone and do something, but you'd be amazed at the things that you can do to generate income these days and once you find that thing. You could really turn it into a business where eventually you probably don't even need to work for anyone.

Speaker 2: 30:36

In my book Broke to Wealth, I actually give a step by step process for folks to just evaluate okay, what are my skill set, what am I good at? And here are the commitments that I would need. Like I really tried to break it down Can I do this while I work? How many hours can I spend doing this? Just so that someone can evaluate whether or not I could do this part-time and what would that look like for me?

Speaker 2: 31:04

Because a lot of times people don't make that move because they it's too overwhelming to think about Like, yeah, I don't know what am I good at, but you start narrowing it, you start putting it down on paper and you start narrowing it down and before you know it you're like oh, yeah, I can do this and I could start making money doing it. And then when you make that money, you start putting that money away. I'm not saying, don't spend any of it, but start putting some of it away. If you don't have emergency fund, you start building your emergency fund If you need to, if you're setting a goal for retirement by X age and you don't have enough money, then you start setting those goals and start putting the money towards that goal.

Speaker 1: 31:41

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 31:41

So that's my third step.

Speaker 1: 31:43

Nice, nice, and you did mention one of your books, but you actually have another book that also talks about how to protect a little bit your finances. I can talk a little bit about that book.

Speaker 2: 31:58

Yeah. So the book that I wrote called Limitations to Limit Less 7 Proven Strategies to Protect your Finances from Life's First Ball, that's the one that I really go in details about and do calculations and they're easy calculations because I know sometimes people are scared of numbers and even though I'm a CPA, I'm not a big numbers person, but I walk people through. I walk through.

Speaker 2: 32:24

This is what happens if you become disabled and this is what you can do about it. And then, in addition to that, if you do become disabled and you have to go through the process of getting disability insurance, this is what it looks like. This is what your income would look like, and if you have the supplemental disability insurance, this is what it would look like too. And then what happens after you get the insurance, after you start getting benefits from your employers, because there's a whole. There's so much that I learned as I go, went through the process, in terms of how to file for the claim, what are the things that you need to ensure that you're doing to keep the claim, because the insurance company could just decide to cut you off and, like the one through my job, they've cut off my disability since last December, so the only income that I have coming in, and then I have a squatter so not getting income from there?

Speaker 2: 33:18

is my supplemental policy that I have a squatter, so not getting income from there is my supplemental policy that I have there. What I have found is that the supplemental policy they're governed by a different rules than the rules that your the insurance through your job is governed by, and the insurance through your job, the rules are much more in the favor of the insurance companies and even your job. Like you think that they'll be looking out for their employees' best interest and they would go with an insurance company that's going to look out for your best interest. The insurance company's goal is to cut you off as soon as they can, and so there are certain steps that you got to make sure that you always follow to ensure that you are keeping your insurance, and then you have to follow certain steps to appeal the process.

Speaker 2: 34:08

It's a lot of different things that you have to do, and so I go through those things in the book just to make sure that if someone is in fact disabled, that they understand. But I always tell people it's better to know before that it happens to you, right? We hope that we never become disabled, but if you are empowered with that information, at least if something were to happen to you, and my idea of the book was like almost like a guide to help people to navigate the stressors of what to do to protect yourself, so that, if you become disabled, these are the things that you need to do to ensure that you remain protected. So that's my limitations, the limitless which I just published, I think, like a week and a half ago or two weeks ago.

Speaker 1: 34:49

Oh, really, oh yeah, I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna add it to my my, my book list because I definitely need a. Um that one sounds like a great book that I need to read yeah, I really feel like that.

Speaker 2: 35:04

People, really people. My goal every time I do something or put something out there is how can it empower individuals to really improve their finances right? And so my first book broke to wealth how to build solid, a strong financial foundation and implement effective strategies. That's to help you. If you're getting started, you want to build your finances, you want to do all that, and as I was writing that book, I thought I don't really talk about the disability and all the nuances of that. So I really need to help people, give them that guide, and that's how this book came. Came about because I had no intentions of writing it and then as I kept thinking about it more.

Speaker 2: 35:41

It was like I think this book is really important for people to have, and so here it is awesome, awesome, well, thank you.

Speaker 1: 35:49

Lots of great advice and lots of tips that are very important, especially based on the statistics and with everything going on. Thank you for coming on here and sharing your tips.

Speaker 2: 36:04

Oh, thank you so much for having me. I think this was a great conversation and I really hope that your listeners will benefit from some of the information I had to share.

Speaker 1: 36:13

Oh, for sure, and I'll have all your social media, your website, your both books linked down below. But other than that, that's it for this episode. Hasta la proxima, bye. Thank you so much. Bye.