Getting Extra Disability Insurance - Do It!

We had a meeting with our financial advisors last night. This was our second meeting and we got this huge folder of our "plan". We started in three areas: my insurance, getting private insurance for my partner, and budget.

My Insurance-
Health-
I have insurance through work for free. Work offers dental and vision for a small
monthly amount- I already took them up on those.

Life- free 10,000 basic from work - will add more next year before we get a house

Long Term Care- None

Long Term Disability- I already had this through work - starts 90 days after you stop work- standard 60% of pay, but WAIT. 60% of pay? I had never really thought about this. I figured since this was standard then we would be ok...right? right? no. This is 60% of pay that can be taxed. NOT ENOUGH. The advisors pointed this out and steered us to get more long term disability coverage for myself. I am the only one with a steady income at this point and we would be screwed without it. They said that pretty much everyone needs to supplement the long term disability plan included with work insurance. Additional cost- around 50-55 bucks a month. This gets an extra 1,000 a month in case I need LTD. This is also free from taxes.

Short Term Disability- None. We can handle a sucky 90 days.


Next, private health insurance for my partner. She is currently attending culinary school and will have no insurance at the end of August. She can't get any from school. Our advisors showed us a well established company. We can get insurance for her for $100 a month. She will most likely get 25 dollar co-pays. We are waiting to get back all the info from the company. This was good news.

Finally, the budget-
We gave them our numbers from what we have spent what on for the past 4 or so months. I told them that they weren't 100% on the money. More needs to be allocated for clothing, gifts, household, etc. Pretty much what we came out of this meeting with was this:

We need to save around 800-850 a month. This will allow us a $10,000 emergency fund in the next year (we already have around $5,000) and $10,000 to put down on a house.

This will be a bit of a stretch. It is going to hurt, but we will figure it out. They showed us having $1600 free at the end of each month, but we have only been saving, at max, $700 a month. Some of that extra that they show is from our numbers being off for different budgeting categories. My goal is to get that 800-850 dollars into savings each month. I might do it a little differently and keep putting some of that "savings" money onto my car note to pay it off faster. I did the numbers and we should come out at the same point. I will take the car payment amount, after it is paid off, and just drop that into savings.


Plans! Ouch!