Most affluent clients can tell you exactly what their investment portfolio is worth. They know the value of their business, real estate holdings, and retirement accounts. But ask them to estimate the value of their future earnings, and you'll often get a blank stare.
That's interesting because for many highly compensated professionals, future income may be their largest asset.
A 45-year-old executive earning $1 million a year could generate tens of millions of dollars in earnings over the rest of their career. Those earnings may fund everything from lifestyle expenses and college tuition to investment opportunities and estate planning objectives.
Investment Management Executive Case Study
Yet it's an asset many clients rarely think about protecting.
The Hidden Gap
As income grows, financial plans become more sophisticated. Business owners expand operations. Physicians become partners. Executives move into larger compensation packages.
Along the way, advisors revisit investment allocations, tax strategies, and estate plans.
Income protection? Not always.
The issue isn't necessarily that clients lack disability coverage. More often, their income has outgrown it. What was adequate five or ten years ago may represent only a fraction of today's earnings.
Debunking Four Disability Insurance Myths for Ultra-High-Income Clients
A Different Way to Start the Conversation
Instead of asking about disability insurance, try asking:
"What is the value of your ability to earn income over the next 10 to 20 years?"
It's not a question most clients have considered. It also shifts the discussion from insurance products to wealth preservation. That can lead to some valuable follow-up questions:
- How much future wealth depends on continued earnings?
- Which financial goals would be affected if income stopped unexpectedly?
- Has income growth outpaced existing protection strategies?
- Does current coverage reflect today's earnings or yesterday's?
When Coverage Exists, But Capacity Doesn't
Many successful clients already have disability coverage in force. The challenge is that traditional disability programs may not fully address the income replacement needs of executives, business owners, physicians, attorneys, and other high earners. In those situations, the issue isn't whether coverage exists. It's whether enough protection exists.
Clients spend a great deal of time protecting assets they've already accumulated. The bigger opportunity may be helping them evaluate the asset that's still creating future wealth.
Because portfolios, businesses, and estates don't appear overnight. In many cases, they're the result of years of earned income.
And sometimes the most valuable planning conversation starts with helping a client recognize the value of that asset before it's put at risk.
