Insurance For Geeks? 15
esobofh asks: "It's commonplace to find actors and athletes insuring specific body parts against damage in the off chance that those body parts might sustain damage great enough to prevent them from earning an income without their use. Now that I'm making the big geek bucks, I wanted to explore insuring my hands. In the event that something might happen to them that might prevent me from typing, I want to cash out and "allow them to recover" in some tropical country - does anyone know which agencies would do this? and what sort of policy I would be looking at?" C'mon. If actors and athletes can do it, why not geeks?
Simple (Score:1)
More importantly, they rely on their physical body parts to do their jobs. An athlete losing a leg is not the same as a geek getting RSI.
OTOH maybe they just have more money to spend on this insurance. I don't think we can afford this. Besides - I dare you to try convincing an insurance company that you REALLY have RSI, and aren't faking it to rake in the cash.
I see one or more of these things happening:
1 - your pain is in your mind. Get a shrink (hey - it happened to my dad after a car accident)
2 - our doctor poked you and couldn't find anything wrong. There IS nothing wrong
3 - RSI isn't a "real" injury
4 - Have someone tail you 24/7, watching for you to pick up the remote control for your TV. Ah hah! His hands work!
5 - Screw off. We don't want to pay you. See you in court. Good luck getting the money, jerk!
From experience, I can tell you that the above are all true and have happened to people I know who really needed their insurance companies to come through for them. Instead, they got injured AND shafted. These companies suck up money from you and never give it back.
It's called disability insurance. (Score:1)
What you're looking for is disability insurance, more specifically, own-occupation coverage. That way you won't have to look for a job doing something else. Many tech companies offer short-term disability insurance, but I haven't seen one that offers long term without you having to pay for it. In my experience you can usually find a better plan on your own. You'll want to read up on this. There are a lot of factors to consider, e.g. how long you're out of work before you collect benefits, etc.
Re:Simple (Score:1)
I am not blind now. IF I GO BLIND TOMORROW, I am screwed. I can't learn Braille overnight. My employer wont be able to afford all the blind-access kit overnight. I know several people who work in this industry that are similarly handicapped, and they do fine. But most of them have had years to adjust. I wouldn't.
And RSI does more than hurt. YOU CAN PERMANENTLY LOSE FUNCTION if you ignore RSI. I know. My sister almost did.
-j
Re:Simple (Score:1)
I know of a network engineer who got his CCIE a few months ago. He's blind since many years
There are many ways to use computers if you have some kind of physical problems. And as stated before, there are other interesting tasks which do not require typing all day long
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Lloyd's of London (Score:1)
See Lloyd's homepage [lloyds.com]
Re:Diversify! (Score:1)
It's always good to have a backup plan.
Insurance for specific body parts? (Score:1)
Re:Diversify! (Score:1)
Any actor could still go and work for Pizza Hut or Burger King with or without a leg and this would defenitely increase the profit of the fastfood company he or she is working for. So for them, would be no problem to get an other job either. It is just a question of what you pay for the insurance.
The real problem I see is, that the insurance would make you pay a real lot of bucks for insuring your hands or eyesight. Famous actor could rather afford this than geeks with good salary.
Re:Diversify! (Score:2)
Does that mean that I.M. Pei could've taken a couple of days off and cranked out UNIX or TCP/IP all by himself if they'd kept the coffee coming?
Diversify! (Score:2)
Even if all you've ever done in your life is programming, being suddenly unable to program should not make you useless. Ok, you can't program any more. But you have years (decades?) of experience: instead of programming, teach others to program. Or move into architectural design -- most of the work there is thinking, drawing pictures, and handwaving -- or even move into (gasp) management.
In my opinion, a programmer who can't do anything other than program probably isn't a good programmer. And we're all good programmers, here, right?
Re:Simple (Score:3)
Bull fucking shit. It's very simple.
I'm a sysadmin and network engineer. If I get RSI, I can't type. If I lose my sight, I can't perform my job. Find me an employer on this planet that will pay me to tell someone else what to type, and never, EVER require me to touch a keyboard myself. Find me someone who will wake up with me at 4am, to tell me what the monitor says, because the webserver went down or the edge router lost a line card.
My roommate is a sysadmin and a programmer. If he loses his sight, he's boned. If he gets RSI, he's boned. Noone's going to sit there and tell him what's on the screen and type for him.
This is just like what happens to if he loses a leg in an accident. Or if he loses an arm, or his sight. He is -BONED-. He can't be a quarterback or baseball player anymore.
-j
Re:Simple (Score:3)
Disability insurance (Score:3)
All of these circumstances can be carreer threatening. Some of them might be short term problems and others may be life long disabilities. When I first started being a responsible adult and storing money away for retirement I spent some time talking to various people who could help me guarantee at least my financial health. Beyond the typical advice I got of "invest early and often" was "get disability insurance". I wasn't too keen on this at first, me, disabled? It'd never happen!
The person who first brought this up explained to me, through statistics, what the probability of an average person losing wages over various periods of time were. I realized that these were lumping western society together as a whole, and included an awful lot of delivery boys, grocery clerks and construction workers who may not have the best sick time policy (of course this probably goes for a lot of ISPs as well!) and may involve a lot of abuse of the body.
So where does this fit in? Basically disability insurance covers you when you can not work for whatever reason. There is some minimum period of time you have to be unable to work before it kicks in, and the shorter the time the more money you spend on it. You don't have to be permanently disabled. If you're hung up in the hospital for 2 months in traction you'll probably be able to work again, but in the mean time your earnings may halt. This is where the disability insurance can cover you, it will provide some percentage of your wages. Your health insurance covers the hospital costs, the disability insurance lets you pay your rent, feed your goldfish and keep your house heated. I won't get into specifics because I only know my coverage and it seems personal somehow
Anyway, as an example, an aquaintance of mine needed his voice to do business. He lost it for a long period of time, way beyond laryngitis, and eventually he used up his sick days. The disability insurance kicked in and kept him solvent.
You probably would find it hard to insure a specific bodypart. Most of those policies are more for publicity than anything else. It's also a bit shortsighted in my opinion because there are a lot of things that can go wrong and prevent you from working. Sure, the lump sum may be a nice idea but its probably not realistic and would also probably only happen once. You'd get one vacation for your carpal tunnel syndrome and then be told to go suck rocks after they cancelled your policy.
Quitting over a little thing like bad hands (Score:4)
Lots of gotchas with disability sinurance (Score:5)
Here are some things to look out for:
- Long-term disability won't pay for the first 30 days or 60 days or whatever is specified in the contract. To cover the first 30 or 60 days you would need either accured vacation/sick leave, savings, short-term disability insurance, or some combination thereof.
- If you pay for disability insurance with pre-tax dollars and you become disabled, you have to pay income tax on your disability check. If you pay for disability insurance with after-tax dollars, your disability check is tax-free.
- The maximum benefit for disability is usually 60% of your pay (for the past year) per year, to provide a disincentive to claiming disability to induced chronic fatigue or something. Thus, if possible, you want to pay for disability insurance with after-tax dollars so that the benefit will be about the same as your current take-home pay.
- If your employer offers disability insurance, I believe there is something that prevents you from buying disability insurance on your own, but I don't know what it is, whether it is a law, a tax disincentive, or an underwriter policy.
- Disability insurance doesn't pay past age 65, so make sure you get enough coverage so that you can still contribute to your IRA with your disability benefit check.
- Policies vary widely in what consider a disability and what benefits they will pay out and whether you're allowed to make some money on your hobby when you're disabled. Some policies (like those $10/month policies offered by most employers) will try to make you flip burgers if you at all can, and then say you're not disabled and not pay anything. That's why if you're serious about disability insurance you have to go to a Cadillac $100/month policy -- not many insurance companies offer good policies anymore, but Minnesota Life [minnesotalife.com] still does. Also, if you've been a member of IEEE [computer.org] for a while, you're eligible for their Financial Advantage Program [ieee.org] group policies. Their disability insurance [ieeeinsurance.com] is almost as good as Minnesota Life's.
- Look for automatic inflation adjustment of benefits.
- You will have a choice between "level payments" and payments that increase as you get older. Since most of us aspire to early retirement and financial independence, get the latter of course, so you can simply cancel when you reach that point and not have wasted any money.
- Disability insurance is cheaper if you can get two or three buddies to do it with you. You can save 10-20% this way.
- The amount you pay depends on your profession. Some dangerous or high-risk professions don't qualify at all. So for a programmer, not only has the insurance company taken into account the possibility of carpal tunnel, but also brain damage, automobile accidents, etc. In other words, you're not a special case -- they've done this before. A supermodel insuring her legs is a unique case. A programmer insuring his hands is not -- it's simply disability insurance.
The short of it is that it is very expensive to not be financially independent. I think the goal of all Slashdot readers is to get to that point as soon as possible. In the meantime, disability insurance will ensure that in case of major accident or illness you can maintain your current standard of living.