A disability that ends your paycheck doesn’t just cut off income — without a plan in place, it also cuts off the retirement contributions you were counting on for decades to come.
The Real Odds Are Higher Than Most People Assume
About 1 in 4 of today’s 20-year-olds will experience a disability lasting a year or more before reaching retirement age, and roughly 1 in 7 adults between 35 and 65 will face a disability lasting five years or longer. In a recent survey, 26% of respondents said they would be forced to draw down retirement savings if they became disabled — not a hypothetical, a stated plan.
A Different Problem Than Tapping an Account Early
Our disability and retirement accounts guide covers what happens on the way out — the SSDI-vs-IRS-disability distinction and the 72(t) early-withdrawal exception once you’re already pulling from an account. This is the prevention side: insurance designed specifically so a disability never forces that withdrawal in the first place.
How a Retirement Protection Rider Works
Standard long-term disability insurance, whether through an employer group plan or an individual policy, typically replaces only about 60% of base salary and stops there — it says nothing about retirement contributions that would have continued if you’d stayed working. A retirement protection (or “retirement savings continuation”) rider is a separate optional benefit that specifically continues contributions into a retirement account on your behalf while a disability claim is active, sized to roughly what you were contributing before.
Why the Group Policy Gap Matters
Most employer-provided group LTD plans don’t include this rider by default, and the ones that do often cap it modestly. For anyone relying primarily on an employer’s group policy, a supplemental individual disability policy with a retirement protection rider is worth pricing specifically because it closes a gap the group plan was never designed to cover.
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