The people you most need to keep are covered by the same plan as everyone else.
Group coverage is built for the middle of a workforce. Life and disability schedules cap out well below what a senior leader actually needs, and the gap is invisible until the year it matters. Executive benefits close it without restructuring the plan underneath.
Income replacement is a percentage until it hits a maximum.
Disability and life schedules are usually stated as a multiple or a percentage of pay with a hard dollar cap. For most of the workforce the percentage governs. For the highest earners the cap governs, and their effective replacement rate is far lower than the plan appears to promise.
Disability, at the top of the scale
A plan replacing a share of pay to a monthly maximum can leave a senior leader with a fraction of their actual income. Bonus and commission income is often excluded from covered earnings entirely, which widens the gap further for the people whose pay is most variable.
Life, above guaranteed issue
Amounts above the guaranteed issue limit require evidence of insurability. An election that was never medically underwritten is a promise nobody has checked — and a death claim is where it gets checked.
Supplemental layers
Individual or executive coverage layered on top of the base plan, portable where that matters, structured so the combined replacement rate is a number you chose rather than one the schedule produced.
Retention arrangements are tax arrangements. They get built with your advisors in the room.
Nonqualified plans are a legal and tax structure first and a benefit second, so we coordinate rather than improvise — clients have CPAs and attorneys available through the firm for exactly these questions.
Nonqualified deferred compensation
Arrangements that let key employees defer income beyond qualified plan limits. The deferral election timing and payment terms are governed by rules with real consequences for getting them wrong, so documents come before funding.
Key person coverage
Insurance owned by the business against the loss of someone the business depends on — sized against what the disruption would actually cost, not a round number.
Buy-sell funding
A buy-sell agreement that is not funded is a conversation. Funded, it is a mechanism. We work with the existing agreement rather than around it.
Carving out the executives can create a testing problem.
Self-funded plans and 105(h)
Where a plan is self funded or level funded, offering richer medical benefits to a highly compensated group can fail nondiscrimination testing and make benefits taxable for exactly the people it was meant to reward.
The safer structures
Insured arrangements, reimbursement designs and carefully defined classes usually achieve the goal without the testing exposure. The structure matters more than the generosity.
Tested before it is offered
We test the design first. A benefit withdrawn after an executive has relied on it is worse than never offering it.
Send us your renewal.
We’ll tell you whether it looks competitive, where we see opportunity, and the five questions we’d put to your carrier. No cost, and no obligation to move anything.
The renewal letter
Your current plan summary
Contribution split by tier
Enrolled counts by tier
Four documents — two more if your group is 50 or more. Nothing else; every extra one is a reason to postpone.
An independent employee benefits consulting firm. We look at the entire benefits program — cost, plan performance, risk and administration.
Bloomfield Hills, MI 48304
248.370.8853
719.425.2649
281.404.5670
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