Income Continuation

When renewing employer-sponsored benefit plans, it is expected that human resource specialists (and their brokers) expend the majority of their time analyzing and negotiating the terms of the corporate health insurance. And it’s no wonder – health insurance is not only H.R’s greatest budgetary expense other than payroll but also the benefit most closely scrutinized and used by employees.

The remaining corporate welfare benefits, those which provide income replacement,  rarely receive the same level of attention as the health insurance plans. Our team focuses on the “ “what happens when the paychecks stop” problem. We understand how to efficiently distribute risk and finance income continuation plan objectives through traditional group, individual, and/or specialty insurance products. We provide specialized  programs for all employees with particular experience working with highly compensation groups.

Executive Benefits

Pillar has worked with dozens of Human Resource, Finance, and general management teams to amend and augment their company’s disability income, retirement savings, and life insurance programs. Broadly based employee benefit plans become inefficient when taking into account high levels of pay. Group benefit and qualified retirement plans are not intended to cover compensation above $250,000 per year or so. Pillar has been highly successful in restructuring basic group life and disability insurance contracts to achieve substantially better contract and economic terms. We’ve then augmented the group plans with supplemental coverage so that highly compensated team members enjoy critical coverages at essentially the same level as the rest of the company’s employees.

In a similar context, we have worked with management to construct financing arrangements for supplemental retirement savings and continuation plans that are optimal from both P&L and tax perspectives. Many companies have existing corporate owned life insurance (COLI) portfolios which have been poorly managed, or may wish to consider COLI but are put off by the complexity of implementing and managing a COLI portfolio. Pillar has been and continues to be a welcome resource for companies that wish to take advantage of the highly attractive financial and tax attributes of COLI.