Workplace Benefits
A qualifying life event may create an opportunity to update eligible workplace benefit elections. Rules and timeframes are set by the plan, so confirm what applies with your employer or plan administrator.
Changes at Home
Growing Your Family
A growing family can change who depends on your benefits, your income, and the protection you've put in place.
What's changing
Here's what typically shifts.
Adding to a household changes who depends on your benefits and income. Healthcare needs a destination for the new family member, protection needs may be larger than they were, and beneficiary designations made before the change may no longer reflect your intentions.
Who does it affect?
Who else could this change affect?
Growing a family changes the household itself, so benefit decisions should account for everyone in it.
- Parents — including the impact on an income earner and on a caregiver.
- Spouses and partners, whose own coverage may change with the household.
- Children and other dependents, who need both healthcare and protection.
- Caregivers, where someone outside the immediate household is relied upon.
What to consider
Start with what already exists.
This is the From Work to Home™ sequence: review workplace benefits first, understand the options available, use the workplace benefits that fit, identify what the household still needs, and only then consider personal insurance.
- Workplace medical, dental, and vision coverage, and how dependents are added.
- Employer-paid and voluntary life insurance, including any dependent coverage.
- Workplace disability coverage, including any paid-leave benefits.
- A spouse's or partner's workplace plan, which may be the better fit for the household.
- Existing personal life insurance already in place, and whether it still reflects current beneficiary intentions.
A life change doesn’t always mean you need new insurance.
What to consider next
Questions worth asking.
Healthcare
Determine how the new family member will receive healthcare coverage, and whether one household plan covers everyone better than two.
Life Insurance
A growing household changes financial responsibilities, income-protection needs, and dependent needs — and the financial impact of losing a parent, spouse, partner, or caregiver, including a caregiver without a paycheck. Review whether existing workplace and personal life insurance, and current beneficiary intentions, still fit before assuming new coverage is needed.
Income Protection
Consider how an illness or injury affecting an income earner would affect the household now that more people depend on that income.
Beneficiaries
Review beneficiary designations after major family changes. Designations on insurance and financial accounts generally control regardless of other documents.
Legacy Preparedness
Consider whether important insurance and financial information is organized, and whether the people who would need it know where to find it.
Relevant solutions
Given what's changing, here's where we can help.
Retirement matters for longer-term household protection, but healthcare and legacy considerations usually come first at this stage.
Healthcare
Individual and family medical, dental, and vision coverage for needs that may arise when workplace benefits aren't available, are changing, or need additional support.
Explore HealthcareProtection
Life, disability, supplemental benefit, and long-term-care coverage considered around the financial consequences a household may face.
Explore ProtectionLegacy
Protection and preparedness for what you want to leave behind — including life insurance where appropriate, beneficiary preparedness, financial-account organization, and coordination with the legal and financial professionals who may be part of the larger legacy picture.
Explore Legacy
These are the areas that may deserve attention given what’s changing. You are not expected to work out which coverage applies to you from this list.
Get help from a Financial Relationship Manager
A growing family usually shifts more than one benefit.
A Financial Relationship Manager can help you review what your household already has, what enrollment windows apply, and what protection may deserve attention now that someone new depends on you.
A Financial Relationship Manager helps you understand what is changing and what may need attention — so you don't have to figure that out on your own first.
A Financial Relationship Manager is a relationship steward and coordinator. The role does not by itself make someone an investment adviser, financial planner, attorney, tax adviser, or estate-planning professional. When a need calls for one of those disciplines, the role is to help you get to the right professional — not to substitute for one.
Talk With a Financial Relationship Manager™Life Change checklist
Growing Your Family Checklist
Review coverage and protection after a birth or adoption—or while preparing for one.
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Related life changes
Changes that often arrive together.
- Getting Married or PartneringConsider how combining households may affect healthcare coverage, workplace benefits, protection needs, beneficiaries, and other household responsibilities.
- Caring for Someone You LoveConsider healthcare, protection, long-term-care, and household needs when caregiving responsibilities change.
- Experiencing Illness or InjuryUnderstand existing benefits and consider how healthcare, income protection, and household needs may be affected.
- Planning Your LegacyReview life insurance, beneficiary preparedness across financial accounts, household continuity, and the broader legacy plan.
Your household changed. Your benefits may need to change with it.
Tell us what's changing and we'll help you understand what may need attention across the household.