Guardian Launches Educational Campaign, Website and Enhanced Enrollment Services for the Fall Open Enrollment Season

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America (Guardian), one of the largest mutual life insurance companies and a leading provider of employee benefits to midsize and small companies, offers employees and employers tips for leveraging their employee benefits in one of the worst economic environments since the Great Depression.

Guardian’s employee benefits experts compiled these money saving tips and educational resources just in time for the fall open enrollment season when millions of employees make important decisions about their benefits for the coming year. Additionally, Guardian recently launched an educational campaign including a dedicated Website and enhanced enrollment services to make it easier for employers to manage and employees, to understand and select their benefits.

Open Enrollment Tips

Sign-up for voluntary benefits
1) Consider taking advantage of voluntary benefits (sponsored by the employer, paid by the employee). They give you greater choices and discounted access to benefits to help ensure protection needs meet your specific lifestyle. They are usually more affordable than individual coverage and require limited or no medical underwriting.
2) Sign up for voluntary benefits earlier rather than later. Some voluntary benefits like life insurance plans may automatically increase coverage amounts each year, building up greater coverage than what you initially signed up for. These increases have no impact to premiums so it pays to enroll early.

Look for the freebies or perks
3) Use your health insurance plan to get a discount on your gym membership. Health insurance plans with a wellness focus often offer these discounts to encourage employees to stay fit, keeping your long-term costs of care lower. Need estate planning or will preparation advice? Check your life insurance coverage to see if free or low cost legal services are available. For example, Guardian has WillPrep Services* that give plan members access to online planning documents and professional assistance with advanced health care directives, estate taxes, financial and healthcare power of attorney, guardianship and conservatorship, trusts and wills.

Keep more money in your pockets
4) If a high deductible health plan is one of your medical plan options, consider opening a health savings account if available. Money in HSA funds build tax-free and you keep it even if you change jobs. You can use the money to pay for qualified health expenses if necessary and if no health care needs arise, you are building your money up on a tax-advantaged basis.
5) All high-deductible plans are not created equally. Look for a plan that doesn’t require you to pay out-of-pocket for common preventative screenings. Critical illness insurance can be bundled with your health plan to provide greater coverage when serious illnesses strike. A new industry feature on critical illness insurance is a hospital rider where if you face an extended hospital stay, you can receive a check of up to $500 for each day you’re in the hospital — up to ten days. You can use the money any way you want, but many employees choose to use this extra cash to cover high deductibles, co-payments, or even child care.

Use it, don’t lose it
6) Look for a dental plan that has an annual maximum rollover — these newer plans became popular in the past three years and allow you to roll over a portion of your unused benefits to the next year. These plans are doing for the dental industry what rollover minutes did for the mobile phone industry.
7) Consider signing up for a flexible spending account which allows you to pay for qualified healthcare, dependent care and even transportation expenses with before-tax dollars. It’s a use it, or lose it account so don’t forget to use the money before the year-end
deadline. Qualifying purchases may include: medical and dental deductibles and copayments, over the counter medications, eye glasses, child care, and transportation related to your employment.

Don’t give up on your 401(k)
Open Enrollment is a really good time to take a look at your company retirement plan contributions. With only a few short months left in the year, you have time to make adjustments, if necessary, to ensure you reach your contribution goal.
9) Now is the time to start up contributions again, if you stopped contributing during the market turmoil earlier this year. Saving through your employer-sponsored retirement plan helps you automatically follow one of the wisest investment strategies–dollar- cost averaging, putting the same amount of money in the same investment consistently, regardless of market movement. Over time, this can reduce the overall cost of your investments.

If you lose your job, keep your benefits
10) If you lose your job, some of your benefits may be portable. Make sure you ask your HR executive about the ability to maintain key benefits at affordable group rates in the event of job loss.

Guardian Educational Campaign and More Tips

Guardian’s Web page www.guardianenrollmenttips.com, offers free online tips, an interactive benefits quiz and resources for employers and their employees. The company is also sponsoring a radio awareness campaign this fall to encourage employees to spend more time learning about their benefits.

“In the midst of economic downturn employers are looking to effectively deliver competitive benefits programs that fit their budgets and meet the diverse needs of their employees,” said Elena Wu, Group Marketing Officer, Guardian. “Voluntary benefits and plan designs that offer value for the benefits buck are increasingly becoming important vehicles for helping employers to strike that delicate balance between controlling expenses and keeping their employees motivated and happy with quality employee benefits. Guardian is committed to giving midsize and small employers and their workforce greater access to not only benefits, but also education that will help them to make better decisions and be more competitive with larger companies.”

Guardian’s services designed to relieve the administrative burden for employers and improve employee understanding and management of their benefits include:

– Customized enrollment success plans designed to increase employee participation to help employers communicate benefit offerings through on-site enrollment meetings and turn-key employee communications.
– Bilingual enrollment services including Spanish language enrollment materials as well as in-language phone support.
– Personalized enrollment kits available to plan sponsors that offer voluntary life or disability insurance, where the employees’ names and addresses are already filled in on their enrollment forms and cost information is conveniently displayed and personalized based on employee’s age and salary making the enrollment decision easier.
– Employee online enrollment available to eligible existing Guardian customers after initial enrollment, gives plan sponsors the option of allowing their employees to update and select their benefits directly using the Internet if they are a new hire or re-enrolling.
– Face-to-face enrollment meetings with our nationwide team of benefit advisors at no extra cost.
– Toll-free employee benefits hotline where support is available in over 50 languages.
– 24/7 access to Guardian’s online benefits website, Guardian Anytime, which includes provider locators, health resources, glossaries and plan information.
– Guardian’s WorkLifeMatters Employee Assistance Program that offers support on a range of matters such as elder and child care, retirement planning and stress management.

*WillPrep Services are provided by Integrated Behavioral Health, Inc., and its contractors.

Source: The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America

To grow spiritually in a world defined by power, money, and influence is a Herculean task.

Modern conveniences such as electronic equipments, gadgets, and tools as well as entertainment through television, magazines, and the web have predisposed us to confine our attention mostly to physical needs and wants. As a result, our concepts of self-worth and self-meaning are muddled. How can we strike a balance between the material and spiritual aspects of our lives?

To grow spiritually is to look inward.
Introspection goes beyond recalling the things that happened in a day, week, or month. You need to look closely and reflect on your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and motivations. Periodically examining your experiences, the decisions you make, the relationships you have, and the things you engage in provide useful insights on your life goals, on the good traits you must sustain and the bad traits you have to discard. Moreover, it gives you clues on how to act, react, and conduct yourself in the midst of any situation. Like any skill, introspection can be learned; all it takes is the courage and willingness to seek the truths that lie within you. Here are some pointers when you introspect: be objective, be forgiving of yourself, and focus on your areas for improvement.

To grow spiritually is to develop your potentials.
Religion and science have differing views on matters of the human spirit. Religion views people as spiritual beings temporarily living on Earth, while science views the spirit as just one dimension of an individual. Mastery of the self is a recurring theme in both Christian (Western) and Islamic (Eastern) teachings. The needs of the body are recognized but placed under the needs of the spirit. Beliefs, values, morality, rules, experiences, and good works provide the blueprint to ensure the growth of the spiritual being. In Psychology, realizing one’s full potential is to self-actualize. Maslow identified several human needs: physiological, security, belongingness, esteem, cognitive, aesthetic, self-actualization, and self-transcendence. James earlier categorized these needs into three: material, emotional, and spiritual. When you have satisfied the basic physiological and emotional needs, spiritual or existential needs come next. Achieving each need leads to the total development of the individual. Perhaps the difference between these two religions and psychology is the end of self-development: Christianity and Islam see that self-development is a means toward serving God, while psychology view that self-development is an end by itself.

To grow spiritually is to search for meaning.
Religions that believe in the existence of God such as Christianism, Judaism, and Islam suppose that the purpose of the human life is to serve the Creator of all things. Several theories in psychology propose that we ultimately give meaning to our lives. Whether we believe that life’s meaning is pre-determined or self-directed, to grow in spirit is to realize that we do not merely exist. We do not know the meaning of our lives at birth; but we gain knowledge and wisdom from our interactions with people and from our actions and reactions to the situations we are in. As we discover this meaning, there are certain beliefs and values that we reject and affirm.  Our lives have purpose. This purpose puts all our physical, emotional, and intellectual potentials into use; sustains us during trying times; and gives us something to look forward to—a goal to achieve, a destination to reach. A person without purpose or meaning is like a drifting ship at sea.

To grow spiritually is to recognize interconnections.
Religions stress the concept of our relatedness to all creation, live and inanimate. Thus we call other people “brothers and sisters” even if there are no direct blood relations. Moreover, deity-centered religions such as Christianity and Islam speak of the relationship between humans and a higher being. On the other hand, science expounds on our link to other living things through the evolution theory. This relatedness is clearly seen in the concept of ecology, the interaction between living and non-living things. In psychology, connectedness is a characteristic of self-transcendence, the highest human need according to Maslow. Recognizing your connection to all things makes you more humble and respectful of people, animals, plants, and things in nature. It makes you appreciate everything around you. It moves you to go beyond your comfort zone and reach out to other people, and become stewards of all other things around you.

Growth is a process thus to grow in spirit is a day-to-day encounter. We win some, we lose some, but the important thing is that we learn, and from this knowledge, further spiritual growth is made possible.