The majority of Australian’s have Superannuation and with that Superannuation comes Insurance. Provided that you have not opted out of paying for Insurance you will be covered for Total and Permanent Disablement.
Total and Permanent Disablement Insurance is meant to protect people if they become too sick or injured to work again. For an in-depth look at what TPD actually means please see other articles on this website. Many people would assume that a policy that is meant to pay in the event that a person becomes too sick to work would require a person to be working at the time they became too sick or injured to do so. It does not.
The most common TPD claims do revolve around a person working and subsequently, due to illness or injury, stopping work. However, TPD Insurance has a number of ways in which you can satisfy the individual definitions of Total and Permanently Disabled as set out in your policy. Most of these do revolve around a person having been working, however, insurers have built in specific provisions for people who were not working prior to becoming TPD.
This is good news for people who were out of work at the time they became TPD as it means that you can still claim on your policy. It just means that you have to satisfy a different set of definitions than people who were working. The definitions you must satisfy are the Activities of Daily Living (ADL’s).
The insurer generally sets out in the policy a list of ADL’s. As someone who was not working prior to becoming TPD you must then prove that you cannot, on your own, complete certain tasks which most people do without an issue on any given day. An example of this would be becoming unable to get dressed without the assistance of another person or being unable to eat by yourself. Most policies will list six ADL’s and require an Insured Member to be unable to do two of them on their own.
This might seem hard to prove, especially if someone is suffering from psychological rather than physical injuries, but they are not impossible to satisfy. As long as you have the correct legal advice you can navigate the process of claiming TPD even if you were not working prior to becoming Totally and Permanently Disabled.
