What your union card doesn't cover.

The union card that built your career has three blind spots in its life insurance.

Your union negotiated hard for the benefits written into your contract, and group life is one of the most common. If you're covered, it's a real benefit — paid for, in most cases, by the employer, with no underwriting and no out-of-pocket premium. But group life was designed for a specific job: replacing income while you're actively working. Everything outside that narrow window is where the gaps live.

Three of them are worth knowing about.

The Retirement Gap

For most union group plans, coverage ends — or shrinks dramatically — the day you retire. A plan that carries $200,000 in death benefit at age 58 might carry $10,000 at 65, and zero at 70. Your mortgage doesn't shrink on that schedule. Neither do your spouse's needs.

The Portability Gap

If you change locals, change employers, or step out of the trade for any reason — a contract dispute, a layoff, a disability — the group policy usually goes with the job. You may have a narrow conversion window (often 31 days) to convert to an individual policy at a higher rate, but most members don't know the window exists until it's closed.

The Amount Gap

Most group life amounts are keyed to a multiple of salary — one or two times annual earnings. A working adult with a mortgage, a spouse, and children generally needs something closer to ten times income. Group fills the floor. It's not built to fill the room.

Your group plan is doing exactly what it was designed to do.

None of this is a knock on the union or on group life. Group life insurance is remarkable on its own terms — it's the reason a third of American workers have any life insurance at all. Its design choices make sense:

• No underwriting. Everyone in the bargaining unit is covered, regardless of health. That's a feature, not a bug — it means a 52-year-old welder with a heart murmur is covered on day one.
• Low (or no) employee cost. The employer pays the premium as part of the benefits package. No out-of-pocket to maintain coverage.
• Simple administration. One policy, one employer, one HR contact. The whole thing runs in the background.

Those are the tradeoffs. In exchange for simplicity and universal access, group plans sacrifice portability, permanence, and individual pricing. That's the whole point of this guide: not to replace group coverage, but to supplement it with something that fills those three specific gaps.

For the gap-filling job, whole life usually wins.

Two types of individual life insurance exist, and they do very different things. Term is the cheaper, narrower option — a pure death benefit for a set period, say 20 or 30 years. Whole life is more expensive per dollar of coverage but does three things term can't: it stays in force for your entire lifetime, it locks your premium forever, and it builds cash value over decades.

For supplementing a group plan that ends at retirement, whole life is usually the better match — because the whole point is to cover the years after the group benefit disappears.

The five questions to ask your union benefits office this week.

Before you shop for anything, it helps to know exactly what your union group plan already does. Most members have never actually read the summary plan description. These five questions will tell you everything you need.

• What is my current death benefit amount? Ask for the exact figure — not "about one times salary." Write it down.
• What happens at retirement? Ask specifically for the step-down schedule. Most plans reduce coverage at 65 and 70. Some eliminate it.
• Is the coverage portable if I leave the local? Ask about the conversion window and whether rates are guaranteed or reunderwritten.
• Can I add voluntary supplemental coverage through the union? Some plans offer optional add-ons at group rates. Worth exploring before going outside.
• Who is the beneficiary on file? Divorces, remarriages, and new children are the three most common reasons beneficiaries go out of date. Check.