Customized Insurance Agency Newsletters, Content, and Marketing

A new survey found that many employers plan to add or expand caregiver leave over the next two years as they contend with workforce burnout, changing family dynamics and competition for talent.

The shift comes as caregiving demands intensify across a multigenerational workforce. Many employees juggle work while caring for children, aging parents or other dependents, often with limited financial or workplace support.

Employers are grappling with another year of steep increases in group health plan premiums due to medical cost inflation, higher utilization and rising drug prices.

At the same time, health insurers can no longer shift additional costs to employers and employees through higher deductibles or narrower networks.

Instead, many insurers are pursuing structural changes designed to control long-term costs while improving care quality and member experience. Here's what they are pursuing with the goal of reducing costs for themselves, employers and their covered workers.

A secure retirement does not happen by accident. It is the result of thoughtful planning, realistic assumptions about the future and ongoing attention to how your money will support you after your working years end.

Whether retirement is a few years away or already underway, having a clear plan can help you feel more confident about what lies ahead.

Small business owners are in the unique position of being able to provide additional benefits to their children who work for the company. One smart choice is to include Roth individual retirement account (IRA) as part of their compensation, which can benefit both the children and the business.

Middle-class families — those with incomes of between roughly $50,000 and $180,000 per year (depending on where they live) — are becoming increasingly reliant on workplace benefits to ensure their financial well-being in case of a disability or critical illness.

Simple health insurance is insufficient to carry the load. The loss of a breadwinner's or caregiver's financial contribution through death or disability is often devastating. Here's how you can help.

Many organizations assume that once open enrollment ends and payroll deductions are set, everything will continue to run smoothly. In reality, enrollment changes, life events, terminations, plan switches and billing delays routinely create discrepancies that can quietly cost both employers and employees money.

That's why it's important for employers to conduct regular reconciliations of their benefits offerings.

For most retirees, maximizing the amount of income they can take from their portfolio with minimal tax implications is their main financial objective. This is the one thing that makes everything else possible.

Being able to enjoy time with grandchildren, play golf or travel and secure your savings against the need for long-term care all hinges on your ability to convert your retirement nest egg into income that will last you and your spouse for a lifetime.

In other words, you need a secure income beyond Social Security and your required minimum withdrawals from your retirement accounts. Fortunately, you can create your own pension.

Plaintiff's lawyers are breaking new ground by suing employers for allegedly failing in their fiduciary duties to manage their voluntary benefit plans, including dental, vision, accident insurance, critical illness, cancer and hospital indemnity benefits.

These class action lawsuits typically allege that employers exercise sufficient control over these plans to trigger fiduciary duties under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act and that those duties were breached. Once ERISA applies, employers can face claims tied not just to plan design, but to the prudence of benefit selection and monitoring.

Employers grappling with the cost and complexity of GLP-1 drugs are increasingly testing a workaround: steering certain employees to direct-to-consumer arrangements that operate outside the company's health plan.

The shift reflects a growing tension for benefits executives: how to manage soaring GLP-1 demand while preserving affordability, plan sustainability and clinical oversight.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in January 2026 rescinded Biden-era workplace anti-harassment and discrimination guidance mainly focused on protections for LGBTQ+ individuals and breastfeeding and pregnancy-related issues.

The move, which came after the EEOC achieved a quorum and a Republican majority, follows through on the policy priorities of the Trump administration. However, despite the rescission, employers may still face harassment and discrimination lawsuits from employees covered by the guidance.

The Dreaded Insurance Audit

If you run a business, at some point you'll be contacted by your insurer telling you they need to conduct an audit of your coverage to make sure you are being charged the appropriate premium.

For workers' comp policies that means looking at your head counts, hours worked and the type of jobs your workers are doing to see if any of those elements have changed since the policy took effect. They'll ask for a lot of documentation. It sounds stressful, but there's a way to handle these audits and it just takes some preparation.

Even if you have company cars or a fleet of vans, occasions may arise that require an employee to run an errand in their personal vehicle or one of your employees needs to rent a car while on a business trip visiting a client.

In these circumstances if you don't have the proper coverage, you could be leaving your organization exposed to liability if an employee injures a third party in an accident. Here's how to protect your company against this.