WEA Trust Member Benefits
From WEA Trust Insurance Coordinators Handbook
Services offered by WEA Trust Member Benefits (Member Benefits)
WEA Trust Member Benefits is responsible for offering voluntary personal insurance and retirement savings programs. These programs include auto, home, and additional liability insurance. Member Benefits also offers the WEAC IRA, 403(b) TSA, and the Retirement Income Analsysis.
Typically, Member Benefits’ individual programs are available on a voluntary basis to employees who maintain a qualifying union membership. However, if a district chooses to adopt the Trust Advantage program, all employees in the district become eligible to participate.
What is Trust Advantage?
Trust Advantage is a unique benefit option that provides your employees with added convenience. It allows your employees the opportunity to budget their auto, home, and additional liability insurance premiums, as well as IRA contributions with Member Benefits, through payroll deduction.
A benefit with no out-of-pocket cost to the district
Districts are finding Trust Advantage attractive because in this age of qualified economic offers (QEOs), revenue caps, rising health care costs, and tight budgets, it’s a way to offer employees a unique benefit that comes at no out-of-pocket cost to the district. There are no fees to the district to participate or to withdraw from the program.
How does Trust Advantage work?
If a district is interested, we’ll meet with you and the other decision makers to discuss the program to see if it’s a good fit. Once a district commits to participate and executes an adoption agreement, we work together to customize a communication plan to meet your needs, and we’ll meet with your employees on-site to inform and educate them about how the program works.
We also provide phone consultations with interested employees to customize his/her policies and/or consult on any retirement savings needs. There are no sales pitches, only good advice with the employee’s best interest in mind.
Payroll deduction authorization
Trust Advantage is different than group insurance products. All you’ll need is an authorization from each participating employee that allows you to deduct payments from their paychecks. We developed a Trust Advantage Payroll Deduction Authorization form for this purpose.
As the Insurance Coordinator, you’ll be in charge of setting up the payroll deductions. We do not expect you to be an insurance or IRA expert. We do all the individual consulting. We’ll answer the employees’ questions, as well as yours, and deal with any changes to policies or IRAs. We’ll communicate to you all new or adjusted premium amounts for insurance policies as well as IRA contributions.
We’ve worked very hard to make this program easy for you to administer by providing initial training, assisting with initial
set-up, and giving you significant control over the payroll deductions. To assist you further, we have automated the payroll deduction process for our Member Benefits’ products for districts that currently use the Skyward Point and Click payroll system. We will also provide you with written instructions, a personal contact person, and any on-site help as needed.
If your district already participates in Trust Advantage, we’ll also send you a complete set of detailed instructions to include as a supplement to this section.
How to reach us
If your school is not currently participating in Trust Advantage and you would like more information, please call us at 1-800-279-4010. This is the same number that your employees can call if they are interested in obtaining an insurance policy or an IRA on their own if your district chooses not to participate in Trust Advantage.
