A Free Financial Planning Session From Northwestern Mutual's Military Advisory Vice Chair — On Us

Veritas Ratings is partnering with Jordan Thompson, Vice Chair of Northwestern Mutual's Military Field Advisory Committee, to offer our clients something most people pay for out of pocket. Jordan is a trusted referral partner of ours — not a Veritas Ratings employee — and a veteran himself who has spent his career helping military families plan their financial futures.

This session is normally a $500 investment for Jordan's clients. As a Veritas Ratings client, it's yours at no cost.

What Jordan Will Cover

  • Life insurance built around your existing VA benefits, so you're not paying for coverage you already have and aren't missing coverage you don't.
  • Survivor and dependent income protection, including how DIC fits into your family's overall plan (more on that below).
  • How to build a financial plan around your disability rating and compensation, so your VA benefits and personal financial plan work together instead of against each other.

What Is DIC, and Why Does It Matter?

DIC (Dependency and Indemnity Compensation) is a tax-free monthly benefit paid by the VA to eligible survivors of a service member or veteran whose death was connected to their military service. That generally includes surviving spouses, dependent children, and in some cases dependent parents of:

  • A service member who died while on active duty, active duty for training, or inactive duty training.
  • A veteran who died from a service-connected illness or injury.
  • A veteran who was rated totally disabled from a service-connected condition for a qualifying period of time before passing, even if that condition wasn't the official cause of death.

Here's the part most families never hear from anyone: DIC eligibility isn't automatic, and it doesn't always get evaluated at the same time as other survivor benefits like the Survivor Benefit Plan (SBP), life insurance payouts, or Social Security survivor benefits. Depending on how those benefits are structured, some can offset each other, some can be paid together, and some require specific paperwork or timing to avoid leaving money on the table. Very few surviving families are ever walked through how the pieces fit together, which is exactly the kind of planning Jordan specializes in.

Two Sessions to Choose From

Session 1: Monday, September 14 at 12:00 PM EST

Session 2: Tuesday, September 15 at 6:00 PM EST

This is a live group session, open exclusively to Veritas Ratings clients. Come with your questions — Jordan will be taking them live.

Why This Conversation Matters: The Math Behind Your Rating

If you're rated 100%, you're receiving roughly $4,000 a month, tax-free — about $48,000 a year. Financial planners use a rule of thumb called the 4% rule to figure out how big a nest egg it takes to safely generate a given amount of income: multiply the annual income by 25. Run that math on your rating ($48,000 × 25) and your compensation is functionally equivalent to a $1.2 million annuity. That's the real value of what you've earned.

Here's the risk: DIC generally only carries that value over to your family if your death is service-connected, or if you've held a 100% rating for a qualifying length of time (typically 10 years, or 5 years if it's within 5 years of discharge). If you pass away from something unrelated to your disability — a car accident, for example — before you've met that window, your family isn't automatically eligible for DIC. That $4,000 a month, and the $1.2 million it represents, can disappear.

And even when DIC does apply, it currently pays a surviving spouse around $1,700 a month — less than half of what a 100% rating pays the veteran. That gap is worth planning for either way.

This is exactly what Jordan will walk through: how an affordable term life policy (not an expensive whole life policy) can close that gap. As a reference point, a healthy applicant in their 30s can typically get $1–1.5 million in 20-year term coverage for around $35–$65 a month — a small cost to protect a family from losing an asset worth well over a million dollars.