There are multiple reasons to purchase life insurance. It can be very confusing when you should look at buying coverage for yourself for the first time or look at what you already have in place.
Here are the most common life events that prompt a need to review your life insurance that we come across:
- Marriage
Why would Marriage trigger a need for life insurance? When you get married, often, you benefit from two incomes. What would you do if one of those incomes went away over night due to a death of one of the spouses? Life insurance can be utilized to replace the loss of income of a spouse. Typically (dependent on age) you want to get about 10x your income. For instance: If you earn $200,000/yearly then a $2 million dollar policy would be appropriate.
- Children
There are a lot of costs associated with raising children. You need to think about how these costs will be covered if you or your spouse were to die while your children are still dependent upon you/their income. This is especially important if your children are young. What would the cost be to take care of your children while you’re working? There are multiple other expenses associated with children such as education, clothing, food, and activities. If one income were to just disappear, would you or your spouse be able to handle it on your/their own?
- Parents
Due to our ever-improving standard of living and advances in medical treatments, life expectancies are getting longer and longer. The care of your parents might fall on you one day as they get older. With getting older there are also medical and caregiver costs associated with it. This can add up quickly and if your parents are dependent upon you, it could severely affect their care if you were to pass away unexpectantly.
- Buying a house
The mortgage is dependent on income level. A life insurance policy can be used to pay off the mortgage, so your survivors do not need to take on the debt or sell the house in the event of your death.
- Running a business
When a business owner dies, the surviving family will either: take it over, sell it or shut it down. Life insurance can protect your family and your business. This is obviously more complex if there are more owners involved. Typically, when this is the case, the owners might want to research setting up a buy-sell agreement that would handle ownership agreement(s) at the event of an owner’s death. Please check out this link: (add link)
- Retirement
Life insurance is essential even after you retire, especially if you’re still paying for your mortgage, want to leave some money to your loved ones, avoid burdening others with your final expenses, these are just to name a few reasons. If you’re interested in life insurance for after you retire, we recommend looking into level term life insurance policies or guaranteed universal life insurance policies.
Those are not your only options, however. If you have a group life policy many employers will offer an option to convert your policy to a whole life policy, or port the coverage to an individual term policy. Please note, there are some things to remember before you do this:
- Whole life is the most expensive form of life insurance, this is not usually ideal if you have a fixed income as most retirees do.
- Ported policies often have coverage deductions at age 70 or 75, where the coverage amount will be reduced by 50% while you still pay the same premium.
While either of these options might not be the best option for you, in some cases this might be the only possibility for obtaining coverage.
If you have any questions about these and other common life-changing events and want to get a free no-obligation life insurance quote, call us today at 1-888-972-0024. You can also send us an email by clicking below:
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