Online Financial Tips

Archive for January 26th, 2012

No one wants to die. The problem is it really is the one thing that is guaranteed to happen to us at some point. As morbid and negative as it may sound, death is a fact of life. One way to help take some of the pain of this realization away is to find low cost term life insurance. That’s right, a life insurance policy is really something you have no business living without if you have a family. What would happen to your loved ones if something happened to you? You can’t afford to put them at risk, and I’m going to explain how you can eliminate that risk as painlessly as possible.

First a super quick primer on term life insurance. You pick a coverage amount and in return you are charged a monthly premium. As long as you pay your premiums every month, if you die during the term, your beneficiary will receive the policy benefit. If you outlive your term, then the policy simply expires. This is the case with what’s known as a level term life policy. This is by far the most common as you can choose a term from 10 to 30 years. There are policies available known as annual renewal term life policies. These are good for one year, and you have to renew each year.

Now that you know the basics, the next step is to calculate the coverage you need. You can do this easily by adding up your monthly expenses and multiplying those by the period you want your family covered for (i.e. 10 years is 120 months). Then add in any big items you can think of such as your kids’ college education, weddings, etc. Now you have a good ball park figure and you can use this on any of the available online life insurance quote sites, or you can take it to your insurance agent.

With all of the options out there and rates as cheap as they are today, there is no excuse for not having coverage. A low cost term life insurance policy can provide peace of mind that your family will be well taken care of after you are gone. Think about everything your loved ones will have to go through and deal with if they lose you. You do not want to add mountains of debt and financial uncertainty to that list.