December 11, 2007
Part three of a guest post by The Finance Buff.
First published Sep. 17, 2007
I ended my previous post on life insurance with the question “how much should you buy?” I will address it in this post.
First you have to figure out how much income you need to replace for your beneficiaries. You don’t have to replace 100% of your gross income because if you died, you would stop earning a salary, and you wouldn’t have to pay taxes on that salary either. You also wouldn’t have to contribute to your 401k and retirement savings any more because you don’t no longer need them (you died). For me, taxes and retirement savings take up more than half of my income. Some of the household expenses directly attributable to you would be gone (you wouldn’t need a second car); and some other expenses might go up (perhaps your family is on your health insurance).
After figuring out how much income you will need to replace, you can run some numbers. AccuQuote provides a life insurance needs calculator. According to the calculator, a 30-year-old wanting to replace $30,000 income for 20 years, with 3% inflation and 6% investment return, will need life insurance for $463,507.
Should you deduct from the need number the free insurance you already have from work? I didn’t. I didn’t because the free insurance from work is usually not portable. If I leave my job, my insurance ends. My next employer may not give me free life insurance. I treat the free insurance simply as extra.
All else being equal, the amount needed for life insurance goes down over time. It takes more money to replace income for 30 years than what it takes for 20 years. If you survived the first ten years, you would need less insurance than ten years ago because you only need to cover a shorter time. However I haven’t seen a policy that will automatically reduce the face amount over time. So perhaps you should buy more when you are young and review your need again every 5 years.
Term life insurance is cheap, especially when you are young. You really don’t have to pinch on the coverage. The cost per $100,000 also goes down the more coverage you buy. See chart below for sample annual premiums per $100,000 coverage at different coverage levels.
For this hypothetical 30-year-old male, the cost difference between $100,000 coverage and $250,000 coverage is only about $60 a year.
This is the 3rd post in a mini series on life insurance. Other posts in this series are:
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