I don’t know why people seem to pass away around the same times, but i don’t like it.

One of my neighbors recently left, and now a friend’s father this week – both from cancer. So while i keep trying to avoid thinking about death and such, it’s been all over my mind today.

Soooo, i figured it was about time i posted something about the most exciting topic ever – Life Insurance (Yay!). haha…I’ll skip the whole salesman aspect of it all, BUT i will say that regardless of your situation, you definitely need to have some!

The Mrs. and i picked up a plan each last year after strong encouragements from the ‘rents. They had been going through my grandparents financials after the g-pa got close to passing away, and realized they needed to get their stuff in order as well. Then, ofcourse, they passed on the info to me ;)

There are a butt-load of insurance types you can get (term, permanent, whole, universal, etc), but we stuck with Term insurance since it seemed to be the best from all our research. You can check out the main differences on Wikipedia, but here’s a quick summary:

“Term life insurance or term assurance is life insurance which provides coverage for a limited period of time, the relevant term. After that period, the insured can either drop the policy or pay annually increasing premiums to continue the coverage. If the insured dies during the term, the death benefit will be paid to the beneficiary. Term insurance is often the most inexpensive way to purchase a substantial death benefit on a coverage amount per premium dollar basis.”

This one’s pretty straight forward, and probably the one most people think about when they hear “life insurance” – IF you die within the timeframe alotted, your beneficiary gets the amount you took out the insurance for. Nice and easy.

You basically have to pick 2 things:

1. The amount of money you’d like/need it for. We chose $350k, each. The main, and only, real thing we’d need covered would be our house, and this would pay it off in full.
2. The timeframe you’d like it for. We went with 30 years, figuring it would be the most “needy” time of our lives should anything scary come up. We’re both young, just getting started really in the work force (and now grad school for her), and we just bought a house. So if anything should happen in the near-to-sorta-near future of 30 years, our main debt would be covered – of course, if we’d even want to pay it off instead of just selling it, etc, but that’s a whole other ballgame :)

And the costs? Well, that’ll fluctuate depending on a whole mess of variables: your health, age, family history of diseases, smoking habits, crack habits, skydiving habits, eating habits…you get the point. And they give you some sort of medical test, so you can’t trick ’em! We’re both pretty healthy (knock on wood), and fairly young, so it cost me $30/month and the Mrs. $25/month – lucky bastard.

Regardless of the type you choose, however, it’s best to pick it up when you’re nice and healthy! This way you qualify for lower rates and will be covered God forbid something happens to ya shortly thereafter.

And the best part is that once you actually take the time and set it all up, you’re pretty much set for years to come! Of course, as time passes and you start aquiring more assets, babies, and more toys, you may need to adust it accordingly, BUT for the most part you don’t have to think about it again. And that’s some GREAT peace of mind that you’ll pick up as well :)