I don’t get it. I’m always being marketed to to buy life insurance (term or whole life, whatever). I don’t see the value in it. When I die, I won’t need a ton of money to bury me, as cheap cremation is my current route of choice. My wife works and is able to be self sufficient, plus we have a nest egg…that we invested in instead of life insurance.
I see no reason to have it and I’m pretty annoyed by people trying to extract money from me to get life insurance.
Am I missing something. do your best; sell me on it; give me a reason that it is valuable enough for me to get it. I dare ya.
It’s not like they’re singling you out. They’re trying to sell life insurance to everybody. They try to sell life insurance policies on babies, which is about the dumbest thing you could spend money on.
A person needs life insurance if there are people who depend on that person’s income and the loss of that income would present them with a problem. It sounds like your wife doesn’t need your income so you likely don’t need life insurance.
It depends on your situation. We didn’t really worry about it until we had a kid. At this point, my husband stays home. He could support himself and our son, but if something happened to me, I’d like him to have a significant cushion, like a couple years, while he got everything figured out. And while he could support himself and our son, one person alone is going to earn less than two, making it difficult to save for college and such. So having a nest egg prepped for our son would help.
And there are a lot of cases where, even without kids, loss of one income would make a current lifestyle unsustainable. So someone might be able to support themselves, but would have to figure out how to sell the house, downsize the lifestyle, etc. etc., during a period of intense personal tragedy. Not really a time when you want to worry about things like that, and all the worse to lose your home right when you are losing the person you love.
If you have a strong urge to discover what the next world is all about, then getting life insurance might be just the ticket. I watch plenty of “real life drama” shows where a lot of people are knocking off their spouses, and pretty much I always ask the question ten minutes into them, “How much is the life insurance policy for?” And nine times out of ten it turns out to be the reason the wife slammed the hubby over the head with the hammer and buried him in the garden.:eek:
Seriously, all in all it doesn’t strike me as a good thing to tempt your wife, though having a policy and her cashing in on it without doing something unkind to you would be sweet just because in this world it’s always better to have a little too much dough than not enough (as long as the beneficiary doesn’t just sit around in casinos blowing it in slot machines:mad:).
You should have life insurance if there are people dependent on you who would be in trouble if you were no longer there to provide for them. If your wife is able to work enough to support herself and you don’t have children or other relatives to support, then I agree that you don’t need it.
My wife and I don’t have life insurance because we’re both employed and capable of being self sufficient. But when we have kids, we’ll probably get some, because trying to raise and support children as a single parent is difficult, and while having a chunk of money is not as good as having a second parent, it’s much better than having neither.
I’m married with no kids, and we bought some life insurance. Not a lot.
My husband and I both work, but our financial plan for the future is based on the assumption that we will both be earning until we are 65. Having two incomes in one household has allowed economies of scale that would disappear if one of us were gone. Also, if there are two of us, one is still earning if the other becomes disabled. But what if I died, and my spouse became disabled? He would have a lower income than he does now, and no one to help him at home. (And vice versa.)
So we decided to purchase enough life insurance to pay off the mortgage. This would allow the survivor to have somewhere to live very inexpensively (our property taxes are quite low). Or the survivor could sell this place and buy a cheaper one, and have a nest egg on top of that.
We still max out our IRAs and save and buy other investments as well. But, there is always the chance that the stock market will tank at exactly the wrong moment. That was also part of the argument for life insurance. It isn’t an either-or proposition. It is part of a comprehensive savings plan.
It helps that life insurance is quite cheap through my husband’s employer.
I’m near where you are on this, however (not trying to sell you on it…) what if the day after you died, your wife gets fired? If you were still alive would you be supporting her for a period until she gets another job? I’m assuming that would be the situation. At it’s minimum, life insurance is intended to replace the earnings you would bring into the house if you were gone. If you really cared about her (I’m being a bit snarky) you wouldn’t be so cavalier about dismissing it?
I have it because going from a dual-income to single income family in an area with a high cost of living would be financially devastating. It’d probably mean my husband and daughter moving to an unsafe area, scrimping on healthcare, switching to unlicensed and potentially unsafe childcare providers, and not having access to a decent education. No college fund, no retirement savings, nothing but hardship. It would knock them out of the middle class we’ve fought long and hard to become a part of.
Insurance money wouldn’t last forever, but it’d help smooth the transition, hopefully until my husband finds a new partner. I would also hope it’d help with the college fund.
Because your life will change. It always does.
My husband just died and I wish he had been able to leave me life insurance. I am now going through everything we own and selling what I can just to be able to pay the bills.
He was Mr. Healthy until the heart disease and I was employed full time until the meltdown.
You can’t afford it when you are ill or working part time. It is a gamble. I do hope you and your family never need it.
Do you have kids? An elderly parent you’re helping to support.
My wife’s college roommate was married to a man who owned a successful business and didn’t believe in life insurance. When he was killed, his business partner decided to play hardball on how much her half was worth. That took a couple of years.
Husband didn’t have a whole lot in savings, since he’d plowed most of his money back in the business, so she was stuck with a couple of young kids. She had quit teaching to raise the kids, so she had to start over again in her mid-30s at the bottom of the pile.
Not that any of that will happen to you or your wife, of course. And she’ll be able to live in the style you’d like her to maintain on her salary alone, right? And that nest egg is enough to smooth things over for a year or two until things smooth out after your death, isn’t it?
My insurance is from work and it is dirt cheap. I don’t have any whole life. Not really necessary, but too cheap to pass up. But we have lots of savings.
On the other hand, when my son-in-laws dad died, unexpectedly, they found that he had not quite gotten to reducing the amount of his life insurance yet. They did not have a lot of savings and it came in real handy. He was really bad at keeping up with things, this was the first time it came in handy.
If anyone ever DOES consider life insurance, term insurance is the way to go. “Whole Life” is only a way for the agent to make a bigger commission, and will not serve you as well as term insurance.
That’s a very simplistic view. What you’re saying is like “Never buy a hammer. All you need is a screwdriver.”
Whole life is actually quite useful for many people, including those who make it an investment vehicle, and those who want to use the proceeds to pay taxes on a large estate.
You’d be surprised how rarely life insurance pays out money on people buried in gardens. “Yes, I’d like to collect the payment on my husband. No, I don’t have a death certificate, he’s not officially dead. No, I won’t tell you my name or address.”
You might not care about life insurance, but I bet your wife would (eventually ) appreciate you and speak kindly of you after leaving her 100K to 250K if you dropped dead tomorrow. Money is rarely resented.
My Father-in-law did not believe in life insurance, he openly said it’s just money the widow is going to spend on her next boyfriend.
Money is rarely resented.