Friday, 27 January 2012

Life Insurance - How Much Of It Is Necessary?

By Margaret Burgess


One of the most common questions asked is how much life insurance should I purchase. While there is no set answer, each individual and family needs to look at their exact needs and situation. You need to consider some of the broad factors mentioned below.

Try looking at your current and future needs. If a family or a spouse that is largely dependent on your wages to live is what you have, then it's important for you to make sure that you have a life insurance that will cover your family and spouse for 20 years or more. Rather than not have enough insurance, some people usually go with the philosophy that you are better off over insured.

According to some financial planners, at minimum, you should at least have a policy of 15K to cover burial and all final expenses. Also, there are some financial planners who would advise you to purchase life insurance by multiplying your salary and an example is buying 5 times or 10 times the amount of your salary.

Other financial planners, advise you to look at your family or spouses expenses for the amount of years that you want to cover them and figure out how much money they will need to live comfortably. What most life insurance agents and financial planners have are some special formulas that can figure out how much insurance you need for your age and level of coverage you want to provide your spouse and children.

Making sure that their family is very comfortable in the event of a death is what many people want. An example would be a policy taking into consideration the cost of a home, car loans, maintenance of assets and education costs for children. Usually the more dependents, the more insurance is necessary.

For some consumers, buying life insurance doesn't really mean purchasing it to care for dependents but rather to cover estate taxes or to give an inheritance to their heirs. Usually these types of policy holders are already well off or no longer have bread winning responsibilities that make it necessary to care for small children or a spouse.

Last but not least, you might decide you do not need to purchase life insurance at all if you are single and do not have any dependents and have an adequate amount of savings to take care of any final expenses such as funeral costs and taxes.

There is one thing you can be sure of and that's making sure you put lots of thought into the amount of life insurance you do purchase and talk to a financial planner, accountant or insurance agent to learn more about how much life insurance, you personally should purchase.




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