Yes! You should definitely have life insurance. Ask yourself this: If my husband were to suddenly die, how would I manage to keep my home, pay my bills, and provide for my (and the children’s) living expenses today and in the future?

The answer to that is life insurance. While it’s impossible to replace your husband’s (or your) life, the value of his income and other things he does (yard work, shuttling kids to ball games, etc) can be estimated and covered by insurance.

Most financial experts agree that the best thing is to buy term life insurance. Although it does expire after a certain number of years (typically comes in terms from 5-40 years), it provides the most protection for every dollar spent.

The best thing is probably to purchase one term policy for your husband with riders for you and your children. Insurance companies use riders to add extra features and conditions onto a policy. This approach is generally more cost effective than purchasing separate policies on each person.

I also live and work in the northern VA area. I’m a newly licensed insurance agent with a large, reputable firm and I would be very interested in meeting with you to discuss this further. If you’re interested in working with me, please send me a message at. Otherwise, good luck and take care.

Make sure whoever you sit down with does a complete financial needs analysis for you. By this, I mean they look at ALL of your finances. They ask you questions of what is the state of your finances now, what do you want to achieve for retirement, do you want to help pay your kids way through college. Then there are about 4 questions to ask about life insurance. Level term insurance with riders for both spouse and children are the best way to go.

What GOAL do you want to accomplish with the life insurance??? Need to know that.

Also, I NEVER EVER EVER recommend life insurance on children. Don’t have any on mine. I think it’s a waste of money.

Life insurance is a pretty name for what it really is, death insurance. It is in this case at least to replace income of the one who died, so having life insurance for children makes no sense, unless they are child stars or something.

Your $2mil for you and your husband sounds in the ballpark - I think that assumes about a 4.5-5% annual return on the money, which is about in-lines with the risk-free savings accounts and T-bills returns right now.

Sorry, I don’t know enough to go through the term vs whole vs convertible thing. From what I understand, whole is basically a savings device combined with insurance, so if you just want insurance, you are probably looking at some sort of term insurance. Note that insurance agents earns tons on whole life, and love to sell it, not so much on term.

Get term insurance as you can get the coverage you need at the lowest possible cost.

The best way to find a company is to shop around based on your health information to get accurate quotes. Once you have the quotes, you can compare the companies, financial ratings, etc. and choose a company.

As far as children are concerned, i would not get policies on them. If you are worried about burial costs, etc.. you can add them as a rider to a term policy, cost would be about $50-$80 per year and would cover 4 kids for $10,000 each.

In addition, on the term policies you can do a conversion to a permanent insurance policy later on in life if you still need coverage, or you can compare rates for new term policies at that time to get the coverage you need.

I found interesting information about your answer here.

I’m a retired life insurance agent. Here’s my advice:
[1] The early child-bearing years of a marriage are the ones in which you need the greatest amount of life insurance. However, those years are the ones in which your income is not as much as it will be later on. In later years when the kids are all grown, your house is paid for, etc. you don’t need as much coverage. So your goal is going to be to get the greatest amount of coverage now when you need it the most, for the least amount of premium payment.
[2] Since term insurance is much less expensive than regular whole life insurance, let 60% of your life insurance expenditure be for term life insurance and buy regular whole life for the other 40%. Over the years the term insurance premium will increase periodically until it finally reaches an unmanageable amount . But by this time the kids will be out on there own, etc. and your financial position will be greater so that you can afford to reduce or terminate the term life insurance. The regular whole life should be adequate coverage for you then.