Life insurance, explained without the jargon.

Term life insurance

Term life covers you for a fixed number of years. Common lengths are ten, fifteen, twenty, and thirty years. If you pass away during the term and the policy is in force, it pays a death benefit to the people you named.

People often choose term to line up with a specific window of responsibility:

• The years a mortgage is still being paid down
• The years children are at home or in school
• The remaining years of a working career

When the term ends, the coverage ends. Some policies offer the option to continue or convert, on terms set by the insurance company.

Permanent life insurance

Permanent life is designed to stay in force for your whole life, as long as the policy's requirements continue to be met. Whole life and universal life are both permanent products, and they behave quite differently from each other.

Some permanent policies may build cash value over time. How that value builds, what it costs, and what you can do with it varies a great deal between policies. This is the category where the details matter most, and where a conversation is worth more than a web page.

Final expense coverage

Final expense policies are smaller permanent policies intended to help cover funeral costs, burial or cremation, and the bills that tend to follow. The benefit amounts are modest by design, and the application is usually shorter than for larger policies.

People often look at final expense coverage when the goal is specific: making sure a spouse or an adult child is not left paying for a funeral.

Family and income protection

This is less a product than a way of sizing one. The question is simple to ask and harder to answer: if the income your household depends on stopped, what would it take to keep things steady?

Working through it usually means looking at:

• Income that would need replacing, and for how many years
• Debts that would not disappear, including a mortgage
• Costs still ahead, such as childcare or education
• Coverage already in place, including any through an employer

That calculation is most of what a first consultation covers.

What this page does not do

It does not name insurance companies, compare them, quote rates, or predict whether any particular person will be approved. Those answers depend on an actual application and the insurance company's underwriting. Anyone who tells you otherwise before reviewing your situation is guessing.