What type of life insurance do you own?

Question

What is life insurance for anyway? Why would a single person like myself who lives with parents need one?

Answer 1

Life insurance provides money to your loved ones you left behind.

You have asked a good question, many young adults in your position don't think they need any life insurance.

In your case life insurance could be used to:

Pay off college loans, credit cards etc.

Pay for your funeral

Provide extra money for your parents who may have lost time at work caring for you in your last weeks/days.

Pay for any final medical expenses

For example if you were to die at this age it would probably be from an accident of some sort. If this were a car accident and spent weeks in the hospital. Even with health insurance you parents could be faced with thousands of dollars in medical bills. Lets say you were driving your parents car and someone else died your parents could be sued.

If you suffer from some terminal illness that last months or even years the financial strain could be enormous

There are many great reasons to buy life insurance and very few reasons not to.



For example a 25 year old male could pay as little as $12.34 a month for a $100,000 life policy with level premiums for 30 years.

Answer 2

You probably don't need life insurance. As you described no one depends on you financially, so your death (and resulting loss of income) would not affect anyone financially (your parents would grieve, but I talking financially), so you don't need to provide money to anyone should you die. Exceptions would be:

1) If you're planning on getting married or having a kid soon. That would significantly change who depends on you financially.

2) Your death would financially devastate your parents. This could only happen one of two ways: they have no money to cover the 5-10k it costs to bury or burn you, or they have cosigned for large loans (like private student loans, because federal loans don't credit check the student and are forgiven with death or permanent disability). Emotionally your parents would be devastated, but would they be financially?

I am in the insurance business, but I would not let you buy from me unless you could explain why you needed it, because even though it's cheap, you could be investing that same money ($12.50 a month for 30 years at an average return of 10% is over $28,000)

To answer your actual question, about 2 or 3 months before I got married, I got $50,000 of variable universal life for around $25-30 a month, which would have been enough to burn me, pay off my car, and allow my wife to take unpaid leave. Unfortunately, I didn't know enough about life insurance and I was paying twice as much for half the coverage. Shortly after I got married, I learned a lot about finances including life insurance and switched to $100,000 of 30 year term, because $100k was the smallest I could get.

Answer 3

Term insurance.

You are single, living with your folks.  Do you have any debts? health problems with your family?  Are your debts co-signed by someone else?

If any of these are true, you should consider it.  Although your debts that are only signed by you will be paid by your estate first then disappear.  If they have someone else on the account, they will be left responsible for it.  Your funeral will be around 8-10k which your parents would have to pay for.

If your family has a history of medical problems, get insurance now while young and still healthy. It will be greatly cheeper.

Answer 4

I own 30 year term insurance.

Life insurance's main purpose is to provide income to your family in case you die. In other words, life insurance is a mean to replace your income after your death.

A person who is single may or may not need life insurance. It all depends on the person. In order to get life insurance, you have to first qualify for it. If a person doesn't want to take any risk of being disqualified later on life, then the person may want to buy life insurance now. If the parents or someone else are dependent on your income, then that's a reason why you would need life insurance. If you are single and you depend on your parent's income, your parents are the ones who should get life insurance, if they haven't already.