It’s Shill Friday (for me)!

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece about life insurance on the front page of its Money & Investing section.  The short version is : more people are doing without life insurance—or rather, they’re going without life insurance; I’m not sure there’s much doing for people in general.

If you’re in the camp of uninsured or underinsured Americans, here’s a fact to let you know you’re not alone: 4/10 of survey respondents said they’d immediately be in financial straits if the wage-earner died.  3/10 said they’d be in same after a matter of months.  …Sounds like 70% of the survey sample would be holding cardboard signs on the street corner before the year was out.

Given these numbers, it might surprise readers to know that most American households actually carry some life insurance coverage.  Right now, it’s about 2/3 of American households (down sharply from the last peak: in 2004, 78% had it).  Why would Americans be in financial troubles if they already have coverage?  My guess is that most have coverage only through their employer; group life insurance plans provide low death benefits (enough to bury the deceased and go on a bender to drown your sorrows but not a lot else).

Here’s good news for people around age 30 who have kids and want some life insurance not purchased on a group plan.  I ran a quote on myself and saw that I could get adequate coverage for less than $15/mo.  Here’s how I got the numbers:

• Multiplied my yearly earnings by 10 for a ballpark idea of how much coverage my imaginary family would require.
• Used an online term life insurance quoter.
• Selected a 20-year term (thinking the imaginary kids would be out of the imaginary house by then and I wouldn’t need coverage anymore).

Alright, suppose you need more than 10 times my annual earnings.  I ran the same quoter for three quarters of a million dollars and found that I could get a 20-year term policy for $30/mo.  Less than a tank of gas.  Not exactly breaking the bank.