Term Ladder - The Best Insurance Set-up We Know
Is your family able to survive without your income if you die unexpectedly?
It is a question that we all should take serious. But your insurance needs change drastically over your lifetime and most insurance advice & planning doesn’t do a great job of telling you how to structure your policies to efficiently line up your needs and your coverage.
Good thing you have us Anon.
We will go over the framework we use when thinking about our coverage and show how we use the ‘Term Ladder’ strategy to:
Minimize our cost (premiums)
Maximize our options & flexibility
Lock in cheap future insurance costs
Align our needs to our coverage
We also drop some alfa on 2 little known peripheral benefits that most permanent coverage comes with but no one discusses.
We don’t know why any of these other gooroos even try to talk life insurance at this point. All the alfa is ours and we share it here.
Insurance Again?
Yes Anon.
We have spent a majority of our careers in the insurance industry and know insurance and annuity products intimately.
And NO, we are not insurance salesmen…For some reason personal finance twitter assumes anyone who can articulate the value of permanent insurance & knows how it works is a scammy insurance salesman selling high priced products to churn commissions. We aren’t selling anything (this substack doesn’t count seeing how it costs a dime a day and even at scale will be fractions of our actual W2 salary).
[Note - There are lots of scammy insurance salesman selling subpar products, just like any commission based industry. But just like you still buy a car despite the stereotypical con-artist used cars salesmans’ existence, you shouldn’t let that deter you from getting ample life insurance.]
Get caught up on some of our other Insurance Posts:
Life insurance is something almost everyone needs and most people don’t have enough of. The reasons people are under life insured are vast:
It is complex
It seems expensive
The industry has a bad reputation
The benefits of it aren’t seen by you (you buy it, pay for it for years, and the death benefit is paid out after you die)
The ‘return’ on it is low if you live a long time
You need to get underwritten (give blood) and it takes a long time to process which makes it inconvenient
However, if you have children you should be loaded up with life insurance until you are independently wealthy. And then once you are wealthy, life insurance (and annuities) are a great way to handle estate planning and tax-efficient passing on of wealth.