Life Insurance on Me (Wife) and Children?

Hey,

I actually work at State Farm, and I am a licensed agent... I would say that whatever company you choose, to check their financial strength. All insurance companies are rated, the best being A++. I have heard that Allstate's "Life" company had to borrow from their "property and casualty" (meaning auto and home) company to keep their life company afloat. You can also check with your states division of insurance for complaints on different companies.

Good Luck!

Hey M. - My husband is also military (17 years and counting) & we have his SGLI & Spouse SGLI through the military. We also have AAFMAA for additional coverage for us both: www.aafmaa.com they are military only and the rates are great (no worry about war clause that is in many other companies).

I saw one other person recommended USAA.com - oh my YES YES YES they are wonderful for military families. I love all of their services (banking, insurance, financial advice, etc). Even if you have another bank open an account with USAA because you and your kids can have them for life. I also like their free online bill pay & deposit from home (with a scanner). Their staff is wonderful to talk with & help you with anything. We also found that their car insurance rates could not be beat by anyone, we had State Farm for many years & had very low rates that no other company could beat the rate & coverage, that is until we moved our coverage to USAA.

You can talk with AAFMAA & USAA advisers and they can help you review the rates for insurance coverage as well as what type and amount works best for your family.

I too am a stay at home mom & home school our youngest with IDVA & oldest in private school so we made sure that our coverage would be plenty to cover the house, school for the kids and even nanny help if needed. With AAFMAA we pay $27 a month for me for $600,000, no it is not the cash out type but we could not afford those rates at this time. But I know that if something happens then my family is covered to keep their life as "normal" as possible. Hope this helps & God Bless

I just finished a finance course and learnt to get INS on kids just enough to cover funeral costs and INS on moms enough to pay for childcare for your kids while hubby goes to work, additionally if you can afford the premium money to pay of your house. Hope that helps.

Our ideal on Life Insurance (for mum & dad) is this:

Minimally enough to
- Pay off the house
- Let the survivors cry for one year without having to work

All of this totals out to about 150 a month for both of us (term).

In an ideal world we'd have a larger policy so we could allot 50k to each of our parents, 20k for each sibling, & a 100k to be put in education trust for our son...but in an ideal world we would have more money then we do.

For child life insurance we've allotted enough for:

- cover funeral expenses
- pay the mortgage for a year so we can fall to pieces
* we've also designated a Power of Attorney (with compensation fee also allotted for the hassle) to actually PAY the mortgage out of that money; and in the event to completely and totally losing our minds to deal with all the creditors & etc.

In all honesty, we should probably up the coverage to the same as ours...since while I'd be devastated if my husband died...I wouldn't want to live if my son died. It's hard to feed yourself when you don't want to live, much less get to work on time. The only real reason why we haven't is just an emotional thing. I need to get to the point where I can put the dollar signs behind that reality. Right now, either I just can't bear to think of "profiting" from my son's death, or I'm making it easier to follow him. Bleck.

We use USAA...and are EXTREMELY happy with them. I've used them in one capacity or another since I was 15, and my parents have used them for as long as I can remember. They're only available to Government & Military employees and dependants, however. (At least the last time I checked.) If you qualify in any way they're worth it 100%.

HaHa! Just read you're "about me" section. Get in touch with usaa now. www.usaa.com

Good luck, this is an icky thing to be dealing with.

I've done a lot of estate planning (living wills, durable powers of attorney, etc.) and my standard advice is that people NOT purchase life insurance for children. If I have a client who really wants to purchase an insurance policy for a child, I recommend that it be a very modest policy - only enough to pay for the funeral expense.

For spouses, ESPECIALLY SAHMs (who tend to dramatically undervalue themselves and how much their contributions are monetarily worth to their families), I recommend that they sit down and figure out how much their family would need if they passed away.

To come up with the amount for my policy, I calculated how much we owed (mortgage, car, etc.) and then I added my husband's salary for six months. Then I sat down with my husband and explained that if I died, I wanted him to use the life insurance to pay off the house, the car, and other debts and to be able to take leave without pay for six months to be with our children. (I also told him that I would absolutely want him to move on with his life and find someone else to love, but threatened him with an eternity of haunting if he used MY life insurance money to court a new woman rather than to benefit our children! [grin])