Life Insurance in the Recession

By Christine Burns

Those who have life insurance coverage know the importance of life insurance products. It is the very reason that they buy them in the first place. It is basically a death benefit that is targeted to ease the suffering of your family if you pass away prematurely during the coverage period. The problem is that us humans are inherently forgetful. After some time we tend to forget the importance of the life insurance coverage and start thinking of the burden of the monthly premium payments. We forget how important it is for our family's future. It can even get so bad that you start to resent the monthly payments for what might seem like a liability to you for so many years ahead.

The resentment and emotional distress about the constant premium payments are actually made worst in recessionary times. This is because most realize that money isn't as easy to come by anymore and that they should actually take steps to start reducing their expenditures in the face of possibly losing income or having your income reduced in the future. It is almost always at this stage that families start to look at the different expenses that they have and look at ways at reducing them. More often than not, they would seriously consider dropping their life insurance coverage to save a few bucks.

It is however in our view that life insurance coverage should be one of the last things that you consider dropping just to save a few dollars. The "cost" of you dropping your coverage means you are foregoing many hundreds of thousands of dollars at the end of your life to help the rest of your family. It is easy to forget why you opted to get life or term insurance to begin with, but if you weight up all your expenses versus the benefits that easy gets you, you will actually find that dropping your coverage is a very bad idea indeed.

In valuing life insurance, you can't look at it at the individual's standpoint. You have to value it by looking at it from the family's perspective. You have to ask yourself the question, will my family be financially O.K if you're no longer in the picture; Most of the time the answer will be no. If that is the case then you know that your life insurance coverage is of vital importance. You simply can't afford not to have life insurance coverage and leave your family in that situation if you die.

The problem is how the recession is judged against the cost of having life insurance. A recession is quite likely a short term problem. The economy will almost always revert back to its normal state of being in just a few years. A life insurance coverage policy is something that is in place to cover you for the rest of your life. It is unwise to make decision to address a short term problem that would affect something in the long term.

Each family has many other expenses that it can easily do without in exchange for scrapping the life insurance coverage. Some things as easy as lowering the number of channels on your paid TV selection or even exchanging that expensive wine you have at the end of the week for something a bit more reasonable are much more practical alternatives as it has completely no effect on your future.

Life insurance is a very important part in keeping the risk to your family in check should you pass on. It is never a wise idea to end the life insurance coverage just to save a few dollars a month. There are so many other areas where you can cut back on and insurance especially for your family certainly isn't one of them.

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