Personal lines
Life insurance
The one policy nobody wants to sit down for. It is also the one where the household either has enough or does not, with very little in between, and where waiting is the only thing that reliably makes it dearer.
The number is not a guess, it is a subtraction
Work out what would still have to be paid if the income stopped, and subtract what is already there. The mortgage balance. The years of household running costs somebody would have to cover. Whatever is set aside for the children. Then take off existing savings and any cover already in force. What is left is the gap, and the gap is the policy. It is a far more useful exercise than any multiple of salary, because it is built out of your actual obligations rather than a rule of thumb.
The employer policy is a start, not a plan
Group cover through work is genuinely worth having and has two properties people forget. It is usually a modest multiple of salary, which is rarely the whole gap. And it belongs to the job, so it leaves when the job does, at exactly the moment a household can least absorb the loss. Cover held in your own name does not care where you work. Full Circle will look at what the employer policy already does before recommending anything on top of it.
Full Circle Insurance, Wexford, PA. Family owned and operated since 2013. Call (724) 935-8000.
If you own a business, this is a commercial question too
A small business often depends on one or two people in a way the balance sheet never shows. If one of them is not there next month, the question is whether the business can carry on long enough to be sold, handed over or wound up properly, rather than collapsing at the worst possible moment for everyone owed money by it.
Because Full Circle writes both the personal and the commercial side, that can be one conversation instead of two people each solving half of it.