There are half a dozen kinds and most people are never told the difference. Here is what each one is for, in plain language, so you can tell whether anyone has ever given you the right one.
Start here
Are you covering a period of your life, or the whole of it? Almost everything else follows from that answer, and it is the question nobody asks before quoting you a price.
For a period with an end date
Coverage for a set number of years — usually the years where losing you would be financially catastrophic. The mortgage years. The years the children are at home. It is the cheapest coverage per dollar of protection by a wide margin, and for most families under forty it is the right answer for the bulk of what they need.
The trade is that it ends. If you outlive the term, nothing comes back, and buying again at sixty costs what sixty costs.
For the whole of it
Coverage that does not expire, with a premium that does not change and a cash value that builds slowly and predictably. It costs considerably more per dollar of death benefit than term, which is the honest reason it is oversold to people who needed term.
Where it earns its place: final expenses that will exist whenever you die, a business buy-sell agreement, a special-needs dependent, or an estate that needs liquidity.
For the whole of it, with moving parts
Permanent coverage where the cash value is credited based on the movement of a market index, with a floor that protects you in a down year and a cap that limits you in a good one. Premiums are flexible. Structured well, it can do two things at once.
It is also the product most often sold badly. It is not a savings account, the illustration is not a promise, and if it is underfunded it can collapse years later and take the coverage with it. We will show you the guaranteed column, not just the pretty one.
Small, simple, guaranteed acceptance
A modest permanent policy — usually ten to twenty-five thousand — designed to cover a funeral and the bills that arrive in the month after a death. Underwriting is light or none, which is the point: it is for people who cannot get anything else.
The part most people are never shown
Death is not the only thing that ends a household's income. These sit alongside a life policy, and in a working career you are far more likely to use them.
Riders on a life policy that let you draw on the death benefit early if you are diagnosed with a critical, chronic or terminal illness. Often included at no extra premium — which means a great many people already have them and have never been told.
Care at home or in a facility, which health insurance and Medicare largely do not cover. This is the single largest uninsured risk in most retirement plans, and the cost of ignoring it usually lands on an adult daughter.
Replaces a portion of your income if you cannot work. If your household depends on your ability to earn, this protects the engine rather than the estate.
Accident, hospital indemnity, critical illness — cash paid directly to you, for the deductibles, the lost weeks and the things a major-medical plan was never designed to pay.
How we size it
The number is not a multiple of your salary pulled off a chart. It is what would actually have to be paid if you were not here: the balance on the house, what is left on the cars, the years of income the household would lose, what it costs to finish raising the children, and the funeral. Subtract what is already covered at work and what you already own.
Sometimes that arithmetic says you need considerably more than you have. Sometimes it says you are already fine and should keep your money. Both are results we are happy to deliver.
Worth knowing
Group coverage through your employer usually ends when the employment does, and it is rarely enough on its own. It is a good foundation and a poor plan.
Next step
No cost, no obligation, nothing sold on a first call. Twenty minutes on the phone and you will know whether there is anything here worth doing.