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A common way that people search online when purchasing life insurance is "affordable" term life insurance. What exactly does that mean...the term affordable? We all have a sense of the word but let's see exactly how it applies to the decision of what term life plan is best for you. We'll also look at how to get the best rate and most importantly, not pay for coverage that you do not need. So let's look a little closer at securing affordable term life insurance.
Back to the term affordable. According to Merriam-Webster's dictionary, the definition of afford is:
1 a: to manage to bear without serious detriment b: to be able to bear the cost of
This doesn't really help us much. Affordable in terms of life insurance definitely points towards term life as oppose to whole life. Whole life can be considerably more expensive and as we discussed in our Term life versus whole life article, the benefits seem to be more for the carrier and whole life agent than you. In fact, term life is probably the only kind of life coverage that falls under the heading of "affordable".
Further more, you are looking at having this coverage for years if not decades. This means you need to be able to afford it...to manage to bear without serious detriment. A 40 year old can get 100's of thousands of life coverage for $30-40 monthly. That's affordable. More importantly, it's much more likely to be affordable 10 or 20 years from now if things change in your life financially. You don't want to be locked into $100-200 monthly if things change. The danger is that if your income decreases or worse yet, you suffer a layoff, one of the first things you'll look at cutting is that big life insurance premium. That defeats the purpose of buying life insurance in the first place. We want affordable term life insurance so that we can feel we can comfortably manage the premium over the long haul.
Once we've realized that term life is the more affordable path to take, we need to then address the the critical decision of how much and how long. We have written many articles on how much term life is adequate and for what length of time. With our quoting engine, we've made it easy to quickly compare different combinations of amount and time. You want to again make sure that the combination results in an amount that you will be able to afford even between jobs or during lapses or decreases of income. Ideally, keep the premium amount below 5% of your income.
That being said, we give you all the tools you need. The engine will automatically give you the best priced plans across multiple carriers to compare. This ability to quote multiple plans and multiple carriers with their various life insurance price points is single handedly the best approach to find affordable life insurance regardless of age, health, or amount.