Life Insurance

Let’s talk about life insurance. It’s one of those areas that I feel like a lot of times people want to sort of shy away from that conversation. But we believe it’s important to be addressing it. And so you think back maybe as you’re young and maybe starting a family. There was a specific purpose. And as you go through life there’s going to be different stages of life and ultimately then different purposes for life insurance. So going back to when you were young, maybe starting a family, maybe it was to replace lost income to help your spouse then to be able to continue to support the children and all that. Maybe it was to pay off debt. If you had a big mortgage, then oh, it would make life that much easier for the surviving spouse. But what about later in life when you’re getting close to or in retirement? So often I hear well, I really don’t need life insurance. Which potentially may be your opinion and your situation may not warrant that. But there may be cases where you want to be thinking through, especially later in life. That’s likely the time when you’re going to be passing away. And so that’s where life insurance may be a helpful tool. And so when you think of like a married couple and one spouse passes away. You know I think about well, there’s going to be a loss of income. With Social Security you keep the higher of the two Social Security benefits. Maybe there’s a pension and maybe there’s not necessarily 100% survivorship benefits. Maybe that’s reduced to 75% or 50% or maybe there’s no benefits left to the surviving spouse. So life insurance may come in handy there. But what about having some type of tax-free lump sum that’s then left to that surviving spouse to help pay whatever bills and whatever else may come up. It could be used perhaps in a tax planning situation. What if you have most of your assets in traditional 401K or traditional IRAs that are fully taxable and the surviving spouse now finds themself in a situation where they went from married, filing jointly on the tax return to a single tax payer. And perhaps they jumped into a higher tax bracket. It might be a scenario where they’d consider should I convert this IRA money to Roth IRA and use the tax-free life insurance benefits to pay the tax and not have a higher tax situation they rest of their life. So things like that as well as maybe it’s long-term care. There’s a lot of different life insurance policies these days where you can access the death benefit early to help pay for potential long-term care benefits. And so again, there’s a lot of different ways to consider that. If you have an existing life insurance policy, I’d encourage you to request an in-force illustration. So in-force illustration essentially seeing what is this policy do for the next 30 plus years? So we have a whole team here. If you have specific questions about life insurance, you’re welcome to give us a call.