Insurance Policies Healthy Male 30 Year Old

Umbrella policies are for supplemental insurance if you have a lot of assets (i.e. a higher net worth than a typical liability maximum for automobile insurance, $300K).
No hurry to get it now if you are single and net worth is under that threshold. It is inexpensive to get later on once your financial picture improves.

If you have dependents, you need life insurance. 20-30 year term insurance that is 8-10x your take home pay.
Long Term Disability insurance. You're far more likely to be disabled than die while still working age. Check with your employer, it's becoming more common in benefit packages.
Car Insurance if you have a car. Lots of variables here.
Home insurance if you have a Home.
Renter's insurance if you're a renter.

I would also add to stay away from purchasing insurance you don't need. No sense in getting life insurance if you don't / have no plans to start a family.
Also, stay away from co-mingling insurance and investments. Keep them separate! Most agents will steer the insurance discussion towards whole life (VUL, Cash Value Life, etc..) because it's very lucrative for them.

If you ARE planning to have a family though, but don't currently have any dependents, is it worth it to get life insurance at a young age? Is it significantly less expensive at age 30 vs. 35 or 40?

I want to know this too. I hope to have kids in the next 10 years, but I'm not married yet.
As another caveat, I have student loans that my parents cosigned on. Is this another reason to have life insurance - to pay off that $50k in case I kick it?

I have student loans that my parents cosigned on.
You will want life insurance for the remaining balance of the student loans your parents cosigned on, unless they have a special death clause that forgives the loan as some student loans do. In general a loan that is cosigned would transfer to the cosigner upon your death. No point in forcing your parents to pay off your loans if you are dead. Better to get insurance.

Insurance agent here.
Yes it's cheaper the younger you are. Plus it's cheaper the healthier your parents and siblings are. So, for example, if you're young and healthy but your dad had a heart attack at age 50 (pretty young) then your insurance will be much more expensive.
I encourage even young single people to get life insurance, just to cover debts and the cost of burial. A 100k term policy for a 25 year old can be had for less than 10 bucks a month.

Does that rate continue? It only seems worth it if it does. Otherwise, as a healthy 25 year-old with no dependents, that's still just $10 I could pocket each month. Why waste the money when I could wait until I actually have kids, you know?

Depending on the plan that rate is the same for the duration of the term.
And you can wait till you have kids and so on, but by then you may have health problems, parents with health problems, etc. which may even make it impossible for you to get insurance at all. It's your call, but given the very minor cost of coverage, I personally see no reason not to.

YES it is normally cheaper to get a term policy at a younger age than later
it is also a good idea to have enough life insurance to cover any debt you may have such as student loans or a mortgage.
Your debt does not disappear in most cases if you die it is just transferred to the next of kin.

Your debt does not disappear in most cases if you die it is just transferred to the next of kin.
Is this really the case? It makes no sense to me (why should anyone have to clean up after estranged family members?) and I've heard a number of times that it doesn't work that way.

These are questions of probate and estate. But, in general, debts do not vanish at death. The estate must still pay off it's debts. This is why there are "estate sales" where a home and its contents are sold as quickly as possible to try and generate the cash needed to pay off debts.

Yeah, this is what I thought. I wouldn't consider this to be "transferring the debt to the next of kin", though, because you are only taking from what could otherwise have belonged to them in the future... i.e., if the estate did not cover all of the debt, the remaining balance would not be passed on.

You are correct. If the estate cannot cover the debt, the debt dies with the estate. There is no additional liability from family members unless you consigned any of their debt.

What happens in the case where there are multiple debts, yet the estate is not worth enough to cover them all?
tautan permaneninduk

No. Debt does not transfer to "the next of kin".
Anyone who cosigns on a loan is automatically responsible for the loan if something happens to the original borrower, or if original borrower does not make payments.

In some cases, debt is communal in a marriage and debts incurred, with or without permission, by one spouse may be required to be borne by the other spouse.

but also remember this means there is no money to have a funeral anything like that

Your debt does not disappear in most cases if you die it is just transferred to the next of kin.
This is not correct. Debts remaining after your death will be paid out of any remaining assets in your estate/trust. If that isn't enough to cover it, your creditors are out of luck. Your "next of kin" are not stuck with your debts when you die. For example, if you're the closest relative to your deadbeat brother, you are NOT responsible for his debts when he dies unless you were a party to the debt in some manner.

When the creditor comes knocking at your door, you say, "I'm sorry, but you have no legal right to hound me for this dead person's debt." And then shut the door.

ok if you believe that but just wait until the creditor are knocking on your door. I have seen it too many times.
I don't "believe" it, I know it. You're posting something as fact that is false. You are not liable for someone else's debts when they die unless you are a party to the debt in some manner. A creditor contacting a relative in that situation is preying on the ignorance of the relative (and that does happen).


That's a tougher decision and one that will be based on your personal situation. Do you lead a unhealthy lifestyle? Any vices (smoking) or chronic diseases with a risk of getting worse? Any reason to believe your health will decline? If yes, then I would try and lock in on a 20 or 30 year term policy. Otherwise, I'd wait until kids were a certainty.

The agent I was working with at the time when I got my disability policy ran the numbers on a few scenarios for term, with health and other risk factors a constant and it was negligible from 30 - 35 (less than ~$20 difference a month for a 30 year term).

It does sort of make sense, but the issue is that you don't know when you'll actually need the insurance, and you also can't be sure how much coverage you'll need. So you may end up paying for several years of coverage that you don't really need, only to have to get a second policy at a higher rate anyway once you DO have kids.

Well personally I'm 30 years old, not married, no kids, but hopefully one day...
Let's say I buy a whole life policy now for, I dunno, let's say $1,000,000. If I end up not having kids, could I list a niece or nephew as the beneficiary? Or can I have the money donated to a charity or my old high school when I croak?

I think for whole life, it probably makes a lot more sense to buy younger (people here will tell you not to buy whole life, but that's a separate issue). I was thinking more if you got, say, a 20-year term and then end up not having kids for 10 years. At that point you'll probably need to buy another policy anyway.

If you could predict with reasonable accuracy how many kids you're going to have and when, then you could run the numbers and see if it makes sense to buy now or later. For example, it might be cheaper to buy a 30-year term now than a 20-year term in 10 years.

I'm pretty sure you can list whoever you want as the beneficiary. If you don't yet have kids, you'd presumably just pick someone else for now and change it if/when you do have kids.


To answer the question: you don't know who you will be marrying, and you don't know when you will be finally 'done' with childbearing. Too many variables - you could be in your 30's and marry someone in their 40's, or someone in their 20's. Very different scenarios on when childbearing starts and ends.

And so the Term Insurance to get doesn't make any sense to buy when you are still single - you buy it when you need it, and for as long as you need it.

Say you get married in 5 years. You will have sunk 5 years buying Term insurance for who? And then your spouse is working, and perhaps she can take care of her own needs should you die, so you still don't need life insurance.

And then in another 3 years you have 2 kids. So from kid #1 you buy a 20-year term, so that that kid #1 is taken care of in the most important years - when they are grown up it doesn't matter nearly so much. And a few years later, with kid #2 it's another 20-year term insurance, and you are all set-up.
You can play with insurance calculators and have different birth dates to determine that the rates really don't move that much between 30 and 35 and 40 (and a few years beyond that).
Everyone's situation is different, and as a single person there's not much point in buying life insurance since you don't have any dependents.

The big issue here is risk. On average, you may come out better not paying insurance just as on average the term itself with dependents is a waste as less than 1% of policies pay out.

Insurance policies are contracts. You have no guarantee you will be able to get one at a later date. A 22 year old in my office just got cancef and will have to either decide not to have kids as early as him and his so want and hope he can get coverage later or accept there is a chance his family will be financially screwed. On the flip side, his wife could plan on not staying home with the kids knowing she needs to have a strong backup.
Or he could have bought term, knowing he wanted a family within 5 years because it matched his goals.

Thanks, those are pretty much the "standard" insurance policies to have. I've only recently learned about Long Term Care insurance - is that a good investment at an early age to help mitigate healthcare costs after retirement?

Insurance agent here - The only reason to buy LTCI at a young age (in my opinion) is if you are particularly risk averse. The costs of long-term care are very expensive, but the odds of you needing it before age 65 are slim. More likely you'd need your Disability policy.

LTCI is a rapidly changing beast. Many many companies which once offered it are now out of the market altogether. Those that still offer it are increasing costs rapidly. While it can be tempting to say "I want to lock in my rate by purchasing now" it's likely to be such a long time that you're going to be paying decades of premiums. Better to simply invest the cash, in my opinion.
Besides, the price for a 30 year old is not really that much cheaper than it is for a 55 year old.
tl;dr: give it a couple decades.

EDIT: I feel I should mention that many life insurance policies nowadays include riders which are remarkably similar to LTCI. For example, my term policy will pay up to 50% of it's death benefit before I die if I find myself meeting the same requirements an LTCI policy has. (unable to dress myself, clean myself, etc.)