Life insurance, sized to what the money is for.

Term life insurance

Term life, for the years someone depends on you.

You just bought a house. Maybe your first kid is on the way. Your spouse would be stuck with a mortgage and a stack of bills if something happened to you tomorrow. Term life exists for exactly that stretch, the years where someone else's stability depends on you showing up.

Term life is the simplest product in the category. You pick a coverage amount and a length of time, usually 10, 20, or 30 years, and on most term policies the premium stays level the whole time. If you pass during the term, the people you named on the policy receive the payout. If you outlive it, the coverage ends, or renews at a much higher rate.

The sizing is the whole job: the mortgage balance, the years until the kids are grown, the income that would need replacing. Those are the parts; the term is how long the biggest of them lasts. Adding them up is a conversation, not a calculator.

Whole life / permanent

Coverage that doesn't expire.

Whole life, along with the permanent variations like universal life, is built to stay in force as long as it's paid for. Premiums are usually structured to stay level, and most policies build cash value over time that can be borrowed against later. All of that costs more than term, sometimes a lot more, so for a young family on a budget term usually makes more sense. Permanent makes sense when the coverage has to outlast any term you'd pick, or when the cash value is part of the plan.

It's a long commitment, and the structure of the policy matters as much as who issues it. It gets sized to the budget on the first call and looked at again as things change.

Final expense

A smaller policy with a single priority.

A funeral and the bills around it run into the thousands, and the bill doesn't wait. It tends to show up in the worst week the people you love will have, and it arrives where more than a third of adults would not cover even a $400 emergency expense with cash or its equivalent (per the Federal Reserve's 2025 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, federalreserve.gov).

Final expense insurance is usually a small whole life policy built for that bill. Coverage amounts are smaller, typically $5,000 to $25,000, and the underwriting is usually simpler; many of these policies don't require a medical exam, though some do. If you've been turned down for other life insurance because of health issues, this is often still an option.

It's a common conversation for people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, and the point of it is that nobody reaches for a credit card during the hardest week of their lives.

Long-term care insurance

The gap that health insurance doesn't cover.

Most people don't realize regular health insurance typically doesn't cover long-term care. Not nursing homes, not assisted living, not in-home care past short-term rehab. More than half of people who reach 65 will need some kind of long-term care (per the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, aspe.hhs.gov, 2021), and without coverage the bill usually comes out of retirement savings.

Long-term care insurance pays toward the cost of that care, so savings and whatever was meant to pass to family drain slower. It's usually cheaper and easier to qualify for when you're younger and healthy, which is why most planning happens in the 40s and 50s; waiting until the late 60s usually means higher premiums, or not qualifying at all.

It isn't right for everyone, and there are other ways to plan for these costs. How it works, what it covers, and whether the math fits is the conversation.