Term Life Insurance · Colorado
Most online calculators tell you to buy "10x your income" and call it a day. That number isn't wrong, exactly — it's just not yours. Your mortgage, your kids' ages, and whether your spouse works all change the real answer, sometimes by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Here's a way to actually work it out, without the generic multiplier and without a sales pitch attached.
The core question isn't "how much insurance is normal" — it's "what would my family need to keep living the life they're living, without my income?" That usually breaks into a few concrete pieces:
Quick gut-check: add up your mortgage balance, 10-20 years of your income, and any big future costs (college, etc). That rough total is closer to your real number than any flat multiplier.
It assumes every family looks the same. A single-income household with three young kids and a mortgage needs a very different number than a dual-income couple with no kids and a paid-off condo. The multiplier doesn't know the difference — it just spits out a number.
It also doesn't account for term length. Buying enough coverage but for too short a window is almost as risky as not buying enough — if your term ends while your kids are still in high school, you're right back where you started, just older and more expensive to re-insure.
Take a 34-year-old with a spouse, two kids under 10, a $320,000 mortgage, and a household income of $85,000. A rough build-up might look like:
That puts a real, defensible number closer to $1.2–1.3 million — well above what a flat "10x income" rule ($850K) would have suggested, mostly because it missed the mortgage entirely.
This is the one people skip most often, and it's a real gap. A stay-at-home parent doesn't draw a paycheck, but replacing childcare, household management, and everything else they do costs real money — often more than people expect. If that's your situation, it's worth including in the math, not leaving it out because there's no salary line to multiply.
Once you know the amount, the next question is how long you need it. A common approach: pick a term that covers you until your youngest is financially independent, or until your mortgage is paid off — whichever is longer. For most parents with young kids and a 30-year mortgage, that lands somewhere between a 20 and 30-year term.
The coverage calculator on the homepage walks through your income, debt, and timeline in under a minute — then you can talk through it with a real person, not a chatbot.
Use the Calculator →Financially, yes — coverage costs money every month, so there's a point of diminishing returns. But most people are under-insured, not over-insured, so it's rarely the risk to worry about first.
Only partially. Workplace coverage is usually 1-2x your salary and disappears the moment you leave the job — it's rarely enough on its own, and it isn't portable.
Often not. Many term policies today use simplified or accelerated underwriting based on health questions, without a traditional exam, depending on your age and coverage amount.