At what age should you start thinking about getting life insurance?

There is no magic age when life insurance should be purchased. Whole life policies are best purchased as early in life as possible, while term life insurance policies are most often purchased to provide for a time-constrained obligation, such as providing college tuition for your kids if you pass away before they get there. It is not unusual for a person to be covered with both types of policies, one intended to provide for the unknown future and the other used for various financial obligations that happen as your family grows.

The best time to start a whole life insurance policy is when your child is born. Whole life policies accrue value over time, and purchasing one for your children can give them a nest egg for their more mature years. By the time the child leaves home, the policy will have built up enough money that they can borrow against the policy to buy a home or to overcome some unexpected hardship.

Basically, the younger a person is when a life insurance policy is purchased, the lower the premiums on the policy will be. As the average life span of people has increased, the average length of life insurance policies has increased as well, and that means that the risk of paying out at a loss is much lower today than it has ever been before. Obviously, there will be a lot more time to pay on a policy for a 5 year old child than on a 60 year old man, so the premiums vary in cost significantly.

If you do not have any life insurance at all, you are already older than you should have been. Everyone needs life insurance, even if it is for nothing more than to pay for a funeral if they die. Funeral costs and burial expenses can easily top $10,000, and that means that a person with insurance is either imposing unnecessary costs on their loved ones or settling for less than they want.