Answers To Questions Only Adults Would Know... (or well informed youngsters)

[Spacescifi]

Here is where you can ask them. I will go first.

Life Insurance and death benefits: If one has no family at all why bother?

How doea it even work?

I presume it's just another profit generator, they want everyone to pay for life insurance whether they need it or not.

How does it work? When you die and are none the wiser anyway?

Or is there more to it?

Yes I live in the US of A. California.

Edited July 26, 2023 by Spacescifi

[TheSaint]

I'll go first.

When I was thirty-five I got married. I was in really good shape, running twenty miles a week, going scuba diving every other week. My wife and I decided to get life insurance. I got a $750,000 term policy, with a fixed table until I was 65. I actually got a preferred table because when they gave me my physical I was in above average shape.

That was in 2003, twenty years ago. Since then, I have had three children, changed jobs four times, died on the operating table for eleven minutes, stopped working because of long COVID, and am now in the early stages of heart failure. At this point, the odds of me making it to 65 are slim to none, and Slim just left town. Am I glad that I locked in a term life insurance policy when I was in good health twenty years ago? I don't know, you tell me.

[kerbiloid]

Your story reminds me computer shooters, when you have gotten a superweapon, and everytime trying to  avoid using it to save its superammo, so you return to the base with backpack, full of legendary weapon and a rusty cutoff. of the first gun found behind the shed.

(Though, maybe I got the situation wrong, and you actually use a devastator cannon to light a cigarette.)

[Superfluous J]

On 7/25/2023 at 10:25 PM, Spacescifi said:

Life Insurance and death benefits: If one has no family at all why bother?

Because your life can change in an instant. Or a few decades. Mine has, several times.

[tater]

1 hour ago, Superfluous J said:

Because your life can change in an instant. Or a few decades. Mine has, several times.

I suppose a younger person who might get married later and have someone to leave the money to could err on the side of whole life, and cash it out should they find themselves permanently single.

I didn't get life insurance until I was married, FWIW, never occurred to me. I suppose that's a bit like the P-47 pilot I heard give a talk at an 8th AF luncheon years ago. He said that as young men, if during a briefing they were told, "9 out of 10 of you won't be coming home today." every single one of them would be looking around the room thinking, "You poor BLEEPs."

Edited July 27, 2023 by tater