The Life Insurance Conversation
September is Life Insurance Awareness Month, and it doesn’t take much time on military-friendly websites to see that this is an important conversation to have. The Pillar Deployment Retreat is coming up in just a few months, and they always have a panel about the importance of life insurance. Full disclosure: I used to sell life insurance and am still licensed to do so, and all that means is that I am still very passionate about this topic because IT MATTERS!
Talking about death and dying is always difficult, especially when we are approaching a deployment where those things feel like real possibilities. We have to have this conversation with our loved ones, though. Life insurance stands for so many things beyond a check. It’s not just money. It’s the legacy of our loved ones. It’s what they left behind to take care of us when they could no longer do so.
We have to have this conversation. And this conversation sucks. Whenever my husband and I have it, I usually cry through the whole thing, but we do it anyway. I know my husband’s last wishes. I know what kind of funeral he wants. I know what he wants done with his body. Thinking about those things eats me up, but not knowing when the time comes (because no matter how far off that time is, make no mistake that it is coming) would make me feel so much worse.
The real power of life insurance is that it gives us time to grieve. We are all well aware of how stressful money struggles can be. Even after the loss of someone, money can be the first thing on our minds if we have to worry about paying for the funeral, burial, and making sure the mortgage gets taken care of next month. I don’t want to have to worry about the money. I don’t want to have to think of a plan. I don’t want to figure out what I will do for the coming months and years. I just want to grieve. I want to sit in my loss and feel the love of my family.
There’s no right or wrong answer for how much insurance we should have. We have to talk about that as a family to ensure we are in a good place should the worst happen. My husband, son, and I have 11 policies in our house (not including any our parents have taken out on us). Some are through the Air Force, some are to cover the mortgage, some are how we are saving for retirement (insurance does a lot more than death claims nowadays), and some covers the fact that we are a single-income family. We even have policies in place for when my husband most likely gets cancer from those burn pits on deployment (they registered him in a database, for goodness sake) so that we can get the money upfront to pay for treatment because as good as Tricare is, everything still seems to cost too much.
When we got married, we reevaluated our insurance needs. When we had our son, we reevaluated. And we will reevaluate come January when we move again. This isn’t a one-and-done conversation because our family's needs are constantly changing. And please ensure that you update the beneficiaries on your policies because that is downright impossible to change after a check has been cut.
I can’t tell you what your insurance needs are. I can tell you, though, that this is a conversation you must have today. And then take action. We never know when our last day is. Life in the military keeps that reminder in front of us, but outside of the war zone, bad things still happen every day.
When you have this conversation, be honest and vulnerable. We don’t need to pretend this isn’t difficult to discuss and imagine. We just have to do it. We have to be honest about where we are at and actually look at the reality of the situation. SGLI for active duty service members goes up to $400,000, which sounds like a lot of money, and it is, but when it includes the loss of the primary breadwinner or caregiver, that money goes away a lot faster than we think it will. Life insurance buys us time. It buys us time to grieve, heal, and plan. We get to decide for our family what that looks like and how much we can afford because life insurance is worthless if we can’t keep it. Something is always better than nothing when it comes to insurance.
I have seen a lot of families who had that conversation and a lot that haven’t. I can promise you that the ones who had it were infinitely better off than the ones who didn’t. On the worst day of their lives, they knew that the person they loved and lost had done everything in their power to protect them. Their legacy lives on in so many ways, and keeping the family safe and healthy is just one of those.
I took out my first life insurance policy on myself when I was 18 years old. I grew up in this industry. I know that it matters, and I know that no one is promised tomorrow. Our dreams all come true in the future. We still fight and plan for them. We also have to prepare for a future that we may not be a part of, and we do that because we love the ones we’ll leave behind. I don’t want them to hurt any more than they have to.
The vows my husband and I made meant that we promised to take care of one another. We would be there, together, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, no matter what. I imagine your vows were similar. Death is certainly a roadblock, but in my marriage, it doesn’t mean we are breaking our vows. We will still take care of one another, and life insurance is one of the ways that we do that. So please, have the conversation, protect your family, and hold your loved ones close tonight.
