Life Insurance - What is Your Human Life Value?

Enjoying Retirement

When it comes to life insurance, what is your “human life value”? And more importantly why does it even matter? Well, the reality is, think of it as your actual earning potential over your entire life time. Take a look at how you earn a living, how much you’re spending to stabilize your family, and how much you’re putting away for retirement. In the end if you estimate what that would be from your current age to age 85, it’s a substantial amount of money.

Now what if you passed away and never had the opportunity to earn that money and put that money away for retirement? This would have a significant impact on your family and their retirement situation.

In basic terms your human life value takes into account the financial sum of all you could have earned in your lifetime. This is actually your largest asset in life. It’s the potential income that you would lose should you pass away earlier than expected.

More often than not when we’re thinking about life insurance we are trying to save money and just cover the basics. Term insurance is a powerful way to do this, and still leave a decent benefit should there be a loss. We focus on the mortgage, and children’s education as top priorities to make sure that if we pass, these won’t be issues for our surviving spouse.

However when you start to think of your human life value, now the loss of income comes into the picture and this makes having a larger death benefit critical in planning for loss of life. I hear many people say that their spouses would continue working if they passed away. While that’s true based on the fact that in today’s day and age, in most families, both spouses are working. But it’s not just the immediate loss of income that is so devastating, it’s the loss of potential income, that now derails the surviving spouses retirement.

So when you’re considering life insurance, think of your human life value and not just the basics when it comes to deciding on how much death benefit you should have. 
