I’ve been selling insurance in Milton, Vermont since 1999, when my dad Nino handed me the keys to the agency he started back in 1965. In that time, I’ve had exactly one conversation about life insurance that didn’t start with someone saying, “I know, I know, I’ve been meaning to deal with this.” It’s the coverage everyone means to buy and nobody wants to talk about, which is a shame, because it’s honestly one of the easier insurance decisions once you strip away the sales pitch. So let’s strip it away.
Do I even need life insurance if I don’t have kids?
If nobody depends on your income, you can probably skip it — or keep it small. But “nobody depends on my income” is rarer than people think. Got a mortgage with a co-signer? A partner who’d struggle to cover rent alone? Aging parents who lean on you? Even a business partner who’d be stuck buying out your share? Any of those counts as a dependent, financially speaking. I had a client last year, late twenties, no kids, who almost skipped coverage entirely — until we realized his girlfriend was on the mortgage with him and made about a third of what he did. That conversation changed fast.
How much coverage do I actually need? Give me a real number.
Here’s the napkin math I use with clients before we ever get into specifics: take your annual income, multiply it by 10, add whatever debt you’re carrying (mortgage, student loans, the works), then subtract what you’ve already got saved up. That’s your rough target. A $70,000 earner with a $200,000 mortgage and $30,000 saved is looking at roughly $870,000 in coverage. I know that number sounds enormous the first time someone hears it, but term life insurance is one of the few products in this industry where “a lot of coverage” doesn’t mean “a lot of money” — a healthy 35-year-old can often get $800,000 in term coverage for less than a car payment. If you want to run your own numbers before you ever sit down with me, the Insurance Information Institute’s guide to figuring out how much coverage you actually need walks through the logic in plain English.
What’s the difference between term and whole life, and why does everyone argue about it?
Term life covers you for a set number of years — 10, 20, 30 — and pays out if you die during that window. It’s cheap, it’s simple, and it’s what I put most young families into. Whole life covers you forever and builds cash value you can borrow against, but it costs a lot more for the same death benefit. The internet loves to fight about which one is “smarter,” but honestly, it depends on what you’re solving for. If you need a safety net that disappears once the mortgage is paid off and the kids are through college, term does that job perfectly well. If you’re thinking about estate planning, a business succession plan, or leaving a guaranteed inheritance no matter when you pass, whole life earns its keep. When I sit down with Chittenden County families to actually put together a life insurance policy built around what their household needs, most people assumed they needed one or the other, and the honest answer was usually “a little of both.”
I keep hearing “most Americans are underinsured.” Is that just a sales line?
I wish it were, but it’s backed by real data. LIMRA’s 2024 Insurance Barometer study found that about 102 million American adults are either uninsured or say they need more coverage than they currently have — that’s roughly 42% of adults walking around with a gap they know about. Part of that is procrastination — I get it, nobody wakes up excited to plan for their own death. But part of it is that people set their coverage once, at 25, and never touch it again. Then they buy a house, have two kids, and get a raise, and their policy from a decade ago covers about a third of what they’d actually need. If it’s been more than five years since you looked at yours, it’s worth five minutes to double-check the math, and it’s genuinely one of my favorite parts of the job to sit down and walk a family through updating their life insurance coverage once their situation has changed.
What actually determines my premium — is it just my age?
Age matters, but it’s one piece. Insurers look at your health, whether you smoke, your family medical history, sometimes even your hobbies (yes, if you’re a Vermonter who ice climbs Smugglers’ Notch for fun, that comes up). What surprises people is how much a little effort moves the needle — quitting smoking for even a year can meaningfully drop your rate class. As an Allstate broker, I’ve watched underwriting get more sophisticated over the years, and Allstate’s own breakdown of the factors that shape your rate lines up with what I see quoting real policies for real Vermonters every week.
How do I pick a beneficiary without starting a family feud?
Carefully, and with a backup plan. Name a primary beneficiary and a contingent one, because if your primary beneficiary passes before you and there’s no backup listed, the payout can get tangled up in probate court instead of going straight to the people you intended. I also tell clients: revisit this after every major life change — marriage, divorce, a new kid, a beneficiary who’s passed away. I’ve seen policies where an ex-spouse was still listed a decade after the divorce, simply because nobody thought to update the paperwork. It’s an easy fix, but only if you remember to make it. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has a solid consumer overview of how life insurance and beneficiary designations actually work if you want the regulator’s-eye view of it.
Honestly, where do most people go wrong?
Waiting. Every year you put it off, your premium creeps up, and your health is one bad diagnosis away from making coverage far more expensive or, in worse cases, unavailable. I always tell folks the best time to buy life insurance was five years ago, and the second-best time is this week.
If you want to actually run the numbers instead of guessing, that’s the part I enjoy most about this job. I’ll walk you through a plan built around your mortgage, your kids, your income, and your actual life — not a generic formula. Milton families have been trusting my family’s agency with that conversation for close to sixty years now, and I’d be glad to have it with you too.