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My husband and I have separate life insurance plans. My parents actually started my insurance policy for me when I was a teenager. I still have to send in some paperwork to change the beneficiary to my husband and son.

We hired a lawyer for the will and we have a financial planner for the insurance.

my work gives me a small $100k insurance for free. not sure if i'd take it with me when i quit my job. my husband has a substantial one but right now, it's just term. not sure if we want to invest in whole life. still need to talk to a financial planner.

I don't think it is weird to plan for the future and the what-if situations that occur in life. IMO it is worse to go around thinking that everything is going to be roses and cupcakes and then be totally unprepared for something as serious as losing a spouse.

@mrs. bee - when you discuss it, are you going to go into whole vs term? also, does it make a difference if you've already had kids or something? i heard it's cheaper if you get it before you're pregnant.

My husband has a policy, and I used to have one but it lapsed because someone else was paying for it for me and they quit paying it. We'll probably get me set up with one soon again.

As soon as we get pregnant we're going to. Enough to pay off the house and live for awhile without having to work. It's hard to think about, but I know I couldn't work if anything happened to him.....

My husband and I have policies that we got right after we got married. We're planning on insuring our little one right after she's born, since children are typically very inexpensive to insure and it's the easiest to obtain a policy right when they're born.

As for the term/whole life difference - ooh! Something I can actually speak somewhat intelligently about! Tequiero21 gave a pretty good description of whole vs. term - basically, the way I think about it is whole life insurance is like buying a house / car and term insurance is like renting / leasing.

With whole (or "permanent") life insurance, you build up cash value that grows year by year (tax deferred!) that you can borrow against, usually at a very low interest rate, should you ever need it. If you decide down the road to "cash out" your policy if you don't want or need it, you can obtain whatever the cash value was in your policy in the form of a check. Also, with whole life insurance, there isn't a set term for how long your coverage lasts, so you don't have to worry about it lapsing/not having coverage after a certain age. Some people believe in buying whole/permanent life insurance as a portfolio diversification strategy, since it grows yearly and is unaffected by the stock market, largely.

Term insurance is much cheaper than whole life insurance, since you're only covered for a specific amount of time, you can't "cash out" the policy and get any money/value back from it, and the value of your policy doesn't grow. Some insurance companies allow you to convert your term insurance into whole insurance during a specified time period (called an "exchange"). You can typically get cheaper rates for whole life insurance if you do it as a "term exchange," but not every policy has this benefit.

Also, depending on the type of policy/who you buy your policy from, some companies pay policyowners back yearly with dividends, typically that they can use to put toward the next year's premiums. You get higher dividends on whole/permanent life insurance policies than you do with term insurance policies.

There's a lot more to it than that...but that's a pretty basic explanation. Hope that helps!

We both have death benefits (sad, right?) through work. We plan on getting life ins. before LO is born and will also do a will.

We both have smaller policies through work. We plan on bumping them up with supplemental term policies after the LO is here. By the time I was ready to apply I was already too far along in my pregnancy. They typically will not rate or will rate a pregnant woman higher after 4 mo into her pregnancy.

@wifefromscratch: what's the benefit to insuring your LO? I always thought of life insurance as income replacement, but there is obviously something I am missing!

@mrsjyw: thanks...that's good to know. I will look into something for DS.

My husband had life insurance before we got married and added me and then our son after he was born. We upped the amount after our son was born just so that our house would be paid off and he would be provided for in the event anything happens to either of us. And given both of our ages we bought term (30-years) for now, I think. Hubby took care of that but I believe that's what we have right now. We'll probably look into it again when we have another one later on. With each child, I feel like we have to up the amount so they each have enough.