Buying life insurance is one of those rites of passage: deciding to buy life insurance is a sure sign that you are, in fact, a “grown-up” with grown-up responsibilities. Most people buy life insurance for the first time after having kids, and/or after getting married. Here are five life stages where you might consider buying life insurance – either for the first time, or as an addition to your existing coverage.

• After having a child for the first time: Everything changes when you’re holding that new baby in your arms – and along with your sleep schedule, nothing changes more than your financial responsibilities when you first become a parent. Ideally, you will want to provide financially for that child until he/she is 18 years old, or beyond. What are your hopes and dreams for your child? Do you want to help your kids pay for college someday? Send them to private school? Help them buy a car or make a down payment on a house? Save money for a wedding? It’s not too soon to start planning, and buying life insurance needs to be part of your overall financial plan for parenthood. Life insurance helps protect your family and keeps paying the bills, even in the awful event that you die before your time. Life insurance can leave a legacy for the most important people in your life.
• After having more kids: Do you have a growing family? You might consider buying more life insurance. The amount of money needed to support one child is different from the amount needed to support two kids or three kids or more. As your family grows, you might need a bigger house (and a bigger house payment!), as well as multiple tuition payments. As your family grows, your financial commitments increase as well – make sure your life insurance can keep up.
• When a spouse stops working to stay home with kids: As part of dealing with a growing family, many couples decide to have one spouse leave work to stay home with the kids, either full-time or part-time. If your income decreases as your family gets bigger, you will want to buy more life insurance to cover the gap. (In addition to the breadwinner, you should also buy life insurance for the non-working spouse – even though he/she doesn’t earn income, the labor of caring for children would still need to be done even if that spouse were to die.)
• When your income and standard of living go up: Are you “moving up in the world?” Whether you’ve gotten a promotion at work, started your own successful business, or come into some money from an inheritance or other financial windfall, life insurance needs to protect your current standard of living, not the standard of living you had when you were 23 years old and living in a starter home. The more your financial “net worth” increases, the more your life insurance policy needs to be worth – to protect your family and keep them comfortable, in the home they’re used to, at the schools they love, with the standard of living they’ve come to expect.
• If you get divorced: If you have recently become a single parent (and sole breadwinner), you might want to buy more life insurance to cover the expenses that your children and their caregiver would be faced with if they lost you. (Also – check your beneficiaries on your life insurance policy to make sure the money goes to the person of your choice. If you don’t want your life insurance money going to your ex-spouse, you need to change your beneficiary designation accordingly.)

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