How much life insurance do I need?

David Roberts, CPA, shares advice for parents on how much life insurance is enough depending on how many children you have and the age of the children
How Much Life Insurance Should Parents Get?
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How much life insurance do I need?

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A big issue for parents whether you have a young family or teenagers is how do you financially take care of your children if something happens to you, the parents, either one parent or both parents. And the answer is basically life insurance for either spouse and both spouses. And the tragedy of both parents being killed, you have to provide for your children. It depends on how young they are. If they are toddlers, if they are one, two , three years old, they have got a long time to go. So it gets to your talking and planning as what do you want for your kids. Are they going to private schools and grammar, middle and high schools? Are they going to college, universities? Do you want to provide for that? If you figure that a college cost in 18 years might be two to three hundred thousand dollars just for college and then to raise a child from birth to 19 might be another couple hundred thousand dollars, you have got a half a million dollars to go through college and then say if both parents are not around, it is probably going to cost more to care for your children. You add some more onto that and so you probably need $750,000 to a million dollars in life insurance per child as a toddler. Now, if they are teenagers, you are going to have to scale that back down but that will give you some parameters.

David Roberts, CPA, shares advice for parents on how much life insurance is enough depending on how many children you have and the age of the children

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David Roberts

CPA

David Roberts has five children and lives in Southern California with his wife Cynthia, their dog Lucy, and cat named Cooper. Dave has always singled out being an involved parent as his most important life’s work while managing the job responsibilities of being managing partner of his CPA firm, RBZ, LLP in West Los Angeles.

 

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