What We Did About Life Insurance After Our Second Was Born

Pete and I got married young, had Theo even younger, and spent the first few years of parenthood doing exactly what every financial article tells you not to do: putting off the boring, uncomfortable money decisions because the day-to-day was loud enough to drown them out. We had a small term policy through Pete's work, the kind that comes bundled with your benefits and disappears the moment you change jobs. Neither of us had looked at the actual numbers in years.

Then Birdie was born, and something about having two kids under five instead of one made the math feel suddenly, uncomfortably real. If something happened to either of us, the other one wasn't just managing grief — they were managing grief while paying a mortgage, daycare for two, and eventually three kids' worth of everything, alone. We finally sat down and did something about it.

Life insurance is a strange thing to shop for because the entire premise requires you to sit across from your spouse and talk through what happens if one of you dies. We'd started this conversation twice before and abandoned it both times, usually because a kid woke up crying or because it just felt too heavy for a Tuesday night. What finally pushed us through it wasn't a tragedy, thankfully — it was a friend of ours going through exactly the situation we were avoiding, and watching how much harder everything got for her because the coverage in place wasn't nearly enough.

We set a date, put the kids to bed early, and made ourselves finish the conversation in one sitting. It took about ninety minutes and a bottle of wine, but we walked away with actual numbers instead of a vague sense that we should probably do something eventually.

I'd heard the terms "term" and "whole life" thrown around for years without really understanding the difference, so here's the plain version that finally clicked for me. Term life insurance covers you for a set period — 10, 20, or 30 years — and pays out only if you die during that term. It's significantly cheaper because the insurance company is betting, actuarially, that you'll likely outlive the term. Whole life insurance covers you for your entire life and builds a cash value you can borrow against, but it costs several times more per month for the same death benefit.

For our situation — two income earners, a mortgage, and kids who'll be financially dependent for roughly the next 18 to 20 years — a financial advisor friend put it simply: term life is built for exactly this problem. You're insuring against the years your family actually needs the income replacement, not insuring forever. Whole life makes more sense as an estate-planning or wealth-transfer tool, which wasn't where we were in our financial life yet.

The rule of thumb we kept running into was somewhere between 10 and 12 times your annual income, but we found it more useful to actually add up our real numbers: remaining mortgage balance, roughly $214,000; projected daycare and school costs for two kids through age 18, which we rounded to $180,000; and a buffer for Pete or me to take a year off work to adjust, which we set at $60,000. That put us at just over $450,000 each, and we rounded up to $500,000 in coverage per person to leave room for inflation and because the cost difference between $450,000 and $500,000 in term coverage was almost nothing.

I expected getting quotes to be miserable, and it mostly wasn't. We used an online broker to get a quote from several carriers at once instead of calling each one individually, which saved us a lot of repeated phone calls. The initial quote is just a questionnaire — age, health history, smoking status, family medical history — and takes about fifteen minutes per person. Both of us then had a quick phone health screening and a scheduled at-home visit from a paramedical examiner who took blood pressure, a blood sample, and measurements. The whole underwriting process, from first quote to final approval, took about five weeks.

If you're starting this process, I'd tell you to get a quote before you assume you can't afford it. We genuinely thought this was going to cost us $150 to $200 a month combined based on secondhand stories from friends, and the number we actually landed on was a lot more manageable than that.

We each bought a 20-year term policy for $500,000 in coverage. Pete's monthly premium came in at $34.12, and mine came in slightly lower at $28.47, mostly due to age and underwriting differences between us. Combined, that's $62.59 a month — less than our monthly streaming subscriptions, which was a genuinely humbling comparison to sit with. The 20-year term takes us through Sam turning 20, which covers the stretch where all three kids are financially dependent.

We locked in those rates at the time of approval, which matters, because term life premiums with most carriers are fixed for the life of the term — the $62.59 a month doesn't creep up as we age within the 20 years.

We added a child term rider to both policies, which adds a small death benefit covering all three kids for a flat additional cost of $6 a month total, rather than needing a separate policy per child. We skipped the waiver-of-premium rider, which would waive our payments if one of us became disabled and unable to work, mostly because Pete's employer already offers reasonably strong long-term disability coverage and the added monthly cost didn't make sense layered on top of that. We did add a 10-year level conversion option on my policy, which lets me convert part of the term coverage to a permanent policy later without a new medical exam, in case our needs change as the kids get older.

If there's one thing I'd want another parent to take from this, it's that getting a quote costs you nothing and usually takes less time than you think. We spent two years assuming this would be expensive and complicated, and the actual number, once we had it in front of us, was less than our monthly phone bill. If you've got even one of the ingredients we had — a mortgage, a spouse who depends on your income, kids who aren't grown yet — it's worth getting the real numbers instead of guessing at them the way we did for far too long.