Life Insurance?

I don’t remember whether it was on one of the shows I watch or something I read online, but I recall reading recently that if you’re married and you live off both incomes, you should have life insurance in case something happens. Now, I hadn’t anticipated looking into life insurance until we decided to start having kids. But with the new year comes my yearly review and raise at work. Once again, apparently raises are stuck at 3% company-wide so that’s what I got. Not really what I was looking for since I took on so much in the past year. Oh well. Add to that the fact that Adam recently became salaried and his pay structure is totally screwed up right now. We really don't have a good idea what his actual pay will be until they get everything worked out.

So while I put together a budget for the year, it was full of lots of wild guesses. I know our escrow payments will increase in March when they rebalance the tax account since our tax bill was about $250 more than we had in the account. My calculations tell me it will go up about $50 a month. Fine. Our auto insurance may also change in both April and October since we’re on a 6-month policy. Everything else I’ve got a pretty good idea of where it will end up for the year.

Taking a look at our numbers, it appears we’re spending 37% of our take-home income on housing costs. This includes mortgage, insurance, taxes, and utilities. But take away Adam’s pay and it’s eating up 60% of my net income. Scary. This might be a little skewed since I don’t include any bonuses in Adam’s income and he tends to bring home something nice every quarter. But still. Wow. Houses are expensive.

Anyway, back to the original point of this post. Perhaps it’s worthwhile to take a look at life insurance before I had intended to do so. Both Adam and I have life insurance options through work but they're nothing significant. No one wants to think about dying or losing someone. But as we know too well, and with people too close to us experiencing this in the recent past, it’s a reality some have to face. I know we also have to get some other legalities out of the way eventually – power of attorney, living wills, etc. Meh.

And just to get it out there so there’s no big hoopla if this should ever happen: if I become a vegetable, just pull the damn plug and let someone else get to use my organs, ok? Thanks.