By Chris Cordon, Affinity Benefits
Every insurance policy you own is a bet you’re hoping to lose.
You pay for car insurance and pray you never crash. You pay homeowner’s and hope the house never burns. Health, disability, the warranty on the dishwasher. Same deal every time. You hand over money each month for the privilege of never needing the thing you bought.
Life insurance is the only one that is guaranteed to be used at some point.
Not because every policy pays out. Because the event it covers is the single most certain thing in your financial life. You will, someday, die. Your car might never get totaled. Your house might never flood. The actuarial table, though, has a 100% hit rate on all of us. Eventually.
That’s a strange thing to sell. It’s also why it matters more than the stuff people buy without blinking.
The Bill That Comes First
When someone dies, it doesn’t wait for grief to finish. There are things to do right away.
The median funeral with a viewing and burial now runs $8,300. Add the vault most cemeteries require and you’re near $10,000, just for the first week. (National Funeral Directors Association.)
That’s before the mortgage payment due on the first. Before the car loan, the tuition, the groceries, the electric bill that doesn’t care the household just lost half its income. Or all of it.
Funeral and memorial fundraisers are among the most common categories on GoFundMe, more than 125,000 of them a year. Sit with what that means. Families handed a five-figure bill they never planned for, passing a digital hat to bury someone they love.
The Paycheck Doesn’t Go On
This is the part people underestimate.
If the primary paycheck in your house disappeared tomorrow, one in four American households would feel the financial hit within a single month. Not a year. A month. (LIMRA, 2025 Insurance Barometer.)
And nearly half of American adults carry no life insurance at all.
Most of us insure a $30,000 car without a second thought, then leave uninsured the thing that pays for the car, the house, and everything in them. The income. A 40-year-old earning $70,000 will run roughly $2 million through the household before retirement. That’s the real asset. That’s what walks out the door.
The Cost Illusion
Ask people why they don’t have coverage, or enough of it, and the top answer is “it’s too expensive.”
It usually isn’t.
Three out of four adults overestimate the price of life insurance, often by a wide margin. A healthy 35-year-old can get a $500,000, 20-year term policy for somewhere around $25 to $30 a month. (LIMRA 2025 Insurance Barometer; ValuePenguin and NerdWallet rate data, 2024–2025.)
That’s a streaming subscription and a couple of coffees. For half a million dollars that arrives exactly when a family has lost the person who used to earn it. People spend more than that on a phone plan they complain about.
What This Actually Buys
Strip away the jargon. Term, whole, universal, riders. Life insurance does one plain thing. It replaces a paycheck and pays a bill at the worst possible moment, so the people left behind get to grieve instead of liquidate.
It keeps the kids in the same house. It keeps the mortgage current. It buys time, the one thing a grieving family never has enough of.
That isn’t a sales pitch. That’s the job.
What ASA Members Can Do
You don’t have to become an insurance expert. You have to ask three honest questions.
First: if my income vanished, how long would my family actually be okay? If the answer is “a few months,” you’ve found the gap.
Second: how much coverage do I really have? Add up all of it, the policy through work and anything you bought years ago. Planners generally point to ten times income as a working target. Most people land well short.
Third: when did I last check the number? Coverage bought when you were single and renting may not fit a mortgage and two kids.
If you’ve been avoiding this because you assumed it was unaffordable, get one real quote before you decide. The number tends to surprise people. ASA members have access to coverage and guidance through ASA Advantage, which is a reasonable place to start.
Every other policy you own is a bet against something that might happen. This is the one built around something that will. Worth getting right.
Chris Cordon is a Benefits Consultant at Affinity Benefits, the program administrator for ASA Advantage.
