What fits your family? The calculator.

How this works

This isn't a quote, and it doesn't pretend to be. It takes what you tell me about your situation and points you at the product that usually fits it — the same thinking I'd do on the phone, minus the phone.

Some of it is arithmetic, and which arithmetic depends on where your money comes from. If you are working, the income-protection figure uses the DIME method — Debts, Income, Mortgage, Education — with your existing savings and coverage subtracted. If you are retired, that method is simply the wrong tool: no affordable policy replaces a Social Security check or a pension for the rest of someone's life, and pretending otherwise produces a number that will only disappoint you when the quote arrives. So for a fixed income it works from what actually stops and what actually has to be paid — the send-off, anything still owed, and a cushion while the survivor adjusts to one check instead of two. Every box is optional and nothing is filled in for you, because an invented number is worse than no number. The rest is pattern matching from placing these policies: a long horizon points somewhere different from a short one, and a health history points somewhere different again.

Age does more of the work than anything else, because it decides what is actually available to you. Carriers stop issuing the longer term lengths as the issue age climbs, and stop issuing term at all before very long. Indexed universal life has a maximum issue age at every company, and needs years of funding behind it to behave the way the illustration says. Final expense and whole life keep issuing when the others have closed, and their premium never changes once it is set. So the tool will point a forty-year-old and a sixty-five-year-old at genuinely different products for the same stated goal — not because the goal changed, but because the shelf did.

What it can't know is what a policy actually costs you. That depends on your age, your health, your state, and — more than people expect — which carrier you apply to. The same coverage can carry very different premiums at different companies. Working out what you need is the easy half.

Two tax figures drive several of the answers above, so here they are in the open. A policy funded too fast becomes a modified endowment contract, which leaves the death benefit income-tax-free but taxes loans and withdrawals gains-first with a 10% penalty before 59½[4]. And federal estate tax does not begin until $15 million per person or $30 million per married couple in 2026, with no Florida estate tax on top[5] — so for almost everyone reading this, it simply does not arise.

The two modes

Simple starts from what is worrying you and works out both the product and the amount. Advanced starts from the other end: you name the death benefit and say what the policy should be best at, and it tells you how I would build it and why. Advanced is where the design questions live — whether a policy should be structured for the largest death benefit per dollar or for cash value you can actually reach, what a paid-up additions rider does to the first five years, and where the tax code puts a ceiling on funding. Those choices change the outcome far more than which company's name is on the front.

If nothing here felt like you

That happens, and it usually means the real question is one you haven't been asked yet. Call me and we'll find it — there's no cost to the conversation and no obligation at the end of it.