Individual & Family · Life Insurance
Protect the people who depend on you.
Life insurance is a promise you make to the people you love: that if you’re not here, the mortgage still gets paid and the plans still happen. Here’s how the four kinds work — and how to size the one that fits.
What it’s for
What the money actually does
A death benefit goes straight to your beneficiaries, generally income-tax-free, and they decide how to use it. In practice, it does four jobs:
Everyday living
Replaces the income your household counts on — groceries, utilities, the ordinary bills that don’t pause.
The mortgage & debts
Keeps the family in the house and clears loans and credit balances instead of passing them along.
Your kids’ future
Funds college or the start your children were counting on, whatever the timing.
Final expenses
Covers funeral and burial costs — commonly many thousands of dollars — so grief doesn’t arrive with a bill.
The four kinds
Which policy does which job
Term Life
Most popularLevel premiums for a set stretch — usually 10 to 30 years. The affordable way to cover your highest-responsibility years: while the mortgage runs and the kids are home.
Whole Life
LifelongPermanent coverage with fixed premiums and a death benefit that doesn’t expire, plus cash value that builds over time and can be borrowed against while you’re living.
Policy loans and partial surrenders reduce cash surrender value and the death benefit.
Universal Life
FlexiblePermanent coverage with adjustable premiums and death benefit, so the policy can flex as your finances change over the decades.
The premium required to keep the policy in force increases over time. Coverage may lapse if premiums are unpaid or insufficient.
Final Expense
SimplifiedA smaller permanent policy built to cover funeral and end-of-life costs. Fixed premiums, simplified health questions, and coverage that can’t be cancelled as your health changes.
New in the last few years
Buying life insurance got dramatically faster.
The old picture — a nurse at your kitchen table, then six weeks of waiting — is no longer the default. Accelerated underwriting lets many carriers approve healthy applicants using prescription and data checks instead of an exam, often within days, and at coverage amounts that used to require full underwriting. If you’ve been putting this off because of the hassle, the hassle mostly went away.
Fika makes it easy
One conversation. Every carrier we work with.
Life insurance pricing is carrier-specific and health-specific — the same person can get wildly different offers from two companies. We take your situation to 25+ carriers, find who treats it best, and tell you plainly what we’d do in your shoes. No pressure, no spam, no charge.
FAQs
The questions everyone asks
A common starting point is roughly 10 to 12 times your annual income — but that’s a rule of thumb, not an answer. The real number comes from your mortgage balance, other debts, how many years of income your household would need to replace, what college costs you want covered, and what coverage you already have through work. We walk through that math with you in one sitting, free.
Explore Individual & Family coverage