I don't WANT Life Ins

The program is providing life insurance in order to pay off your debts should you die before accumulating enough assets to pay them off (if you're single). If you're married/partnered, the program is providing you with enough life insurance to maintain the survivor's standard of living.

You may be able to adjust the need for insurance by using some of the contingent planning features (I think you can lower the standard of living of the surviving spouse, but I'm not sure) but you can't eliminate it.

Best,

Dick Munroe

munroe wrote:The program is providing life insurance in order to pay off your debts should you die before accumulating enough assets to pay them off (if you're single). If you're married/partnered, the program is providing you with enough life insurance to maintain the survivor's standard of living.

You may be able to adjust the need for insurance by using some of the contingent planning features (I think you can lower the standard of living of the surviving spouse, but I'm not sure) but you can't eliminate it.

Best,

Dick Munroe

Has any "progress" been made on this issue? I still want to eliminate life insurance. I have no debt, so that's not an issue, and there are so many other variables in survivor lifestyle decisions I want the ability to turn life insurance off.

To turn off our recommendations to life insurance you can specify in the estate screen that you want your survivors to suffer a major decrease in their living standard. But why would you want to do this? Larry

Larry, I own real estate without debt, with substantial cash flow.

I also believe (a relatively early) death of one spouse will within two or three years, or less, cause major modifications in lifestyle and standard of living for the surviving spouse.

I'm retired, my wife is retired; we have no need to protect our income, as it is all passive, i.e. our standard of living does not depend on earnings...which is really what life insurance is insuring...income, not life. Make sense?

Since I'm revisiting all my old questions, I might as well bug y'all about this one, too. I definitely get the ESP concept of life insurance as protection for survivor's standard of living, but in my particular case I don't think it applies. We have no debt; we have no earned income; the death of one of us will leave the survivor in a better financial position, not worse, as she/I get the entire pile to ourselves; even Social Security survivor benefits are close enough to living spouse's benefits that there will be an insignificant reduction in total (unearned) annual income.

So, why do I need life insurance? I realize it's easy enough for me to do a little arithmetic and deduct the annual insurance premiums from all the data tables, but still....

I assume you've looked at the survivor reports? Those reports indicate that your wife will have a lower living standard than current living standard or otherwise it wouldn't be recommending life insurance.

Now if you are saying that's not true because of real estate income, then you should put that real estate income into ESPlanner and it will perhaps show that you don't need insurance. But I believe you can trust the ESPlanner conclusions if you are giving ESPlanner all the information about your family's available income. Does that make sense?

Dan

We chose to have both spouses die at 95, for planning purposes; I don't find survivor reports, either in the main or detailed reports...of course, I don't find lots of things :oops: :oops: .

The insurance amounts are relatively insignficant, starting at around $50k for me, $80k for my wife, and diminishing over time.

The real estate income is already included in our lifetime earnings ( I put it under "Special Receipts").

Here's the parts I don't get about forced life insurance:

1. If I die early, given that there is no reduction in income or estate value, doesn't my wife's standard of living actually increase? One is now living on an amount sufficient to support 1.6.

2. While impossible to factor into something like the software, the death of a spouse creates a cascade of drastic life changes, many of which are independent of financial condition, including, for instance, moving into a smaller house, joining children in their home, finding a new love/spouse, even rejoining the work force for social reasons. Within just two or three years, the assumptions ESP makes can become essentially meaningless due to all the changes.

When you click "create reports" you'll see a box in the panel to create survivor reports. So you can kill off a spouse and see just how or why life insurance is needed or not needed. You are right--in many cases the living standard of the survivor does go up. In my own case, if my wife dies, my living standard goes up--thus it recommends no life insurance for me--but if I die, my wife needs about 350K in order to keep the same living standard to the dollar.

As you point out, this assumes all other things stay the same. But you can use contingent planning to account for some of these possibilities. You can double-click the contingent planning menu at left and see it expand. Then you can enter the assumption that your wife's income, for example, will go up in the event of your death. If you are comfortable assuming that, then you'll see the need for insurance on yourself to help her will go down. In this manner, you can tweak the possibilities quite a bit.

Dan