Do I Need Life Insurance Now That I'm Getting Married? 
Yes ! One of the primary points of getting life insurance after getting married is for income protection purposes so your spouse can maintain the same lifestyle for a given amount of time without having to worry about financial matters . When a family loses an income stream due to the death of a spouse , the surviving spouse often has to make a dramatic shift in lifestyle choices with no way to have that income immediately replaced - this can be everything from losing your house because the income is not there to pay the mortgage , to pay off the car loans , credit card debts -LRB- which can increase rapidly in this case as it 's a quick source for people to delay paying immediate bills , but draws substantially large interest rate charges and can put that person into even bigger debt -RRB- . This is where life insurance comes in . Instead of using 100 % of your own money , you use someone else 's -LRB- the insurance company -RRB- so your spouse does n't have to worry about financial matters so heavily right after the death of a loved one . For income replacement purposes , you ideally want to have at least a 5-7x income value so if you are making $ 100,000 per year , you want to have at least $ 500,000 - $ 700,000 of coverage for that type of purpose . As noted earlier , you would then add in other debts you do n't want your spouse to have to worry about such as mortgage , cars , credit cards , etc. . Term insurance works great for taking care of the mortgage and other temporary expenses because you may only need coverage for those items for a specified number of years -LRB- e.g. 20 year or 30 years -RRB- . A great idea for people is to create a step-down process where you have a larger amount of coverage in the immediate and a lower amount in later years when the larger amount of coverage may not be needed at that future point . This can help reduce costs for coverage and use the savings in premiums towards other avenues such as retirement planning , investments , savings , etc. . If you would like to go over this information in further detail , discuss your life insurance needs , and any other questions you may have , please feel free contact me by clicking on the button next to my picture and I will be happy to help . I do not charge any fees for my services and my group is licensed with over 50 insurance companies to compare rates through . I hope the information is helpful - thanks very much for your question . 