By Ryan Parker

People who have life insurance policies know the importance of it and how it is not just something you buy for yourself but in fact something that you invest in for you family's future. All your intentions are right at the time that you committed to purchasing your life insurance. The problem is that over the years we humans tend to forget why we committed and bought certain things. We forget the importance of certain things and can even learn to resent the premium payments that we make. This is often the case of the monthly premium payments that you need to pay for what seems forever. It can become very tiresome and worst can even mean that you have to stinge for a month or two putting even more emotional pressure on you to do something about it.

The resentment that you have for the monthly premium payments will get even worst in the face of the current recession. Money is getting harder to come by and the expenses that you have don't seem to be coming down. Most even face the possibility of loosing some income from either retrenchment or a pay-cut. It is almost always at this stage that families start to really worry about the future and tend to make mistakes about cutting back on their expenditure. More often than not, families will take a good long hard look at their life insurance coverage and think of cutting it to save some money every month.

If you actually step back a moment and think about it, canceling your life insurance coverage to save a measly $20-$40 a month is actually a rather daft thing to do. In terms of economics, you are actually foregoing a huge future benefit just to save a disproportionately small amount now. It is far too easy to forget why you bought the life insurance coverage in the first place. You did not buy it for yourself, you bought it for you family so that they won't have to endure too much financial burden when you pass.

The thing about life insurance is that the way you value it is quite different to what you might do with other assets. You can't look at it purely from a personal perspective. You must value life insurance coverage by looking at how it will benefit your family if you are no longer around. You need to think about who is going to service the mortgage or the car loan if you suddenly pass on. How will your family survive on the severely hampered cash flow situation from the loss of your income stream? You must be ready to look at your family's situation if you aren't in the picture. It is only then that you can truly appreciate the value of life insurance coverage.

Another problem of how life insurance is judged is in terms of its scale and period. This is especially true when you contrast it against the recession. A life insurance coverage plan is something that you invest in for your life; it is very long term proposition. The recession however is a much shorter term problem. If you decide to drop your life insurance coverage then you are reducing your long term benefit for a short term gain. This is again a very unwise thing to do.

Each family has many other expenses that it can easily do without in exchange for scrapping the life insurance coverage. Some things as easy as lowering the number of channels on your paid TV selection or even exchanging that expensive wine you have at the end of the week for something a bit more reasonable are much more practical alternatives as it has completely no effect on your future.

You probably already know that life insurance coverage is very important. You know that you do it for your family and not yourself. This fact can however be lost in all the noise about the current recession and how all of us have to cut back. Life insurance coverage should almost never be dropped unless you really have no other expense items that you can save on. The benefits that you are foregoing are almost always too big.

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