Would your family have enough? Finding the real number.

Ask most people how much life insurance they have and you get a round number. Ask them how they chose it and you usually get silence, because the honest answer is that the policy was sized to a premium they were comfortable with, not to what their family would actually need.

The DIME method

It is called DIME, and you can do the first pass on the back of an envelope.

1. Debt: everything that would not disappear with you, including co-signed loans.
2. Income: your annual income times the number of years your family would need it replaced.
3. Mortgage: the balance that keeps the roof over their heads.
4. Education: what getting the kids through school would actually cost.

Add those up, subtract savings and any coverage you already have, and you are looking at your real number. A common rule of thumb lands around ten times income, but DIME gets you closer because it starts from your life instead of a formula.

Why this matters more than people think

More than 100 million American adults, a record 42 percent, say they need life insurance or need more of it, according to the LIMRA Insurance Barometer. That is not a statistic about careless people. It is what happens when coverage gets sized by comfort instead of arithmetic.

You do not need to do the arithmetic alone. Our 60 second Coverage Gap Check runs the same logic in five taps, and if you want a human walkthrough, that is what we are here for. No pressure, ever. You decide.