I was fortunate to receive an evaluation copy of Tony Steuer's Questions and Answers on Life Insurance: The Life Insurance Toolbook. This 368-page book contains just what it says it contains: 134 common questions on the topic of life insurance, along with answers in plain English.
Mr. Steuer's goal was “to use [his] experience to provide you with a useful reference tool.” The book was not really meant to be read from cover to cover, but to be used as a reference.
I admit myself that I didn't read the whole book cover to cover (or even a majority of it), but I was very impressed in particular with the completeness of his answer to question 3. This question was: “How much life insurance do I need?”
An easy answer to this question — one that I had heard of before — is “five to eight times your annual income.” This is an answer, but it always rang about as true as the statement that “an engagement ring should cost two months' salary.” That is, it's a nice big juicy marketing figure disguised as traditional advice.
Mr. Steuer does mention the “multiple of income” method for estimating the amount of life insurance needed, but quickly classifies this as a “best guess,” and one that is probably too simplistic to be used by itself. He also classifies the “cover your debts” amount as too simplistic.
In total, he spends twenty-four pages answering this question, complete with worksheets. The questions and answers take up 300 pages of the book, so he dedicates over ten times the space to this question that a typical question would get (2.2 pages). He does a bang-up job answering this question. I really came away feeling that I understood how awfully important it is to take a careful survey of how much life insurance is necessary. This is good, because missing badly in either direction can be devastating: having too much life insurance is unnecessarily costly, and having too little could result in a world of hurt for the people you're trying to protect.
His complete, thoughtful answer to this one question is worth the price of the book. And there are 133 other questions he answers! The ones I did read were surprisingly understandable.
I invite you to put my review to the test and check out Questions and Answers on Life Insurance.
