When I talk to families about their life insurance programs there is a phenomenon that seems to continue to surface. While agents pound and pound on adding life insurance to the male, they seem to completely over look the need to cover the female in the family.
I’m afraid this is a carryover from past thinking which says “The man makes the money and the woman stays at home with the kids, so, it is the loss of the man that wipes out the family”.
Of course, these days’ women often earn as much, if not more, than their spouse. But for my purposes, I want to stick with the “old time” thinking.
What if the wife doesn’t work and there are children involved.
I contend that the death of a wife typically will wreak more havoc than a husband’s death.
First, often you lose the emotional heart and soul of the family. I know we live in an age where it is popular to “give sexes equal attributes” but I can’t buy it. Women, I believe, have an edge for nurturing.
If the woman is acting solely as wife and mother, she is acting as taxi driver, administrator, confidant, advisor (to both husband and children), cook, laundress, cleaning lady, and nurse just to name a few duties. If you stop and think what the cost would be for a man to pick up the tab for these rudimentary services it would be daunting. But what about emotional needs? She is the man’s friend, date and lover. She is his ally. She is the children’s’ booster. She is not replaceable.
Her services however, can be, to a point
If you have three kids what does it cost to send them to a daycare center? Two-hundred fifty dollars per week? What does a cook cost? Let’s just say you have to eat out two meals per day at twenty-five dollars each meal or fifty bucks. Cleaning one hundred dollars a week. Heck I’m stopping there. What have we got so far? About seven hundred dollars a week. That’s thirty-six thousand four hundred dollars per year and that is just three functions. If it takes fifteen years to get the kids raised then the cost is five hundred forty six THOUSAND dollars.
I think if you consider the fact that we’re only dealing with three “wifely functions”, it is more than comparable to the “one” function of earning an income.
I have made it a practice to examine the coverage of wives and mothers with equal vigilance as that of husbands and fathers.
If you don’t, in my opinion, you’re failing the family.