Why Everyone Asks for a Million Dollars of Life Insurance

One number comes up more than any other when a family sits down with me for the first time: a million dollars of life insurance. Not a range, not a question. A figure, settled on before we ever spoke.

Then we work through what comes in each month, what goes out, and what the household would actually need if that income stopped. The million dollars usually turns out to be too little. When I ask how they landed on it, the answer is nearly always the same. It is close to what their friends bought.

Why a million?

I have wondered about this for years. Part of it is inflation. A million dollars in 1990 had the purchasing power of roughly $2.5 million today, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation data, so the word millionaire carries a weight it stopped deserving a generation ago.

Part of it is that a million really is large next to what people actually carry. The average individual life insurance policy purchased in the United States in 2023 had a face amount of about $206,000, according to industry data compiled by Statista. Against that, asking for a million sounds thorough. The number is impressive enough to end the discussion, which is exactly what makes it dangerous.

But the part I find genuinely interesting is this. A million dollars is close to correct for somebody. The Census Bureau put median household income at $83,730 in 2024, and the rule of thumb most often cited runs ten to twelve times income. Twelve times the median lands within a rounding error of one million dollars.

So the number is not foolish at all. It is a sound answer to a question that belongs to the median American household. Most of the families I meet are not that household.

The arithmetic nobody can copy

Take a household earning $180,000. Ten to twelve times income puts the target between $1.8 and $2.2 million, so a million-dollar policy covers roughly half. Add a mortgage with eighteen years to run, two children headed for college, and a spouse who may need to step back from work for a while, and the gap stops being a rounding error.

Run the same exercise on a single-income household with a paid-off house and grown children, and a million dollars may be more than that family needs. Same number. Opposite verdict.

None of this arithmetic is difficult, and I walked through the whole method in How Much Life Insurance Do You Actually Need?. It just has to be run on your life instead of your friend's.

The one thing worth asking your friends

I am not telling you to stop talking to the people you trust. Most of the good things in my life arrived by word of mouth, and most of the families I work with found me the same way.

There is a real difference between asking a friend who she trusts and copying what she bought. The first question travels well. The second one almost never does.

Start with your own numbers

If you do one thing this month, do not go shopping for a policy. Write down the plain facts: what you earn, what you owe, who depends on you, what protection you already have, and the year you would like to have a choice about working.

That list is worth more than any number you could copy from someone else. It turns "what should I buy" into "what am I actually trying to solve," which is the only version of the question with an answer that belongs to you. I have written before about why that step comes before any product.

A copied number is hard to catch precisely because it does not look like a mistake. Someone thought it through. It served them well. It simply answered a question that was never yours.

If a friend of yours is about to make a large financial decision because of a number someone else landed on, this is worth passing along.

If you would like a clear look at your own numbers, I am happy to walk through it with you.