About

Life Coverage Calculator exists to answer one question properly: how much life insurance do you actually need? Most sites answer it with a rule of thumb — ten times your income — and move you along to a quote form. That number is a guess dressed up as advice, and it is wrong for most families in one direction or the other.

Why this site exists

I am a licensed life insurance producer. Part of getting licensed is learning to run a needs analysis. It is a structured way of working out what a family would actually have to replace, instead of picking a round number that sounds about right.

When I went looking at what was available online, almost nothing did that. The calculators were either a multiple of income with a nice slider, or a form that collected an email address and produced a phone call. One step was usually missing altogether: subtracting what a family already has. I had been taught that it was the step that mattered most. Leaving it out makes the recommended number bigger.

So I built the tool I had been trained to use. It is free, it is on this site, and the reasoning behind it is written down. That is the whole idea.

Who writes it

My name is Ryan Hearn and I am a licensed life insurance producer in California (CA licence #0L14758). I write everything here.

The method behind the calculator is not assembled from other websites. It is the needs-analysis approach taught in licensing and used in practice: replace income for the years it is needed, clear the debts that would otherwise fall to your family, fund what you intended to fund, cover final expenses, and subtract what you already have. That last step is the one most online calculators skip, and it is often the difference between a realistic number and an alarming one.

How this site is built, and why that matters

I am blind. I use a screen reader for everything. So every tool here was built and tested the way a screen reader user meets it — from the first line of code, not as a check at the end.

That is not a footnote. Insurance sites are unusually hostile to assistive technology. Form fields with no labels, calculators that display a result without announcing it, quote flows that trap keyboard users partway through, controls that only make sense if you can see where they sit on the page. I could not ship something I could not use myself, so the accessibility here is not a compliance exercise added at the end. It is the reason the tools work at all.

In practice that means the calculator has real labels on every field and announces its result. The quiz is a genuine radio group you can move through with arrow keys, not a row of buttons that looks like one. Color contrast is measured rather than eyeballed. None of that is remarkable on its own. It is remarkable mainly because so much of this industry does not bother.

If anything here is hard to use with a screen reader, by keyboard, or on a phone, treat it as a bug. I would like to hear about it.

What this site will not do

  • It is not an agency, broker or carrier. I do not sell policies through this site, take applications, or bind coverage.
  • It does not ask for your details to show you a number. No email wall, no phone number, no “an agent will call you”. The tools run entirely in your browser, and nothing you type is transmitted or stored.
  • Using it does not make you a client. Everything here is general education, not a recommendation about your particular situation.

How I try to keep it honest

The site currently earns nothing. It may one day earn a commission when a reader follows a link to an insurer or a comparison service. If that happens, it will be disclosed on the pages where it applies.

Three habits are meant to keep that from bending the writing. Where companies are compared, the criteria are published, so you can judge the reasoning instead of trusting the conclusion. Where a page argues against a product, as the mortgage protection guide does, it stays that way. No commercial arrangement changes it. And the calculator page states plainly what the tool does not model: inflation, taxes, and Social Security survivor benefits. A number is only useful if you know what went into it.

I also removed the insurer financial strength ratings this site once published. Ratings go stale, and a figure that was accurate two years ago is worse than no figure at all. The site now explains how to look up the current one instead.

What you can do here

Corrections

Insurance changes, and so does this site. If something here is wrong, out of date, or unclear, get in touch and it will be corrected. Corrections are the cheapest form of credibility there is.