I have three web-based calculators to suggest as a starting point. One of them is carrier-neutral in that it is hosted by the Life Insurance Foundation for Education non-profit website. (Then again, the L.I.F.E. organization is funded primarily by life insurance carriers.) The Prudential tool is particularly interesting in that includes a tab labeled “The Value of All You Do” which is intended to help quantify the economic value of a spouse who may work as many hours as her high-income husband but without whom the family would be lost.
The following two calculators are hosted on an ugly, ad-supported website. They may be of interest, however, because of their quite different approaches. The first attempts to be very comprehensive by accounting for a wide variety of a family’s economic circumstances and expectations. The second goes in quite the opposite direction by eliminating all the distractions and approaching the problem as one of quantifying the present value of the income earner’s future stream of income. (Personally, I tend to favor this approach in circumstances where the clients are sufficiently affluent that speaking of the survivors’ “needs” makes little sense. In such cases, the idea is to replace the contribution to the family’s expected wealth accumulation which is lost due to the premature death of a high-income earner.
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