Question: Bob, in your opinion, is it necessary to have life insurance on my wife and children? I am the primary wage earner, and I have adequate insurance on myself. Response: There seem to me to be two logical reasons to have insurance on your wife. One is for burial expenses. The other is to provide extra funds to care for the children, if necessary. The amount of insurance on your wife would normally be substantially less than that on yourself. Also, I don’t believe insurance for children is necessary except to cover the cost of burial. An argument often made for insurance on children is to guarantee their insurability in later years. However, only a small fraction of folks are uninsurable at the time they marry; therefore, I believe the potential risk does not justify the cost of buying insurance at a young age.