← Back to blog

You Insure Your Car. You Insure Your House. What About the Income Your Family Depends On?

By Michael Gurr, Licensed Insurance Advisor, WAOIC #1335287 · University Place, Washington · Published June 30, 2026 · About Michael Gurr

Most people in Washington carry car insurance without a second thought. It is required by law, but even if it were not, most people would still carry it. Nobody wants to be the person who causes an accident and has no way to cover it.

Most people also insure their home. Even without a mortgage requiring it, the logic is obvious: a fire, a flood, a fallen tree, the cost of being wrong is too high to risk.

Here is the question worth sitting with: if you have a mortgage, a spouse, or children who depend on your income, what happens to that income the day you are no longer here to earn it?

For most Washington households, the honest answer is: nothing good. And for many, the answer is: nobody has actually looked at it. That is the gap a life insurance review is built to close.

Washington Is One of the Least-Insured States in the Country

This is not a guess or a sales line. It is documented in the state-level policy data published by the American Council of Life Insurers and analyzed by Western & Southern Financial Group.

States like Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi have nearly one active life insurance policy per resident. Washington falls below 0.25 policies per capita, putting it in the bottom tier nationally, alongside Arizona, Alaska, and Utah.

There is no single explanation for why. Higher cost of living and housing costs in Washington likely play a role, as does the state's younger average homeownership age and the general national pattern of underinsurance. But the practical result is the same regardless of the cause: a smaller share of Washington households have a plan in place for what happens to their family's finances if a primary earner is gone.

What Actually Happens Without Coverage

This is the part that is easy to avoid thinking about and expensive to discover too late.

If you have a mortgage and you are the primary or co-earner, the mortgage company does not pause payments out of sympathy. The balance is still owed. If your income was what made the monthly payment possible, your family now has to find that money somewhere else, savings, a second job, or in many cases, selling the home during an already difficult time.

Research from the Insurance Information Institute found that 30 percent of American households would face significant financial hardship within just one month of the unexpected death of a primary wage earner. Not a year. Not six months. One month.

For households with young children, there is also the cost of ongoing care, education, and the years of income replacement needed to maintain stability. For households closer to retirement, the picture shifts but does not disappear, a surviving spouse may lose a portion of Social Security or pension income at the first spouse's death, creating a gap that life insurance is specifically designed to fill.

Why So Many People Go Without It Anyway

Nationally, the leading reason people cite for not having adequate coverage is cost. According to LIMRA's 2025 Insurance Barometer Study, more than half of Americans say they believe life insurance is too expensive.

Here is what the same LIMRA research found right alongside that statistic: most people significantly overestimate what term life insurance actually costs. Estimates show people guess the price at three to six times what it actually is.

The second most common reason is simpler and more human: competing financial priorities. Life insurance rarely feels urgent until the day it suddenly is. There is always something else that feels more pressing this month. The mortgage payment. The car repair. The vacation that was already planned. Coverage gets pushed to "eventually," and for a significant share of households, eventually never arrives.

What Coverage Actually Costs

For a healthy adult in their 40s or 50s, a term life insurance policy sized to replace several years of income is, in most cases, less per month than a typical streaming and phone bill combined.

The exact number depends on age, health, the amount of coverage, and the length of the term, which is exactly why a specific quote matters more than a general assumption. The gap between what people think coverage costs and what it actually costs is one of the largest barriers identified in national research, and it is also one of the easiest to resolve with a single conversation.

The Same Logic You Already Apply to Your Car and Your House

Nobody buys car insurance because they expect to crash. Nobody buys homeowners insurance because they expect a fire. The logic is the same in both cases: the cost of carrying coverage is small and predictable. The cost of not carrying it, if the worst happens, is large and immediate.

Life insurance works under the identical logic. The monthly cost is small and known in advance. The cost of going without it, if something happens, falls entirely on the people left behind, at the exact moment they are least equipped to absorb it.

If you already insure your car and your home as a matter of course, the income that pays for both of those things, and everything else your household depends on, is worth the same five minutes of consideration. For households closer to retirement, that review also touches on estate tax exposure and how coverage fits the rest of the picture.

Frequently Asked Questions

Michael Gurr is a licensed insurance advisor serving Pierce County and Washington State. This article is for educational purposes and does not constitute legal, tax, or financial advice. Coverage needs vary by household and should be reviewed for your specific situation.