How much life insurance do you actually need in Oregon?.

Start with what would still be owed

Every sizing conversation I have starts the same way: if your income stopped tomorrow, what would your household still owe? Write down the mortgage balance, the car loans, any credit card debt, and private student loans that someone co-signed. Federal student loans usually discharge at death; private ones frequently don't, and that surprises people.

For a lot of Oregon households, the mortgage dominates this list. Home prices across Washington County and the Portland metro have climbed a lot over the last decade, and plenty of families bought near the top of what they qualified for. If one income covers a meaningful share of that payment, the mortgage is the single biggest reason to own coverage.

Then add the income years

The second number is income replacement. Pick the number of years your family would genuinely need your paycheck replaced — until the youngest kid finishes high school is a common marker — and multiply that by your take-home pay.

People often default to '10 times salary' because they read it somewhere. It's a fine starting guess and a terrible finishing one. A 26-year-old with no kids and a partner who out-earns them needs something very different from a 41-year-old with two kids, a stay-at-home spouse and 22 years left on a loan.

Don't forget the unpaid work. If one parent handles childcare, replacing that with paid care is a real, large line item in Oregon. Coverage on a stay-at-home parent isn't sentimental, it's arithmetic.

Add the one-time costs

Funeral and final expenses, a few months of household bills while everything settles, and — if you want it — an education fund. A modest cushion here keeps your family from making a fast decision about the house during the worst month of their life.

Subtract what you already have

Now subtract savings, existing policies, and group life through your employer. Just be careful with that last one: group coverage is typically one to two times salary and it disappears the day you leave the job. I'd count it, but I wouldn't build the plan on it.

What's left is your ballpark. Round it to something clean. Nobody needs $743,000 of coverage.

A worked example

Say a Beaverton couple has $420,000 left on the mortgage, $28,000 in car loans, two kids aged 4 and 7, and one income of about $95,000 take-home. Fifteen years of income replacement is roughly $1.05 million, plus $448,000 of debt, plus $30,000 of final expenses — about $1.5 million, minus $150,000 in savings and $190,000 of group coverage. Call it $1.2 million.

That number sounds alarming until you price a 20-year term policy on a healthy 35-year-old. It's usually far less than people expect, and it's often less than the monthly cost of the streaming services nobody in the house watches.

What to do with the number

Take it to an independent agent and get quotes from several carriers, because the same person can be priced very differently depending on who's underwriting. If the number feels out of reach, buy what you can sustain — a policy you keep beats a perfect policy you cancel in eight months.