Life Insurance Needs Calculator
The DIME method: Debt + Income replacement + Mortgage + Education, minus what you already have in place. A defensible number — not a rule of thumb, and not a lead form.
Coverage needed
DIME coverage gap
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Debt
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Income replacement
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Mortgage
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Education
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Already covered
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Suggested policy size
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Why DIME instead of "10× your income"
The 10×-income rule ignores everything specific about you: a renter with no kids and a homeowner with three toddlers get the same answer. DIME builds the number from the actual obligations your income currently carries — the debts that would land on your family, the years of paychecks that disappear, the roof, the tuition — then subtracts coverage and savings already in place. Two households with identical incomes can come out $500k apart, and both numbers are right.
Where the inputs come from
Income years: the common anchor is until your youngest is independent — a 8-year-old suggests ~10 years, a newborn ~18–20. Education: College Board data puts 4-year public in-state around $90–120k all-in per child; private roughly doubles it. Group life at work counts, but it's usually 1–2× salary and vanishes when the job does — many planners deliberately exclude it for that reason.
What this deliberately leaves out
DIME doesn't discount income replacement to present value (a payout invested today covers slightly more years than the raw multiplication suggests), and it doesn't count Social Security survivor benefits. Both simplifications err toward slightly more coverage, which is the safe direction. Term life pricing makes over-shooting cheap: at 35 and healthy, the difference between $750k and $1M of 20-year term is typically a few dollars a month. This tool computes your number and stops — no quotes, no lead forms, and your inputs never leave this page.