How much life insurance in retirement?

If you do need life insurance, financial professionals use one or more ways to calculate how much life insurance a surviving family will need…. Those include human life, financial needs and capital retention. The human life value approach uses projected future earnings; the financial needs approach calculates the income replacement needs of one’s survivor or survivors; and the capital retention approach provides a death benefit that, along with the family’s other assets, provides enough income without having to touch the death benefit principal. Though some retirees do have earned income, most planners don’t use the human life approach and the capital retention approach would result in you buying a larger amount of life insurance than with the other two approaches.
Most financial planners favor the financial needs approach. With the financial needs approach, you would factor in your surviving spouse’s and/or any dependent’s income needs, final expenses and debts, a mortgage payment fund, education expenses if any, and emergency expenses.