Life insurance is an important tool to protect your loved ones financially if you die before financial goals are met.

An ethical, competent insurance agent doesn’t want you “worth more dead than alive” or want your budget so consumed with insurance payments that you can’t meet your financial goals. Knowing what life insurance you need can help your agent meet that need.

Not all insurance policies are boring!

Since the insurance industry can be a little dry, here are 13 interesting insurance facts you probably didn’t know.

One of the biggest challenges in retirement is building a reliable stream of monthly income to support you for what could be a very long time. While retirees have long relied on bonds for this purpose, a retirement income expert recently told Money that there’s a better solution: income annuities.

Saving for retirement is Americans’ biggest financial worry, according to a survey by Bankrate.com. Younger Baby Boomers, those between the ages of 54 and 63, and Gen Xers, those between the ages of 38 and 53, are the most stressed about retirement, with 25% and 22% of these demographic groups, respectively, saying so.

To anyone over the age of 40, uttering the phrase “long-term care” is like raising the subject of the Babadook. According to the most recent annual polling by The Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, about two-thirds of Americans over the age of 40 say they expect they’ll need to provide assistance to a close family member or friend over the next five years. Nearly half believe they cannot fund their own long-term care. More than 60 percent of this cohort expect they will need some form of long-term care in the future, only slightly below the real number of 69 percent.

Saving for retirement seems to be never ending.

It's twice as expensive to retire today as it was 25 years ago, writes James Moore in MarketWatch. And according to one financial planner, millennials need more than $1 million saved by the time they retire.