Where our coverage estimates and rate ranges come from, what "not financial advice" means on a site like this, and what happens when a reader flags something that looks off.
The number the homepage calculator returns is not looked up from a database of quotes. It is arithmetic: a base multiple of your income, adjusted by a factor for debts and mortgage balance and another for future education costs, following the same DIME skeleton (Debt, Income replacement, Mortgage, Education) that financial planners have used for years. We say this plainly rather than dressing the output up as a personalized underwriting result, because it isn't one. Change the inputs and the arithmetic changes; there is no hidden model guessing at facts you haven't told it.
The premium side of the calculator, and the dollar ranges in our guides, are pulled from published US term life pricing patterns: insurer rate filings, industry pricing studies, and publicly available sample rates for common age and coverage combinations. We are not a comparison engine pulling live quotes from carrier APIs, and we don't pretend otherwise. When a guide cites a specific range, such as the roughly $45 to $70 a month for a healthy 35-year-old buying $1 million of 20-year term, that figure traces back to published pricing data for that scenario, not a single carrier's promotional rate.
Nothing on this site tells you which insurer to buy from, how much life insurance is legally required, or whether a given health condition will get you approved. Those questions depend on your application, your medical history, and underwriting rules that vary by carrier, and only a licensed agent reading your actual file can answer them. What this site does is show you the shape of the math, DIME inputs in, a coverage range and a rough premium range out, so you walk into that conversation with an informed starting number instead of a guess pulled from a salesperson's rule of thumb.
Rate ranges and coverage guidance are reviewed on a rolling schedule and checked again whenever industry pricing data shifts enough to matter, at minimum once or twice a year. Every guide carries an updated date near the top so you can judge, at a glance, how fresh the numbers you're reading actually are.
If you spot a rate table that looks stale, a calculation that doesn't reconcile, or a claim that doesn't hold up, tell us through the contact page with what you found. We check it against the original source before changing anything. Once confirmed, we correct the page and move its updated date forward, and if the correction meaningfully changes a coverage or premium figure, we note what changed rather than quietly editing it away.
We won't promise a specific premium or guarantee that any applicant will get approved, since only an insurer's underwriting department can do that. We won't take payment to rank or recommend one carrier over another. And we won't publish guides under a fabricated "review board" or an anonymous house byline; see the authors page for exactly who writes what appears on this site.