Almost everything in a financial plan is an estimate. Life insurance is the one place a genuine guarantee can be bought.

Markets, longevity, health, timing — a sound financial plan is built on these, and they are well-founded estimates, but estimates still. The guaranteed death benefit is the one element that is not: a fixed sum, tax-free, paid at a date certain to come but impossible to predict when.

That is what makes it the natural place to begin measuring. You can measure almost anything; what a fixed point gives you is a measurement that means something. Start there, and a family can see the guaranteed and the non-guaranteed side by side and decide how much of their wealth, if any, belongs in each.

So the question is not “is life insurance better than the alternatives?” It is “how much of this certainty do we want in our own plan, and what is it worth paying for?” And in Canada today, for the life insurance a family actually buys, that certainty can reliably be had.