Opinions on life insurance for your kids?

This thread is going to get shite on with the quickness. If you're doing it for the insurability aspect, make sure it has a guaranteed insurability rider that will allow them to purchase later in life with no evidence of insurability.

Not a fan of smaller policies on kids in general. Although when you're working with ideas like grandparent gifting and larger premiums, those policies if designed correctly can provide great benefits.

ALL my kids have a 15k term policy as a rider on my term policy for like 42 bucks a year combined. Like a dollar and change a month per child. I'll save for them on my own, and don't need a life insurance company to do that.

My parents did this for my sister and I when we were born, although it was two $10k policies. The plan was (obviously barring death) to give us the policies when we graduated high school either to pay for college or to use however we wanted. I've kept mine and continued to pay them because they cost me $88 a year apiece.
I know the board's opinion of whole life policies, but it is a big relief knowing I can cash those policies fairly easily if I ever came upon hard times, and I am extremely grateful to my parents for giving me that peace of mind. I plan to do the same for my kids one day.
Also guaranteed insurability is nice as well. If anything ever happens (cancer etc.) that would make me unwritable they cannot deny me a new policy when the option comes up (every 3 years in my case). Well worth the extra dollar a month in my opinion.

TL;DR: I'm happy with mine.

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I believe my agent said if 30 years down the road they wanted to increase the coverage it could be done with out providing any proof of insurability....

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Can he really bind himself to that, though, 30 years down the line? I'm not sure how that would work exactly.

I'm not really meaning to "shite on" anything, and I suppose there are plenty of worse things to with such a small amount of money, but I still don't really see a decent point of doing this versus just setting that money aside in another vehicle for them.

virtually ALL whole life policies are terrible 'investments' and only useful in VERY special circumstances. Children certainly don't need life insurance and you're just throwing away money that could turn into something substantial if saved instead.

Alternatively, put $25 per child in a full market ETF like VTI (call discount broker like Fidelity to find out which one) in a UTMA account or 529 if for college and here's what happens:

$24/month at
8% return
becomes
$15,000 in 20 years or
$37,000 in 30 years or
$445,000 in 60 years or
$992,000 in 70 years

good luck

About a year ago, I was discussing some things with my mom - she is single, doesn't have a lot of savings, has a paid off house, and will probably work until she drops. We did some POAs and stuff like that in case we need it down the road. She told me that my grandparents (now deceased) bought a life insurance policy for her when she was like 6 months old. There hasn't been a premium payment due in 30 years, she gets an annual statement. The death benefit is something like $17,000 and grows a bit each year. Not much, but enough to go towards final cost. She has group life through work but is probably uninsurable (at least at reasonable cost) with a private policy.

My wife and I both have riders on our group term policies at work for our two kids... I think mine is for 20K term per kid and hers is 10K term per kid... combined... we might pay a total of $5 per month.

About a year and a half ago, we started putting $50/month in a savings account at the local credit union for each kid, in addition, we put half of any monetary gifts they receive into that account (they can spend the other half). Obviously that's not going to be a lot of money by the time they turn 18. We've also thought about buying a couple of small life insurance polices for them as well.

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Whole life is a flat out scam loaded with fees, commission, and risk that is only useful in very, very few tax planning situations.

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Are we talking about UL's or traditional WL? Very different products with very different fees, structures, and objectives. What risk are you talking about? What fees and commissions are too much? Are the commissions not loaded on term policies then too?

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Who said anything about 'every year

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Well, doesn't your calculation not assume an 8% rate of return over those years?

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who said anything about 'after tax'?

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Well, considering we are talking about whole life insurance, it would make sense to use after tax rate of return if we are going to be comparing things.

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If you think whole life is a good investment vehicle for the OP, you either sell insurance or have no idea what you're talking about (or both).

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I never once said it was a good investment. I just asked why is it a bad investment. What rate of return on your money would make a WL policy a "good" investment?