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When it comes to buying life insurance, Dwight Raiford, a senior financial planner with MetLife, says ask yourself the following question: If someone offered you a check to never work again, how big would you need that check to be?

"Is a million dollars enough, $2 million? $10 million?" Raiford says. "Remember you can't work for the rest of your life. How much money would you need? That's the amount of life insurance you should think about."

To help determine the correct amount, New York Life Executive Vice President Mark Pfaff breaks down needs into two categories. The first, he says, are the immediate cash needs.

"In other words, I died last week," he says. "What does my family need right now for final expenses and burial, immediate savings, taking care of the mortgage? Do I have kids in school? What do they need to take care of right now?"

The second part is income replacement, meaning how much will your family need to live off going forward? While $1 million may sound like a lot, it may be less than your current worth.

A 35-year-old male, under normal circumstances, will probably work for another three decades. If he makes $100,000 year, his worth would be more than $1 million.

"Over 30 years, that is $3 million," says Raiford. "That's gone if you would have died at the age of 30. So that is a sort of ball park way of thinking of it."

So how much will a million dollars worth of coverage cost you? That same perfectly-healthy 35-year-old male might be able to get a 30-year term policy for as little as $70 a month. It would cost his female counterpart even less.

Whole life policies, which earn equity over the years, would be closer to a thousand a month.

And while those payments are not tax deductible, Sal Spagnuolo, a personal finance representative of Allstate, points out that the death benefit paid to your loved ones is tax-free.

"That is another great advantage of having life insurance," says Spagnuolo. "Someone has a million-dollar policy and that person is no longer here, their beneficiaries are entitled to one million dollars tax free."

In addition to individual policies, many work places offer group plans, often for just a few dollars a month. Experts suggest you use this as a supplement to your privately purchased plan, rather than a replacement.

The reason: the job, and the policy, may not always be there.

"If I get downsized at age 48, I lose that," says Pfaff. "If my health in that time frame has turned poor, I may not be able to get it anywhere else."

All three experts recommend sitting down with a professional advisor while you are young and healthy and determining what you need and what you can afford. You can always adjust or convert your coverage as you come to different crossroads in life.