What am I worth?

In case you need reminding, I bought a car two weeks ago.

The paperwork of buying the car took quite a while, but when I walked out of the sales office, a bank in Cleveland was the proud owner of a Subaru Forester - but they let me drive it.

This was followed shortly by a visit to my insurance agent at State Farm.

I love these guys. I've been with them since I was 16 (with a brief flirtation with Allstate due to my first husband's insistence that they were the best - he was wrong about that, as about so many other things). In fact, I've been with the same office for nearly 30 years!

My whole family is insured with them, as is my husband's family.

When my Explorer was wrecked, they took care of me and my car.

We've known each other a long time, me and my insurance company.

So when I sat down across from my latest fresh-faced agent, he didn't know quite what to make of me. Sometimes I think the head honcho breaks his new guys in on me. The combination of me and Darling Man can bring an agent to his knees with laughter.

We talked auto insurance and car loans. Did you know that State Farm has its own bank? I did and I didn't - I thought they just did investment stuff, but they apparently also do some loans as well. So we ran some numbers and it turned out that they could give me a loan at 3.7 points lower interest than the yo-yo's my current car loan was with. Obviously, I switched. We signed the papers today.

And while we were in there, fresh-faced agent asked us about our life insurance situation.

I am ashamed to say that Darling Man and I looked at each other a little blankly before turning to FFA and telling him we had no idea. I mean, when you have a kid... well, you have to make sure he gets raised if something happens to you.

We talked a little about what we'd want life insurance to do, should something happen and settled on an amount that would cover things for a year if something happened to me. Darling Man was a little more reticent about going for it until he checked things out. I do have life insurance through work, but I don't really think it's enough. And it turns out that Darling Man is wishing to check out other avenues of insurance, like AARP.

If something happened to both of us, I want ZBoy to have enough money to see him through to adulthood. He's already got a college fund going (thank goodness for Florida Prepaid or he'd be relying on scholarships). And if one of us remains, we want the house to be paid off as well.

It's a stop-gap measure at the moment, because you can't really decide what you're worth in the space of half an hour. But over the next few months, there will definitely be an examination of what we are worth to the family unit, and how much it would take to survive the death of one of us on the financial end of things.

Things happen. And neither one of us is getting younger.

See what happens when you buy a car?