What is term insurance?
A term plan is the simplest life insurance, you pay an annual premium, and if you die during the term, your nominee gets the sum assured. If you survive, you get nothing. That sounds bad until you see the price: a 30-year-old non-smoker can buy a ₹1 crore, 35-year cover for ~₹12,000 a year. The same cover bundled into an endowment or ULIP would cost ₹1 lakh+ a year, with a fraction of the actual life cover.
If you earn ₹15 lakh a year and have a spouse and a child, the standard rule is 15 to 20x annual income, so ₹2 to ₹3 crore of cover. At your 30s, that is ₹20,000 to ₹35,000 a year. If you die at 45, your family gets the corpus and 20+ years of replacement income. If you live, you have spent ~₹4 lakh over 20 years to be unworried.
Buying a 'return of premium' term plan. It returns your premiums at the end with no interest, after charging you 1.5x to 2x the regular term premium. The 'extra' you paid, invested in a Nifty 50 index fund, would be worth far more.
A 60-second lesson on this, with a worked drill in rupees, lives inside the Finlo app. Free, forever, on the basics.