Why buy insurance at all? Why not be self-insured and save the profit margin that carriers earn? After all, everybody knows that if you live to age 85 or so, the return on a life policy (represented by the death benefit) for the investment of premium is around 3%. Long-term investors can achieve much better results than that! Sure. But the “return on investment,” or death benefit, can come anytime in life, and your investments may not accumulate to total anywhere near what the death benefit would be, especially if your investments had serious losses or you had a briefer life than you assumed….