Not a veteran agent, but a guy who has lived his life and can draw on a little experience.

Ladder your coverage.

When you are young, you need a lot of insurance. Once you have assets and your children grow, you need less insurance. You are insuring a need and once the need diminishes (either because you have money or your children get closer to growing up so the funding period diminishes or gets eliminated) you essentially self insure. This happens in tiers, so you don't want to buy a long term, all or nothing policy.

For example:

If you decide you need $3,000,000 (deciding how much you need is a different post) in insurance and your children are young and you may have more children, maybe you ladder it like this:

$500,000 for 10 years
$1,000,000 for 15 years
$1,000,000 for 20 years
$500,000 for 25 years

So your coverage looks like this:

$3M for 10 years
$2.5 for years 10 to 15
$1.5 for years 15-20
$500K for years 20-25

There are inflation risks for anything that long term too, so that should be considered, but bottom line is, this is just for example purposes to help you visualize it, because you don't need 100% of your insurance for 100% of the time you need it. You can always add policies to your basket over time if your needs increase or inflation increases the need.

Other advice - don't buy extra insurance from work unless you are a bad risk (bad health). But if you do, make double triple sure that it is portable (you can continue it once you leave work). Typically those polices are 3X to 5X more expensive than what you can get on your own (because they have to guarantee coverage, even for people that are sick).

One other thought - those supplemental policies like AFLAC, Colonial, etc. for weird coverage like cancer, etc. are generally crap and a rip off.

Reminded me of one other thing. IMO, the most underinsured risk in America is long term and short term disability insurance. I never insured against the risk but should have. Fortunately I was never disabled and lucked out.

Oh, and don't buy anything besides term insurance...mixing investment and insurance products is almost always a bad idea.