Life insurance offers you a way of making sure your family does not need to endure any drastic life changes once you are no longer there to provide for them. Guaranteeing mortgage repayments, income protection, and ensuring childcare and education expenses can be met are thus the most common reasons people choose to take out the cover.

Yet many people who need the protection pass it up, squirming at the thought of preparing financial contingencies for our own deaths. This is doubtless an unsettling activity for even the most stoic of individuals, but forgo making provisions and the alternative prospect - knowing your loved ones will face financial destitution on top of their emotional loss - seems even more daunting.

Another reason that life insurance seems so unpalatable is that it can be as confusing as it is disturbing, but if you bite the bullet and get your head around a few key concepts you should find everything else falls into place.

First up, let's deal with the oft-talked about distinction between life insurance and assurance. The upshot here is that insurance offers cover from something that might happen (e.g. a freak accident leading to your untimely demise), while assurance offers cover for something that is certain, or assured, to happen (i.e. your eventual death). It might seem immaterial but the difference is worth keeping in mind - mainly because life assurance policies offer guaranteed payouts whereas for life insurance, numerous conditions have to be met before a payout.

Concentrating for now on bog-standard life insurance, the main types of products on the market can be distinguished from one another by their so-called 'terms'.

Level term insurance is the simplest. It pays a guaranteed, unchanged sum of money if you die within a certain time period. Variable term insurance complicates things a little, either decreasing with time (ideal for diminishing mortgage protection), or increasing (for people who want to offset inflation). Renewable term insurance, meanwhile, allows you to renew your cover without a health review. And finally - most confusingly of all - convertible term insurance gives you standard level term cover, but with the option of switching to an even more complex form later on.

These alternatives are basically assurance policies (though to keep things as complicated as possible insurers will typically retain the name 'insurance') - and they often become preferable once you've held a life insurance policy for a number of years.

One of the most popular products, endowment life insurance, offers a way of transforming your policy into a savings scheme and making the life insurance side of things largely peripheral (it typically becomes decreasing term assurance). Your other main option, meanwhile, is to switch to whole life insurance, which removes all the variables and simply guarantees a lump sum payout upon your death (as long as you maintain payments as long as you live, that is).

If you thought that's all there is to it, though, think again. Every product will have its own unique exclusions governing what you can and can't do to maintain eligibility throughout the duration of the policy - most of which predictably revolve around taking care of your health.

No matter what you choose, therefore, make sure you read the small-print. And be glad you only have to do this once in your lifetime!