Insurance begins with a superstition as old as sailors. Before they crossed oceans, merchants split their cargo among many ships so that no single storm could bankrupt a dream. That is all insurance is: the pooling of risks so that no one person has to carry the whole weight of weather.

But to most of us, insurance arrives as paper: dense fonts, clauses that look like brambles. We sign because the agent smiles, because the law insists, because the future is a fog and this feels like a lantern. Let’s make the fog thinner.

Health insurance is the truce between your body’s miracles and its betrayals. Premiums are the monthly tribute you pay to keep the tent of coverage staked to the ground. Deductibles are the first miles you must walk alone before the plan meets you on the road. Copays are toll booths; coins do not insult you if the bridge is worth crossing. Networks are the map, and out-of-network is a forest where good doctors might live, but the paths are expensive.

Life insurance is not for you, but for the people who will keep loving you when you’ve left the room. Term life is plain and kind: you pay, you’re covered, the term ends. Whole life is a more complicated garden—it grows cash value, but charges admission in fees and complexity. If children or partners or parents depend on your income, term life is a letter that says, “I thought of you when the sky was still blue.” Decide the amount by imagining the bills on the table without your paycheck beside them.

Disability insurance is the most ignored and the most necessary. It pays when your body cannot do what your job demands. Short-term catches you when you stumble. Long-term carries you when a season becomes years. If you have nothing else, have this—one day, the odds will turn their coat, and you will be grateful for a promise you made to yourself long ago.

Auto insurance is a social contract for the road. Liability coverage is courtesy; it pays for the harm your vehicle might do to others. Collision and comprehensive are shields for your own car—metal and glass and the small heartbeat of an engine. Choose deductibles that you can swallow without choking. Raise them if you have an emergency fund strong enough to take the hit, lower them if you don’t.

Home and renters insurance are for the spaces where your life hangs its coat. They will not prevent a fire, but they will make the morning after less cruel. Inventory your belongings with your phone’s camera; the list will be a grief you do not have to compose from memory. Know what perils are covered and which are not; floods and earthquakes often require separate policies, as if the earth’s most dramatic moods insist on their own paperwork.

Then there is liability—the quiet umbrella. It opens when a guest slips, when your dog remembers it was once a wolf, when a joke at a party travels to court. Personal liability coverage exists so that a moment’s accident does not unthread a lifetime’s work. For those with more assets, an umbrella policy widens the sky of protection, converting what could be ruin into an inconvenience and a story.

Policies are promises, but promises are only as good as the understanding that binds them. Read your declarations page. Ask about exclusions. Document everything when claims arise; facts are lifeboats. Choose insurers who answer the phone with a human voice and agents who speak in sentences, not spells. Price matters, but service is the hand that helps you stand up when the water recedes.

The deepest truth about insurance is that it is an ethics of care at scale. We agree, all of us, to shoulder each other’s catastrophes in exchange for not facing our own alone. In good years, you will grumble as you pay premiums for nothing. In bad years, you will whisper thanks into a receiver when a claim check folds your worry in half. Across a lifetime, may your grumbles be many and your whispers few.

And remember: insurance is not an amulet to ward off sorrow; it is a plan to share it. Buy it when the sky is blue. Keep it when clouds gather. Review it when your life builds a new wing or closes a door. On rainy days, promises are what keep the roof from forgetting its job.