As you know, life insurance are use to protect the love ones from a financial devatation when the breadwinner dies. Most financial experts recommend a coverage of around ten times your annual salary. So if you are making $100,000 per year, you should try to get a coverage of around $1,000,000.
In essence, there are only two types of life insurance policies: whole life and term.
Whole life policies - which has life insurance coverage and a savings component. This is also called a permanent life insurance. It builds up cash value so that if you wanted to cancel your policy, there would be cash value that you can withdraw. Other benefits of the savings component is that you can borrow money against it. In addition, the interest on the savings is tax free.
Whole life policies comes in different form, be it universal life, variable life and any other derivatives from it.

Term Life Insurance -is an insurance where it is limited to a number of years. This is also called temporary insurance and the coverage can range from 1-yr to 30-yr. This is just like your car insurance where it does not build cash value, it only covers you for the financial loss. The monthly premium is way cheaper than the whole life because it does not have the savings component. Most recently, there is one form of term insurance that are being sold in the market. This is called the Return of Premium (ROP), wherein if you have a policy with a 30-year term worth $500,000 in coverage and you pay a monthly premium of $100 per month, you can receive a refund of your monthly premiums if at the end of the 30 year term, you are still alive. If you die before the end of the term, then you get the $500,000 coverage. In essence, the ROP is a hybrid of term and whole life because it is a temporary insurance that carries a cash value.