Many people scoff at us buyers of term life insurance. They claim we’re suckers for paying out hundreds of dollars a year for a policy we can’t collect on while we’re alive.

That sums up several comments I fielded during a recent online discussion with Kimberly Lankford, author of “The Insurance Maze: How You Can Save Money on Insurance and Still Get the Coverage You Need.”

Here’s a quick primer on the difference between term and whole life insurance, the latter of which falls into the broad category of “permanent life insurance.”

Term life insurance is not unlike buying insurance to protect your home or car. Under term insurance, when the policy runs out, you typically get nothing back.

I say typically because there’s a new version of term life insurance that’s a lower-cost alternative to permanent insurance. A “return-of-premium” policy will give you back all the money you paid under a term life insurance policy – provided you are still alive when the policy’s term is up.

For example, a 41-year-old man could pay about $405 for a regular term policy with a $500,000 death benefit. If that same man bought a return-of-premium policy, he could expect to pay about $1,330 a year, all of which he would get back at the end of the term. That’s $26,600 over 20 years tax-free.

A typical return-of-premium policy might cost about 25 percent to 50 percent more a year than regular term.

To be sure it’s right for you, do the math, Lankford says. For instance, if you took the difference in what you pay annually for the term life insurance policy and the return-of-premium policy ($925 in Lankford’s example) and invested it, you would only need to earn an annual interest rate of more than 2.8 percent (before inflation) to beat what you get with the return-of-premium policy, she points out.

Keep in mind that if you have to cancel a return-of-premium policy before the term is up, you may only get a percentage of your money back.

Lankford prefers return-of-premium policies over permanent life insurance. The costs for a permanent policy are generally a lot higher than for term insurance.

I know the debate over term versus permanent won’t end here, but I hope at least we’ve made the case that you don’t have to feel like a chump if you’ve opted for term life insurance.