We use data of life insurance holdings by age, sex, and marital status to infer how individuals value consumption in different demographic stages. Essentially, we use revealed preference to estimate equivalence scales and bequest motives simultaneously in the context of a fully specified model where agents face U.S. demographics and have access to savings markets and life insurance markets. Our findings indicate that individuals are very caring for their dependents, that there are large economies of scale in consumption, that children are very costly (or extremely important in terms of marginal utility), that wives with children produce a lot of goods in the home, and that females seem to have some form of habits created by marriage, while men do not. These findings contrast sharply with the implications of standard notions of equivalence scales.

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