Do you lose your equipment when you die in Phasmophobia?
You lose whatever equipment you were personally carrying at the moment you died — it's gone for that contract. Gear that was already sitting in the van, your player level, and money you'd already banked before dying are untouched.
Only the gear on your body is at risk; the van, your level, and your banked money never are.
You lose whatever you were personally holding or wearing when you died — that equipment doesn't come back for the rest of the contract. Anything you'd already left behind in the van stays exactly where you put it, which is why experienced groups keep a backup set in the truck instead of carrying everything into the house at once: gear that never left the van can't be lost to a ghost hunt.
The rest of the team can usually keep going without you. Dying doesn't end the contract on its own — on the higher difficulties in particular, a death during a hunt extends how long the hunt lasts for the survivors, but the investigation itself continues, and the team can still finish it and collect the payout.
Insurance softens the loss, but how much depends on the difficulty you're playing. The game refunds part of what you paid for the equipment you lost, and that refund gets smaller as the difficulty gets harder — on the easiest settings you get back a real chunk of the cost, in the middle difficulties it's noticeably less, and on the hardest settings you can expect to recoup nothing at all. Treat "how much insurance pays" as a difficulty slider, not a fixed number.
What dying never touches: your player level and the equipment upgrades you've already unlocked aren't affected by a single death, and any money the team had already banked before you died stays banked. The only thing on the line each contract is the gear you're currently carrying — which is exactly why the van, not your pockets, is where you store anything you can't afford to lose.