There's a line that gets repeated at seminars: with this strategy, you're paying interest to yourself instead of to a bank. It sounds great. It's also not accurate, and I'd rather you hear the real version from me than find out later and wonder what else was oversold.
On a HELOC, the interest goes to the bank. All of it. There is no mechanism by which any of it comes back to you. Running your paycheck through the line saves you money, and the savings has nothing to do with paying yourself anything.
Here's where the savings actually comes from. Interest on a line is calculated daily on whatever the balance is that day. Park $6,000 of income against the line on the first and spend it down over the month, and the balance was lower for most of the month than it would have been sitting in checking. You paid less interest, because the balance was smaller, for more days. That's the entire mechanism. It's not clever accounting and it doesn't require anything to be paid back to you.
On a policy loan the claim gets closer to true, and it's still not exact. You pay loan interest to the carrier. Meanwhile your full cash value, including the portion you borrowed against, keeps getting credited under a non-direct recognition contract. So money is coming to you and money is going out, but they're two separate flows at two different rates, and the difference can land either direction depending on the year. Some years it's a wash. In a high-loan-rate year it isn't. The difference between the two systems is explained at direct and non-direct recognition.
Why does this matter if the strategy works either way? Because people who bought the pitch tend to stop paying attention to the rate on the line, on the theory that the interest was coming back to them anyway. It isn't. The rate matters, the balance matters, and the payback schedule matters exactly as much as they would on any other debt.
Put your own line through the first chunk math before your next draw. The savings is real and it's smaller and more mechanical than the seminar version, which is the version I'd rather you plan around.