Run the system for a while and something good happens: the debts shrink, the leak closes, and cash flow you didn't know you had starts piling up. Which raises the next question. Where should that growing pool live?
Leave it in checking and it's back to doing one job. Send it all to the market and it grows, on the market's terms, behind the market's risks. The banks answered this question for themselves a long time ago, and their answer is worth studying. Banks hold hundreds of billions of dollars of cash value life insurance on their own books. $205.7 billion of it across more than 3,000 institutions as of late 2024, per FDIC filings.
Why? Because a properly designed high cash value policy is, in plain terms, a line of credit that's guaranteed for life. It compounds safely, it can't be frozen or called the way a HELOC can, and you can borrow against it for anything life asks you to finance, while the full balance keeps compounding inside. Pay yourself back on your own schedule. Be an honest banker.
A word of caution: design decides everything here. The same product built the default way produces a policy that deserves the criticism it gets. Not all whole life policies are created equal, and that's exactly where the education continues on my main site.
