Premium

The premium is the payment that keeps a policy in force — monthly, annually, or on a compressed schedule like 10-pay or 20-pay, where a lifetime of coverage is fully funded in ten or twenty payments and nothing is ever owed again.

What the premium is depends entirely on the policy behind it. In Term Life Insurance, premium is pure cost: it buys protection for the year and is gone. In Whole Life Insurance, the premium splits — part covers insurance costs, part builds Cash Value you own. In an Infinite Banking design, where most of the payment flows through a Paid-Up Additions (PUA) rider, the majority of each premium converts to accessible equity within days. Same word, three different financial events.

That reframe matters psychologically as much as mathematically. Families run from "expensive premiums" toward cheap term and then wire ten times as much every month to banks as loan payments — interest that leaves forever. The Volume-Based Banking view: a properly designed premium isn't spending, it's capitalizing your own system, the way a bank capitalizes before it lends.

What you're quoted is set by Underwriting — age, health, tobacco use, and coverage amount — plus design choices: payment schedule, rider load, and base-to-PUA ratio. Whole life premiums are contractually fixed for life; Universal Life Insurance "flexible" premiums float against rising internal costs, which is a very different promise.

Two funding disciplines pay off for banking designs: fund the policy to its maximum non-MEC level every year you can (see Modified Endowment Contract (MEC)), and treat the premium like a first-priority transfer to your own bank — because that's what it is.