Understanding Cash Value Life Insurance
Most permanent forms of life insurance have a feature built into them which grows the value of the policy over time, known as the Account or Cash Value. These types of policies include Whole Life, Universal Life and its variants- Indexed Universal Life and Variable Universal Life. A policy holder with any of these types of policies may be able to leverage the accumulated value of the policy to take a loan against the value, withdraw some or all of the value, pay the policy’s premium with it, or surrender the policy back to the insurance company for some amount of the account value (in some instances for the full cash value). But what is the difference between account, or cash value, and the cash surrender value?