Whole life insurance is a cash value form of life insurance, which means the premiums that you pay will accumulate a cash value in the policy. You are free to use this cash value for whatever purpose you'd like and one option is retirement income.

There is a specific way you typically have to go about distributing money if you want to maximize the tax benefits afforded by life insurance, this includes using a recovery of the cost basis and loans to keep distributions income tax free under current tax law.

We walk through an "over the shoulder" example in this video with a whole life policy to show the accumulation of cash value and the income it could potentially produce someone well into their advanced age.