Here's a piece of the whole life world that rarely comes up in a first conversation. It matters the moment you start borrowing. It's how your policy treats dividends on cash value you've borrowed against. The industry calls it direct versus non-direct recognition, which sounds more complicated than it is.
Start with the setup. When you take a policy loan, your cash value stays in the policy earning its keep while the insurer lends you money using that value as collateral. Recognition answers one question. What dividend does the borrowed-against money earn while the loan is out?
Under non-direct recognition, the company pays the same dividend on your cash value whether or not you've borrowed against it. Your loan doesn't change the crediting. Under direct recognition, the company changes the dividend on the borrowed part. It can go lower or higher. It depends on how the loan rate stacks up against what that money would have earned. Neither one is better on its own. In higher-rate stretches, direct recognition can actually credit more on borrowed money. In other conditions non-direct looks better.
Why bring it up at all? If you plan to lean on policy loans as a regular tool, this feature changes your real cost of borrowing. Understand it before you pick a policy, not after. It's one more reason two policies that look alike on the surface can behave differently in practice.
This is general education. It isn't advice to pick one setup over the other. And dividends aren't guaranteed either way. Loans reduce your available cash value and death benefit until repaid. The broader mechanics are on the How It Grows page, and when the education clicks, Build a Life LOC covers putting it into practice.