Here's a piece of the whole life world that rarely makes it into a first conversation but matters once you start borrowing: how your policy treats dividends on the 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. The question recognition answers is what dividend the borrowed-against portion earns while the loan is outstanding.
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 adjusts the dividend on the borrowed portion, sometimes lower, sometimes higher, depending on how the loan rate compares to what the money would otherwise earn. Neither approach is automatically better. In higher-rate stretches direct recognition can actually credit more on borrowed value, and in other conditions non-direct can look more attractive.
Why bring it up at all? Because if you plan to lean on policy loans as a regular tool, this feature affects your real cost of borrowing, and you want to understand it before you choose a policy, not discover it after. It's one more reason two policies that look alike on the surface can behave differently in practice.
Watch for this: this is general education, not a recommendation of one structure over another for your situation, and dividends aren't guaranteed under either approach. 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.