If half your income arrives in one check, the standard advice to pick an annual premium and stick to it doesn't fit. A commissioned salesperson, a contractor, someone with a February bonus. The income is real, and it's lumpy.
The design that handles it sets the base premium low, at a number your worst year covers without thinking about it, and puts the flexibility above it in a paid-up additions rider. The base is the obligation. The PUA is the option. A good year fills the PUA to the limit, a lean year skips it, and the policy stays healthy either way.
The mistake is designing around the good year. Someone whose income has run $180,000 for three years sets a premium sized for $180,000, then has a $95,000 year and can't make it. Now they're taking an automatic premium loan or dropping coverage, and both cost more than being conservative would have.
Know your PUA window. Most contracts allow the paid-up additions rider to be funded within a set period around the anniversary, often 30 to 60 days, and some let the rider lapse permanently if you skip too many consecutive years. So a bonus arriving in March against a September anniversary needs a plan for where it sits for six months.
The MEC limit is the ceiling on all of it. Put too much in too fast and the policy becomes a modified endowment contract, which changes the tax treatment of every distribution for the life of the contract and can't be undone once the correction window closes. Before a large one-time deposit, have the carrier run the seven-pay calculation on your specific contract and give you the maximum in writing.
Set the base at what a lean year supports and let the good years do the heavy lifting. That's a smaller policy on paper in year one, and it's the one still standing in year fifteen.