Once you're sold on the idea of a high cash value policy, the very practical question is how much to put in. This one trips people up in both directions. Fund it too lightly and the design never gets the fuel it was built for. Stretch too far and you strain a budget you have to keep feeding for decades. The right number lives in between, and it's built on what you can sustain, not what excites you in month one.
Start from your cash flow, not from a target death benefit. Look at your real monthly surplus, the money that reliably survives an average month after everything, and ask what slice of it you could commit for the long haul without white-knuckling it. That commitment is the engine. A well-designed policy assumes you'll actually feed it, especially the paid-up additions, so the funding level and the design have to be set together.
Build in flexibility on purpose. A good design generally lets you fund a range rather than a single rigid number, with a base you can always afford and a paid-up additions rider you can lean into in strong years and ease off in tight ones. That flexibility is what keeps a policy alive through a rough stretch instead of getting dropped, and a dropped policy is the one reliable way to lose with this asset.
A word of caution I say on every call: your household's foundation comes first. Cover the raw risk, keep your emergency fund, and get your cash flow steady before you size a big premium. If cash flow is the bottleneck, fixing that leak over at Dynamic Banking is usually the fastest way to free up room to fund well.
This is general education, not advice for your specific numbers. When you're ready to put real figures to it, Get Started lays out the first steps, and the deeper teaching is at Lifetime LOC.