Claim Social Security at 62, with a full retirement age of 67, and you get 70% of your benefit. Wait until 70 and you get 124%. So the check at 70 runs roughly 77% larger than the check at 62, permanently, with the cost-of-living raise applied to the bigger number every year after. And if you're the higher earner in a couple, it's also the check your surviving spouse keeps.
Nobody argues with the math. The argument is the eight years of income you have to replace to get there, and that's where a funded policy gets proposed as the bridge.
Policy loans bring more than cash to those eight years. A loan isn't income, so it never lands on a tax return. That keeps your provisional income down, which is the number the IRS uses to decide how much of your Social Security gets taxed. It also keeps your Medicare premium surcharge down, because that surcharge gets set from your tax return two years earlier. And it means you're not pulling from a traditional IRA at ordinary income rates. Some people specifically want IRA withdrawals in those years to do Roth conversions, so this cuts both ways. That's a conversation for your CPA rather than for a blog post. I'm a licensed insurance broker, not a CPA and not a registered advisor.
Now the part that decides whether you can do this at all. Run the loan balance forward before you start. Borrow $30,000 a year for eight years at 5%, with the interest building on the balance, and you land around $300,000 of loan by the time the Social Security check starts. Your cash value has to be big enough that a $300,000 loan sits comfortably inside your loan value, with room left over. And it has to keep growing fast enough that the balance isn't outrunning it. Most policies funded for ten or fifteen years can't do that. They can carry two or three years of it.
Which makes the realistic version a partial bridge. Policy loans cover part of the gap. Part-time income covers part, and taxable savings cover part. And you might claim at 67 instead of stretching for the full eight years. A partial delay still buys a permanently higher check, and the 8% yearly credits live between 67 and 70, so even two of those years are the most productive ones you can buy.
The other thing the loan balance has to survive is you. Die at 74 with $300,000 of loans outstanding, and the death benefit pays off the loan first. Your family gets what's left. That's fine if the policy was sized for it, and it's an unpleasant surprise if it wasn't. Look at the projected death benefit after the loan comes out, at 74, at 80, and at 90, on an in-force illustration. Do that before the first loan, not after the fifth one.
And decide up front whether you're paying any of it back. Some people run this as a permanent loan against a policy they never intend to repay, letting the death benefit clear it. That's a legitimate plan when the numbers hold up. Others pay it down out of the larger Social Security check starting at 70. Both work. What doesn't work is never deciding, which is the failure described in what happens if you never pay the policy loan back. If retirement income was the policy's job from the beginning, you're in better shape than most, and the design points are in when the policy's job is retirement income.