Here's a dull prediction I'll stand behind. The policies that do best over thirty years belong to owners who automated the premium in week one. The ones that lapse belong to owners who paid by hand. The design matters, the carrier matters, and neither matters as much as the premium arriving every single year without a decision.
Willpower is a terrible payment system. Paying by hand asks you to choose the policy again every year, forever. Including the years money is tight, or the market is loud, or the bill lands the same week as your property taxes. People aren't weak. The ask is just unreasonable. Systems don't re-choose. Set the autodraft and the policy gets funded in the exact years a hand-payer would've skipped. And those are precisely the years that decide the whole outcome, as the cost-of-waiting math shows from the other direction.
Three settings make the autopilot sturdy. First, timing: put the draft right after a payday, so the money never sits in checking long enough to get spent. Second, the mode. Ask your carrier what monthly costs against annual, because most charge extra for monthly. Pay annually out of a fund you feed every month and you get the discount and the monthly rhythm both. Third, PUAs: if your design includes flexible paid-up additions, automate a default amount too. You can always adjust it in a tight year. Flexibility you have to remember to use isn't flexibility. It's a skipped payment with a nicer name.
And keep a backstop behind the automation. Confirm your contract's grace period, and ask whether the automatic premium loan provision is elected. So a missed draft doesn't become a lapsed policy while you're distracted by real life. Autopay covers the ordinary years. The backstop covers the strange ones. Between the two, your policy's funding stops depending on your memory at all, which frees the first-90-days energy for decisions that actually need you.