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What's the difference between Term and Whole Life insurance?
Term life insurance is just that - life insurance that pays out if you die, just like car insurance pays out if you have an accident. Like car insurance, it's easy to compare amongst term life insurance policies - you can even compare quotes online.  Whole life insurance is life insurance plus an investment component. The money that you pay goes to pay for your life insurance and it also is invested by the insurance company. Insurance companies love whole life because it is not a commodity; they can come up with a large variety of variants, and that fact plus the fact that it combines insurance and investment means that is very difficult to compare policies. Not to mention that fact that none of the companies - as far as I can tell - publish their whole life insurance rates, so it is very difficult to shop around.