The problem is that whole life insurance almost never beats term life insurance compared to investing the difference in mutual funds, even after the tax-sheltering benefits. The same is true for ALL life insurance company products - including all forms of annuities. Why? There's several reasons, but the most important are:

1) Most all subaccounts (the mutual fund-like investment vehicles one actually invests in) have pathetic long-term performance, not enough asset class choices, high fees and expenses, and poor diversification. This major drag on performance is what is NOT accounted for in the program. So in addition to the inefficient packaging, you'll also more than likely get much less total return when investing in life insurance company subaccounts, compared to mutual funds.

So if you modeled these lower returns, their results would be much worse.

With this financial software, you can also see what the minimum rate of return needs to be on a normal investment portfolio to get the same or more lifetime income than a fixed or variable annuity would provide. You'd just input what you paid and the annuitized payout, then lower the rate of return on the other investments until the portfolio lasts until an advanced age (e.g., 115).

2) For fixed annuities (and whole life insurance), after deducting the massive initial commissions, fees, and expenses, the interest rates are unbelievably low. They may seem high when the agent says, "You'll get X% guaranteed!" But that's only applied to the amount of money that's left over after commissions, expenses, and fees are initially deducted. Your actual yield when compared to the gross amount of money invested is usually half this quoted amount.

3) Most all life insurance company products have "layers of fees on top of commissions on top of fees on top of expenses on top of even more fees." When you add them all up, they're several times higher than even loaded mutual funds, and dozens of times more than with no-load mutual funds.

4) The whole life insurance company business model is based on maximizing profits for their shareholders, not policyholders (you). How else do you think they grew up to be "too big to fail," can afford billions in TV ads, and have huge offices fully-staffed with expensive employees? Unless you die way before your time, are a shareholder in life company stock, or are an agent that has a way to drum up a lot of easy business, then this whole thing is just a very bad deal.

Next, big financial planning software vendors are surviving because they've had large infusions of capital from the life insurance industry. So they don't want you to know the truth about investing strategies. The old Black Hat way is how they stay in business. The Internet changed all of that, and there's no going back, which is one of the reasons why AIG in '09 was "too big to fail" and had to be bailed out with $182B of taxpayer dollars (which they have yet to pay back).