Well, initially my goal was to protect my family in case I die. But once I learned about permanent life insurance, I thought why not get some sort of return while at the same time protecting them.
Well, the real question is this...Do you ACTUALLY get a return?
Typically, if you die, your policy pays the value of the policy to your beneficiary, and the savings component is kept by the insurance company.
If you want to withdraw the funds from your savings component, you either have to borrow against it, or cancel the policy and then you get the funds minus a ridiculous "surrender charge." My wife recently cancelled a policy her parents had taken out for her when she was a child. The policy was over 30 years old. The "cash value" was in the neighborhood of $8,000, and the surrender charge was just over $3,000. That means that the insurance company charge her around 40% of the cash value just to send it to her.