Life Insurance as an Investment Vehicle

While I was recently enjoying my GoogleReader batch of the latest pf blog updates, I had a realization that I don’t think I’ve read much of anything on life insurance. I have a 90 Life insurance policy with Northwestern Mutual – it’s whole insurance, which means that it provides coverage similar to term life insurance (you pay premiums to receive a death benefit), but it can also be used as an investment vehicle. The benefit is that it produces guaranteed cash value – right now the cash value is around $607 but I’m hoping that by the time I’m paying for my kid’s college or starting my own company, it will be a great resource of guaranteed funds when I need it, not dependent on performance of mutual funds or stock portfolios or anything else. Everything sounds good, and I like that I have something planned for that mid-term savings horizon, but I do wonder how I should compare that to just investing with e-trade. Perhaps I could make my money work harder, but I don’t know if I’ll be disciplined enough to invest for twenty-five years out, in just a regular account. Thoughts?