What have I gotten myself into

Wow, I didn’t know life insurance had its own community, who knew? So about 9 months ago my wife and I signed up for an “investment account” with Park Avenue Securities that also includes Guardian Whole Life insurance polices. The representative was a friend of a friend and very nice to us so I definitely did not ask as many questions as I should have. Long story short my wife and I each have a whole life insurance policy that we pay into every month for a fixed 5% interest rate(Sorry if I don’t explain it correctly, i have only been in the investing world for a shirt time so far). Basically how it is set up is this. We have what is basically a high interest savings account that we keep a few thousand bucks. We also direct all our paychecks to this account. Then each week we have a fixed amount of money(less than our normal weekly paycheck) sent back to us. So it is basically a roundabout way to make a budget and stick to it. Then the portion of our checks added with the interest revenue from the account(around $700 total) gets sent off to the life insurance policy to grow.

Now this seemed pretty simple and great right? 700 per month compounding monthly grows fairly well, not amazing, but steady. Well now our budget is changing with life and we have had to lean more on our credit cards, nothing serious, but still worrying. The more I talk with our representative friend the less information I get and he makes it seem like we’re totally locked in this arrangement. Now I have a much better investing opportunity with Charles Schwab and we desperately want to move things over. But now I realize a life insurance policy is much different from a traditional investment account that you can just roll over wherever you want.

I have poured over my account looking for policy information but the client site is really limited. I do intend to reach out again today for more information. I really just want know what my options are.

Yes I realize I should be having this conversation with my provider, I do intend to. I am here just to ask if there is an SOP for closing a policy like this or if anyone has experience with this? Doing some rough math my wife and I have around $8-9,000 invested in these accounts each so far.