What is "year-by-year cash value"?

The two columns

The table has exactly two things to track for each year of the policy:

• Total paid — the running total of every premium rupee you have put into the policy so far. It climbs by one annual premium every year until the premium-paying term ends, then it flatlines — because you stop paying but the policy continues.
• Estimated cash value — roughly what you would walk away with if you exited (surrendered) the policy at the end of that year, or — in the final year — what you receive at maturity.

Both columns are illustrative. LIC declares the actual bonus rate each year; the calculator uses a recent historical rate as a stand-in. Treat the table as showing the shape of the outcome, not the exact rupee figure.

Why does cash value grow so slowly at first?

During the policy term — until the final year — the only thing accumulating in the "cash value" bucket is the simple reversionary bonus (SB). LIC declares this bonus as a rate per ₹1,000 of sum assured each year. If the rate is ₹47 per ₹1,000, a ₹5 lakh policy earns ₹23,500 of bonus in year 1, another ₹23,500 in year 2, and so on.

The sum assured itself — the big number you insured for — is not paid out if you surrender early. You only get it on death or at maturity. So the cash value during the middle years is only the accrued bonus, which is a small fraction of the total payout you are working towards.

This is why surrendering an endowment plan early is almost always a bad deal: you have paid premiums for years but you only get back a thin slice of what the policy will eventually be worth.

Why does the last row look so different?

The final row is the maturity year — highlighted in green in the table. At maturity, three things land together:

1. Sum assured (SA) — the face value of the policy (e.g. ₹5 lakh). This is the core promise LIC made when you signed up.
2. Accumulated simple reversionary bonus — all the annual bonuses that have been building up over the full policy term.
3. Final additional bonus (FAB) — a one-time lump-sum bonus LIC pays only at maturity (or death). It does not accrue year by year; it appears only at the very end. This is the reward for staying the course.

Those three added together produce the big number you see in the last row. The jump from the previous year's value to the maturity value is large precisely because the SA and FAB are both absent from every earlier row.

A quick example

Suppose you hold Jeevan Labh with a ₹5 lakh sum assured, a 21-year policy term, and a 15-year premium-paying term. Using illustrative numbers:

✦ Maturity year. Numbers are illustrative — see the calculator for your specific inputs.

What this tells you about endowment plans

The shape of this table — slow build, big jump at the end — is the defining character of every participating endowment plan. It is not a flaw or an oversight; it is how the product is structured. The insurer pools premiums, invests conservatively, and pays out a predictable lump sum at the end while providing life cover throughout.

The trade-off is that the effective return (XIRR) is usually lower than what you would earn from a pure investment like an index mutual fund. The calculator shows the implicit XIRR so you can compare with alternatives. Whether that trade-off makes sense for you depends on your need for guaranteed, low-risk accumulation combined with life cover — not on the maturity number alone.