Instead you depending on your income you should invest in a cash advantage IUL as well as purchase a regular whole life policy or just get a whole life policy and look into investing into a S&P for retirement.
A few comments here. A WL or IUL for income makes a lot more or less sense depending on their likely tax bracket in retirement and income needs. Life insurance solves the problem of taxable fixed income for people who have lots of income. Given we are talking a $50k term policy we might not be talking a ton of income in retirement.
Second for retirement income IUL is far better than WL. WL excels at high leverage during a lifetime. The classic example of the real estate investor, business owner using it for equipment loans (Nelson Nash's original use case).... WL offers guaranteed returns. Those guarantees come with a cost which reduces average return. As time passes a higher average exceeds the value of the previous guarantee. That's why you are seeing lots of accumulation oriented WL with 2% guarantees now.
Also if you have the cash a SPWL (single premium whole life) will give you instant cash value and pay up the policy all at once. Meaning the face value will never go away.
That's a MEC. You won't be able to use the cash value non taxably. A MEC can make sense for someone who has high insurance expenses because the face value will be less than cost basis and over 59 1/2. What you are advising her to do basically a worse version of an expensive annuity.
You may also want to consider a LTC(pays income for your job for life or until a certain amount depending on the policy) policy incase you become disabled and you're the sole provider for your family.
LTC doesn't cover income replacement for disability, you need disability insurance for that.
LTC insurance should cover you if you can't do 2 or more activities of daily living.
Ya you can pull out the cash value taxed but you keep the death benefit.
I don't think of WL in terms as retirement. I think of WL as in terms of something you will always know will be there and you can forget about it with automatic payments.
WL is ideal if you don't have enough for a IUL. Term is for if you're desperate.
Edit: I guess LTD is a thing. I don't ever remember seeing LTD before in anything I looked at.
