Understanding Your Household

In Policy Stack, your household represents the scope of your personal or family banking system. It is the container for all of your policies, loans, deployments, goals, and ledger entries. This article explains how households work and how your data is organized within one.

What Is a Household?

A whole life banking system is rarely just one policy on one person's life. Practitioners commonly hold multiple policies — on their own life, their spouse's life, and their children's lives. All of these policies work together as a single banking system, sharing the same capital pool and repayment discipline.

Your household in Policy Stack mirrors this reality. When you add policies, each one is part of the same household. Your dashboard aggregates data across all of them to give you a unified view of your system.

Multiple Policies in a Household

You can track policies on different insured individuals within your household. Common configurations include:

• Your own policies — one or more whole life policies on your life, possibly with different carriers or funding structures
• Spouse's policies — policies on your spouse's life that you manage or co-manage as part of the same banking system
• Children's policies — policies on your children's lives, often started early to take advantage of lower premiums and longer compounding timelines

Each policy maintains its own snapshots, loans, and history. The household level is where everything rolls up.

Dashboard Aggregation

Your dashboard shows household-level metrics by combining data from all tracked policies:

| Metric | How It's Calculated | |--------|-------------------| | Total Cash Value | Sum of the most recent cash value snapshot from each policy | | Total Death Benefit | Sum of the most recent death benefit snapshot from each policy | | Total Loan Balance | Sum of all outstanding policy loan balances across all policies | | Net CV (subtitle: Available CV) | Total cash value minus total loan balance | | System LTV | Total loan balance divided by total cash value |

These aggregated metrics give you a single view of your banking system's position without needing to calculate across individual policies manually.

Customizing Your Household Name

By default, your household is labeled with your display name. You can change this in Settings → Household to any name that fits your preference:

• "The Martinez Family Banking System"
• "Our Household System"
• "Personal Banking System"

The household name appears on your dashboard greeting and in any exported reports.

Access and Privacy

Your household data is private to you. Only you can view, edit, or export your banking system data. There are two controlled exceptions:

• Connected advisors — if you connect with a whole life banking advisor through Policy Stack, new connections default to read/write access. You can downgrade to read-only, choose no data access, or revoke access at any time.
• Partner collaboration (Builder Pro) — you can invite a specific person to view and modify your household data, such as a spouse or family member involved in managing the banking system.

No one else — including Policy Stack staff — can access your financial data. All financial values are encrypted at rest.

Partner Collaboration Lifecycle

Partner collaboration is a Builder Pro feature. One household can have at most one active partner at a time. The collaboration moves through four states:

| State | What it means | |-------|---------------| | Pending | You sent an invite. The partner hasn't accepted yet. You can resend or cancel from Settings → Collaboration. | | Active | The partner accepted. Both of you have full access to the household. | | Grace | Your Builder Pro subscription lapsed. The partner keeps access for a 30-day window. Both of you receive an email when this starts. | | Removed | The grace window expired, OR you clicked "Disconnect partner" for immediate removal. The partner's account is wiped from the household. |

When Your Subscription Changes

If you cancel Builder Pro, downgrade to Starter, or your payment fails and you stay past-due for 7 days, your partner does not lose access immediately. The collaboration enters a 30-day grace window. During those 30 days:

• Both of you continue using the household exactly as before
• All data stays visible to both users
• You receive an email when the window opens, and a reminder before it closes
• If you reactivate Builder Pro inside the window, the collaboration returns to active automatically — nothing is lost

If the window expires, the partner is removed and you receive a final notification. You can also choose to disconnect a partner immediately from Settings → Collaboration; that path has no grace window.

What Happens to Activity History

The collaboration activity log is preserved even after a partner is removed. Their display name is captured on every entry they recorded — past activity always shows who did what. The removed partner's authentication record is cleared, but the historical attribution is permanent.

Future: Household Members

A planned future enhancement will allow you to add named household members (spouse, children) and associate policies with specific members. This will enable per-member views and more detailed household reporting.

Currently, you can achieve a similar effect by including the insured person's name in the policy name when you add it (for example, "Jane - Northwestern Mutual WL").