147. Financial Tailwind For Your Whole Life

You are listening to the Wealth Without Bay street podcast, a Canadian guide to building dependable wealth. Join your hosts, Richard Canfield and Jason Lowe, as they unlock the secrets to creating financial peace of mind in an uncertain world. Discover the strategies and mindsets to a financial future that you can bank on. In this episode of Wealth Without Bay Street, I'm joined by my good friend Vern McCarty. Together, we discuss the headwind tailwind analogy that Nelson used in his book. Now, not being a pilot myself, nor is Vern, sometimes we struggle more with this analogy than other people. But we dissect it, go through it, and in fact, we reference exactly where it's discussed in the book. I would encourage you, when you get a chance, head over to the YouTube channel to watch the video, because we actually bring up my scanned copy of Nelson's book as we go through and talk about these two important pages, page 18 and 19. Enjoy.

You heard about this concept called becoming your own banker, the infinite banking concept, this idea, and you, you hear that this is the way to help you propel yourself forward. You can achieve whatever it is that you want to achieve financially. You're just going to do it in a more efficient way. You could say that you're going to create a tailwind on your. In your financial life. If you're not in the airplane world like me. I'm not in the airplane world. I don't know really anything about that. I had a hard time understanding an analogy that Nelson shares in his book where he talks about creating a tailwind in your financial life. So my colleague Richard and I are going to show you today how you can stop flying into a headwind and going backwards and how you can create a tailwind in your financial life. Nelson was the type of person, you knew him much better than I did. He would never really give you the answer, would he? And that's exactly how he wrote this book. He wrote this book with the intention of having people read it multiple times. And he wrote it in a way that makes you think. You actually have to think about what he's sharing. Right? If you just read what he says and you take it for whatever you read and you walk away, you might not even get any value if you're not careful. Rethink your thinking. Right.

He was a master storyteller and he liked to use analogies. And I think those are really important and especially when you are looking at a book. Yes, you can add pictures, but one of the things that makes books wonderful in reading in general is it gets your Imagination working. And as you read through the words of any book, you're creating a picture in your own mind what is that story telling you. And so Nelson, I think in the analogies that he used, he uses kind of real world analogies. And the one that we're going to talk about today is an airplane analogy. And Nelson uses it because he, he told the book. And the concept of becoming your own banker really stemmed from his life experience and his, what he recognized and saw based on the things that he had learned in being Green Forester than understanding and his voracious reading of anything to do with Austrian economics. If you looked at Nelson's website and you see the amount of books, there's like 300 books on his recommended reading list. He used to say, Vernon, he would say, look, if you read every single one of those books, you're going to have the equivalent of a PhD in Austrian economics and in history, and you can't understand economics without understanding history. And so he would, he would talk about the importance of those two things. And so what Nelson's going to teach us and what we're going to talk about today is a, is a piece of Nelson's history. And it's around his time as an aviator. He was a pilot for 70 years. He absolutely loved everything to do with flying an airplane. He would always say that, look, flying an airplane is best described as hours and hours and hours and hours of pure boredom punctuated by a few moments of stark terror.

Right? But when you're flying over vast fields and mountains and trees and all these things, he said it gave you a huge amount of time for introspection and you learn a lot when you ruminate, you, you spend time thinking on your thinking. So a lot of the formulation of this book and the concept developed over time as Nelson had time to fly an airplane and think about stuff. And then he related all of his experiences and the learnings and the reading that he developed over that period of time mixed in with some stories of pain. Pain is often our best teacher. You put your hand on the stove when the burner's on and you, you remove it pretty fast because it's hot and you don't like the feeling. Well, those moments of pain teach you that you shouldn't do that anymore. And so Nelson experienced moments like that in his life. And he talks about that the very beginning of the book as some of the most, I guess, extreme moments of pain that happened in the very early 80s when he was in his, in his early 50s. At that point in time, in his life and through the experience of the financial pain he was going through. That's really what culminated in the understanding of this concept. And it began to develop and really further from that point on. Diamonds are created by intense pressure. The learning that we go through in our life in finding out what things work and what don't work is through the school of hard knocks and that pressure and the learning that we can get by making either mistakes or you learn that you don't like that feeling and then you want to avoid it in the future. And so that type of learning opportunity came up in Nelson's life in a variety of ways. And it's through a lot of those painful events and then recognizing what was working and what would would work well that he was able to say, look, this is the path for me. And that's where the concept of headwind, tailwind comes from. In Nelson's book that we're going to.

Be discussing today, you raised some so many good points. You're exactly right. You talked about intense pressure. Right now there's a lot of things that are going on in Canada economically. There's a lot of things happening with the stock market and interest rates and all these things that are happening. And there's nothing that you or I can do. No matter how many books we read or how hard we pray or whatever it is, there's nothing that you can, you and I can do to control what's happening in Bay street or Wall street or with the bank of Canada. There's nothing we can do about that. And what's interesting to me, to your point about learning from your experience, it seems to me that the people continue to want to stick their square peg into a round hole over and over and over again. We just keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Which I heard somebody says that that's the definition of insanity. We just think it's going to get changed or it's going to get better or things are going really good, life is good. So I feel good. The market crashes, oh, I don't feel very good anymore. And we're always trying to control the uncontrollables. And that's really what Nelson's talking about in this airplane example. He teaches us here that I can't do anything to control the environment. There's nothing I can do about the weather. But you're going to see at the end of this example that you can control the financial environment through which you navigate the world.

This is a scanned copy of my own book.

Now that's awesome.

As, as Vernon and I were looking to figure out, like, oh, where's our copy of the book? And so we're on page 18 of becoming your own banker.

What we should point out, Rich, is that the previous page, Nelson describes the problem that Canadians are facing. They don't even realize. We don't even realize we have this problem. It's called banking. Somebody else controls the banking function as it relates to your needs. You're doing all the work and someone else is getting all the money, and you're forced to pay interest to someone else and you're forced to make payments on someone else's terms. If you use cash, okay, great. But interest always has to be reckoned with. That's what Nelson would say, right? I'm either paying interest to someone else or, or I'm giving up interest that I otherwise could have earned. So he talks about what he calls the all American man and the average Canadian. It would be interesting, Rich, if we actually looked at someone's financial situation and actually worked. It would probably take a while, but to work at the math, to see the percentage of every dollar that's actually coming into the home and leaving the house, how much of those dollars that are leaving are actually going and paying pure interest. And so Nelson did that work and he, and he estimated that approximately 34 and a half pennies for every dollar that you earn is paying on interest. So that's setting up the, the airplane example and where we come up with a 345 mile an hour headwind. Right?

Talking about headwind and tailwind. Looking at Nelson's book, let's start with what is a headwind? You know, Vern, you just mentioned that we have 34 and a half cents of every dollar is going towards interest in our life. And that's looking at a combination of factors. It's the mortgages, it's the credit cards, it's the boat payments, it's the car payment. It's all these things added up. We're looking at a period of time. And then of course, what happens? Well, we need to go get another car, we need to go refinance the house, we need to go sell that house and go buy a new house and get a new mortgage. And we're kicking, starting that interest kind of all over again. So Nelson's really focused on not the percentage rate on a loan. He's talking about the. If you look at the dollar value of every monthly payment, how much of a monthly payment, when you add it all together is walking away to interest in all those things. It's the seen versus the unseen. You look at the loan document and you see the percentage interest, interest rate or the APR. What you don't see is over the seven years of the car loan and the 30 years of the mortgage, what amount of each individual payment is dollar value interest. That is walking away from your family for the rest of time. That's what Nelson was trying to focus on. And he's kind of bringing that home. You know, on page 17 and page 18 of the book, a headwind though.

Just to complete that. Basically you're flying into wind, right, Rich? You're just flying into wind and that's going to create resistance and slow down the airplane. Regardless of how fast the airplane goes, if you've got, if you got a headwind, it's pushing you backwards. If it's stronger than your speed.

Right? Yeah. So Nelson's example is an airplane flying at a hundred miles an hour. Okay. That's the ground speed. And you're flying into a 340 mile an hour headwind. It's, it's pushing back on that, on that airplane. And while it's pushing back on the airplane, effectively, that airplane's going backwards. We'll use, we'll use Edmonton, Calgary as an example. So I'm up in Edmonton. In fact, I'm literally, I'm flying to Edmonton tonight. If I'm going to go now from Edmonton to Calgary. Well, I get it. We get in the airplane. The airplane's traveling at a hundred mile an hour ground speed, but we're flying into a headwind that's pushing against us. Maybe it's a, maybe it's a Chinook wind, I don't know. And it's going 345 miles an hour against the airplane. Like we're going backwards. I'm going to, for McMurray, you're going to Grand Perry. I'm going, I'm going to like I might be seeing Santa Claus in a little bit of time, you know, like I'm heading north. Okay. And, and so what Nelson's talking about is the environment in which you fly in. So the, you know, the smartest thing that could happen is that you sit on the ground, you land the plane and you wait for that air mass to move, move over, move past you so that the air environment that you'll be flying, the tool in, the tool is the airplane will be, it will be a different environment. So if you let that air mass move on, because they all do Nelson says they all do then now you can go take up that airplane. And now if you're flying in where there's no headwind, it's just, it's just calm still. Still, right? Well now you've got a hundred mile an hour airplane. Hey, we're going to make it to Calgary in a pretty reasonable amount of time. Like you know, not, not a problem whatsoever. We land the airplane and that's okay. What we've done in that case is we've changed the environment in which our financial vehicle or our financial life is operating in. We didn't change the vehicle, we didn't change the airplane, we didn't get up there with a paintbrush and put speed stripes on it so that it can appear like it's going faster or something. Something. And Nelson makes the analogy of what a lot of people do in this environment. The a hundred miles an hour is, is kind of like what you're able to fly your, you know, it's like the 10% that you're saving or you're supposed to be saving every single month, every single year of your income. And the 345 headwind is like that interest volume. That's the, that's the pressure you're feeling against your cash flow. You're trying to put money over the side to build up a nest egg. Meanwhile all this money is just leaking away out of your life never to be seen again. So you're technically going backwards financially in Nelson's analogy. And it's very common for a lot of people that that's the case. Whereas if we get rid of that 340 mile headwind, in other words we get rid of the, the outside third party creditors and debt that, that would be impacting us moving forward in time. Now we can properly start putting our 10% away and saving properly. So that's the like get out of debt, get a debt, get out of debt model. Nelson then talks about okay, what if we could control the environment even further and we could wait for the air mass to continue. And now we actually have a 345 mile an hour tailwind. So now we get up, we, we take off from Edmonton, we have a tailwind that's pushing us, pushing us from behind the airplane at 345 miles an hour. I mean we're going to go fast, liquid fast. So now we've got a hundred mile an hour headspeed plus we've got the, the tailwind of 345. We have a four like a four 45 mile an hour ground speed. Now at that point we're going to be landing in Calgary in like four minutes kind of a deal and hopefully, you know, safely in Calgary. And so that's what he's saying. He's like, look, if we can just change the financial environment, if we can take that headwind that used to be coming at you and applying pressure, we could be patient and understand that we could control and decide how and when we're flying our airplane, right? Be able to control the financial environment in which we operate our life now we can create all that, that interest and that pressure and that cash flow that used to, that used to be sucked out of your life is now adding extra speed into your life for every day moving forward. That's really what the process of becoming your own banker is about. It's about moving yourself from being pressure of a, of a financial headwind coming at you to getting control over all that and then repositioning that headwind so that it's actually working in your favor and it's now pushing you forward financially for the rest of your life.

I want to circle back to the unseen. I'm paying my mortgage, I'm paying for the cars, I'm doing all these things and I'm just making the payment. It is what it is. Especially when I go on my online banking or they do the automatic debit, I don't see the interest, I just see the payment and then I go, oh, I'm going to be a responsible father, husband, business owner, whatever. I'm going to take my hundred bucks or whatever out of the thousand that I have and I'm going to put that over here in my RSP tax free savings account, high interest savings, whatever. I'm going to pile that up. And now I can see, oh yeah, look at my account here. I've got this money, this cash, this capital. And I kind of think I'm doing okay. But if I was able to actually look at what's happening, here's my cash that I've built up, here's what's leaving. It's not even on the screen anymore. It's like all that's leaving. So you're trying to make this little bit of money that you're building up and saving and investing. You're trying to make that work hard enough to make up for all this that you can't even see it's gone. So that's what we're paying all those payments to someone else. Even if it's just cash, I pay cash. Well, someone else Got it.

It's gone.

It's not working for me anymore. So by changing the environment, we're doing the same process. It's called banking. We're just using this tool where we flow our capital through a system, a system of policies, dividend paying, participating, whole life policies. And I'm using that policy system to fulfill my financial objectives. The access and the cash from the policy system. And now I'm going to be responsible. I still have to store capital, I still have to make payments, but now I can shift who's actually receiving the payment, who's in control of what that payment schedule looks like, who that capital is actually being put to work for and who gets to go back and re access it again. The answer's me. So if I'm the one receiving all the money, that's where now we know that there's growth, there's uninterrupted growth on the capital inside the policy system that's contributing to the tailwind, right? But those payments that I'm still continuing to make and sending back to my own system is helping propel me forward. I'm collecting and accumulating and putting more of my own capital that I'm working so hard for to work. And it's propelling me forward, it's pushing me closer to, well in this case back to Calgary. But I'm in Calgary, it's pushing me to Edmonton. Now I'm going back to Edmonton. I'm really confusing people here, but you see what I'm saying, we're just shifting, you know, the environment through which we navigate the world.

On page 18 of Nelson's book he says most people in this situation concentrate all of their attention on trying to make the airplane go 105 miles an hour. When he's talking about, it's like, so let's say we've gotten rid of the tailwind, we, we've gotten rid of the debt obligations and the third party creditors and you know, we're, we're quote unquote out of debt. We're debt free at that point. Okay, so now we're, we're at that a hundred mile an hour ground speed. And you know, everyone says, oh this is the best thing ever. We're doing the best that we can do and it's magical. Now all we gotta do is try and make the airplane go faster. So we're saying look, because rather than being at a hundred miles per hour, let's see if we can do 105. And what Nelson would reference when he would talk about this part of the analogy is that's the equivalent of everyone else going to work and talking about, you know, around the coffee station or the water cooler about getting a better rate of return. Well, if only I can get my dollars to earn more dollars, and I can. I can hunt for the better rate of return. And, and then we get into this whole rate conversation. So that's everyone out there now trying to make the airplane go faster by getting a better rate of return. There's nothing wrong with trying to do that. However, understand that you're also taking on more risk. And, and the analogy here ties back to the airplane. An airplane is engineered, and it's engineered based on how much, you know, baggage and people and weight it can hold, how much fuel goes in for a certain amount of distance. You know, they can't. If they put in too much fuel for the, for the length of a flight, the plane will be too heavy. It won't be able to land because it'll have too much fuel in it still before it lands. Right. There's, there's all these kind of things that go into that. If you try to stress the airplane by forcing it to go faster than it's designed, what ends up happening is you deteriorate the tool that you're putting stress on the. On the engineered tool. All right? And what you could do is you could break the airplane. You could. You could make it so that you have to go and put it in for maintenance, and then it's down for a while. So what does that analogy tied to that ties to? Hey, we got a great rate of turn, and then all of a sudden everything fell apart. We had to pull the money out and go into maintenance mode for a bit because the market was shifting. And then we're losing out on growth now. So, like, there's all these connections to Nelson's airplane analogy about what's happening with our money in real life. So you don't want to try and focus on putting stress on your vehicle. Instead, you just want to control the environment. Now, Nelson goes on to say here in this, in the same paragraph, rather than trying to make the airplane go 105 miles per hour, they would do well to spend their energy instead on controlling the environment in which they fly. You can't do this in the airplane world, but you can in the financial world. You can do it by controlling the banking equation as it relates to you, your personal needs, your personal economy. That's what this book is about, creating a perpetual tailwind to everything that you do in the financial environment. He says there are many financial gurus in air quotes out there who are praising the matter of getting out of debt, but they never address this fact of controlling the financial world that you live in. This is the unique message of the infinite banking concept.

Nelson talks a lot about imagination. We actually have to imagine what's going on. We have to think about, you know, you're working and you're saving money, investing money, making payments. Nobody ever takes the time to actually think about what's going on at the bank or how a bank works or what a bank does. It's actually pretty simple process, right? So we have to imagine what's possible. And we're talking about creating a tailwind or a headwind.

You're.

You're fighting against a headwind. They might not even know what a headwind is or that they're fighting against a headwind. So if I don't know what a headwind is or that I'm fighting against a headwind, how would I know that I could create a tailwind? A lot of people don't even realize that they're flying through an environment that is not favorable and that they can do something about it. They don't even realize that they can control the environment through which they navigate the financial world. And that requires a little bit of imagination. As I said, if somebody just picked up Nelson's book and started reading on page 18, right away, they'd say, like, what is this guy even talking about? Right? So that's where it takes a little bit of imagination. And I got on a call today with a fellow, and I was talking to him, and he's like, hey, look, you know, I got to do some work to get my wife to better understand what's going on here, because she kind of wants to do it the neutral way. She wants to make the plane go 105 miles per hour. That's kind of where she's at. She's at that arrival syndrome, Parkinson's law. This is where we're at. This is the best we can do. That's the conclusion that she made. And so she doesn't realize that she can do anything about it. And he told her a little bit about this process, and you're never going to guess what she said. Well, gosh, that sounds too good to be true. And then, you know what I always say to people when they tell me that sounds too good to be true? I don't know if I could become my own banker. I say, well, if you knew the reality, what was actually happening at the banks, you'd think it was too bad to be true. This isn't too good to be true because it isn't an overnight thing. It takes time. Just like getting an airplane license. You can't just go fly an airplane tomorrow. Put some time and effort into learning how all that works so that you can become a pilot. Well, no different than learning how to become your own banker. You got to put some time and effort into understanding how all this stuff works. And then when you know what's going on, then you'll know what to do.

And the idea of it being too good, and we do. We hear this a lot of the times, it's like, okay, if it were too good to be true, then you, you know, then, then you can determine that. But the only way you're gonna determine is if you put the effort in. So you go and put the effort in, and now you find out that it's not too good to be true. Well, how will you ever get there if you don't make the first step and start the education journey? Like. Like just making a blanket statement that it sounds too gonna be true. Okay, well, hey, like, if my radio turns on all of a sudden and it's playing country music. Cause my wife is in control of Spotify, then it sounds to me like country music is playing. But I can actually get on my phone and I can control that Spotify and I could turn that into AC DC if I wanted to, and we could flip the switch right away. So in other words, what I'm getting at is like it's within your power to control the. The way that things sound as they enter your. Your brain, right? And challenge yourself a little bit to recognize if something sounds to be a true. Well, maybe it is, but maybe it isn't. Why don't you do a little bit of research? Why don't you watch a couple videos, read the book, and then you can decide if it. If it's still at that case. If you come to that decision, that's fine. That's your decision. At least you put the energy and you put the effort in, right? Everyone that's watching this, guess what? You're in the banking business now. You are your own banker today. The problem is you don't know it. And you're not controlling any of it. You're abdicating the responsibility that you already have. You have a given responsibility on your capital to operate as a banker. You're just saying, you know what? I don't want the responsibility. I Don't even know that I should have the responsibility. I'm just going to abdicate it over here to third party banking institutions because they seem to have been doing it for a while and they've convinced me that, that that's the best place for me to warehouse my money and to do all my business with. And I'm happy to just willingly transfer all the custody of my own capital over to them and put it on the books of their business so they can issue me some crappy IOUs that says I can get my money on demand, assuming that they actually have my money. You're doing the banking business now, you're just not doing it the right way. That's my opinion. And you can take it for what it's worth. I was on a call with somebody and young, young girl who's exploring this concept. Fantastic. Got a, you know, wonderful marketing business and it's growing and she's, she's doing good with online type businesses like marketing things that really have like a lot of softwares and that sort of stuff. There could be a huge, huge savings potential when you pay for those expenses, business expenses on an annual basis versus on a monthly basis, you know, and I don't remember the exact number, but she was funding somewhere in the area of about, let's call it $2,300 a month in cash flow expenses just to service the cost of the necessary software she needed so that she could operate and be effective at her business. Having these tools so that she could help her clients the way that she does. Okay, so she needed them. They're, they're critical to her business operation. Got it. Now, through our discussion, we had a discussion and I challenged her to do some homework. I said, look, go and find out. Put a spreadsheet together, go and find out with all these offers. If you went and switched them from monthly to annual, what would the savings value be? And then we'll look at calculating what the percentage is and all those kind of things. She went and did that work. We met about, so we just met yesterday. It was about 30 days. 45 days later I asked her, so how did it go? Like, tell me about your homework. She was like, well, turns out I can drop that monthly burn rate down from like $2,300 a month to $950 a month.

Wow.

And I said, what wow?

Oh, I like where you're going with this, by the way.

And so, and I don't remember the exact numbers, but the end result is it was about fifteen hundred dollars a Month basically of differential of tailwind headwind transferred into tailwind that was created by her doing that work that wasn't even around debt, that had nothing to do with outstanding debt or whatever. Any of that other stuff that was just about changing the way she thought about the financial environment she was operating in. She didn't know that she could make that adjustment until someone coached her to go and find out. I didn't go find out all the values and get the work. She did the work. I simply helped her see that the possibility was there. And then additionally there was some other changes. She's now getting, becoming incorporated. This is going to make a change for her where she's going to be able to control more of the financial environment. She can reduce how much she, you know, contributes to Canada pension plan. The overall total change on different factors that we worked out for her, the situation is going to be like around 2000, maybe $2500 a month, maybe even as much as $3000 a month of total financial cash flow readjusted in her life and she's not working any harder. She doesn't have to go and earn more money to do this. She has to change and reprioritize how money was flowing through her life. So now is this common for everybody? The answer is no. This is an outlier circumstance. But it all started with our thinking. And now because she knows how she can control that, she can start creating a tailwind to her financial life. She can optimize this cash flow on an ongoing basis. And she's at a young age, she's, you know, in her early 30s. This is going to have a momentous impact for every future, you know, year for the rest of her financial life.

Well, this is awesome, Rachel. I'll take it one step further because you say, hey, not everyone's in that situation. Well, maybe not. Like that's a huge amount of subscriptions and things like that she's paying for. And to your point, everyone knows you know how it is. You even Spotify. You mentioned that earlier. YouTube, premium, whatever. Like you have these things you can pay for on a monthly basis or you can do the yearly subscription. There's usually big time savings. Well, let's take it back to the home and the family for a sec.

Rich.

I actually have my policy loan payment tracker open that I was sharing with a client earlier and showing them how I operate my system. Well, what did I just take policy loans for recently? My wife's CRA bill, my kids, critical illness, insurance premiums. My wife's critical illness insurance premiums, my home and auto insurance premiums. I have other things that I have to pay for. And many of these things. Sometimes, you know, some insurance companies, like I work with my, what do you call it, Home and auto insurance company that I won't mention, they don't happen to give you a discount when you do annual versus monthly. A lot of them do 3, 4, 5, 8%. Some of them. Right. You pay annually versus monthly and you save a lot. I don't really care about the savings. The savings is a bonus. As far as I'm concerned. I was paying $420 a month for home and auto insurance. I don't really care if I get a discount if I pay it annually versus monthly. What I care is who's getting the payment, who's getting the money. What I do is, you know, I build up this system of policies. I have capital available in the policy system. Money's gotta come from somewhere. You just gotta pay the bill, right? So I access money from my system. I pay my home and auto insurance. I pay all these premiums annually. And guess what? I'm fortunate and blessed enough if I had to pay all those payments monthly. Like I used to do 35 automatic debits per month. What a nightmare. I have like zero now. I used to be able to pay all those payments monthly. I was already used to making them, wasn't I? So now I use my policy system, my own family banking system, to pay the annual premium. And then what I do is I create my own loan repayment schedule to create that tailwind. I'm now continuing to make the monthly payments that I always used to make for all of those different types of subscriptions and insurances and all the stuff that you were mentioning earlier. I've paid all those annually now using my policy system. While I continue to enjoy uninterrupted compounded growth on my capital inside the system, which is contributing to my tailwind. And now, because I'm a responsible banker, I read Nelson's book, page 17. I want to say the grocery store. Grocery store. So I'm still making the payments. In fact, I've increased my payments. If I have to pay critical illness insurance, it's a 192 bucks a month. I'm paying 100 or 200 bucks a month back to my system because I can, but I'm getting all that money back. So those monthly payments that I used to send to all those other essentially banks, I was sending money to all these other banks. I'm Sending all those monthly payments right back to my own bank. And that's exactly what you're talking about for your client there. She's going to be able to now recapture a whole boatload of that money that was just leaving her for services and subscriptions. Yeah. That she needed. But now that money is going to be put to work for her instead of being put to work for somebody else. And she still gets the subscriptions. And she has a lot more control, a lot more peace of mind, and a lot less stress. And, you know, I really enjoy the fact that back in July, I increased my monthly payments that month because I missed a couple in June because I was busy and I was traveling and I was doing all these things. And guess what? I didn't get a phone call or a letter or a cancellation in my insurance or whatever because I missed the payment. Yeah, I made it up, but I didn't stress, I didn't worry about it. I didn't even think about it because I'm in control and it makes a world of difference.

And there was even one other win, like, in the process of going through that discovery, she also said, hey, here's four or five of the tools I'm using. And here's another tool that will accomplish all the same things kind of smashed into one. It'll simplify my process a little bit. I'll have a little bit of a learning curve, but it'll add even more value to the longevity of my business and how I help my clients. And because I can bundle them together now, I also save $150 a month. So that was part of the total savings value there. So it wasn't all just on the discounting. It was also by taking an introspective look at what she was using as tools. And then, hey, she found a better mousetrap at a better value proposition. So that's also part of it. Now, if we add all that stuff up, if she. We looked at the same amount of cash flow, you know, about 30 grand a year, basically is what she was doing. If she had to invest that money and invest the monthly payments and to get the same equivalent return or whatever on savings value, like what she now can. Reducing that value from being 30 grand down to like, you know, 18 grand or whatever, you know, or 15,000, whatever it is that she's reducing it to, that's like the equivalent of like a hundred percent plus rate of return. Like, she would have had to go get on the open market to create the same environment. And she didn't have to work any harder. She just had to reallocate capital and rethink about the situation again. It's an outlier example, but there's little efficiencies in your life, in your financial environment. You're already living in a financial environment, some of which you can control, some of which you cannot control. Bank of Canada, federal government decisions, next election, whatever shenanigans, market factors, you know, global strife that might be happening, all of this stuff is outside of your window of control. But at the you and me level, what are the pieces you do have control over? And if you're not exercising a measure of control over it, you are abdicating that responsibility to someone else. Stop doing that.

A hundred percent rich. That is so powerful. So if. Can I just to. To cap this off, if I to hear, to. To share what I heard you say. I think one of our colleagues shared an analogy. Let's say I have $10,000 a month. That has to be, you know, payments and various expenses. And I'm able to put, let's say, $1,000 a month into some sort of a savings or an investment vehicle. So what we do, what we're taught to do is we're taught to focus on the thousand, the small number, and try to grow that by 10 or 20%. So if I grow my thousand bucks by 20%, now, I've got 1200 bucks, right? I got $200 extra 20%. Most people pretty happy about that. I got to make that money, work pretty hard to achieve 20%. Fair enough. Might have to take a lot of risk. Yada, yada, yada, right?

Probably a lot of risk. Yep.

Now, if I got this 10 grand and, and, and those payments that I have to make, which is a function of banking that somebody else controls, if I focused on that 10 grand and found a way to better control the environment and better control the process of banking, if I was able to recover or recapture, let's say 20% of the 10, that's leaving me, that's $2,000. What's the rate of return on that? So we're focusing on the wrong pool of money here. We should be focusing on what's leaving rather than what you're trying to keep and putting that to work. If we could find a way to reverse the flow of your money, you would dramatically enhance your rate of return. Is that a fair statement?

And you wouldn't be focused on the rate of return. Instead, you'd be focused on the recovery of capital that was already willingly sended to someone else and by the virtue of doing so, you would end up with more capital. And because you have more capital, you have more opportunities to therefore grow that capital in other areas of your life. More investments, more opportunities, more joy. Like whatever it is that you want to do with it. You're only amplifying your capacity by making these changes and shifts in your financial life. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Vern and myself as we discuss the headwind tailwind analogy and how you can contain and control more of the capital as it flows through your hands so you can create more opportunities throughout your financial life. Stay tuned for our next episode. Thanks for listening to the Wealth Without Bay Street Podcast where your wealth matters. Be sure to check out our social media channels for more great content. Hit subscribe on your favorite podcast player and be sure to rate the show. We definitely appreciate it. And don't forget to share this episode with someone you care about. Join us on the next episode where we continue to uncover the financial tools, strategies and the mindsets that maximize your wealth.