203. How Soon Can I Stop Paying Premiums with Infinite Banking?

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So what is it that people get wrong when they're exploring and initially beginning to learn about this process called becoming your own banker? They want. They heard about the infinite bank accounts. They watched a video, they listened to a podcast, they saw a Facebook ad, whatever it was. They're on the Instagram, the Tic Tacs and they're learning all these things and they heard all this crazy stuff about infinite banking. They're intrigued. What are the things that people get wrong right out of the gate when they approach an advisor, a coach, and they want to talk to them about this process? So I'm joined today with my good friend Jinjin and Jinjin and I are going to talk a little bit about some of the calls she's been having with people lately and what are some of the questions that are coming up. And so I think this is going to be a good topic for anyone who, you know, our existing clients who are, are thinking about referring or introducing their friends and family to the concept more. This is going to be really helpful for you. It's also be really helpful for anybody who's new to this and you're really just exploring it. I think you're going to get a lot of value out of the conversation today and, and how we can focus on our thinking because really ultimately it all comes down to how we think. So Jingen, you talk with people every week. You're on the phone, you're on zoom calls, you're in back to back meetings, you're helping people implement this process all the time. Amazing advisor, just an incredible teammate. What are some of the questions that have been coming up for you lately that have really been sticking out and maybe let's just pick one and we'll, we'll dive into it.

Great. Thank you. Richard. Yes, we, we talk to people often every day and a lot of the time people especially they are in the early stage of learning about this concept. One of the question is how soon can I stop paying the premium? Like I understand it's a life insurance product I understand there's premium that I need to pay. How much is my obligation? Life happens. I only have X number of years, I plan to work. How soon can I stop paying premium is one of the question and very similar question is someone would ask how small can I get started? How small of a premium can I start with a policy? So, so those are some of the questions that I get to experience quite often for people early in their journey.

Yeah. And, and you know, I remember receiving, it's been a while probably since I've received some of those questions, but it, it certainly does happen. It's on people's minds. And so it's, it's not necessarily that there's no such thing as a bad or a wrong question. You know, I really want people to understand that because we, we only are where we're at at that point in time. And unfortunately, you know, guys like me, we have this, we have the curse of knowledge. Once you are so enamored and engaged in, in a way, it becomes very second nature. And sometimes it's hard to even put yourself in the position of where an individual is when they're beginning their journey again. You know, for me, that was 15 years ago when I started my journey. So going and transplanting back to that, that place that I was at then sometimes is difficult to even see. So I totally appreciate where questions like that come from. And I want to talk about the one, you know, how soon can I stop paying the premium? Because I think it's really important to identify, you know, where does that come from. The end result is it's all about our thinking. But if we really start to break that apart a little bit deeper, Jingen, it's not just about our thinking. It's also about where does our thinking come from. So we are influenced as we go through life and we're influenced by all kinds of factors. So most of those factors are going to be people we work with, colleagues, the different jobs, employment work or business opportunities we had in our life, how we were compensated for those things, the strategies that we were told and marketed to by things like, I'm going back to pre Facebook, you know, before that time frame. But you know, the news, the six o' clock news, the, the TV commercials, the newspaper, all of the, you know, the radio. I mean, I don't, I don't even listen to radio anymore because, well, living out here in Chillak, you can't get a station on tune anyway, so. But listening to podcasts and, and, and music that I just want to listen To I don't even hear anymore.

So.

But these were all mediums that we were bombarded with. Things about what to do with your money and, and the idea of oh, you're going to stop paying for things. And the concept of insurance in general, just the word insurance. So you know, wherever you are, you're listening, just take a moment, stop the car, pull over safely and just take a moment and pause and think. What has been your experience with insurance in the past? On other things we have insurance for travel insurance, luggage for, you know, our car for our home, for a liability coverage, WCB if you're a contractor. Like these are all different forms of insurance that we have. You pay insurance when you buy a new cell phone for replacement, for damage warranties. Like these are all things in that same category. You may have had a really bad experience with one of those things. And so what happens is we often associate sometimes a negative event, a bad experience. And then we put a blanket, a wide paintbrush, a label across all things that are associated with that. In the category of insurance, I've experienced people having those and sharing stories with me about bad experiences they had in the past. Now Jingen, maybe you've heard some stories from people about bad experience or maybe you even had one yourself.

That's right. Because in general when people think about insurance, some people do associate with all the casualty insurance as well. Right. Those are pure expenses. It's expenses for the rare events that would happen. So that is more like a risk involved with it. And so that's some of the, I guess the train of thoughts people going towards when they heard about always life insurance might be something similar to that. But life insurance or especially whole life insurance is kind of different story in terms of the, the premiums when you talk about that, especially when we talk about the premiums in terms of as a deposit. I don't know if I supposed to say that towards your. When you're building a banking system. Right. So it's, it's kind of different things, but we like to use our past experience to influence what we're thinking as towards about this concept when you start to learn about it.

Yeah. And so the result is, I mean again, the question's coming from a place of, you know, we've had, we have either past experience, past knowledge, past behavior, whatever it is, we've been told, trained, learned thought that insurance is an expense. Therefore when can I stop paying for the expense? That's kind of where the brain's mindset is at and what our goal is. And our job as the coach is to help people break through that and understand if we change the way we think, if we spend some time on our thinking, we're gonna start asking different questions and in my opinion, better questions. And you're start, instead, you're gonna start to ask, how long can I pay the premium for? So, so it's not that they're the wrong, wrong question, but there is a right question, and the right question is, how long can I pay the premium for? And how much can I put into it? It's not how little can I pay? And it's not how, how short of a period can I pay. It's how many years do I get the privilege and the ability to pay and how much can I get in there? So when you really understand and you go through our training, you go through our content, you get a chance to go through Nelson's book, you watch Nelson's documentary, you go through these amazing, incredible resources that are available. You listen to some of our incredible colleagues, you know, the folks over at the Banking with Life podcast, you know James and Ryan, a number of other colleagues who have incredible information that's out and available. If you go through that, and you don't have to go through all of it, but if you, you do need to spend some time educating yourself, going through some of this, because it's going to set the stage for you to be asking the questions that are actually going to be relevant to your life. What are going to actually support and help you as you grow? And if you, if you owned a banking, if you owned your own bank, how much money would you want to put in there? Would you want to put a little bit of your money or all of your money? If you own the bank, probability is you want to put all of it in there, right? Yeah. Now, that doesn't happen overnight, but if the mindset is I want to put as little of my own money into my own bank as possible, then you're never going to create a bank that's going to be able to do anything of value. So one of our mentors, and I know you've seen some videos of him in the past, Bob Shields, incredible guy. He passed away a number of years ago before, actually, I think it was either the year after, the year before Nelson, I can't recall. Anyway, wonderful man. And one of the things that he, he would say is, look, if you put penny, if you put a penny into the deal, all you ever have is pennies in the deal. But you put dollars in, you get access to dollars. So don't build your system based on thinking around pennies. Start thinking around dollars. And it's so true. The more financial energy that we put into the program, the more capacity is created, the more capital is building for utilization at all the stages of life into the future. And the other thing is, you know, just to circle to that other question that came up is, you know, how small can I start? Or what's the smallest insurance plan or insurance policy I can, I can begin. What I want people to really take away is, again, it's not that that's a bad question. It's where is that question relevant? See, things have to have relevancy. It has to have relevancy to you, but you have to, as the person asking the questions, you have to convey what that relevance is to the coach so that they can help you. You know, Jingen, if I'm 70 years old and I ask you how small I can put into the premium, well, probability is, am I in a position where I'm going to put much in or the policy I'm going to create is going to be of any real intrinsic value to something I might want to do as a goal or an objective?

Yeah, probably not.

Probably not. There's a function of age, function of maybe resources and, and, and, and sometimes we, sometimes we have, I like say we have Cadillac goals, but we, but we only have Honda Civics to drive.

Okay, anybody picture a Honda Civic on a road next to a Cadillac? You get the idea where I'm going with this? Okay, so everybody wants, you know, the, the shiny rims and then, you know, the leather seats and all the bells and whistles and the heat, the heated seats and all that fancy stuff. But sometimes all you really have to work with is a dented, rusted Honda Civic that you can go and repair easily at the auto wrecker because you know how to go get the parts out for yourself. So neither of those situations is wrong. But you can't expect to have the ability to go to the Cadillac if all you're working with is a Honda Civic. You can, however, grow and you can be coached over time with someone who's working with you on a regular basis. Regular meetings, engaging in content, coming to regular quarterly group coaching sessions, logging into our client portal and watching the content that's in there and learning and asking questions. You can build yourself into a position where you end up in the Cadillac stage. I didn't start, I started with a Honda Civic. I don't know if I'm at A Cadillac or not yet, but I definitely think I've upgraded the vehicle along the way. It's a 15 year process. I'm not done. I'm slow, but I'm worth waiting for. I got a lot more Runway left in me. I know there's a lot of money that's going to flow through my hands, my wife and my two kids, our family. The capital is going to come in, the income that we're going to go and spend, the taxes that we're going to pay. All of this energy and financial flow is going to disappear out of our life if we don't contain some of it. We need a warehouse to contain it. So instead of asking how small can we make, the warehouse should be asking how big can we make the warehouse so we can contain as much of it as possible. And how long are we going to be earning that income for? Well, the amount that we take as income might shift and change as we get older. We might choose to take less at some future point, I don't know. But it's still got to flow from, from my business or from, from an income place, an investment, cash flow from real estate, wherever the income source is, it's got to flow to us. And then it's going to go to the people that we buy stuff, vacations, cars, gas. You know, we got to pay for the heat on the house. We don't. I don't know anyone who gets away with not having heat in the house, not in Canada anyway. You know, these are all things that we still have to. We have to pay the property taxes. That money's got to go from our income to someone else somewhere along the line. If we can harness as much as is possible and we can continue to keep that financial energy operating in our family system for as many generations as possible, as many bodies, as many lives as possible. We're only enhancing the potential of what our money can do. So again, how can I, how soon can I stop paying the premium? How about, how long can I pay the premium for? If I get into hot water financially or get into financial trouble, is there the possibility that I might be able to pay the. Stop paying the premium sooner? Is that a different question, Jingen?

Yeah, that's completely different question. And yeah, the answer is yes, when you, when you build a big pool of capital, then that could become your safety net. And yes, you can start paying premiums in it if things happen, because we understand life happens. And, and when you have.

A very safety net, a big, big jar of dollars in it. Instead of pennies, then there's many different things you can do. And we actually had clients during COVID business owners that the business stopped functioning. They cannot put any money out of their business to pay for the premiums. There's many different ways that you can still keep your policy going without putting in premiums for a short time or depends on your situation. There are ways that you could do. There's so much flexibilities built in with this. With this. Right. So there's a lot of different things that we can do with that for sure.

Become your own banker and take back control over your financial life. Hey, is this even possible? You may be asking can I even do this? Well, you better believe it. In fact, it's easy to get going. So easy that we put together a free report, 7 Simple Steps to becoming your own banker. Download it right now. Go to seven steps ca. That's seven steps Steps ca. Now let's get back to the episode.

The key takeaway is I, I asked the same question. The difference is I was very specific and my focus wasn't on stopping the premium. My focus was on continuing to do it and then seeking clarity about what are my options. So really the question is driven around help me understand what some of my options are so that I can make good informed decisions. That's really what the question is in both of these scenarios or both of the questions. The problem is we're asking it from a, from the wrong place. Our, our internal mechanism of question asking isn't functioning to its best capacity. We need to change the way we ask questions so we can get very specific and get clear about what our real intent and what our objective is. If the goal is to just stop paying the premium right away, what's the probability, low, medium or high that that person is going to be a very good fit to work with our company. Ginger and if you knew someone was intent was just to stop paying the premium, would you take them on as a client?

No. I would say you better off put in a GIC than put in a vehicle like this. Right. Is really about whether you have a long term vision or not. Building a bank is any bank you can see today has been capitalizing for a long time. You, if you have a problem to solve, you cannot, you cannot expect to solve that problem right away by any kind of any kind of investment or any kind of way vehicle to do that in a short period of time. I wouldn't say that's, that's a good mindset to have but I mean Richard, you mentioned a lot about coaching and learning. I think that really comes in with the next question. After you ask this question, then the next question is, how willing are you to be coached? How willing are you to accept new knowledge? Because really, today you are here listening to this podcast or watch this on YouTube, you are really educating yourself. So the chances of you asking that question might be low if you listen to many of Richard's wonderful podcast. Because, because a lot of the things what, what we've already learned through people around us or Richard, you mentioned the commercials. Some of the times you have to unlearn what you learn so that a new idea or you can really empty your brain to get a new idea coming into you and to learn the new knowledge. You have to unlearn some of those things in order to learn the new things. So really, education is key. And that's what we do here at Ascendant Financial. That's all. Our coaches are not salesperson. We're not here to say, okay, this is a quote. This is how long you can pay for and buy. Because we are here to coach you and we're here to see if we are a fit, if you are coachable, if you're willing to learn. And that's what we are looking for. And it's okay to ask a question like that. But the next question is, if I send you some resources, if I teach you about this, are you willing to learn? Are you willing to keep an open mindset? I guess that's the next question I would ask.

Yeah, well, and, and will you commit the time? Are you, you know, hey, like Rome wasn't built in a day. It takes, you know, three to four hours to read this book. Or you can read one of Richard and Jason's books in about an hour, hour and 20 minutes. That's not necessarily a repl. That's not a replacement for Nelson's book. It's not intended to be. But it might be a great place for you to, let's say, start to decide, hey, you know what? I really like what I'm learning here. I want to dig in more. I'm going to commit some more time. Then you commit an hour to watch Nelson's documentary film. You watch it with your spouse, you grab a glass of wine, make some popcorn, you sit down together, you have 30 minute conversation about it. What did you learn? Then you say, you know, I'm really interested. We both want to learn a little bit more. Hey, let's book a meeting with a coach. Let's, hey, let's watch one of these webinars that's available, that is recorded or on YouTube. These are great. You go through that experience, you spend a little bit of time so that you can save yourself. Not just yourself. You're going to save the coach's time, too, but you're going to save yourself a whole bunch of frustrations trying to ask questions that ultimately don't matter and aren't really going to help you get the results you're trying to achieve. Because fundamentally, you know, questions are so important. I always. I always tell people to develop a mindset of Curious George. Do you remember Curious George, Jingen?

I love that monkey.

Always getting into. Always get into trouble, everything. But he was learning. He's learning quick, he's learning fast. And so I encourage people to develop questions and ask a lot of them, but I also would work with them on how they're asking. So the way that you ask and phrase a question is is more important almost than the question itself, because if you really find out, you might be asking a totally different question. You just weren't phrasing it correctly. And I find that that's the case in a lot of scenarios. So we go back to another one that you mentioned here, Ginger, which is, you know, how small. Can I start again? Not a bad question. But is that the real question? What they're probably asking is, hey, if all I want to do is dip my toe in the water, can I do that for a certain amount of money? Or maybe what they're asking is, it could be different. Could be, you know, I'm really interested in getting started. However, I have a limited budget today. I want to know if I, you know, can it even work with my limited budget, is it even possible for me to start? Right. Maybe that's what they want to know. The reality is you. The real question you should be asking is.

I want to know if this process is for me. I have X amount I want to start with. Can we work with that number?

Yeah, I like that.

That's a little bit different. And then the coach would say, hey, that's a great number. Tell me how you arrived at that number where you picked that number out of a hat. Did you go through your budget? Do you. Is that from your tax refund? Is that from what you're sending to registered accounts now? Like, where did you come up with the number? And what you'll find when you get into a conversation with someone like Jinjin or another member of our team is they're going to go through a series of really good questions with you and they're going to start to figure out where your cash flow is going. Often just that experience alone is worth, worth the admission to the meeting, you know, because you might find, you might learn some things about how the cash is flowing through your life that might open some thinking processes for you. Didn't you didn't otherwise know? There's been lots of times where I've found an extra 500,000, $2,000 a month equivalent capital in people's budgets. The money was always there, but they had allocated the money in such a way where they couldn't even see it anymore. They, they knew it was going to something, but it was so committed and they were on such a habitual type nature that they didn't think about how they could reallocate that effectively. And so we can often see things because of having time and training and experience, meeting with people, thousands of people, that we can be able to show you from all that good experience and that you may not have yourself. That's one of the advantages of being able to work with a coach. So these are, these, these are again, these are good questions to be asking, but they're much better questions if you're asking them more intentionally and more specific when you meet with somebody. And the, you know, the first two that we covered here, Jingen, they're also really coming from, the way they're phrased is generally coming from almost a measure of scarcity. It comes across when you're talking to someone that it's coming from a scarcity mindset. And that's okay because mindset is something that we work on here. Right? But the abundant mindset says how can I 10x, how can I, how can I get more in? How can I make it bigger? What might I do differently so that I could make it bigger? That's abundant minded thinking. And it's not to say that the coach is going to get you something bigger, but if you're asking those questions, it shows that you're not only very coachable, show that you're motivated and shows that you're willing to put in certain effort and to get the result that you want to achieve ultimately. And it wouldn't matter if you're trying to achieve that result with infinite banking or something else, those questions are still going to benefit you in some other area of your life also. Right? Hey, I only have two of those, of the six pack of abs. How do I get the other four? Right? That's another, you know, it's just it's, it's just a way of thinking about how do I go about achieving the thing that I really want and asking those, those good questions. Now another thing I think comes up with this Gingin, is, is questions like this and, and another one, I think people in the, in the day and age we live in online need it now. Amazon delivered it into my house and they put it in my fridge while I wasn't home type environment. You know, Amazon yesterday is what we live in. We, we're bombarded with stuff all the time. I think everyone can agree with that. We're all glued to, you know, a 3 inch screen that's in our pocket most days or our purse or what have you. If in that situation in the modern age, people are being marketed to for things like insurance all the time, there's insurance everything online. It's a very wild and crazy environment out there and there's a lot of good information and there's also a lot of crappy information. It gets very difficult as a consumer sometimes to dig through it all and then you're always measuring the information that you see against your own bias that you've learned over time. And it doesn't, your bias might be good or bad, but, but you have one, we all have one to some degree. So you're, you're, you're using that as your barometer and your measuring stick for the things you learn. Well, you can go and get quotes for term insurance and quotes for insurance. If you just typed into Google quotes for insurance. I mean you're going to get all kinds of stuff and you can go gangbusters typing things in. And so that's all based on a pick the cheapest, get the lowest price type thinking mentality. And that is okay in certain areas. Hey, if you want to get travel insurance, maybe the cheapest is the best. Although if you want travel insurance that you can actually get someone on the phone when you need to make a claim and you can actually get your claim processed and you're actually going to get service, then maybe the cheapest isn't the best. I don't know that for sure, but those would be questions I would consider asking. So just because something is cheap and inexpensive doesn't mean it's the best. Another great example of that is, hey, I can go on Amazon right now and I can Google laptops. I'm thinking about buying a laptop for my kid. He's going to start doing some coding classes. He's in this program called Code Ninjas. It's really Cool. They get little wristbands and the wristbands are like the, like belts and karate. So the same kind of idea. It's a really neat program. Started out of Texas, I found out. So we're considering buying a computer for him. It's like, okay, well do we just go and get the cheapest one that's on sale right now for like 150 bucks? Is that even going to allow him to do the thing he needs to do and am I just going to be replacing it six months or a year from now? Or do we consider going and speaking to someone and talking about what is the actual need that he has? Do we want it to be able to grow over a two or three year period? And are we willing to put a little bit more in to get something that's a little bit more robust? You know, that's, it's, it's really the same concept as what we're talking about with the insurance. So I don't phone Amazon and say what's the, hey, how, how, how, what's the cheapest laptop you can sell me?

I might phone someone at Amazon if they were technically knowledgeable and say, I have an 8 year old kid who's entering a program called Code Ninjas. I think I want a pro, a laptop that can last for about three years. I suspect we'll need to buy a new one at that time anyway. What would you recommend that would be, that would have a B and C category? That's a very different question. So the same way of doing that is how you should be coming at and approaching a conversation with a coach when you're talking to them about beginning the stages of implementing this process or even finding out if it's the right process for you. Does that make sense? Jingen, am I on the right track there?

Yeah, I love it, I love it. And Jason, like to say our process start by telling the truth. And when you get a coach to talk about becoming your own banker, really you're entering in a new paradigm shift of thinking, a mindset and sometimes we're not there at once. We probably need a few. It took me a while to get it as well. Right. So it took a little, little iterations and read the book and going back to the book. So it's great to just ask questions in a very full manner like this is my situation rather than just a few sentences like what you just said. You probably just want to explain. Explain. Here's my thought process. Really a lot of time when we take this calls, all we want you to do is to, to understand where you are at, where your mind is at, because that's where we can add value. If one thing that we spoke at our conversation like, inspired you and you can change your thinking, that's a win for you. And, and because that's hard to, to get because if you just surround yourself with people that you know that has a similar way of thinking, same mindset, same way of managing your finances, you aren't getting anywhere new, aren't you? If you stay with the same way. So you wanted to get into a different circle of friends, which is maybe the podcast Wealth Without Bay street, where maybe is the books that you surrounded yourself with, then you get inspired to think differently. And really, that's really about what Nelson teaches us, is really all about the way you think, the way that you look at things differently. And I really agree because sometimes people come in, they feel like this is a sales call. I'm so tied with my, my, my wallet. I just don't want you to know I have this, this money. Then, then maybe you have to change your thinking. And you may be having a call like, this is great because you can express your, your, your thinkings and maybe get inspired with different way of thinking. And you don't have to pay us anything when you, when you make a call to us. But, but I think you will get a lot, a lot of values from a call because, you know, that's really, really where all our jobs are. That's our missions are, is trying to inspire you by thinking differently, to look at your money differently and to plan your finances differently. I think that's really what Nelson wrote this book and what Nelson wanted us to teach.

Yeah, absolutely. And I come back to the idea of the word, the word relevance because, you know, we, we meet with people again from all over the map, all over the country. We have people that contact us from again, other, other locations and you know, in the United States as well. And of course, we have the ability to refer them to our American arm at lifeva. So there's people not only from all, all geographic areas, all backgrounds, people that are, you know, immigrants, let's say to Canada or like literally all over the map, families, business owners, like everything and then different age groups. So relevance matters. You know what, you know, if you're asking certain questions and you want to know how, hey, how, how, how soon can I stop paying the premium? How little can I put in? But you earn $300,000 a year, you don't have any kids or dependents you know, maybe it's just you and your spouse and you, you know, you already have like a million dollar real estate portfolio. I mean, that's, that's not relevant. That's coming from the wrong location and that's very scarcity oriented thinking. And that, that's probably not going to be a good setup for someone that's going to be successful at this process unless they're coachable. Whereas if you're 25 and you're recently married and you have a newborn and you're just starting a new career, you just got out of university, income is just beginning to grow, but you've got a long horizon ahead and now you're asking a question, you know, hey, how small can I start? So the relevance there is very different. Okay. And so everything has to be contextualized around what's actually going on with you. But the coach doesn't know that until they get a chance to meet with you. And they don't really know that until you get a chance to fill in some of your financial information. And they can actually see it and be able to say, oh, okay, I, oh yeah, I see with Bob and Susan, I get it here. They got the two kids, okay, they have a little bit of insurance now and then they got some group plan. That's probably not, I'll teach them about the group plan. That's maybe not the best insurance for them. And oh, they got mortgage insurance. We're gonna have a big conversation about that. Oh, I see here their mortgage renewal is up in 24 months on their interest rate and they have, they have a 2.5% interest rate. I better have a conversation with them about where their mortgage payments probably going to go in two years from now. We better prepare them for that when we're thinking about their cash flow. So if we set something up for them that we're already planning that in advance. So like these are the things that we go through when we're looking at someone's financial details. We're trying to really understand how we can set them up for success. But they have to be willing to actually put that information in. They got to be willing to have the phone call, they got to be willing to watch a couple videos, they got to be willing to read a book. You can either read the book or watch the videos, or you can do both. Most people do both. You can listen to a couple podcasts, but. But you're not going to get away with doing nothing. I'm sorry. That will never get you successful in the process of becoming your maker and probably won't get you successful much of anything in life. And I don't mean to be the jerk or the bad guy. It's just the way that it is. Yeah.

And I really value the power of coaching someone who's been there, done that, and can give you, give you idea, give you suggestions, give you advice. I really value that. You know, that's how we break through, that's how we grow in our life. So when I first got introduced to this, I'm very happy to present everything that I have, all the spreadsheet that I have for my financials because I want people to have a very subjective view on my financial situations where they can give me suggestions. Because I mean, we all have some prejudice with things, right? For instance, when I first entered the industry, I was quite offended by telling people my finances because I do have those people say, oh great, you should put this amount in RSP and this will save you this amount of, this amount of money. You should put this money in this deal because I'm very cautious with that. But becoming your own banker is not like that. And sometimes, you know, is, is a bad analogy is like when you just learning the swim, learning to swim. We're not going to put you in the deep waters, right? Is, we're going to, we're going to meet where you are at, we're going to get you to start trying and, and then, and then it's really about you. Whether you are willing to learn swimming, whether you are willing to take the courage, take the time and lesson to be coached to swim. Then you can go into that beyond imagination, big ocean that you can enjoy the view and an experience that you can never experience by the shadow water. But, but it comes with coaching. It comes with your willingness, but it's really come from you. Because I do have clients that are just starting their business, just starting their little family. They don't have a lot of income that, but they are willing to put 20%, 30% of their annual income into this, this vehicle because they see the value of it. They, they continue to learn. And sometimes this big problem for us because I'm like, okay, I'm not sure that's going to go through underwriting. And then, and then yet we have another stream of people might be you're like, oh, I know what exactly I want to do if I'm in your shoes. But you have to have the same amount of knowledge because knowledge is power. With that knowledge, then you will have the confidence to know how much you can put into a policy. But you start where you feel comfortable. That really decide is what you feel comfortable and what your knowledge, what, what amount of. Yeah, you know what I mean? Your, your level is.

Yeah, that's right. And, and I think something that's, you know, really interesting that you, you touched on there is. I love, I love your ocean swimming analogy. I think that's fantastic. The, you know, people have been sold things a lot in their lifespan. By the time that, usually by the time that they reach out to us, they've already gone through a number of sales experiences, whatever they are. And don't get me wrong, we are in the sales business. If we don't, if we don't sell someone an insurance policy, would you believe it, we don't make any revenue and we can't pay for all of our employees and all like all of our systems and our technology and you know, would you believe it? The podcast people, they want to get paid to produce these podcast episodes and the videos. You know, the video guy wants to get paid and like, it's just imagine that everybody seems to want to get paid along the way. I think it's okay that the insurance advisor gets paid because you know what? I know how much work they're going to do. Most people don't realize how much work they're going to do. And in most environments, if you're just going in and you're getting some term insurance, you're getting some critical insurance, whatever, those are all good things. And there's lots of people who service those individuals. But not always is there the type of engagement and ongoing relationship. What we are doing here is very different because the work actually begins after you get the first policy and usually after you get the second policy. It's, it's the ongoing implementation of the process. It's the checking in with the advisor and running ideas by them that you're, how you're checking in on your thinking. I had a meeting with a guy the other day, amazing guy, and he just had a, an income adjustment. He got a little bit of a raise and he got licensed in another province. And the result of that is there was going to be a little bonus for him doing that work and taking on that new responsibility. And it was going to create another like 25, $3,000 a year in annual income in perpetuity. Like he's like, well, that was, that money wasn't coming in before I was thinking about getting another policy. Can we talk it through? So we talked about it and talked about it and you know, it may happen. We haven't decided or not yet. It's up to him to make that call. But you know, he's already paying a substantial amount of premium. So we have a different challenge that we have to figure out also in the coach's responsibility and that's how are we going to get that through underwriting if he decides to move forward and who's the body going to be. So that's all about strategy. But the mindset and the conversation is an ongoing, fluid conversation. It doesn't end when you get the policy. Some, some places, maybe that is the case in some insurance agencies, maybe they do that. I have no idea. That's definitely not what we do here. And in most of the colleagues I have who are authorized infant backing practitioners, I would certainly like to think and believe in. For many of them, I know for certain that their process is a continuous, ongoing engagement of implementing a lifestyle. You know, changing your diet or going on like a diet fad or like a, like a cleanse or something. That's something you do really short term. Buying the diet kit is a transaction. Implementing what the kit does is some, is a process that you do. The time frame for how you do it is the difference between whether you're gonna, whether you're gonna make it a lifestyle or not. That makes any sense, right? Going to the gym again, you sign up for the gym, you just signed up, actually going to the gym and doing it repeatedly, you're gonna start to see some results. Making it a part of your fundamental lifestyle where this is, you know, something that you do every, either every day or multiple times a week. And it's ingrained and it's part of a habit. That's a lifestyle oriented. That's what we're teaching people how to do is embrace a lifestyle oriented way of financial life. Moving their cash flow as much as is reasonable and aggregately growing it over time into well constructed, very flexible whole life insurance contracts with a good company that has amazing history and great tools and great functionality for the utilization of capital through the power of collateralization. Now that's a really, really long way of saying infinite banking, but I mean that's basically what's going on. If you, if you put all these little pieces together, that's, that's how it gets summarized and what's taking place. And without having someone knowledgeable to help you through that process, probability is you could do it on your own. I don't know anyone who's done it effectively on their own very well. In fact, we have people that reach out to us who attempted to do that and then we find out that they have a bunch of, I'll call it crap that we have to sort through and clean up to try to get them reorientated to working in the right direction again. And so unfortunately, not only do they end up having policies that probably aren't as good as they could have been, doesn't mean they're bad. A policy is a policy, is a policy, but it probably could have been optimized a little bit better to some degree with a little bit of forethought. But most importantly, what they lose is the time. If they started them two, three, four years ago, we can't get those four years back. So you can never get back to time. If so it's so important that you, you know, if you are going to embrace this process, don't sit on the sidelines, you know, do the work that's necessary to make a decision, make your decision and then begin get started.

Love it. Love it. Richard, Just like as a parent, you always want avoid your child to fall, you want to, you want to warn them, say, hey, don't do that. You're going to fail, you're going to hit your face, you're going to go to the hospital. But sometimes.

You need to listen to some advice. Like in real estate, you will say any advice you get from, from a real estate advisor, it helps you because any mistake is very, very costly. You may not get back from it. Same thing like if you wanted to grow very successfully, you need advice, you need a good coach, you need someone who's been there, down that and probably trained so that you can save that time, you can save that mistake and it will help you to set, set up for success. And as you were talking about, I was just thinking about page 65 of Nelson's book, you know, the implementation. Nelson always uses the, the diet analogy in that, in that page as well. So I just love it because Nelson says on page 65, he said everyone is already spending all financial resources on what he think is best. There has got to be some honest introspection at this point. And a commitment to get out of financial prison must be a burning passion. So where does that passion come from? Where does that realization of there's a problem is that lies into how much you can get coached and how much you're willing to spend to learn and get coached.

Amazing. Gingin, this was awesome. Thank you for bringing these, these questions up again, you know, to kind of close Things out, you know, truth. There's lots like, you know, there's lots of different statements that technically are saying something that is true. But is it telling the whole truth? Is it a half truth? I think there's a lot of danger in telling half truths and not being more specific. And I know in the past, even in this process, with my knowledge where it was, I, I probably said things that I wanted to simplify and condense and make it very, you know, very, you know, nice, tidy, neat little package. And the reality is it's okay to take time to extend the conversation, use a few more words if you need to, to be specific so that you can actually say what's, what's going on. You know, an example of that would be you going back to like, not, you know, it's finding a time to not pay the premium. But it is true that in the future, if a policy is robust and it's been funded, that you might not have to pay premium. The future. Just because you can be in a position where you don't have to pay it doesn't mean that you should. Just because I, I can go jump out of a perfectly good airplane with a parachute doesn't mean I should. I might want to do that. My wife would disagree, but it, it doesn't mean that I should be doing that. Just because I can jump off a bridge and I'll probably land in the water down below and be fine doesn't mean I should. So you can do things like those. But then you also need to understand, again, this is where that coaching relationship is. This is where ongoing training happens because there's only so much you can learn at one time. You have to build some of this up as you go. The way you go about doing that in a future date is also important. And there's different levers and ways that you can accomplish it. And so understanding the how when you get to that stage is also part of the learning during the process. So just because you can do something, you also want to know how can you do it, and what are the different variables and variations. Another thing that you mentioned earlier, I just wanted to touch on Jingen, was that again, you know, the idea of, of, of putting money into a policy and growing it as large as you can, but also having some awareness and understanding of where, where you can shrink back if you need to. If, if, if times are tough, life changes, a curveball gets thrown at you. What are some of those again, levers that you can adjust to be in a different position. And I Just want people to be aware of a couple of those levers. So number one is when a policy is constructed, we have a minimum amount of premium. We refer to it as the base premium. That number also usually includes any rider. So if you have a term insurance rider or a child protection rider or some other feature that's in there, that's part of the minimum requirement. And then there's a flexible amount that's often referred to as the paid up additions rider. And it goes by different names. Every insurance company calls it something different. I just call it the flexible premium. Okay, so whatever that is. And then, so that flexible portion is flexible, it's optional. You can choose to put it in or not put it in. Okay. You also have policy loan availability. If you've used it all, then you don't have anything available, right? So you only have available what you haven't tackled, which you haven't touched yet. You have to be mindful of your utilization. Don't spread yourself too thin. But if something, something happens, you get into a hiccup scenario. Well, let's say you're paying annually. Maybe you switch from annual to monthly and you make the monthly minimum payment. As an example, you come into an influx of money from a tax refund or a bonus. But you could take that influx and then you can shove it back into the policy as, let's say flexible premium. Or you could apply it as to the policy loan. You can choose how to maneuver through those, those events that do arise throughout a typical year for most families. Then if need, if necessary, if you actually had to, you can actually reduce the policy. Now, it's not, not recommended, probably not what your plan had in mind. But if everything's, you know, going out the window, maybe it's a divorce situation, or maybe, you know, you lost income, lost a job for a while. Things like this do happen and you have to make no different than if you didn't have a policy and the same event happened. You're going to make some different financial decisions. You're going to be in a position where you have to, you have no choice. And if that is the case, you can work with your coach and they can help you make adjustments so you can try to preserve as much of what was already there that's built. So there's a variety of options. The possibility of eventually doing a premium offset is a consideration. There's other dividend options. We don't recommend them, but they are there. That might be a conversation topic for a different podcast. There is something called reduced Paid up insurance. Again, not an ideal situation, but another consideration. So there's many different like triggers that you can implement if necessary. If you do find yourself in a situation where you get into, let's call it, hot water and you have to make some, some maneuverability, you got to make some changes. You know what's not going to help though is if you don't tell your coach. I've had it happen. In fact, it happened recently with a gentleman, young man, amazing guy, been a, been a policyholder for 10 years. Unfortunately hasn't listened all that well over that time frame, provided a lot of coaching, hasn't implemented the things I've said. So maybe demonstrated not being all that coachable, but has a young family, just bought a house, bit off more than he can chew, in my opinion. And the result of that is the policy that he had set up long ago, who he had basically robbed all the money out of, borrowed and borrowed and borrowed and borrowed and not sent any money back. Not what we teach, not what we show. Not implementing the process, not being, going through the education, not reading Nelson's book regularly, not booking regular meetings, not meeting with his coach. He did all of the things that you're not supposed to do. And the result of that is he put, he overextended himself yet again even further. And he ended up deciding to cancel a policy that had been in place for 10 years and now he has no coverage protecting his family, despite the recommendation that he should keep it and, and that he should get more, more insurance in place before doing that. Now hopefully that'll all get resolved for him. I really truly hope the best for him, but that's a perfect example of, and, and, and actually, by the way, I will also add that policy was also reduced and cut in half several years ago, like four or five years ago. So there'd already been changes in conversations about, you know, maintaining and keeping that policy alive in the past. So these are situations that do happen and I get it, life takes place for people. We, we can't change what's happened. What we can do is think, change our thinking about what's going to happen next. And if you're not sharing financial hardships that do come up with your coach, then you, you're, you're not helping them help you. You can't fix something a year and a half after the problem occurred. When you've been trying to band aid it yourself, if the problem happened and you notified someone who could help work through it with you, you might have new ideas, fresh ideas, New resources show up and that problem might not get into a really, really bad scenario because you have the right people able to help you. That's part of what a coach can help you do. When you have that great working relationship, does that make sense? Jingen?

I love it. It's like when you go to see a doctor and ask for a cure and medicine. You can't just not telling them everything that happens to. You have to tell them all the symptoms so that they can make a holistic view of your situation and make suggestions and give you the right cure for your. For your disease. Right?

Yeah. So if I go in with a cough, but I've got a sword shoved through one side of my gut, I probably should be not focused on the cough, right? Is that what you're getting at?

That's great. That's great.

On that happy note, no, this is a lot of fun. Thank you for bringing these questions up. I think this is great. I hope people get a ton of value out of this conversation and, and the way to, to consider looking at this, especially if you're, you know, you're referring, you know, friends and family to your coach and you want to make sure that those people that you're talking to are, are getting that mindset idea set up right out of the gate. This is going to be a great episode for that. So everyone who's paying attention and listening, we appreciate you so much. Thanks for being an avid listener to the program. If you're on the YouTubes, of course, as you know, we have these playlists that pop up poof right down below. Check it out. There's one right there. It says watch me. It's good stuff. Go ahead, get it. 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.