257: The Best Whole Life Insurance Policy Design Discussion

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Worth at the same time.

Is everything that I hear about the infinite banking concept online true? Well, we're gonna discuss that a little bit. And the answer is, you know, maybe it's not. We see a lot of misused information out there, and it's not just limited to that. Of course, we have several episodes where we talk about, you know, appropriate language, but it's also the types of conversations that we find out people are having with different professionals. And it could be, you know, Bob's insurance agency that they just know, or their Uncle Tom, who's an insurance advisor, or Aunt Sally, or whoever it is that they are that they're connected with. And they may not be well versed in these topics, or perhaps they have a person that they're working with that just isn't particularly well versed in some of the nuance, let's call it the nuances when it comes to actually looking at implementing the process in your life. So core elements of the concept, and we talk a lot about that. We got tons of episodes about that, Jason. But we're going to get into, you know, we'll do a couple discussions here on a few, you know, recent things that have come across our desk. You know, some. Some meetings that I know I've had. I know you've had a number of them, and our team certainly is having them. And they're around conversations for people that reach out to us seeking counsel about something that's been presented to them, typically an illustration with. Without maybe a lot of context, and then trying to provide some context to those individuals. So where should we begin this topic?

Well, I think it's what initially triggers someone to begin investigating the concept.

Right.

And we've talked about this in the past, but it's still prevalent because it's still happening where people begin investigating the concept because of how maybe it's initially presented, as I think you use the phrase, you know, like the black box of the wealthy, or somehow that this is a process where you can get wealthy buying X or that it's very product focused, in other words. Right. There's a lot of sensationalism around the product, and then people begin to investigate it, which is wonderful. So mission accomplished. Somebody is actually curious enough and compelled enough to start looking at the process and then what we've been experiencing in these interactions that people have been having with us is that they feel like maybe it's not quite complete in terms of clarity, that there might be some things that are just not 100%, but they can't quite put their finger on what that is. And they start doing research, they go to Uncle Google, they go to the YouTubes or the Instagram and they will come across us. It's not a matter of if, it's when because of how much reach we have on social media. And they reach out and they want to have a conversation and the conversations are warranted in the majority of the cases where, and this is not a slant on any colleague in the industry whatsoever. It's, we assume angelic intentions, as our good friend Ryan Griggs would say. We assume that everybody wants to be helpful. They want, they want to provide great value and great service to people. But there may be some things I think that you and I can address today that will just hopefully help them too. Not just the prospective client, but, you know, other advisors who are at different stages in their journey, you know, with the process. And so I think we want to begin with first and foremost the fact that it's most often always leading with product, not process. And we just hear that and see that time and time again because when we ask somebody a simple question. So walk us through.

Problem in your own description so that we understand why the solution you've been presented with matters to you.

Crickets.

Well, I selected this because I was told this was the best company to buy insurance from. The policy is the most flexible. The dividend scale interest rate is higher. The policy loan interest rate is lower. I understand all that. Those are all product attributes. But walk me through the problem so that the solution that's been recommended to you, I can understand how that is going to be most helpful to you.

Crickets.

In other words, the process discussion is limited to policy loan activity. Here's how quick you can access them, here's the process of repaying them.

That has nothing to do with the infinite banking concept whatsoever.

And actually even, you know, especially given some recent conversations, not even those convert those topics are happening to some degree. And so it's. There is a. The nuances of utilization are important to understand if you're going to be incorporating the process of becoming your own banker. Because it is a utilization concept. It's not a set it on the shelf and let it collect dust concept. Right. It's not a.

Dollar cost average your way into a Long term stock portfolio strategy. It's. It requires utilization to develop the habits necessary to be successful at the process so that you can also relate those habits to your family members so that they can create continuity on the process when you're gone. All right, so there must be utilization in order to be fundamentally successful.

And the policy owner's behavior is far more critical than the behavior of the insurance company. And that's been absent from these discussions that have been coming up where, so walk me through, like, whose behavior do you feel is more important? And the person, like, what do you mean? Like, I'm not sure I understand the question.

Is it the policy owner's behavior or the life insurance company's behavior? Because everything that's attracted you to want to move forward with the process is all about addressing the life insurance company's behavior. They're going to administer the contract. You pay the premium, they administer the contract. The, the cash value is going to grow daily uninterrupted. Which again, cash value is not money for any of our advisor colleagues in the industry out there. Please ensure you develop a clear understanding of that. Because we hear things like, you can borrow and have all your money growing uninterrupted. It's not money that's growing uninterrupted. It's equity in the policy that's growing uninterrupted. There's a distinction there. And so again, it's the fundamentals that just are absent. You know, the policy owner's behavior, the discussions that need to be had around.

That and the significance of it. Nelson's book is 92 pages. Now you take out the glossary and the epilogue and a couple of blank pages that are in there. And you take out some illustrations. I think you end up with, I can't remember the exact number, but when you boil it down to core elements, there's like 56 pages, really? And so there's no excuse for not reading it, by the way, if there's only 56 pages. So anyone that has an excuse that you don't like to read, get over yourself and just get it done. Because it's 56 pages. Like, honestly, it's not a big deal. If you want to know how I recommend reading it, you can send us an email or whatever, comment on the YouTube channel and we'll figure out a way to get you a copy of the letter that I send people. But that 33% of the whole book is based on human behavior.

Right?

So one third of the entire element of the whole process is behavior. Based, that should tell you something. And it's all the most important stuff, and it all begins there. So if it all begins there, then your, your process of learning should begin there as well. If you're new to this or you're just learning this for the first time, or maybe, you know, you were referred here by a friend or whatever, recognize that you have to go through a learning process. You know, we get a lot of people who reach out and they say, I just, I, I just want to get started. I want to get this going now. Like, cool, that's great. But what is it that you actually know? You may be excited, you may want to do this right away, and that's fantastic. But don't let your exuberance like, outweigh your rational elements of understanding. If it even makes sense for you to do that. Okay. People will learn. Like, you know, we have a great webinar on like debt recovery, debt recapturing, and they get really excited, well, I want to go do that. I'm like, okay, cool. But why is it that you want to do that? Do you know how you can do that? Are you, do you have money left over at the end of the month, or are you spending it all and your negative cash flow and you're going backwards and you actually need a different kind of help. So just because there's a thing that can help you in an area doesn't necessarily mean it's the right fit for you. You have to go through some of these learning hurdles. And I was chatting with a marketing guy recently about, you know, the learning process and that, you know that it takes a while to go through some of this information. You know, when you have whatever 8, 000 videos that we've got or whatever the heck the number of videos we have. Jay, between the podcast and the Bankers Vault channel and shorts and everything, the, all the podcast interviews that we've done on other people's shows, it's a lot of content to go through. No one's saying you need to go through all that, but you do need to go through some, you know, Nelson's book, it says right there on the very first page, page three, that it's the workbook for a ten hour seminar. We're not saying that you need to dedicate ten hours, but if you read the book, you've committed about two and a half to three, maybe two. If you do it the way that I tell you to do it. And so then you watch Nelson's documentary film, that's one hour. You watch One or two podcast episodes, maybe that's another hour of time. You've got about four hours of investment into your own education, and now you should be able to have a pretty good idea. Is this something you want to implement in your life or do. Is this something you want to explore further by meeting with an individual, or is it not? And if it's not, then tip your hat, wave goodbye, see you later, good luck. Thanks for coming by. You don't need to go waste anyone's time to try to figure out what an illustration looks like if you don't understand any of those other things, because none of it will matter. Honestly, none of it'll matter unless you understand those core elements. You know, a lot of this stems from a conversation I had recently with a gentleman and, you know, nice guy. You know, I'm not sure exactly if we'll be able to help him. I'm pretty confident we will if he, if he chooses to go that route. But he's got some things to learn and he reached out because, you know, a common friend. So a client of mine is also a friend of his originally he, he wanted to introduce that individual to me, but the individual found, you know, someone else's information. They wanted to go through that information and they were very focused on, I think, something to do with tax savings or whatever the result is. They got presented an illustration and the illustration, I, I, I haven't seen it, but I based on what he told me and conveyed him like, it's, it, it wouldn't be a bad policy, right? But it wouldn't solve the things that he was looking to do. And he said, well, no one asked me those questions, Richard. I'm like, well, why not? Like, well, I don't know why they didn't ask me those questions. Like, well, you have multiple businesses, you have businesses in both U.S. and Canada. You have some complex tax issues. Sort out. You, you have three kids. I asked him if any, if they asked about, you know, doing policies on his children and the oldest is 17, so they'd be turning 18, which means he's got to be much, It'll become, not more difficult, but it'll certainly be easier if he can become owner of the policy while she's 17 rather than having to do it after the fact. And no one asked them. You know, the advisor he was communicating with didn't ask about kids policies, didn't make any suggestions about that, didn't think it was critically important.

You know, and in the whole aspect, he, all the conversation was around a Contract and a death benefit and the ability to take loans. There was no discussion on how to take the loans, that he wouldn't be able to access the policy loan for the first year. When I told him that, he was very upset because he needed to use the money. He actually wants to become the bank for his business because he's tired of dealing with banks. I got to the core of it and I said, what do you really want this to do? He's like, I'm tired of dealing with banks. I don't like it. We're in two different countries, we're growing, we have capital availability and I believe I can finance the operation, but I want to do it efficiently. I want to use this process. I've read the book, but I don't want to be beholden to some third party lender. I want to be able to have that control for me and my business partner back. And I want to do it through this process. I'm like, okay, well that's pretty clear. Did you convey that to the other person? Like, well, I thought I did. It's like, did they explain how this, this product will help you do that? It's like, well, not really. They just said I could take loans. Like, okay. Did they indicate anything about how difficult it might be to get the loans, how long it might take, how, how they might not process them properly if you make repayments, how sometimes those, you know, because I have experience with that particular insurance company, I have a policy with them and frequently when I've been taking loan transactions, it hasn't gone. Let's just say it hasn't gone smoothly would be an understatement. And Jason, you've likewise experienced some of those challenges with that similar insurance carrier. A hundred percent doesn't mean that they're a bad carrier and it doesn't mean that they're bad policies. I'm very happy. I haven't.

Yep.

But I use it for very specific purposes and I don't use it for, you know, more regular day to day transactions. And you have a gentleman who literally wants to finance large capital influxes to his operating company from a Holdco and he's doing online banking all the time. He's moving money between us and Canada. He's got a lot of transactional banking, transactional banking taking place with regular bank accounts. He needs something that will allow him to have a higher increase of transactional capacity with the policy as well. Right. And the product presented to him just wouldn't allow that to take place. And so we had A good discussion about that. I asked him, you know, the question, okay, well, how important is online banking to you? And you know, I don't remember the exact comment, but it was something to the effect of, well, do you need blood in your body to survive? Like, do you need oxygen to live? Right? It was pretty damn important. And I said, okay, well, well, did anyone walk you through the process of how you would go and access funds from here and repay it? Like what that would look like? It's like, not really. Nobody walked me through that at all. I'm like, well, did you ask those questions? Like, no, I didn't think of it. I just assumed they said I could take loans and it would be fine. Like, okay, well, well, if you went this direction for what your transactional needs are that you've described to me, you might, in order to do what you wanted to do, actually need a third party lender to collateralize the contract so you could use it in the first year and you could do the transactional environment you need. And then you're doing exactly what you told me you didn't want to do, which is what? You're bringing a third party bank into the mix and they're going to make you jump through a hoop once a year to kind of, you know, raise the limit or whatever. And it might be a bit of a pain. I mean, it's fine. There might be a rational reason to do that for you. Like there could be some strategic reasons why that might make sense, but you have to be prepared and know that going in and he just didn't know that. So the end result is, you know, he's going to be looking at doing something differently than what was presented to him. Again, nothing, nothing that was presented him was, was.

Bad per se, but it wasn't connected to his objective and his own understanding. And there was a gap between what the product is and what the utilization he needs in his life is for the process of banking. Right? There was no discussion about the process of banking at all. Not one.

And all the things that you mentioned, just around.

The, I guess the desire to, to be able to, to have what we would describe a convenient experience, right? No friction, limiting the number of manual steps or eliminating them all together. Being able to take care of that experience online to the greatest degree possible. Everything that you, that you outlined. But the we hear comments, you know, like, well, it was explained to me that the policy is flexible.

Okay, that may in fact be true, but the person hearing that.

May conflate that with these other things. Oh, well, certainly flexible. Flexible means that it's going to address all my issues. When I hear flexible, I think, okay, you know, can the policy do yoga? Like what, what, what exactly is it.

That, how bendy is it that you're talking about?

And again, you know, we're just sharing this just to provide clarity and value, that's all. Every reputable life insurance company that provides dividend paying whole life insurance contracts has flexible policies. But what we encourage people to do is to ask really insightful questions around the experience and the process of requesting loans, repaying loans. Is that online offline combination of both. What has your experience been like customer service wise? Because that matters, especially for people who have a whole lot going on in their lives and the last thing that they need is any added friction or frustration or tension or purchasing something under the guise of believing that it was going to address all their needs only to find out that it's not that it's a bad product, product is right. I'm sure the design is right and for, for that individual.

But a lot of things were missing around what exactly it is. That gentleman truly wanted only to find out that with that particular product in that particular company, he was not presently going to get what he wanted. And so that triggers frustration or, or whatever the case may be. And all that you've done, I wasn't part of that conversation, but all that you would have done is investigate what he truly wanted.

And, and does what he wanted actually makes sense, right, relative to implementing the process.

Right, right.

And, and what has, and also what has he done for education? You know, he need to explain, he'd read the book, he watched, you know, a few webinars, he'd done, you know, he'd done several of the steps, he was knowledgeable about several things. He was already familiar with the idea of economic value add. He was implementing that to some moderate degree, kind of like a, you know, like with a sinking fund model, you know, in his business a little bit. So he's, he's developed and he's doing some of the habitual things. He fundamentally is ready to migrate those habits that are already conducive. And he's got a profitable business and he's expecting growth, but he knows he's going to need to fund that growth. Right. And he needs his capital that rather than sinking all of his capital into growth and putting it all at risk, he wants to mitigate the risk and also get the coverage in place. While also, you know, there's a, there's a component of it builds to an exit strategy. There's just a whole number of great, great things here. And so, you know, the other piece of this too, Jay, is like, you know, again, the idea of like quote unquote flexibility. You know, it was described to him that the, the contract presented, the, the, the illustration presented would have this thing called that. They, I think the term used was unused contribution room, which is not true. It's inaccurate. That's a, that's an rrsp, a registered retirement savings plan type of, of a discussion. And it's misleading because it's not accurate. And what, what every insurance contract has is they have an exempt room, right? The tax exempt room that you're able to put in, you know, extra, extra flexible premiums, paid up addition premiums. If you're approved for it, if you know you've got a rider in place that allows you to do that, it was approved at the time of application, etc. What are you able to do on an annual basis? And there's a lifetime limit. Okay. Most insurance companies, at least in Canada, they calculate that to age 100. In the United States, age 121. And they'll say, roughly speaking, on a per year basis you can put in, I'll just pick a random number. Let's just say you can do $50,000 a year of flexible premium.

Okay.

And then you take, okay, so if you're 50 years old, and I'll use age 100, so that's 50 to 100 is 50 years. 50 times 50,000. I can't do that math. But that's, but gonna be two, was that 22, 250, whatever. It's a lot. It's a lot. Anyway, it's a boatload of money. Okay, so that would be your lifetime limit if we just kept it simple like that. Okay, you know, 50k a year until age 100. But you, you're not able to do more than that. 50k a year, you can't do $50,001. All right? And you know, there's other companies that might do it in such a way where say, hey, look, we're going to pre approve you for a lifetime limit, but rather than letting you have that same equivalent amount, we're going to reduce it to a lower amount because we want, we need to manage our risk. There's a risk to the pool. We're going to let you have a little bit more leeway on a per year basis, but we're not going to give you the same lifetime limit. Right? So with that in Mind actually here, let me, I'll bring up my calculator. I'll, I'll calculate the number so I have a, a better range here for our listeners to understand what we're looking at.

Sounds good. And this for our listeners and viewers, pay very close attention to what Richard's going to walk through here because this is, this is a not well understood in the industry element of it and certainly not understood by the general public. And so pay very close attention what Richard's going to lead us through.

So, so in the example I gave, okay, so we got 50,000 a year for 50 years. We got a 50 year old person 50 to 150 years.

52 and a half million years times.

50 grand is two and a half million. That would be the quote unquote lifetime limit. That's pre calculated. Yeah, but if you, if you don't put 50 in that, in, in a given year, you don't get it back the next year. You get the same amount next year, but you don't get, you don't get unused room. It doesn't like, it doesn't carry over, carry forward. Okay. Now with other carriers, some carriers, they produce an area where again the insurance company's in the business of mitigating risk. One of the risks that they need to mitigate is what's called anti selection. Anti selection has to do with an insured person who maybe has adverse effects or maybe they develop cancer or something and they might want to buy more coverage, let's say as an example. So they do selection processes to mitigate that. Well, if you're approved for insurance and you develop, let's say a cancer, they wouldn't approve you to keep doing that. But if you've already got it in place, you're allowed to keep doing it. Does that make sense? As long as you keep it going? Yeah. And so in order to mitigate those risks, they have to set some limits. Some companies set the limit on an annual basis, other companies set it on a lifetime basis. And so another company would say, look, we're going to let you have a little bit more leeway on a year to year basis, but we're going to reduce the lifetime amount. And so they, they won't likely approve the same two and a half million. Maybe they'll only approve one and a half million. Right. So now you have, you might have a little bit more wiggle room on a per year basis, more quote unquote flexibility, but the lifetime flexibility is actually lower because they won't approve the policy unless Again, given your financial condition, it really just depends on the individual, depends on how the policy is portrayed, how it's illustrated, and then how, you know, cover letter is written to the insurance company to defend the rationale. But I know on many occasions I, I've had individuals denied that extra flexibility room. So, you know, understanding this is really important. And now if you're using that, let's say you, you know, it was company B, you can put in the same 50,000 that year, but you don't do it well the next year, maybe you might be able to put in 60 or 70,000. Right. It doesn't mean that you got a carryover amount. What it means is that the tax exempt room of the policy for that year has changed. Maybe because you got a dividend, the dividend bought more coverage and it's just, they're just giving you more flexibility on the tax exempt room available in a given year. But if you missed it the year before, you still missed it the year before. Right. It's not carrying forward. There's no such thing as that. That's how RSP contribution room works. That is not how it works with an insurance contract. So these kind of things are misleading and the type of language being used is misleading. And if a policy owner believes that they have unlimited carry forward room and then they find out that they don't, that could be a challenge.

Add a little bit more to the equation. Jay. I don't want to make it over complicated, but if we have term insurance in the mix.

Yep.

And this is very a common. Again, I don't want to speak to US design here, but it's a common utilization in many formats. Term insurance can temp. It's temporary insurance. Term temporary. It can temporarily increase the exempt room of an insurance contract. Right. And so this is often utilized in designs from advisors to, to create a false sense of extra room to be able to maybe put more premiums in. Flexible premiums. Now on the surface that's fine, but for Those watching on YouTube, I'll give you a little visual example. I got a water jug here. Okay. The water jug is about half full right now. I've got some kind of a electrolyte drink in here. It's actually quite delicious. And so just imagine my water jug, it's got a lid on it. If I fill this all the way up to the top, but I kept pouring it in, fluid is just going to flow out over top. It's totally full. It will not accept any more fluid. Okay. It's maxed out so imagine that's the year contribution room. That's the annual maximum flexible fluid that we can put into the jar. We can't put any more into it. Okay, now if, if we have used term insurance to create this jar size, okay? This jar is the whole life plus the term connected.

Okay.

At some point in time, the policy owner decides that they're going to get rid of the term insurance. Maybe because they were at the 10 year renewal or the 20 year renewal, or maybe they decide, you know what, I got a cancer diagnosis, I want to convert that insurance and I want to strip it off policy one and I want to create policy two. Okay, so these are common reasons why you might move that term insurance off. Okay? Renewal timeframe is the most common. And the second common option is when you want to convert it to create another policy. All right, so just imagine if I take my hand here and if, for those of you listening on, you know, I'll just audio only, I just chop like a saw and I cut this jug in half. All of that fluid in the top half is going to spill out. It's got to go somewhere, right? There's no more room in the container. Okay, well imagine if that was tax exempt room and you'd overfilled the container and now you're chopping it off because you got rid of the term insurance. And so the total exempt room goes down. That means there's not enough exempt room to hold what's in there that can create a taxable event. Okay. You know, they would use like terminology, like a MEC in the states. Here in Canada, we don't have the same terminology, but essentially you, you don't have, you have, you've overstuffed what the contract can hold based on the exempt room. And it creates a taxable event to the policy owner. And so that could be very dangerous. And it's not well explained to people, I find. And we meet with people day in and day out all the time. We have a team of people that meets with people all the time. And we're hearing these stories about things that are not getting explained to them. And so when that event happens, if you don't know what's happening or what causes it to happen, the policy owner's behavior could create that taxable event. If they don't know any better because they did too much funding, too much funding at the wrong time, they, they needed to convert the term too early. Like any number of scenarios could create an adverse scenario with the policy owner if they're not well informed. And don't understand. And it doesn't mean need to get crazy complicated. The key is to have an appropriate discussion about that possible event taking place. To know that it's going to happen so that you can plan accordingly and to make sure you understand the guardrails that are there. So it doesn't mean that it's bad policy. That's not the case at all. It just means that it requires an important knowledge base that needs to be regularly and continually discussed with the client so that the client is aware. Because I don't know about you, Jay, but I've had meetings with people 10 years ago and would you believe it, they don't remember every meeting that we've had.

Right.

It's kind of like you and I, we've known each other a long year. If I were to look back at all my memories, I can't. I can't picture every time you and I went for wings and beer.

Yeah, that's very true.

And people forget stuff like. Seriously.

Yeah.

This is important. This is not little. This is not little trivial things that we're talking about here. These are potentially heavily financially impactful events that must be well understood and well managed. But the person that needs to manage it is the policy owner. Because they're the only one that can. An advisor can't manage it because the policy owner is in total control.

Yeah.

And they can at any time cancel the policy. They could, they could cancel the term rider. They could do something directly with the insurance company. Bypass an advisor and create a financially damaging impact if they don't understand.

Really good point. And that's why it's so important when you're investigating the process, given that that's what you're investigating. If you're, if you're investigating a product.

Yeah.

High cash value life insurance is very appealing both individually and corporately. Investigate the product. If you're investigating the process, make sure that you're gaining clarity on how the. The advisor is going to help you best utilize the tool. Because Nelson always said that you can put the best tool for the job in the hands of an incompetent. Not only will that person not turn out any good work with the tool, they will likely break the darn tool. Exactly what Richard just led us through. And this is about creating awareness in the marketplace to make sure that people have clarity. We are always available for second opinions. We have no interest in.

Pursuing other advisors, clients or anything like that. We have zero interest in that. We have more leads than we can handle. We need help in our organization to deal with all the traffic that we generate, but we're always, always happy to provide a second opinion. And over the years, Rich, like you can attest, I mean, there have been times where we bring the advisor from outside into the conversation to, to be helpful and sometimes that works out well and other times, for whatever reason, the reaction maybe isn't as professional as it otherwise could have been. But at least we know that, you know, we've, we've made an attempt to do that. But.

Look, at the end of the day, people just want, they want what they expect to be aligned with what they're purchasing and what they're implementing. And the truth is the conversations that we've been engaged in, there's been misalignment there. And it's important for us to, to just create some awareness around that and provide additional clarity.

And I think there's like, you know, another piece that I want to, you know, earlier I mentioned like talking to a marketing guy about, you know, messaging and you know, everyone wants, like, look, everyone who's in business needs to market. You need to market to develop, you know, leads, prospects, customers, whatever it is. I don't care if you've, you make, you're a baker and you make bread and donuts. Like you need a nice sign to bring people, you know, to your, to see the chocolate coating on your donuts. Yeah, right. Everyone needs to do that. And we're no different from that vantage point. Right? And so recognize that marketing is meant to create curiosity. It's to get people to reach out to you. That's its purpose, that's its function. But marketing is an education. Okay? And if you are interested, you're going through this process, please, please, please do not get Your information from 32nd and 62nd TikToks and TIC Tacs and Instagrams or whatever they are. I mean, if that develops curiosity for you, that's fine. But that is not a method to learn anything of value. Right? If we're talking about something that's going to be a fundamental component instituted in your financial life, potentially for generations of your family members, is it reasonable to think that a 30 second TikTok can explain how that's going to work for you? It's not. It is absolutely unreasonable. Is it reasonable to think that you can have a 30 minute conversation with somebody or even two, you know, two 30 minute meetings and all of a sudden and see an illustration that you've never seen before, don't know anything about, and somehow feel like you're Ready to get started now? A lot of your learning will come once you're in the. Once you're in the process. Once you get that first policy and you begin taking loans and repayments, a lot of the real core click components happen once you begin. Nelson used to say, this is more caught than it is taught. Okay. He said you catch it. But please, I just really would wish that people would take a little bit more time and go through more content. Like, yes, it is important to get started. Of course it is. We absolutely want people to do that. But. But what we don't want people to do is to rush through the process. Because here, if you look at the top of this book, it says, becoming your own banker. So, you know, Jason, you and I have talked about your own a lot in the last couple of years. You know, lately I'm really focused on becoming. Becoming is something that you're doing. You're becoming a better version of yourself. You're becoming a better banker. You're becoming a better knowledgeable person about your personal finance. You're becoming a better habit maker. You're becoming a better family steward for the. The money that flows through your hands that you are stewarding for the generations that follow you. These are things that you're doing. These are action. Becoming is an action word, okay? Becoming your own banker is an action. You. You, you are not your. You're not just the banker all of a sudden. Right. You're becoming it all the time. I'm always becoming a better version of that. So recognize that this does take some effort. Don't look for shortcuts. Okay. Don't reach out to some advisor and say, can I just show me an illustration? First off, if someone asks me that question, my response is, no, I can't. And I won't until I understand if you're ready to see one. And then we absolutely will do that. I'm not sending illustrations to people because they asked for them. No. What do you want? Have you gone to the information? And, like, I don't want to be a jerk or anything about it, but, you know, Jason, if someone reaches out to me or they're. They're introduced by a client, which I, I love. We love getting referrals. We appreciate that. I have some very specific criteria that people need to do. I say, look, I'm going to give you options. I'm going to give you five options. Pick three and do them. And once you've done them, then we can meet. Yeah. Number one is you can buy and read Nelson's book, becoming your own Banker. It's 92 pages. You only need to read about 56. If you read it the way that I tell you to read it, it's only about two, two hours of your time. Number two is you can watch the documentary film. This is Nelson Nash. You can go to Nelson Nash film dot com. That's Nelson ashfilm dot com. It's one hour. Get some popcorn, get some wine, whatever your spouse likes to beverage and sit down together and watch it. That's one hour of your time. Watch three of our client series podcasts. Okay. I will hand select them for you if, if you want, but I recommend our client series. Okay. You can read one of our four books, soon to be seven books, because we got three in the works. Okay. We got a whole bunch of books coming out this year. Read one of our books. And usually I would recommend don't spread the wealth or as an example, cash follows a leader because it's a quick, easy read with some visual diagrams. Okay. And. Or you can, you can watch one of our recorded webinars. So those are five options. Pick three. I don't care what three you pick, but pick three and you must do them if you haven't done them. There's no reason for us to meet because you do not have a baseline of understanding for us to have a constructive conversation yet. We can't even begin talking about what you think that you want because you don't even know enough to be able to have that conversation yet. Right? There's literally almost no conversation that can be had until you've done those three things.

Pick three and do them.

And we've had countless, literally countless people who have provided feedback when they're well into the process, thanking us for making sure that we were very intentional around creating clarity before they did anything at all. And that comes up all the time. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And we're incredibly blessed and very privileged to serve. But even at our live events and virtual events where we have existing clients come on and. And share, that comes up often where it's like I can think back to the beginning of my journey and, you know, when I was basically encouraged to just take a moment, slow down, let's make sure that we get to clarity before we dive into the deep end of the pool. Let's start wading into the shallow end first and just kind of develop a clearer understanding before we go any deeper. And.

It'S impactful versus just rushing into it because the marketing kind of drummed up all of these, you know, great, great feelings, the great euphoria. And oh, geez. Like, this process, this is going to.

Solve all my financial problems, right? Make everything better. And it's the best thing since sliced bread. It's so good that I'm going to do it immediately, right now, asking any questions, and then I'm just going to wipe my hands and it's going to magically solve all my problems. Like a unicorn. Like. No, it's not a financial unicorn, okay?

The truth is, it's a process. It's not an event. It's not an event of buying a policy or, or a system of policies. It's a process. And it takes time. It takes time to integrate it. It takes time to make it a part of your lifestyle, because again, that discussion's not happening. So, Mr. Or Mrs. Prospect, walk me through how you plan to incorporate this as part of your lifestyle.

What?

Like, I just, I want to. I just want to take a big dump in a policy and have a bunch of money available tomorrow. Okay. I, I mean, you can do that, but that's not implementing a process. That's buying a product. That's a transaction. It's an event. This is all about making this a lifestyle. That's what the infinite banking concept truly is. And rich, given how long we've been doing this, you know, since myself, since July of 2008. You were just literally the next bus to pull up to that transit station a year later, and you hopped on the bus. And so we've been doing this for considerable amount of time. And we, we meet with advisors who are at different stages of their journey, and we could almost map out chapter by chapter if they continue.

You know, being receptive to learning new things and not arriving in knowledge and not sensationalizing the message, we could literally map out chapter by chapter what their growth curve is going to look like. And we, we talk to advisors now that we first met 10 years ago, and they're completely different people. So for all you new advisors out there who are just embracing this concept and you want to introduce it to your marketplace, we would encourage you to just take a real deep dive into everything that we've put out there and to fully immerse yourself into the resources that are available to help you develop the deepest understanding you can around the concept. Teaching you how to sell a product that is not difficult to do, teaching you how to sensationalize the message, that is really not very difficult to do at all. There's no shortage of that going on. Out there. But teaching you how to deliver this in a way that Nelson engineered it to be delivered and he pioneered it to be delivered in that takes time and experience.

We're going to be doing coaching, we're going to be doing some options for advisors to get 100% training on how to do that this year.

You bet. Yeah, it'll be a quarterly coaching.

And advisors that we've sort of preliminary, you know, said hey would, is this something that would be of interest? It's like where do we send the check? Like, you know, people are just really hungry for this and it's not to teach the advisor on, you know, how, how to be, how to be the best, how to be the best practitioner. There's, there's something to be said about being a practitioner. There's something else entirely to be said around how you serve, coach, educate, build a business where people are actually, you're helping them by actually helping them versus checking the box on. Yes, I know everything there is to know about the product and I know everything there is to know about a concept. How are you helping the people by actually helping them. And that's one of the aspects of our coaching that we're going to doing with advisors in North America. So stay tuned. It's going to be an awesome year.

Yeah, I mean thanks for giving me a chance to talk about that today Jay. I mean I think that there's again we have, there's incredible people out teaching Nelson's message. We appreciate that people are getting the message out. We love that, we appreciate the Nelson Nash Institute for all the things that they're developing. Of course we have a program now developed for anyone new joining that they need to go through a coaching academy. That's a two day event. We've now hosted that event twice. The third one's coming up here shortly and that is a phenomenal deep dive into Nelson's book and implementation steps and interaction and getting to know people in your community. And we have veterans are coming through that, learning all kinds of new things as well as brand new people so that we can get the message out the way that Nelson had intended. There is so much good that we can do in the world but for our, for our listeners it's okay to take a little bit of time, it's okay to go through some, some information but, but in the same respect, I mean don't sit on your hands forever like you know, if you know something is the right thing, don't get locked in analysis paralysis, you know, if you've gone Through a couple hours of education, it is appropriate to reach out to someone, reach out to an authorized practitioner and, and initiate a conversation and determine if you think that there's a good fit for you to work with that individual. Not everyone's going to want to work with me or Jason or certain members of our team or whatever. That's fine. That's okay. You have to choose someone that you have a fit for. And likewise, as the advisor, we get to choose that too. There's a couple people I've turned away. Well, actually, several of them I've turned away in the last quarter that they just weren't a fit for me, you know, And I said, you know what? Love this interaction. Love to be friends. I tell you what, I'm going to introduce you to so and so. And I think that you'd be a good fit for that individual. You're in a good geographic proximity, you know, you have some similar mindsets, blah, blah, blah. You got some similar hobbies. Maybe you'd be a good fit. I really like working with people that don't like the government and want to have control over things and are willing to do certain steps to show initiative and ambition in their life. If you've got no ambition, you want to sit on, you know, you want something to sit on the shelf, a set it and forget it model, we will not be a good fit to work together. That's not how I operate. I'm not a babysitter, and I. I hire a babysitter for my own kids. I would hire someone for you also, if that's what you're looking for, but I won't be that person. Okay.

Well, this was fun. And yeah. To all our viewers and listeners, thank you. Make. Make the rest of your week outstanding. Make 2025 a transformative year and continue working on building your bigger future. And whatever part we can play in that we'd be deeply honored to. So thanks again, Rich. This was a ton of fun.

Cheers, man.