317: How to Build Financial Control Using Infinite Banking

Welcome to Wealth on Main Street, where conversations about growing your wealth are fun and entertaining. Wealth isn't just about money. It's the skills and the knowledge that we develop to pass on to future generations. Tune in each week to grow your mindset and your net worth at the same time. Well, everybody, uh, welcome to tonight's session. Um, I'm going to be sharing a little bit about my, uh, personal journey. I'm going to be sharing about, uh, basically my, my life, my last 14 years of implementing and getting started with this process we call the Infinite Banking Concept. It's something that I've embraced many, many years ago. It started in August of 2009 for me when this book that actually in this picture you can see my son Nathan is holding up, Becoming Your Own Banker. That is my copy of the book. And he basically doesn't— well, he knows now he's got a copy of that book signed by Nelson, the author, but he hasn't had a chance to— until he proves himself that he's not going to destroy the book, he won't get his hands on a copy of it. But in 2009, that book came in and it completely changed and revolutionized everything in my life. And so everything that I'm going to be sharing with you today is direct and it's real and it's coming from my own personal life experience. And, you know, there's an old saying called open kimono. So that's kind of what's going to happen today. I'm really just going to, you know, give yourself a look at what's behind the curtain on everything that's been going on for me. I'm going to share a couple of stories. Uh, over the last 14 years about how not only I've used this system but the reasons why I've needed to use it in some of the things that have happened over my lifespan. So I think it'll be a great learning opportunity for everybody. So we're going to do a couple of very basic housekeeping items here as we get started. So just to kick it off, I'm going to share— essentially today you're going to get 3 stories, uh, out of my life from different points in my life. Uh, I'll be talking through some challenges that I've experienced and how I've had to overcome those challenges and how they kind of circle back a little bit to the infinite banking concept. I'm going to walk through building my system, what I did to start it, how it expanded over time. I'm going to summarize where that system is at now. Today, as of, as of this month, I'm going to give you up-to-date numbers on that. And I'm going to talk a little bit about family banking meetings, which is something I've incorporated. In fact, the picture on the screen right now is from about April, I believe it's April last year where we rented a house in Vegas with a pool. And this literally is the picture from our family banking meeting that we did last year. So let's dive in here a little bit more and talk a little bit about these stories. So again, these are all real life and what's, you know, might surprise people. And I'm really curious to see if anyone else has had an experience like this, but for myself personally, there's been about 5 times over the last, you know, over a 12-year period— the last 14 years, but in, in about a 12-year period— where, uh, I was kind of like Homer Simpson here, just smacking my face against the, uh, the, the counter. And in those periods, it was roughly 3 to 6 months, and they varied depending on the period, where I barely made an income. I had a transition, a major upheaval in my life, something that came up where, uh, income was impacted drastically. And if you think about that over a 12-year period of time, the total amount of time is roughly 20 months. So that's not quite 2 years, but it's getting pretty close to 2 years. That's about a 17% period of time over a 12-year period. So that is a little bit about an introduction into the stories that you're going to see. So some of these stories I'm going to share with you today and these are just 3 of many that I have, are really going to be about those periods and how I was able to overcome some of those challenges and implementing this system and still be able to build my system for the Infinite Banking Concept. Now, these stories are in a timeline, but the timeline isn't in order. I just want to prepare everyone for that because there's a rationale to that around how it ties into my family system. But I think the stories themselves, hopefully you will, you will enjoy. So I do want to give everyone fair warning. There's going to be excessive use of GIF images as we go through today. So hopefully everyone will be— enjoy that to some degree. If you find one that you really like and it puts a smile on your face, make sure you put a smiley face or a happy face in the chat box for everyone else to see. Now, everyone, I think on this call, we're all looking to have success in different areas of our life, and success may mean different things to you. These are some of the bullet words that we see when people think about success. For me, the two that are on here that connect the most is significance and legacy. These are the ones that I feel are the most connected to me. And so myself and building my system and thinking about what I want to create in my life, these are kind of some of the words that stick out for me as I go about certain aspects of my life. So the good news is that we're all in this together, okay? No one escapes getting through life without a couple of battle scars. And these stories, I think, that I'm going to share are going to be around that. And you may be— you may resonate with them to some degree as you think about, you know, your own life and your own circumstances. So I think it's really important that we have to have focus on a goal and a target, just like throwing darts at a dartboard. If you don't know where you're aiming, it's pretty hard to hit the target. I've always been a very focused person and I've had a goal and a target. And since I read this book, Becoming Your Own Banker, back in 2009, my focus and my target shifted. And I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that after reading this book, which completely changed everything in my life right down to my very core, that I was going to be laser beam focused on building my family system so that I could create a legacy and I could have a layer of significance through that legacy, through this message and that medium, by, by doing what we're doing today. Being able to facilitate this session for everyone that's in attendance is part of the feeling of significance I'm hoping to create in my life. And so I'm deeply honored that you're here with us today because it means a lot to me that you're learning and actively looking to grow yourself in different areas of life, specifically around your financial life. So the key thing is that you need to have focus and a target. You need to know where you're shooting from. And this is a great quote by Robert Kiyosaki. It's not how much money you make, but how much you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for. It's one of my favorite quotes. And this is where, you know, tying into the family banking system is really going to be important. So with that in mind, I'm going to jump into my first story here. Now, I like to call these 2x4 moments. Some may remember the movie Tommy Boy, one of my favorites, absolutely hilarious. And this scene always stuck out to me, and I feel like we can probably resonate as we see this repetitious smacking happening here, that this is something that's happening to us in life in many, many areas. And that is something that we want to make sure that we resonate with. They are— we take the lessons that we learn in that overcoming of those, of those situations. And I think you're going to see that a little bit as I go through these two stories. So story number one begins in March of 2017. This story is actually in two parts. And it begins actually right here. So what you can see is a picture of an ultrasound. Now, this ultrasound is of my daughter Nora. My wife told me that we were going to be blessed with our second child, Nora, and absolutely amazing and wonderful news. And it was shortly thereafter that, that we had to go in actually to the emergency room. We had some ultrasounds and some other testing done. And they came back and notified us that she had what was called a subchorionic hematoma. That's a pretty big word. I had to go actually look how to spell that word. And through that experience, it was really, well, I mean, it was a real gut check moment for us. I mean, they basically indicated that at least the first doctor pretty much was indicating that we needed to be prepared to lose the baby. Following that, we, we had some follow-up consults and the result of this that we learned, you know, these things are measured in the size of small, medium, and large. They keep it that simple, small, medium, and large. And what we had was on the large scale. Once it gets to that scale, it tends to have more potential problems and pitfalls that can come with it. We learned in a follow-up test that there wasn't just one of these, but there was actually two of them. And both of them were on the scale of low, medium to large. They were both large. When we found that out, I can tell you it was a, it was an epically difficult period of time. And the result of that is, well, I mean, we, we had to rethink some things. And our regular doctor had indicated that my wife really should be on not an official bed rest, but she really should be on— be very careful about what she's doing as far as, you know, how much she's lifting and that sort of thing. So the idea of bed rest was introduced. Although it wasn't exactly official, we did need to make sure she was monitoring how much she was lifting. Now, here's my son Nathan. At the time that this was going on, he was right around 15 months of age. Here's a picture of him standing on a box of CDs at that age. And, you know, being a young boy, our firstborn child growing pretty well despite the fact that he didn't want to eat anything, he still seemed to grow really good. He was getting pretty heavy. You know, by the time that we were at the stage of the game, he was probably roughly between, you know, 21 to 25 pounds. And with my wife being told basically she, you know, she probably shouldn't be lifting more than a carton of milk. Nathan was bigger than a carton of milk and he was growing. So that created a lot of challenges. Now, if you have a 25-pound kid And at the age of 15 months, what does it— what does a young kid want to do? Who do they want to spend all their time with? In my household, their mom. It was pretty much all mom all the time. And so it was really heartbreaking because she, to some degree, was limited on what she could do, which she didn't— she didn't want to be limited, but we had to be really mindful and prepared for, um, you know, again, not aggravating her to any degree because of the potential danger to, you know, the pregnancy. And well, when that happens and you want— you have a kid that wants to be picked up pretty much all the time, like, you know, every waking hour of the day, it's up, down, up, down, up, down. That meant that someone else needed to step in and that someone else ended up being me, which also meant if I'm focusing a lot of my energy there, then I'm not able to focus a lot of my energy on my business and meeting with clients, which then generates into not growing a great income. So can everyone kind of follow along and imagine where I'm going with this? It was a very stressful time. The result was it was about 5 months roughly where we had very little income coming in and it was hard to maintain, you know, working with my clients and doing those kind of things. Thankfully, everything worked out fine and baby Nora joined us in September of 2017 and she is absolutely incredible to the point where, you know, here's her last year having a good time doing some dance moves, and she's quite the character. So we're eternally blessed. She's our little beautiful miracle child, and thankfully that whole experience is behind us. But the impact of going through that financial time frame and the stress built around the whole circumstance, the emotional turmoil, that was really, really difficult. And it takes a lot to bounce back from that. So these are some of the things that happened in my life, and there's several of these types of indicated stories. This particular story goes a little bit further than that. So part 2 of this story just kind of adds a little bit more, I guess, context. Now, everyone here on the call must earn some kind of an income. For most people, when they earn their income, it goes in their bank account and it's done. It's a completed transaction. There's no, there's no additional components to it. That is not the case for every industry. So just for a question, ask the group here. Have you ever experienced being paid for something, earning the income, receiving it, and then years later having that income taken away from you because that from the job that you earned the money? It is definitely not very common. Most people don't have a circumstance where that happens. However, in the industry that we're in, which is in the insurance industry, That does happen. So a couple of months, 3 months after my daughter was born in January 2018, I had what our industry refers to as a chargeback. Okay. A chargeback is a situation where a policy that was in place is no longer in place. And depending on what time frame that happens, whatever dollars that I earned has to be paid back to the insurance company. Okay. That's how our industry operates. And In this particular situation, the amount of the chargeback was around $20,000. It wasn't a little bit of a number, it was a pretty big number. The funny part is, and I don't know if it's funny, but in retrospect, maybe it's a little bit funny, this particular contract had been in place for 57 months. That's almost 5 full years. The particular situation with this policy at the time, which I'll expand on a little bit more, was that there was a chargeback for 100% of every dollar that I'd earned. It was actually, it was actually two different contracts. Up until the 61st month. So I was about 4 months away from there no longer being a chargeback. And so this is a situation where it's very unfortunate, but it also was to a large degree out of my control. Why do I say that? Well, let me expand. My client just so happened to have a very successful plumbing company in the, in the general vicinity of the city of Edmonton, which is where I'm from. And in fact, this gentleman, we'd become good friends. He'd been to my house a number of times, attended a lot of our events. He'd referred some individuals to me and I'd referred several individuals to him. The situation here is we were actually meeting and having discussions about expanding his system, adding more, uh, contracts to grow his own, his own situation, because he had started a brand new business. We had a meeting in person at my office in November of 2017, uh, just shortly after my daughter was born. We had another really long meeting on the phone in December We— he had two policies in place. One of those policies was 6 years old, the other one was 5 years old. And both of those policies were at a point where they were growing greater than what he was putting into them. The problem was something had changed with his behavior. He wasn't doing and listening to the things that we were coaching him to do. He was letting himself, you know, his business, the new business and his other business get, you know, get him so busy that he wasn't paying attention to what was happening inside of his policy system. Shoot forward to January of 2018. Well, everyone probably knows that in 2018 in Canada, around October, marijuana became legal. Prior to that, it wasn't. And this particular gentleman, he had actually started the beginning phases of building a dispensary, but he was hitting the ground running a little bit early and there was other people doing it as well. He wasn't the only one. And he had actually had the RCMP come and check out his facility. He made sure everything was on board with them. He had lots of meetings with people, including meetings with city officials. And no one told him specifically that he couldn't do it. Yet in January of 2018, near the end, they basically shut down the facility and seized everything. And it was shortly after that period of time where this whole circumstance happened, and that led to the chargeback situation for me. So something that had happened 5 years previous, almost 6 years pre— 5 years previous. Now, this gentleman, because of his own changes in his own lifestyle and his behavior, and a new business could no longer continue on with the thing that we had built, and it had a direct impact on my family life. It's kind of the situation. That's sort of what happened. So it was a pretty impactful experience. I went from having a, a difficult time earning income that year because of the pregnancy to then having, you know, back to earning income and trying to rebuild and recoup that big hard year to now almost going backwards again with a large unexpected expense. Right before tax season as well. So, you know, turns out I called him. We had lots of voicemails, lots of messages, sent him registered mail, did everything we could to reach out to the individual. I found out later that he had gone out of the country. He ended up going into a bit of a, you know, he had some emotional things that happened. He went into a bit of a depression, I think. Thankfully, he's better. He's fine. He's returned and he has a new business. You know, we don't speak anymore, but he did reach out to me about 2 years later and apologize, which I do appreciate. And so I hope he's doing well now. But nevertheless, that, that was the real life impact that happened to me in my story. Now, everyone knows that you should have an emergency fund. We all know that that's important. We should all have one built up. Where you store the emergency fund, I think, is what's important. We're going to talk about that today. But the best laid plans that we might have don't always come to fruition. And you can't cash someone else's good intentions. So this, this gentleman who was planning on growing his system and we're having good conversations about, and then everything flipped 180 degrees was quite a surprise. In my life. It really made an impact for us in that time frame. Now, the next 2x4 moment I want to talk about as we go into our next story is— it starts a little bit earlier. So our first story was in 2017. Here we're now rewinding the tape a little bit and we're going back to 2014. Now, this story actually takes place over about a 6-year period of time, and it's actually a real estate story. Now, this is a picture of my wife, my beautiful wife Heather, and I getting married in Jasper. Now, Hopefully everyone's had a chance to visit Jasper. If you haven't had a chance to visit Jasper, I highly encourage you to do it. This is a picture taken out of Jasper Park Lodge. It was an absolutely beautiful day. It was an incredible experience. One of the wonderful things about Jasper, of course, obviously is its beauty and the mountains and, you know, all that amazing stuff. But it does have this other thing that comes with it, and that is a price tag. So when you visit Jasper, things tend to cost a pretty good dollar. And additionally, when you pay for a wedding there, Let's just say that it's, it's not what I would, what I would consider a budget-conscious wedding decision, but that is what was important to, to her and I and to our family. And so we figured out, we figured out how to make it happen. Now, with that experience, of course, there were several things that happened to me in the year of 2014. So first off, we had our wedding. Now, thankfully and much appreciatively, my in-laws and, you know, through, you know, gifts and things that you do get on wedding, there were several people that contributed to some things, so we were able to bring that cost down. But nevertheless, the cost that we still had to incur was around $20,000 after everything was said and done. I had a large backlog of back taxes because a previous— an accountant, a previous accountant had had a heart attack, disappeared, had to sort through all of that, took a while, found a new accountant. That one couldn't clean up the mess. I had to go find another one. And over a period of about 6 years, I went through this huge turmoil with some business changes where I'd created a pretty big mess and a nightmare. Took a long time to clean that up. And including the accountant bills and everything, you know, I had a large tax bill to take care of. So that had to get taken care of and I needed to get that taken care of so that we could buy a new family home. And I also needed a down payment for that home, which is where we're going to get to. So you add all those things together and that's about $130,000 worth of capital just in 2014. To go and solve a few problems. Well, thankfully I had a rental property that I was able to refinance in that scenario, and that helped take care of a large chunk of this, but it certainly didn't solve all the problem. I still had to, you know, do a lot of it out of savings and out of income. Just so happens where I keep my savings is in my family banking system. Now this right here is the property. Now I grew up in a small farming community outside of Edmonton, a little place called Hay Lakes, Alberta. And beautiful, wonderful town and community. And I loved, you know, the idea of acreage and farm lifestyle, that independence, the peace of mind, country fresh air, hearing the birds chirping, all those wonderful things. And I really believed and thought that's what I wanted. And it was a big dream of mine for as long as I can remember. And my wife also was really invited into that dream. So we ended up finding this piece of property that was quite close to Sherwood Park, Alberta. We found it literally right after our wedding and we ended up making an offer. And it was 3.5 acres, beautiful land space. House could have used a few things, of course, but it was a perfect location, perfect plot of land. It had some really awesome features to it. What ended up happening, of course, is that we put a lot of money into this particular property. Now, anyone that's owned an acreage and an older home, I'm sure you can imagine some of the things that happen here. So you don't have to imagine all of it. I've gone ahead and I've broken down a few of the numbers for you. I've crunched them in advance. In 2014, the— so we made our offer and had it accepted in August. Right after our wedding in 2014. We moved in, purchase price was about $630,000, the mortgage $580,000, and we put 10% down. So after that and closing costs, it was about $65,000 that we had into the deal. Okay, that's how much capital we had to come up with to get this done. Now, we sold that property because we now live in Chilliwack, British Columbia. We've moved. I'm going to get to that story in a moment. In that experience, we ended up selling this property, which was basically during, during the COVID year, the lockdown kind of experience. And we had some challenges unloading the property due to the timing, due to a lot of people didn't like the kitchen layout, you know, that sort of thing. They loved the land, they loved the location, but they didn't, you know, feel as in alignment with the house that we did. So after everything was said and done and we had our payout penalty for the loan, some realtor fees— thankfully I was able to negotiate that pretty good because I was a realtor myself— the end result is we walked away with $44,000. Now there's a lot more that goes into the story, and one of the things I want to highlight on— I have an asterisk here around the the COVID situation? Well, for the payout penalty, when payout penalties are incurred on mortgages, generally there's, there's two primary ways that they're calculated. It's usually 3 months worth of interest on the, you know, on the overpaid balance, or it's something referred to as an IRD, an interest rate differential charge. And of the two of them, usually the IRD is the nastiest of them, but it only is triggered in certain circumstances. Now, right now we're in an environment where interest rates have skyrocketed. Everyone's familiar with that. But if we reflect back and we go back a few years, roughly around, I think it was 2016 or so, give or take, there was a period where rates were rising then and they were starting to climb up at that point. So we had actually, for the first time in a long time in all the real estate I've owned, I actually locked in a mortgage because, oh, I'm never selling this beautiful acreage property. We're going to be here forever. Why would I ever get rid of it? Lo and behold, life does throw you curveballs. And because I had actually locked in and then during COVID to stimulate the economy, they dropped rates again. I was now in a position where I was at the IRD charge. So when I phoned to check out the payout penalty, when we were first considering selling the property, the number was— it was about one-third of this, $9,000, about $3,000. By the time we actually sold because of the impact of COVID the payout penalty had tripled, roughly speaking, in that scenario. So just to give you some context about the way things are unexpected and also around how banks tend to have a lot of control over things in our life. Now, we did a lot of things to that property. I built a salon for my wife. I built a huge deck out front right before we sold. We did a bunch of renovations on the interior, new carpet, new stairwell, new banisters, electric flooring, new tile. So I, you know, built a closet in the basement, you know, a whole number of things. Of course, that all had a cost to it during the experience of having the acreage. Of course, I needed to get a blade for a truck because we got a lot of snow and we had a big driveway. Here's kind of a rundown. Here's a little bit of a recap of all the different things that we spent money on while we lived there. And some of them were required just to be able to sell the property, including the update that we made to the septic system so that we could be able to market the property for sale property properly, I should say. And Coincidentally on this, I had 2 furnaces, an air conditioner, hot water tank, a new pressure tank and a pump. All those things were added and they were added by the same plumber that I mentioned who was my friend and a client of mine who ended up disappearing to Mexico. And we had the chargeback on, on the first story. So it was the same guy that did all that work in that property that helped me out. Anyway, you can see there's an awful lot of, awful lot of things that went over in about a 6-year period of time. Now, when you take the original down payment numbers and you add all these additional costs that I put in, there was about $145,000 of money of our dollars that went into the property. When we sold the property, we got $44,000 out. So I'm not a math wizard or anything, but I would imagine you guys can, can help me and see where the math landed. This was what was missing for us out of that situation. Now, life is life. I have no regrets on it. But what it is, is a good and a powerful story. Now it goes a little bit further than that. We need to consider what else happened during that, you know, 6-year period of time. Well, we had to make mortgage payments, you know, and the mortgage payments, it was just shy of 6 years, it was 70 months. That totals $185,000. So that was the flow of money, the financial energy monthly going out of our hands over to someone else's bank. It does not include the property taxes or the home insurance. When you have an acreage that's farther from a fire, you know, a fire hall, your home insurance rates are up a little bit more as well. Just You know, so, you know, so there's certain periods of time where you have this face because you just can't believe some of the things that you see. Well, if we take a consideration here and we look at the $185,000 of mortgage payments that I made over that timeframe, my wife and I, we paid down, obviously we paid down some principal on that mortgage. But if you subtract the principal and you just look at the interest component, it was $103,000. Well, the interest rate was very low. This was during record low interest rates still. And the interest rate wasn't what mattered. What matters is volume. What's the physical amount of money that's going to flow through your hands and out the door to someone else's, someone else's account that you never get to see again? That's the key takeaway, the teaching point here. And if we do the calculation, $103,000 over the $185,000 of payments, the total interest volume was 56%. In other words, $0.56 of every dollar I paid on a mortgage payment went to interest. In this scenario. And at the time I had a rate at 2.5%. And when I locked in, it was at 3.1% on this very mortgage. So the rates was actually very good at that time. Now let's take that one step further. $65,000 went down. I had the upgrades plus the payments on the mortgage. It says interest, but it's actually the mortgage payments. The total amount of energy, financial energy that we contributed to that situation was about $330,000. We received $44,000 when we sold the property. So in essence, I got 13% of all the financial energy back. I'm missing $286,000. Now, the question I have for everyone: who got all the money? Other people, someone else. And for the most part, it was the bank. I don't own stock in that bank. I don't co-own that bank. So I didn't receive any benefit from that other than they, they had money. I needed to tap into their big pile of money in order to get the property. So they did me a service and a favor, but I paid for the service. I paid $103,000 for the service over a 5-year period of time. Okay. Now, in my opinion, you should have the money in this scenario. I would have much rather had the money for my family. We want to position you so that you can be the one to benefit from that flow of financial energy. And I am benefiting from it in a large— a lot of areas of my life. But this was one that I just wasn't able to tackle just yet. Perspective is very important. And so if we consider this and we look at the down payment and the principal paydown, that was the actual, like, you know, initial capital that should have been where, assuming that the market was flat and never went up or down, that would have been at minimum the equity I should have had. And so just based on that, I only recovered about 30% of what the principal is. To me, this equals something. It's a lack of control. It's a lack of the ability to determine the outcome. I didn't control the real estate market. I didn't control the impact of COVID I didn't control the interest rates and what the Bank of Canada is doing. These were all areas that were outside of my control. Okay. Sometimes in life we kind of feel like we're going one step forward and then we're taking a whole bunch of steps back. Usually we don't have this smiling grin on our face when it's happening. Now, a question I have for everyone is, do you think or do you believe that you can become your own banker for all of your needs overnight? Okay, so I'm going to go to Nelson Nash's book here on Becoming Your Own Banker on page 48. This is called Expanding the System to Encompass All Income. And one of the things that Nelson says here is that he basically indicates that it will take the average person approximately 20 years to build a system where you could get all of your income to equal premium. And ultimately, if all of your money runs through someone else's bank, if you own and control your own banking system, wouldn't it be logical to have your money run and flow through your own system first? And that's fundamentally what we would like to see happen. I'm not in a position where that's happening yet, but I am getting a lot closer, and I'll share that with you in a moment. Now, really funny, I was working on my— I was reviewing this PowerPoint earlier today, and it just so happened that a Facebook memory showed up for me, and I took a screenshot of it on my phone today. I'm like, I got to add this to my slides. This is a post that I made in 2015, 9 years ago, on the exact same day, April 23rd, 9 years ago. And this This says— I'll see if I can get my highlighter here— the cost of using your own money is increasing while shareholders are being showered with huge dividends created through profits. It's— the banks are suggesting that consumers might be being hit by added fees to make up the difference in the profit because banks are not making as much money with low rates and they're looking for ways to increase their profits. Now, this came out of an Edmonton newspaper. I don't remember which one. But my question for you, did any of you get a letter from your bank telling you that your fees and your day-to-day banking fees were going to go down because interest rates have gone up? I certainly didn't receive that letter. I do remember receiving letters several years ago about my fees going up. Does anyone remember getting some of those several years ago? I think we can all agree that's a situation where we don't have a lot of control. And if they're telling us that they need to raise fees because they're running low on profits, yet they're record-breaking profits. That seems a little bit mismatched and a little bit disingenuous in my opinion. And yet, if all of a sudden they're able to make a lot more money in theory because there's higher rates, which I actually don't really believe is the case, then shouldn't it make sense that they should give us some kind of a discount somewhere else? That's not what's going to happen. So the result is that we have what's referred to as cost creep. The costs keep creeping up on you slowly, and when a change in the future happens that should replace, or that cost should revert to a previous amount, It never does, and we're just stuck with it. It's kind of like the boiled frog theory. You know, you can slowly boil a frog by just turning the heat up, is the way the adage goes. Okay, so just very interesting. Now, it's not all bad. In my opinion, that money that I spent on, you know, not returning, not getting the money back from selling my acreage, was the best $100,000+ that I ever spent. And here's the reason why. We have an amazing and unbelievable life where we live now. We made a lifestyle decision. I knew I wasn't going to get the money back. I made the decision anyway because we wanted something much more. We exchanged value for a lifestyle. I live a 2-minute walk to this beautiful river right here where my son is playing. This is overlooking our neighborhood, beautiful mountains. This lake where I paddleboard regularly is a 10-minute drive from my house. We have an unbelievable lifestyle, and I recognize I paid the cost for that lifestyle. Lifestyle to make that change. And I would, I would make that deal any day of the week because of what it's given our family and memories and value for our lifestyle today. It was worth it. Okay, the key thing is we got to come back to focus. During this whole time frame, I kept building my family banking system. I'm going to share with you exactly how I did it over that time frame. I had a focus on it. I never lost sight of that. And even though it was difficult, it was hard, I kept my intentions clear about what it was that I wanted. Now, the next story, the next 2x4 moment that comes up is a life transition that happened in 2016. Now, this was a major transition in my life. I was, I was shifting from, you know, one, one entity where I was conducting business to another. And my son, my firstborn, was born in 2015, December. And this is really just a few months after that, 6 years after starting working with a company. And I put a lot of energy, invested time in with the company. This is a picture of me conducting one of the very first presentations that we ever did around this concept of infinite banking, taken in January of 2010. So this is going a long ways back over the time frame of the 6 years I spent with this company. And there was some wonderful and great times. We did approximately 75 events that I was involved with. There's probably more, but about 75 or so that I was involved with. We served and educated and taught about 1,600 or so people over that entire time frame. We had a lot of fun doing it, very similar to what we're doing here on this webinar today, only it was in person. But there was a point where creative differences were just becoming a little bit too big to deal with. It was time to make a change and to make my transition. So I decided that I would go fly solo. And of course, it's a big transition to make because there's a lot of unknowns in that situation. And being in the insurance realm, here's where some of the unknowns are. Well, My son was born in December 2015. So come January, you know, I'm still able to earn an income. Everything's going well. I'm making the decision that I'm going to transition and move things on. It's not something happens overnight. It takes a while to come up with and make a plan as to how you're going to do that. So come February, I was spending a lot of my energy and my time thinking about how I'm going to get this transition done. And I wasn't spending a lot of time working on generating an income. Unfortunately, that's just the way that things worked. There's a lot of moving parts that needed to be done when you're licensed in an industry. I gave my notice in March, and as of that moment when I left and transitioned, I could no longer conduct business in insurance until I had my license set up in a new location so that I could begin talking about insurance again. That process took longer than I expected. It basically wasn't completed by the end of March— or sorry, April, I should say. So March, April, I really couldn't even generate an income. I wasn't technically licensed and allowed to do that. So it wasn't until May that I was able to start picking the game ball back up And at that point I could start reaching out, contacting clients and, you know, speaking to people about what it is that we teach. And it really wasn't until June where I was able to start seeing some money roll in. Now, I don't know if anyone knows or not, but in the insurance business, you know, it's not like, like an electrician or a plumber where you go in and you fix the thing that's wrong or you complete a job, you send a bill and you get paid right away. This is something that can take quite a long time. There's a lot of things that you don't— you don't realize how long it takes. And often there's people who, for whatever reason, they might be uninsurable. And if that's the case, you might put a lot of work in, but you might not get compensated. This is just the nature of the business that we're in, and it's fine. It's the way that it is. I love what we do. I'm very happy with it. It's a— it's one of the most incredible blessings that I've ever experienced to be a part of what we do. But it doesn't come without challenges, and these challenges are real. So for those of you that are brand new, you probably wouldn't know these things. And so this is just part of my life and my life experience. The result is this was a transition where it was a very difficult income time during that period. So 4 to 6 months or so, very little income. You got to build everything back up. You got to get policies and underwriting. It might take 1, 2, 3, maybe 4 months even before they produce an income later on. I had a newborn. It's my firstborn. We didn't know what we were doing. We had to buy all the stuff that you need for new kids. How did I survive this whole experience? I used policy loans for my system. I was constantly using policy loans, dipping into my emergency fund, my reserves, which I store in policies, whole life policies that I have for my family system to help me get through all of these lean times. They were there for everything that happened. Okay. Now, in 2016, after these major changes happened, come June, I was able to go to work, get like hardcore, get really focused, and like I had to crush it. I worked like a rented mule. I was just going, going, going. A lot of late nights, a lot of sleepless nights. Missed some time with my newborn son because I had to make up for all the lost time. I had to, I had to, I had to make up for past decisions to be able to put some money in the bank account. The good news is, in the new situation, I was able to earn a little bit more per case scenario than I was previously. So that helped quite a bit. It helped actually enough that by the time that 2016 was done, I actually ended up having my best year ever. So in that last 6 months, I crushed it. And I didn't know that was going to happen. It, it's sometimes the world just makes things work out for you. I do think the effort I put in certainly helped, but the reality is I was able to add 3 more policies into our system. I doubled my income from the previous year in that last 6 months, and that was incredible and a huge blessing. But it wasn't without hard work. So how do we grow the family system? Well, number one is that we kept our mind focused. We kept our mind focused on what it is we wanted. We knew that we wanted to grow. So in 2016, my system started the year at $14,000 a year, what I was depositing, what I was putting into premium in the policies I had at that stage. By the time that the year ended, I had increased my system to $40,000 a year. That's a huge jump. It's almost 3 times, it's almost triple the amount. And the only reason I was able to do that is because the last half of the year was so good because I had doubled my income. Well, I wanted to more than double the size of my family banking system. Because Nelson Nash taught me— the author of this book, Becoming Your Own Banker— he taught me, don't be afraid to capitalize, Richard. You have to put some money in to get the big thing that you want long term, because you've got— if you're focused and if you're committed, everything that you want can be yours. But you have to be able to be focused and committed. We went from only having 4 policies in our family system to 7. This was 6 and a half years after I got started doing this, this work. So it was— it took a while for us to get to that stage. See, the time is going to go by anyway. No one here on the call has a DeLorean. We can't go back in time. The time will go by anyway. And I knew that was the case. I knew that I could never be younger than I am at that moment. And if I could lock things down for myself and my wife and my son at that time, we would be able to create something of tremendous value later on. Nelson— this is a picture of Nelson— and I often asked him, Nelson, when did you know it was time to help grow, to grow the size of your family banking system? His response to me was always the same. It was, Richard, as soon as my feeble brain could envision doing so. In other words, he did it as he was always thinking about it. Because he was always thinking about it, a path on how to do it always materialized for him. Because of his focus and his intention, he was always able to keep growing. And when he passed away, that's why he had— he, one time he had 49 insurance policies. And he gave a couple away and he had a couple of death claims. And when he passed away, there was 45 that he, that he had. 17 of them ended up paying death benefits and 28 are still with his family today, still growing and earning and generating passive income potential. So very powerful. So let's get into the family system. I'm going to walk you through what my system looks like. I'm in my 15th year as it sits right now. I started my very first policy And again, this was all I could muster at the time. I, in fact, this was a huge stretch for me. I was starting a brand new business. I was only about a year and a half into having my real estate license. I was still trying to get my sea legs under me. I was having an issue with my getting my taxes done. This was the maximum amount of money I could possibly fathom in 2010 that I could work with. And it was probably a big stretch at that time. 15 years later, or almost 15 years later, as far as having my physical system in place. It's 15 years since I got Nelson's book. It's 14 since I started my system. 13 policies in place and they range in size. The smallest one is $1,000 a year. The largest one is about $90,000 a year. So they're all over the map. Today, my entire system, I can, I can choose to put in about $207,000 annually into my program. Okay. That's how I have it set up today. My minimum required that I, that I must do, and that is required for all the policies to make sure that they stay in force, is just shy of $52,000. But $155,000 is completely flexible and within my control. I value control a great deal. So the total of I get the privilege to pay is about $207,000. Now, out of this, the breakdown— I just wanted to give people a little context. So of these 13 policies, 4 of them, only 4 of them are larger than $20,000 a year. 7 of them are smaller than $3,600 a year. In fact, the average is only about $2,300 on those policies. And then there's a couple who are kind of in the mid-range. Their average is around $5,000. So the bulk of my system is in, you know, the larger premiums are in 4 policies, and a lot of them are little ones just built up over time. It's all part of one system. It's like Think of it as, you know, you, you, you have an apartment building and you own all the units in the building. Okay. Same kind of an idea as that. Now, the next thing we should kind of consider are who are the bodies, who are the life insured people that I have these policies on as part of my family system? Well, I have 3 on my wife. There's 5 on Richard. There is 2 on my daughter and 2 on my son. And just in case anyone's wondering, wondering, I did not get the dog insured. We're not allowed to do that. So, no, these, these 2 are actually on my son right here. Okay, so 2 of my daughter, 2 of my son, and then I have a business partner that's insured, and that's the most recent one that I've added to my system. So I'll expand on this a little bit more. This is a breakdown of how much premium I'm able to deposit into my system on each person based on all those policies. So about $40,000 to my wife, roughly $6,000 on each of my kids, and the bulk of all the dollars go on Richard. And the reason that is— there's several reasons. Number 1 is Richard's the primary income earner. My wife makes— does the amazing and hard job of actually making sure that our kids survive day in and day out. Well, I get to get— I get to get up on a Zoom call and have this fun experience. So because I'm the primary income earner, I have the one— I'm the one that if something happens to me, it's going to pose the largest financial impact to the rest of the family. So hence, I'm the one who has the bulk of the premium and the bulk of the death benefit. I also have a business partner who's insured as well, okay? And that's the most recent policy. Now, breaking that down one step further, what does the death benefit look like across all of it? Well, the entire system is about $7.5 million worth of death benefit, while $4.7 million of that is actually on Richard's life. I'm the person who has the bulk of this death benefit, okay? Because I'm the one that's the biggest risk. If something happens to me, we need to spread that. We need to bring— we need to replace Richard's income if something happens to him. Okay, for everyone else. And of course, I have a business partner. So there's— this is a new policy, and if something happens to him, I have a financial interest in making sure that we can— I can use that capital to help continue growing that business. All right. So that's kind of a breakdown of how everything's set up. In other words, this didn't all happen overnight. I didn't— 14, 15 years ago, I didn't sit down with a piece of paper on a loose-leaf scratchpad and a spreadsheet and say, how am I going to build my family system? And I tried to map everything out projecting into my future. Of course not. You can't build everything overnight, but you have to get started. So what did I do? I started with policy 1, $4,219 a year. It was all I could mentally consider possible at the time, and it was even a stretch for me at that stage of the game. And then I kept building and I kept building from there. I also have critical illness and disability on my life. I have 4 critical policies on my own life, 3 disability policies on my own life, 2 critical illness for my wife. I have a disability for her. I have critical illness on both of my kids. There's another $9,400 a year in premium I put on those things. That doesn't show up anywhere in my family banking system. It's something different. Okay. Compounding can only operate when money sits still. It has to stay somewhere for it to grow. It's slow and it's boring. And because it's slow and it's boring, sometimes people get frustrated with it. Well, with insurance, because you can get money into insurance, dividend-paying participating whole life insurance, that the vehicle that we use to build this system. It's just the tool. It's a tool in my toolbox, and I need a tool to get the job done. This is the most efficient tool. As I deposit premiums, that money is now in the system and it's in constant motion for the rest of my natural life. I'm going to show you more about that in a moment. But in most scenarios, when you're trying to create compounding or putting money into a GIC or some kind of a, of a fund that you want to get growth on, it can only do the job of that one thing. It can't go work for you somewhere else. In the insurance structure that we utilize, because of the power of collateralization, you can utilize, you can utilize it as collateral to get access to capital to go and do other things in life. So it creates a multitasking effect of money. It took me 4.7 years to get to my first $14,000 a year in policies in premium. That was 4 policies. It took me almost 5 years to do that. It was on 2 bodies, myself and my wife. It took me 6 years to get to $40,000, 7 policies, 3 bodies. My son had joined us at that point in time. It took me 9 years to get up to $137,000 a year, 9 policies, 4 bodies. Now I've got my daughter involved in the question. In March 2022, I increased my system. I hadn't had a policy for a while. It'd been a few years. I was getting a little bit stir crazy. I wanted to get another one and I had to figure it all out. Things were starting to go really well again, and I wanted to expand my system. I added 3 additional policies. The total premium of all of them was about $42,000. It was the largest increase to my system at that point, at that point in time. It was about a 31% increase to the entire system. And part of the reason for that is that I wanted to create a policy for my taxes, my annual taxes. I have to pay them every single year. I want to have the money that's going to go for the tax situation, which I'm going to pay. I want to be able to have my family use that money first. Before I give it to the federal government or the provincial government. So I created a policy just to contain as much of that as I could. I funded the premium. When it's time to pay my tax bill, I borrow from the policy and I pay the tax bill. Over the course of the next year, as I'm saving up for my next year's taxes, which I have to do anyway, I replenish the policy loan and I take extra profits that I generate and I pay the premium. And then I'm just able to do that again. So I have now, I'm now using, and my family will be blessed by the same tax dollar that I have to give everyone else before I give it to them. That's one way that I've thought differently and changed my thinking over the last 14 years about what's possible. This isn't about a single policy or a single insurance contract or about, about a policy illustration. This is about how we think. The only thing that stopped me from doing that 10 years ago was this squishy mass in between my ears. My brain mentally couldn't comprehend how I was going to be able to do it. I knew fundamentally it was possible, but I couldn't quite figure out how I was going to get it done. Well, I figured it out now. I got there. It took me a while, but it's okay. I'm slow, but I'm worth waiting for. The time was going to go by anyway. Does that make sense? Okay. And I was able to backdate these policies to a degree, so I was able to get more premium into them. It was very, you know, and I needed new ones on my kids. So all these things, it was all important to me at that stage of the game. It took me 13 years to get to $180,000. So that was adding those 3 policies that I just talked about. Now I'm at 12 policies, 4 bodies, and I had a big 31% increase in my system. Well, here we are. We're April of 2024. We're now at the 14-year mark. We're just crossing into 14 years of having policies. 15 since I, you know, not quite 15 since I got Nelson's book, but 14 of actually owning policies. I got 13 of them and 5 bodies, and the system is up to $207,000. So what you guys are recognizing here is a progression. And that progression is happening because what I started long ago— think about, think about rolling a snowball down a mountain. Because I started in 2010 and I had a little snowball, $4,219 a year, and I added to the snowball as it went down the mountain. Now I have more capacity to continue making it even bigger. Okay. Now, out of that, 4 policies are basically brand new. They're less than you know, 2 years old pretty much. That represents $70,000 worth of premium or 34%. One-third of my system is basically new. It's new within the last pretty much 24 months. So a lot of what I'm doing is all added very recently. It's been a long process to get here and, you know, but it's well worth it in my opinion. Here's a really quick snapshot. I'm not going to go through all this. I'm just going to highlight something, you know, really quickly. I just want you guys to kind of see the start date of these policies. Now, these policies, some of them are backdated. This one of my wife, I didn't actually complete it until, you know, March of 2022, but I backdated it to December. This one I only started in December a couple months ago, but I was able to backdate it almost an entire year. So now I've been able to pay 2 premiums, but it's actually a brand new policy. Okay. Each one has its starting initial death benefit. A couple of them have term riders. There's reasons for that. It's a strategic usage. And then I have paid-up additions. This is how the system grows. This is all additional accumulated whole life that's been added to my system because of, uh, because of my efforts, because of the way that I've built it. It's a progression. It happened over time. Okay, cash grows every single day inside of these policies. I'm going to show you exactly how much in my system. This is an image I had created years ago based on a drawing I used to do in our live events. A policy has a minimum guaranteed amount. It must grow to equal the original death benefit by age 100. Here, by age 100 of the life insured, the original contract has to grow to equal the original death benefit. So for everyone, if you got notes, you're taking a note, you know, taking any notes, I want you to write down by age 100— this is in Canada, it's 121 in the United States— by age 100, the cash value must equal the death benefit. This is the contractual obligation that the insurance company has. So these policies aren't growing because of the market, because of anything that the federal government or anyone else is doing, because of presidential elections, or— it's insulated from all of these other geopolitical events and the turmoil of markets. It grows because it's contractually obligated to grow. The insurance company has no choice in the matter. The cash value, which is your asset, must grow to equal the death benefit. There are no questions asked. It is— it must take place. And as it grows, I get to add these things called paid-up additions. This is what the flexible premium allows me to create. I get to control that. And because I can control that, it adds increasing dividends, and those dividends get to grow on top, and I get to control the impact of how they grow based on my own behavior and my own actions. The result is we create an ever-growing machine that is on autopilot as we grow. That's essentially what gets created here. Okay. And the benefit is we have an insurance company that's going to administer the whole thing for us and we get to co-own them. So not to get into a lot of details, but it's pretty badass. I got to tell you, I love what we do. Here is a snapshot over a 14-day period, April 3rd to April 17th. There's a lot of work to get all these numbers. I think— thank you. Big shout out to Lynn, my assistant Lynn. She's amazing. Helped me do all this in that time frame, in that 14-day period this month. I did not add any new premiums and there were no dividends paid because it wasn't an anniversary date. So I wanted to get a snapshot of a period of time where it was in between anniversary dates, in between funding premiums, and we're just isolating what took place in that 14-day period of time. My cash value grew on the entire system $2,082 over that time frame. Guaranteed growth. That's $100 and basically $149 a day. I have an asset that will grow nonstop until somebody dies. The only thing that's going to stop it is either me, if I choose to cancel, which wouldn't make any sense, that would be very illogical, or if one of those insured people passes away. It's the only two things that'll stop it. Okay. Total and utter control. Here's a snapshot of each individual policy and the growth that they had individually over that timeframe. You can see that one of them was only about $1.82. Okay. Wasn't a— wasn't a massive amount over that time frame, but each one of these grew this amount over that 14 days. And you stack it all together, there's the almost $2,100 or $141 a day. That's what's happening inside of my system. What's the minimum premium again? Well, it's $51,978. Let's just round it up and call it $52,000. I hope everyone's okay with rounded math. Let's take a little snapshot and understand. Well, if I take $149 a day and I multiply that by 365 days, that gives me the output of my system, not including any dividends. Okay. Assuming no more premiums were paid, assuming no dividends were earned, just the system growing by contract based on how I've created it. My minimum premium is $52,000, which means I've got $2,407 extra before anything else takes place, or the equivalent of about a $200 a month cash flow. Now, is that a massive amount? Everybody say no. Okay. This isn't an investment. That's not its function. That's not its purpose. This is a system where I store and access money. I put money there, I use the money, I put money there, I use the money. I have something I need. Oh, maybe I had a chargeback, which I showed you a story about. Maybe I need to do a renovation on a house. Maybe I needed a snowplow. For my truck. Maybe I needed to do a salon and build it for my wife so that she could do hair from home. Maybe I needed to pay my mortgage payment for several months because I couldn't generate an income because I had to lift a 15-year-old baby every, you know, 75 times a day because my wife wasn't allowed to. Are you guys starting to see how I was able to put my system to work throughout my life? Go ahead and type a Y in the chat box if you, if you can see how I use this. Over the last 14 years. This is real life, guys. This is exactly what's going on for me. I'm not hiding any— this is, this is the God's honest truth. Okay. Now, this doesn't include other things. I have riders. There's some term insurance, some critical illness riders, flexible guaranteed insurability, very important for kids. Everyone should have that. You know, that, that's about $2,800 a year. That's included in this premium number. Okay. So it's not all whole life premium. It's the minimum premium required to maintain those, those particular policies. Here's the key piece that I really want everyone to understand. I'm trying to keep this as simple as I can, and I know it might be complex to a degree. I already looked at the in-force illustrations. I've already had the dividends declared for this year. I'm going to receive dividends on all those policies, my share of the profitability of the insurance company that I co-own. When I get a participating dividend-paying whole life insurance contract, I become a co-owner with the company. They are obligated, I repeat, obligated to share profits with me if they are profitable. Would you believe that insurance companies in Canada are ridiculously profitable? That's a great thing. If you own one of them, it's fantastic. So every anniversary date we get to celebrate a dividend party. In fact, I backdated a lot of my policies. My birthday is August 10th and 6 months back from that is February 10th. So on February 10th, I get to have a dividend party on several policies. It's a fantastic time of year. Now I'm going to have over $25,000 of dividends declared over this next 12-month period of time. Okay. And if I did not pay any more premium, that would still happen. All right. There's a way that I could make that work. That would all increase the size of my system and it would take this number and it would grow it drastically. Yet my minimum wouldn't have changed. So even if I did pay the minimum over the next year, I've created a machine that's going to continually grow greater than what I put into it, and it's going to accelerate every time I receive a share of the profits from the insurance company that I co-own. Okay. Now, these things take a while to get efficient. They're not immediately efficient overnight. And I think that that's pretty— I think people are fair to clear that 34% of my system is brand new. It's not even efficient yet. The largest component of my system isn't even efficient yet. It will be very shortly, but it's not quite. Okay? So I want to give you context on all this. See, a factory tries to automate as many things as it can so that it can produce more. The goal is to enhance production, which can then enhance overall profitability. That's the exact same thing that I've done. I've built a system that's on autopilot. All I gotta do is pay a premium and the insurance company takes care of everything else. And when I need money, I click a button in an online login with the insurance company and I request what's called a policy loan. And a couple of days later, give or take, that lands in my bank account. It's not my money that I'm accessing, it's the insurance company's money, but I co-own the insurance company. So if I access some of their money and I pay them a little bit of interest, that goes into the big pool that generates profits. Who do they generate the profits for? Everyone, I want you to type me in the chat box because if you own one of these things, they generate the profits for you, period. There is no one else that can share in those profits. So it's, is it okay to pay interest, some interest to an entity that you co-own? Going back to the idea of Nelson's book, page 48 and 49, expanding the system to encompass all income, which he talked about. My family presently needs to generate roughly speaking, around $250,000 of gross income personally every year. So we earn our money in a corporation. I work— still work very hard to earn and generate a living. I do have a variety of passive income sources. The passive income sources aren't, aren't in excess of this number yet. Unfortunately, they're getting there. They're growing. But we need to earn money in our corporation and then we have to pay ourselves through dividends or, you know, T4 income, whatever we decide to do. And with the help of our account, Now we've moved to BC. What does BC stand for? Earn cash. That's right. There you go. Okay, so who remembers what size my system is presently? How much do I— am I able to put into premiums every year? $207,000. That's right. We're at $207,000 right now. So high five, everyone got $207,000. Give yourself a pat on the back. Great job. I'm already putting $207,000 in. That's 83% of everything that I need to earn gross revenue personally. Now, not all these policies are owned personally. Actually, most of the large ones are owned in my holding company. Okay. So I'm not trying to just draw a balance between the before or after tax. I'm just getting a reference point. I'm putting $207,000 in now. That's new. It's updated. It's recent, but that represents 83% of everything I need to support my family, including paying my, my personal tax bills. Right. Um, I, you know, et cetera, that's taken me 14 years to get there. Our income has changed over that time a lot. When I first started doing this, my income was question mark. It wasn't $40,000 or $50,000 a year. My income was literally question mark. In fact, it was like triple question mark. It was a very crazy and scary time for me. I'm a recovering electrician by trade. I left $160,000 a year career, and then the following year I think I might have made maybe $35,000 and I spent a lot of money, right? So it took me a long time to come over some of these targets. But as my income goes up, the target of what I want to accumulate moves as well. So the $250,000 represents the income that I, my family and I need to pay for our living expenses, personal premiums on policies, our property taxes, our personal income taxes, our food bill, our groceries, our— we still have a mortgage. I don't— I haven't taken over the mortgage on my house yet. You know, all those things. We still have a mortgage payment, all that stuff. That's what I need in order to accomplish that. Okay, this year I'm going to receive dividends on the policies of about $25,000, and that's going to grow even further next year. So if you take that, those dividends actually become a premium. Dividends, when we use it in the system, they actually go back into the system and actually become another premium. So it expands everything. Everything is growing and expanding. And again, for those of you that are new, you, you may not interpret all this. I appreciate that, but I also appreciate you being with us here. So that's going to raise me up to about $232,000, which is going to be about 93% of my personal, the personal gross income that I need. Before today, working on my slides, I didn't even realize that that was the case. I figured this out probably 2 hours ago before I joined you guys, and I'm like, wow, I had no idea that I was approaching the level of what Nelson was talking about in his book. So it was just a fun exercise for me to go and rethink my thinking. About how this is all happening and appearing for me. By age 100, the cash value must equal the death benefit. By age 100. I'll be 43 this year. I'm not yet, but I will be shortly. That means I've got 57 more years left before 100. My children have 92 more years, 92 and 94 respectively. Okay. The bulk of that energy, the system is going to grow in my lifespan before I go, and then it's going to create an automatic cascade effect of prosperity down my family line because of the legacy that we've built. As of today, I have outstanding policy loans with the insurance company of $316,000. This is our— as of April 3rd, that number has actually gone up as of today. But as of April 3rd, it was $316,000 when I captured all these numbers. I had $312,000 available. I literally just took a policy loan yesterday for $27,000. So, but as of April 3rd, these were the numbers. I have $25,000 of dividends on the way. Key takeaway here is that the policy owner is always in control. No one else is ever pulling the strings here. You get to control the strings. It is so liberating. I can't even describe to you how liberating it is to have that feeling. It is unmatched by anything else financially I've ever experienced, in my opinion. That's just me. You make your own judgment about that, but that's me. One of my favorite quotes that I learned from Nelson Nash: does having money safe and available when you need it take away any of your options? Well, Over the 3 stories I told you guys, would you say that I had some of my options taken away? I had a lot of money going out and there was a lot of money not coming in during a lot of those periods. So it was a little bit chaotic, but because I had access to money and, you know, policy loans didn't solve everything, my system wasn't big enough to solve everything. I still had to use third-party loans, lines of credit. I still had to dip into all the other stuff. I don't anymore. But at that time in my life, I absolutely did. I pulled every lever on planet Earth I could in order to get through it because my focus— if I can do this, if I can get through this, on the other side of this, if I keep building my system, everything is going to work out. Everything will be okay. I knew that. I knew it in my core. And everything has, even through all those hard times. So again, can't forget, by age 100, the cash value must equal the total death benefit. Well, in February of 2010, my first policy, the starting death benefit was $148,000. Didn't have any term insurance on it. I had no idea what I was doing, just trying to figure things out. I just knew I needed to get started and I said, I can do $4,200 a year. Let's figure what that gets me. And that's, that's what I end up with in 2024. Now the— we're at 13 policies. The original starting death benefit, the original starting death benefit, not the total, but the starting amount on each policy, what they begin with is almost $3 million if I add them all together. But now I have paid-up additions. Paid-up additions are these building blocks of increased death benefit. Each increased death benefit block comes with cash value. It builds up and it builds up and it builds up, and it follows the leader quite literally, to the point where he even wrote a book called Cash Follows the Leader, because sometimes people struggle with this understanding. But quite literally, as the death benefit grows, the cash, which is your asset, must follow. It must grow with it. We have paid-up additions of $2.3 million. So not quite 50% of the original whole life. I also have some term insurance in there. Most of that is on my life. I'm the one who has most of the coverage. When I look at my system and I subtract all the loans, remember I had loans of about $316,000. If I subtract all the loans, the net value of the system is $7.3 million of total death benefit. One year ago, I did a presentation in Vancouver very similar to this. I shared a similar, similar story. And I used the numbers from a year ago, the total death benefit at that time was $6.4 million. There's been an almost $1 million increase, over $900,000 increase in the size of my family system in death benefit. You know, I've made a lot of large loan repayments recently, you know, in the last period of time, and I added a new policy as well. So that's, that's part of what increased that number, right? A new, new policy of $250,000. Plus loan repayments, bought the loans down. So there's about $300,000 or so of this increase that was created from the new policy and some loan repayments. Now, $4.4 million of that is for my family. So if Richard goes, that's the death benefit on my own life. If I go, that's how much net of all the loans that my wife is going to receive to take care of the kids. 60% of all the death benefit that I have is on me. Richard is the patriarch of the family. If something happens to Richard, it's going to be, you know, well, I would like to think it's going to be devastating for them, but more importantly, I know financially it will be prior to having this. Because we have this, it's still going to suck, but we will have something come in and solve an awful lot of problems, a big-time amount of problems. He's back on the shelf. What does that mean? That means loan repayments. I've made loan repayments in my system totaling $568,000. That's money that's gone back into the system. For me to be able to reuse, put it back in, take it back out, put it back in, take it back out. Just like a savings account. I put money in the savings account. I need to use it for transmission. I take money out, I put it in the savings account. Oh, I didn't have any income for 4 months. I need to make my mortgage payment. I'm going to take something back out. Okay. Same scenario. I have made 50% of these loan repayments I put back in in the last 24 months. In all the previous years, with all those financial challenges that occurred and all those transitions that I showed you, and there's more that didn't make the story list. I wasn't able to put all the pieces back on the shelf. I wasn't making as many loan repayments as I wanted to because I didn't have the cash flow. It wasn't possible. I owed on the policies in a lot of years to just to get through lean times, but it doesn't mean I can't backfill them later. The system kept growing the whole time. Okay, that's so important to understand. I didn't have anyone knocking on my door saying, Richard, we're going to foreclose on your house because I didn't make a loan repayment to my policy. I control that whole situation. I make monthly repayments of a little over $5,000 a year. There's 6 individual payments. They're for a variety of things. What's the impact of all these moments in my life? Well, a lot of learned lessons, number one. And another thing is I have interest that I ended up paying the life company capitalized. In other words, at the end of an individual year, if I didn't have the loan repaid and I— whatever interest would've accumulated over that year at the anniversary date, that amount rolls over into the next year. Okay, so it's a simple interest calculation and then it compounds one time per year, essentially. Over all of my policy system, the total that I've paid life companies is $86,000. Well, how much did I pay the mortgage company on my acreage property over 6 years? That was like $103,000. Of the two different people Who do you think I would rather pay? The one that I'm a part owner in that allows me to have total and absolute control over everything and never ask for a payment ever, or the one that begs for my firstborn anytime I want to talk to a human being over at their bank? If I average that out over the entire timeframe of 14 years, it's about $6,000 a year. It's like $500 a month for the privilege, the privilege to protect my family with almost $8 million of death benefit in various sources to grow a guaranteed stream of future accumulated cash value, have total control over its access, not be asked any stupid questions, have an online portal I can do most of the work in, not have to worry about anyone asking, you know, wondering what I'm doing, have a private contract that the Canadian government doesn't even know I own. All of those things. I would happily pay $500 a month to get all those benefits happily every day. Okay. I co-own that company. It's a future cash flow. Okay. It's got to grow. Now, my total cash value as of April 3rd is $691,000. That's the asset. I've put in premiums of about $833,000. Again, a huge amount of that's in the last 2 years. I got, I got a lot of new policies. A big chunk of my system is brand new. And this is just the whole life portion. It doesn't include the term, the riders. The riders I separated out of for this calculation. So 81%, I have an asset that is 81% of every dollar of premium in whole life I have contributed over my lifespan so far. And a lot of it's brand new. Okay. I'm only at this stage. Age 100 is way the heck over here. How do you think it's going to grow? It has no choice but to go up. It can only do one thing. The total death benefit of whole life— I said to take the term insurance out, separate the term insurance, and we just isolate the whole life. The original face amount plus the paid-up additions. Face amount plus paid-up additions. This is the total. This is the current cash value. Well, the jelly in the sandwich is the difference between those two numbers. This is how much more my system must grow if I stopped today and all I did is pay the minimum premium. and I never received another dividend for the rest of my natural life. If all I did is pay the minimum, I didn't put any of the flexible premium. I only put the $52,000 in. I didn't put the $207,000 in. If I just did the bare minimum, this is the future cash flow that my family is guaranteed. That is the power of setting something like this up for your family's life. Nelson Nash was a forester. He took this picture. You can't see, I cropped it, but down below is actually Nelson Nash's feet. This is a picture from a tree that got cut down in his yard after he sold his— the house that he built with his own two hands to his, his daughter and a son-in-law. Notice the inner rings of the tree and how the size of growth, the rate of growth looks bigger in the very epicenter of the— of this. Okay. Seems to grow at a bigger pace or speed. But notice on the outer ring. So this, this is where my family system is in cash value today, $691,000. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt because it's already, it's already in place. The death benefit already exists that my system will grow this much more. It'll be— this is the additional amount that it will grow. That's assuming that we cut the tree down. That's assuming that we don't keep feeding the tree. That's assuming I don't plant more trees. Does that make sense? More trees is another policy on another body. I don't care who, doesn't matter. More trees is more premium. That I put in. Okay, feeding the tree is letting the dividends continue to do what they're supposed to do inside of the policy. These are the things you have a lot of control over. Notice how the lines of growth as we go in a lot of these years, they're not as big. But just because they're not as big, you have to understand the perspective. It's all about perspective. It's growing on a much larger circumference. So even though the amount that it grew might be smaller because it grew in a larger amount, the volume of growth is far superior. This is not about rates, guys. This is about volume. Don't ever forget that. Very important. Here's my family. I'm going to play a quick clip for you about our family banking meeting. This was 2 years ago, our first annual family banking meeting. And I play a little clip with my daughter here. Okay, do it again. One more time. Family bank meeting. Did you— did we have fun on the family bank meeting? Yeah. Did we talk about everything we're grateful for? For? Yeah. Who else did we talk about? Nelson. We talked about Nelson. And is that book pretty special? Yes. And you have a copy signed by Nelson, don't you? One day when you're older, you're going to get that copy. Yes. And it's important every year we talk about the family bank. Family bank. Hurrah! All right, let's hear for little Nora there. So, uh, she was— I guess she would have been 4 when we recorded this. So her first family banking meeting was at 4 years old. I've been planting seeds with her about the family bank since she was 2 years old. My kids don't understand anything about insurance. They don't care. They don't even know what Dad does. They just know he's on— he does a podcast. They know that this book that she is holding is so important and is integral to everything in our life. And they know that everything that we do centers around this book. They don't know why. They know who Nelson is, and they know that he's important. These are fundamentals that they can ingrain at a very early timeframe. The rest of the details don't really matter. We're talking about creating stories and building value in our kids. Okay, now this is Nora. She had this little book called Fancy Nancy's book, and I used this book at around 2 years old to start teaching her about the family bank. There's a story about the piggy bank. And I was able to convert that into how we have our own family bank, our own family piggy bank. And it's become this unbelievable lesson that she'll remember for the rest of her life. I read these books with my son, the Tuttle Twins series. They're about Austrian economics and fundamental principles, and they're fantastic. And I incorporate that into discussions about the family banking system. Last year we had our family banking meeting. It was 25 minutes. We celebrated our vacation. We shared what did we love about being there, having an amazing event. We talked about Nelson, kind of like Santa Claus as a character, and every kid loves Santa Claus. We did the same thing with Nelson, helping people understand that. We introduced his 5 golden rules to the kids. We reaffirmed the things that we learned the previous year, so we did some repetition. And then I talked about active versus passive income, and I gave 2 examples. I'll show you that really quickly. We talked about books. We have a number of books. These are the 3 books that we've written so far. Our 4th book Don't Spread the Wealth is all about keeping money in the family. Don't Spread the Wealth is going to be released in June. You can pre-order it on Amazon right now. I talked about creating passive income from books, you know, somewhere between $150 to $300 a month. As we release more books, that'll grow, and that's a way that we can generate and create an income. I wanted the kids to understand that. We talked about active income. I stand in front of a computer every day. The kids can't see active income. They can't understand what that means. My wife, however, is ridiculously crafty. She makes these really amazing wood art projects and all this other amazing cool stuff, and then she sells it on like Facebook Marketplace. So they see people show up to the house and exchange physical money for something that's a physical object. They can interpret and understand that at the age that they are as active income. So we use that as a lesson in our family bank meeting. And then we took this picture. So just want to give you some context as to starting to have these conversations to integrate family wealth. Positive conversations about money as early as possible with the people you love and care about. On my to-do list was to build a legacy. This is a picture of my son Nathan meeting Nelson Nash. I was absolutely blessed to have that picture. It was amazing. Nelson, I learned so much from. He was my friend, my mentor. I loved him dearly. I just, I think about him all the time. Amazing human being. He's here, he's here beside me. He's here with me all the time. Always got a photo of Nelson, Nelson and his wife Mary with us right here. And I just learned so much about, about life from him. More than anything else, I learned this. It's all about how you think. It is all about how you think. Okay? This isn't about an insurance illustration. It's not about an investment. It's about control over the family's financial energy for as long as possible, as many generations possible, and being able to utilize as much as possible while you're on planet Earth. Okay? Nelson would say, when is it time to go and get started? Or when is it time to increase your system? He'd say, just go plant another tree, get it done. Don't wait. Okay. I bring back this example of success and what does success mean for you? I mentioned significance and legacy. For me, it might mean something totally different from you. I'm sharing a little bit about my context and my story. What Nelson poured into me and all the members of our team, what his book has done for people. It's totally changed my life. And you can see through the last 14 years of my life how it's changed and what it's changed. Okay, you want to learn how to implement the process of becoming your own banker? It's easy. We put it together in 7 steps, the exact educational path you need to be successful in this process. Go ahead, go to 7steps.ca. That's 7steps.ca. And get your copy of the report right now.