Bulletproof Your Wealth in Canada and Make it Efficient

If you had $2,500 a year back in your financial life for 15 years, what on earth could that have done for you? And then if you're still Alive after those 15 years, what else would you be able to do moving forward? Well, I know one thing you could do. You can certainly get a policy for 2,500 bucks a year. And if you did that for 15 years, it would have accumulated capital and it would have accumulated death benefit. And it's going to create a legacy event. It's not about how much money it's running through your life today. It's not about how much your income is. It's about how you're thinking about, about everything. And where are you prioritizing things that matter to you in your life. Controlling the banking function as it relates to your needs, your needs is the most important thing that you can do financially.

I have a client now who I'm working with who may be a few years older than me. When he was about 30. He goes, yeah, Vern, I had no idea what I was doing. I was making pretty good money at the time. A good friend of mine is still in the business, but he's in a management role now. He was a life insurance advisor at the time. And he just like twisted my arm and said, hey, just get this thing called a 20 pay permanent whole life policy with a certain company. Let's just say they've been in Canada for life.

They're really big on the 55 number.

Yeah. And he's, and he's done, he's done all these different things throughout his life in the last 21 years, because it was a 20 pay, the policy is actually quote, paid up. Now, you couldn't put another dime into the policy if you wanted to, but yet it's still, continues to grow every single day, still pays dividends, has a massive death benefit, and there's a big pile of cash in there, by the way. He had no idea about any of this or how it worked until him and I met. I said, dude, you gotta call that company and find out how much cash you got and how much loan you can borrow. I told him to call a couple days in a row to find out what the loan availability is. He finds out that the cash value is growing by like 60 bucks a day or something. And he's just going like, Vern, he goes, I can't even believe it. There's like 140 grand in this policy. And he goes, I've earned money, lost money, invested money, lost deals. He Goes, this is the only thing that is consistently just worked. And I didn't even have any clue that it was happening. For me, it was just, I already knew that. But it was just so validating for him to come and say, like, I can't even believe this. Like, this is amazing.

Right?

So just, just another kind of story that just shows the strength of these things and how it all works and what you can do.

You'd be amazed how you know for, for folks listening and you'd just be amazed how often people have some kind of an insurance or insur. And even if it's not whole life, but there's, there's value there, good value. It's either been doing okay or doing well. And they could have been tapping into it for 10, 20, 30 years and just had no idea. And I'll give you, I'll give you another quick story, Vern, because I think stories are important because they're real. I was on with a gentleman not that long ago. He, he was getting a policy with another advisor and that advisor decided to get out of the business. They made a transition and so they, they ended up coming to me and we found out through all these different insurance policies that they have, he had been paying everything monthly, 100% monthly on all these. And it was like seven or eight different policies and they're at various things size. Some are like critical illness. There was like, I think there's a long term care, there's a bunch of different, like life insurance, you know, most of which was whole life insurance. So he had value in there. They, they weren't monstrously sized policies, but that's fine. They've been building up over time. But because they were paying monthly, this entire time frame and they had all this value built up, plus they had other like savings. They were basically paying give or take because of the company that they were with about seven and a half percent more money than necessary on every one of those policies. When we did the math on it, it was almost $2,500 a year. Wow. In other words, for basically the better part of 15 years, they had been paying an extra $2,500 a year unnecessarily because no one sat with them and said, you can take a policy loan and you can pay all of these annually and then you can make the exact same monthly payments that you've always been making. And you're going to make now the 7 1/2% that XYZ company is making off you for the privilege of allowing you to do this monthly. Now, every company's a little different when policies were sold. They can even be different. But on average, it was a lot of money. If you had $2,500 a year back in your financial life for 15 years, what on earth could that have done for you? And then if you're still Alive after those 15 years, what else would you be able to do moving forward? Well, I know one thing you could do. You can certainly get a policy for 2,500 bucks a year. And if you did that for 15 years, it would have accumulated capital and it would have accumulated death benefit. And it's going to create a legacy event. And it's like. It's just like. Oh, it's just like a snowball effect. But the problem is because they had no idea, no exposure. Nobody told them they weren't having regular meetings with a coach, with an advisor. They'd gone through. They bounced through, like four different advisors. There wasn't a single same advisor's name on the, on any of the paperwork. And so they're kind of let out there, you know, hanging in the wind. And they're jaded by that experience, which I understand that's a common thread for people. But recognize there's these little subtle things of efficiency that you can do in your life. And all of a sudden, hey, there's an extra 500 bucks a year.

Boom.

There's a thousand bucks a year. There's $252,500 a year. And that sort of thing happens for a lot of our clients when we meet with them. All we're doing is they're not. We're not changing what they're doing. We're just changing subtle adjustments to make more efficiency onto what they're doing.

Yeah, exactly what you said. I mean, I have to pay home and auto insurance. I don't like it, but I have to. I used to pay 420 bucks a month. Now, unfortunately, I'm with one of those companies that has that green logo you were referring to earlier. That's my. The insurance provider. And they don't give a discount on that. Home and auto insurance.

Right.

And I, And I heard that from a client once. He goes, oh, yeah, I called my insurance company. They don't give me a discount if I pay annually, so I'm just going to keep paying monthly. I said, okay, did you were just going to change it to annual because there was a discount, or is it that the money that's leaving you that's the problem? I don't. I Mean, the discount would be great, but I don't give a crap about the discount. I want the capital. I don't want two automatic debits coming out of my bank every month. I don't want that lost control. I don't want home and auto insurance being ripped out of my bank account. So I just access the policy loan, I pay the annual premium, and you better believe I just redirect the money back to my own system. I was already paying it anyway. And now like again, increased death benefit, cash value, all the rest of it, I'm controlling the process, I'm controlling the payment. Really empowering.

And I've heard that from a lot of people that, oh my, my company doesn't offer a discount. You can call people and they'll say that. But then when you actually get the numbers and you do some third grade arithmetic, almost like not. Certainly not every time. But my experience has been 85, 90 of the time. There is some kind of a discount. Maybe it's 3%, but it'll say something on the statement. But then when you actually do the real math of what the savings value is, often it's as high as 8%.

Yeah.

And so, you know, it's, it's a. Look, you want to go chase a rate of return on some investment and you're, you're hoping to get 8 to 10%, but meanwhile over on this side, you're just watching money leak out of your life.

Yeah.

That you could simply just stop and make an instantaneous 8% return by changing.

One thing to your point, Rich, about those critical illness policies. And I mean, I have all that type of insurance. My most valuable asset today is my ability to earn an income. Because I don't know about you, but I'm dependent today on my income. So you better do whatever you can to ensure and protect that asset. Right. So if I get sick, if I get hurt, I don't have to worry about paying the bills. Right. But I used to pay all those premiums on my two kids, on my wife, on myself. I used to pay all those premiums monthly while the insurance company, the life companies that I have those policies with give, you know, they provided a discount or they charge you more when you do monthly. So I just flipped around, grabbed a policy loan, paid all those off. So there is, I call it my debit to deposit ratio, Rich. You know, a few years ago there was debit, debit, debit, debit, debit, debit, debit, debit, debit, debit.

Right.

There's all this Money just flowing out of the bank all the time now. So I have like two, maybe two automatic debits coming out of my bank and there's a few more deposits, which is nice, but there's a lot of, lot less debits. I still have to pay for a lot of things. I've eliminated third party debts and stuff, but just by shifting, you know, I did eliminate, like I said, some third party debts, my truck payment, but by shifting from monthly to annual and getting rid of some of those debits, and by implementing the process of becoming your own banker over the last 18 months or so, there's about 3,000 plus $3,000 a month that is no longer automatically leaving my family. Like, how much of a difference would that make for you? Like, it's, it's just incredible, man. Like, it's. Anyway, I don't want to beef it up, but I'm, I'm like, you know, you're, you're what, 10, 12 years into your journey?

Yeah, I've made a ton of mistakes along the way. I'm sure there's more in my future. Same here.

And, and hopefully so, because you're, you either win or you learn. Right. But I'm, I'm like, I'm like a third of where you're at. I'm like, I'm like four.

Four.

I've had policies longer than that, but actually implementing the process and expanding my system and really getting after it and getting things done. I'm like four years into my journey. So a lot of these wins are really fresh for me. Right. It's like, holy snap, like just two years ago, the lack of control, the amount of money that was flowing out, still trying to kind of figure things out. And my system has gained momentum. I've built up more policies, I've achieved more objectives, and now it's just like I go into my bank and there's like no transactions going on except for when I get paid like today. I immediately take that money and fire it off to a policy I have. I always joke with my clients and I say, yeah, if I showed you my bank account, which from time to time I do, you'd think I was broke because I got about this much money sitting in the commercial bank.

Yeah.

Nelson used to say he wanted the, you know, when he passed, he wanted the final expense check to bounce.

He wouldn't want to owe anything to anybody. He didn't want to have any. He didn't want to own anything. He won't have any assets. He wanted it all just to be insurance. And recently on our most recent quarterly client community coaching event that we did a few weeks back, we actually had a story that we were able to relay to our clients in that private setting about we call the Tale of Two Dads. And so David Stearns, who was Nelson Nash's son in law, he did a great presentation on his own father and Nelson Nash as his father in law. And they're two kind of parallel lives. They were similar age, had similar kids and grandkids and they were both were in the army at one time. They had very similar lives. The big difference was how they prioritize things where their focus was. You know, I found out that Nelson actually got his very first policy when he was 14 years old and he had his parents listed as his parents listed as the beneficiaries. And then he got another one at 16 and then he got another one at 19. And so when Nelson passed away, this is three years ago, he had 17 death benefit checks. 17 death benefit checks were cut to various people, you know, a couple went to some organizations. But 17 death benefit checks and 28 policies, 28 policies were still in existence after he's gone. They still are around today. Just think about the legacy of that. Just imagine if that was something you could provide. You could leave behind 17 death benefit checks, tax free money showing up when it's needed the most, solving all kinds of problems. The government's not giving a single dime of any of it because you got to choose who the beneficiaries were and you've created these other policies and you're now be able to hand them off to the life insured or the parent whoever owns that thing. Like there was three policies on ex business partners that were passed down to family members. And so 28 additional assets with ready available access to cash and accumulating death benefit, a secondary tax free event that's impending in the future, all transition down to another generation. That is unbelievable. And the only thing that differentiates people from creating that is right here. It's not about how much money it's running through your life today. It's not about how much your income is, it's about how you're thinking about everything. And where are you prioritizing things that matter to you in your life. Everyone is already spending all financial resources on what he or she believes is best. It has to take a change in priorities to recognize controlling the banking function as it relates to your needs is the most important thing that you can do financially. Once you've done that you can do every other financial thing in life that you already are planning to do or want to. That is the power of the infinite banking concept or the.

It's not a tax free savings account. We gotta be careful what we say. But we, we joke and say the oldest tax free savings account.

Yeah.

In Canada.

It, it can be. When you do it right. And the reality is it doesn't have the same limitations and deposit minimums and the fact that you can only take money out one time per year and then wait to the next year to put it back in. Etc. None of those stupid, you know, things that can restrict your autonomy and what you want to do with your own financial life are involved in an insurance policy.