Buy, Finance, or Lease a Car? (What the Banks Hope You Never Learn)

Most people would rather die than think. Tell me, what would you feel like having a peaceful, stress-free way of life financially? You've all heard the expression the pursuit of happiness. It is meant to be created, not meant to be pursued. Just take a moment to think about your thinking, not mine. How much money you have spent up to this point in your lifetime just on that one thing, on cars. It is enormous. And I don't want you to think just in terms of yourself. I want you to think in terms of your family, your extended family, your coworkers, the people that you spend a good part of your week with, and their families. Whose future are you financing? And more importantly, what future? Unless you understand the problem, the solution just won't matter to you. If I dove right into tonight focused on the solution, the Infinite Banking Concept, and you had not yet developed a deep understanding of the problem, the solution just wouldn't matter. How many of you have read this book titled Becoming Your Own Banker? This book was the 92 pages that completely changed my life. That if you read it with an open mind, it's gonna open your eyes to a whole new financial world. I absolutely promise you that. The Infinite Banking Concept is meant to be caught. It's not meant to be taught. Are you ready to think about your thinking tonight? Not mine, not our Nelson Nash's, but your thinking. What would it feel like for you to have a peaceful, stress-free way of life financially, knowing full well you're not going to get there in 3 years? You'll be well on your way, but it's not going to be achieved in 3 years. Tell me, what would you feel like having a peaceful, stress-free way of life financially? What future are you financing? If you really truly think about that, what future are you financing? Is it yours or someone else's? If you just reflect on all the money that's flowing through your hands and your entire family's hands every single day, whose future are you financing? And more importantly, what future? If you understand that all that money is being permanently transferred away from you and from your family, I would wager that the future you're financing is not the one that you feel most aligned with. Correct me if I'm wrong. If you think ahead to that bigger future, I would say that based on how you conduct your financial affairs right now, the future that you're financing is not the one that you feel most aligned with. And this leads me to, again, so many great things that Nelson shared, one of which was at the core of developing a deeper understanding of the infinite banking concept. Unless you understand the problem, the solution just won't matter to you. Here's the truth. All of your money is flowing through the books of someone else's bank right now. That is a fundamental truth. You're earning income, you're receiving money from a variety of different sources, and then you're making payments. So you're systematically transferring that money away through your debit transactions, your house payments, your car payments, your business equipment financing. If you're a business owner, you've got passive income from rental real estate, from investments. You've got W-2 or T4 income, you're earning dividends, you've got interest income. All of that money is flowing onto the books of someone else's bank. All of your company revenues and expenses, when you pay for all that stuff, it's flowing onto the books of someone else's bank. Now, we all have, yours truly included, we all have major expenses throughout our lifetimes. Now, how are those expenses financed? The most common methods are paying cash. Some of you have a story that you've written in your mind that you should always pay cash for things. You've got leasing where you're simply renting whatever it is that you're leasing, and at the end of the lease you don't own the thing that you were renting and you don't have any of the money. You've got loans where you've got to jump through lengthy, nosy credit applications to get access to someone else's pile of money. And you've got to sign personal guarantees, and you've got to qualify from an income, from a debt servicing standpoint, from a credit score standpoint. And then you've got credit cards. Credit cards, the bane of our existence. Most often high double-digit interest rates. Unbelievable. If you've ever had an opportunity to look at your credit card statement and, uh, you just for whatever reason wanted an instant migraine Take a look at how long it's going to take to repay that balance and make sure you're sitting down when you do. All of these things are financed through someone else's banking system. So in other words, you're doing all the work and everyone else is getting all your money. Is that a problem? I started where you are. I grew up in a small mining and forestry community, and this community is located in Timmins, Ontario. Home of Shania Twain. Her real name's Eileen Twain, by the way. Shania is Ojibwe. It means "on my way." And when I was growing up in a semi-detached duplex house, I was a toddler in the early 1980s. I was just a young child. And I have an older sister. She's a year older than me. And my parents argued about money all the time. And in the early 1980s, when interest rates skyrocketed to 21.5% if you were a prime customer of the bank, I've never met anyone who's prime. You're always prime plus. I know my family was never prime. My family, my mom and dad argued about money. They had nobody to guide them. Nobody. And that experience for me was very painful growing up. We came this close, this close to having our home foreclosed on. My dad's solution was to work harder. He was never home. That's where I inherited my workaholism from, is my father. He was never home and he worked tirelessly to try to put two ends together financially. That created an irreparable wedge in my parents' relationship. They ended up separating. Both my parents passed away prematurely. My dad worked the same career for 35 years. He retired. He had a dividend-paying whole life insurance policy. His advisor at the time advised him to surrender it in exchange for the cash value, something that you can still do to this day. He wanted the golf clubs, the snowmobiles, the recreational vehicles. He wanted all of that. And he was conditioned to pay cash for everything. So he took that advisor's advice. He surrendered the insurance contract, which means there's no more death benefit. And almost a year to the day that he retired, he died. He was doing what he did every day because every day became a Saturday, and he was checking the mail and sitting at the dining room table, and lights out. Sudden death. There was no death benefit there when it was needed the most. I was 22 years young when he passed. I had to step up and be the patriarch of the family. Not too long after, my mom passed away. My mom was a registered nurse. She worked at— before she passed, she worked in a hospice unit giving care to people who were terminally ill from cancer. And she was often the last person that would be holding the hand of someone taking their last breath because the family couldn't get there in time. And she would— my mom would always volunteer for that. And I never knew at the time, but when we were celebrating her life, there were flowers, literally flower arrangements all around the venue where we were celebrating my mom's life. And one of her final wishes was to be cremated. And so I had my mom with me and I gathered up as many people, as many vehicles as I could. And everybody was asking me like, why are you doing this? Like, why do you want us to pull up our vehicles to the front of the venue? I said, well, let's load up as many of these flower arrangements as we can. And we did. And we drove to the unit at the hospice care that my mom worked at because many of her colleagues had to work. They, they couldn't attend her celebration of life. And so we showed up there with dozens of flower arrangements and I spent hours talking to her colleagues. I spent hours speaking to patients that my mom was blessed to care for. And I heard so many stories that I just didn't know about my mom's servant leadership and her heart and how she cared for people. And my mom never talked about that, never brought it up, and didn't, didn't want any kudos or recognition. She just had a very caring heart. And when she passed, there was a small group employment insurance benefit that barely covered her final affairs. I'm sharing this with all of you because I started at a point in life where nobody told me, nobody told my parents, if you don't come from a wealthy family, a wealthy family should come from you. That you do not have to be rich to get into the banking business. Whether you're wealthy, ultra-high net worth, middle class, just working your way into middle class, you're going to need the use of money. And the process of banking is happening in your life regardless of where you are financially. And so at Ascendant Financial, we show up for you regardless of where you are in your journey of building wealth, if that's your journey. Let's think about building generational values, generational ambition, generational perseverance, generational goal setting, generational family. That transferring that wealth mentality. Because if you do this right, and many of you will, many of you are going to take that step and get in the water and schedule a conversation. And when you do that, that's going to be the domino that tips over for you. That's going to be what triggers your journey in the implementation of this process. Isn't that good? Here's a turning point. I want you to think about what you see in this picture. This young lady that you see is my niece. The gentleman earlier was my nephew. They will not see a conventional bank for anything other than the convenience of debit. When they purchased their first cars, they sat down with me and said, we need to borrow money from the family banking system. They were already gainfully employed on a part-time basis, demonstrating that they could earn money and save money. The money for these cars came from the life insurance company, not from my savings. The repayment schedule of the policy loans from the life insurance company are on my terms, nobody else's. I control that repayment schedule. My niece, my nephew are making payments back to the family banking system every single month. Everything that we repay, we get to reuse plus more because our cash values and our policies Don't stop growing while they're driving around in these cars. That's a turning point. If you think regarding the process of how you are financing all the things that you need throughout your lifetime today, and you contrast that with how these 16-year-olds are doing it, and we essentially, we get a calendar reminder every 5 years to go and buy a new car, and we have much more money inside of our family banking system than we did the 5 years previous. Is there any disadvantage to buying our cars this way? Now here's where I want to again invite you to think about your thinking. What future are you financing? I know what future these family members of mine are financing. Something to think about. And so what I want to do now is I want to invite you into a story. There's this book that we released recently titled Growing Your Own Capital. Credit to my teammate Dan Allen, who's on tonight. Credit to my teammate Richard, who I'm not sure if he's on tonight. In this book, Growing Your Own Capital, we share a story, and this story is about two farmers. What I want to invite you into is I want you to think through— replace farmers with whatever your profession is 2 mechanics, 2 roofing contractors, 2 chiropractors, 2 dentists, 2 lawyers, whatever your profession is. And here's the story that I want to invite you into. With these farmers, Ray and Jake, we're dealing with the same amount of land, very same amount of land. They just happen to be next-door neighbors. They have the very same amount of land. They're doing the same work. So they're obviously, as next-door neighbors, experiencing the very same weather conditions. But yet they've built two different futures. So let's talk about Ray. He pays cash for everything. That's how he was raised. Boy, you save the money, and once you've saved enough, you go and buy the thing that you need. You never go into debt. If you've ever seen a coin, you know that there's two sides and an edge, right? I'm standing on the edge looking over at Ray saying, Ray, you don't see the other side of this coin. All the cash that you're spending on these things is permanently transferred away from you, your family, and future farming generations that come after you. He borrows from the bank, and when he does that, he's repaying on the bank's terms, not his, not his family's. And the interest that he repays as part of that repayment to the bank is gone permanently. Every expense, money's flowing away from the farming operation, and he's always dependent every season on banks every season. There's his financial posture. He's got banks finance companies and he's got lost opportunity cost that's permanent. Now, let's contrast that with Jake. I want you to picture Jake. He builds his own banking system. He finances his needs from a position of total and absolute control. He recaptures the interest. He keeps money flowing back to the family. His own capital grows daily, uninterrupted compounding. This is his financial posture, his system, his family, his capital. Now, I expressed earlier that the fundamental truth that your money must reside somewhere, that is fundamentally true, courtesy of the late R. Nelson Nash. Now let's look at what Ray was doing. Both Ray and Jake had surplus of $50,000 each and every year. And Ray said, you know what? I'm going to save this money and I'm going to save it on the books of someone else's bank. I feel I sleep easy at night knowing that I've deposited the money into that savings account and it's earning me some, some decent interest. And I've piled up in the first year $52,000 because I earned some interest on that money. And whenever I need access to the money, I have to withdraw it to go and buy the thing that I need. And then I got to replenish the savings. And over the course of a 10-year window, I piled up $500,000. And with all the interest that I earned, that pile of money grew to $624,317. 20 years, it's $924,000. 25 years, it's $1.1 million. 30 years, it's $1.3 million. 35 years, it's $1.6 million. We're not doing too bad. But let me ask you in the chat window, where does all this money reside? In a bank. Now, do we presume for a moment that the bank where this money resides is letting this money sit still? Not a chance. Now, God forbid Ray passes away in the 10th year. He's achieved a very good amount of savings. He's done really well. God forbid he passes away. What gets left behind to his family is the value of that savings account, $624,000. That's what gets left behind. Now, Ray says, Jake, listen, I understand you've read this book, Growing Your Own Capital. You've been talking to me about the infinite banking concept. Look, why don't we just build our own versions of our bigger futures and let's see how we make out? And so Jake says, all right, no problem. Jake puts money inside of a dividend-paying whole life insurance policy, and at the end of the first year, he's got $44,609 piled up in cash value. But he put $50,000 in in premium, but he's got a $1.6 million death benefit. Now him and Ray are chatting with each other in their fields. Ray says, see, Jake, I told you you were a lunatic for doing that. Jake says, well, I purchased a grain bin. I borrowed the $18,000 from the life insurance company and my cash value kept growing uninterrupted. I saw you bought a grain feeder too. That grain bin of yours. 'But you had to withdraw the money.' 'Oh no, I didn't do that. I borrowed it.' 'Oh, okay. What's your repayment schedule?' 'It isn't yours. I get to repay it based on my terms, nobody else's.' Ray says, 'Hold on a second. Let's see how things go here a few years down the line.' Well, they end up chatting with each other a few years down the line, and Jake says, 'Hey, look, I got $261,000 in cash value, but my death benefit's grown to $2.437 million.' And Ray says, my goodness. So if I'm understanding you right, God forbid if you passed away, even if you had borrowed against that entire $261,000, your family would get a check for $2.4 million minus the loan balance that you have outstanding? Yeah, Ray, that's exactly what would happen. Okay, now you got my attention. We get to the 10th year and Ray still didn't change. He's been hearing about this concept. He still didn't get in the water. He wanted to focus on learning how to swim without swimming. Keep teaching me this process of swimming, Jake, but I'm not getting in the pool. They get to year 10. Jake's piled up $621,000 in cash value. He's got a $2.6 million death benefit. Year 20, $1 million and a $3 million death benefit. Year 25, you can see the numbers. Jake invited Ray over for a family meal at year 10, and he said, "Ray, how you doing?" And Ray said, "Well, I've got money in the bank, but I'm feeling stressed. Money's leaving. I'm still dependent on the banks. I got to start over every year. And I kept thinking about what you said, that we're all going to die someday. And when I die, I'm going to leave behind a lot of problems. There's going to be a pile of money there, but I'm going to leave behind some problems." And Ray says, "Jake, how are you doing? I know you've been talking to me about this infinite banking concept for the past decade. And I'm just curious, how are things progressed and how are you doing?" And Jake says, "Well, I'm relaxed. The money flows back to the family. I've become the banker as it relates to my family and my family farm's needs. I've definitely built a heck of a lot of resilience and wealth. And when I graduate, when I pass away, Ray, I'm leaving my family a tax-free windfall and a whole heck of a lot of options. I need all of you to stop for a moment and think about your thinking. Jake and Ray, the very same work effort, same crops, the same weather. The difference was who controlled the banking function in their lives. You get to make a decision today. Which future do you see yourself most aligned with? Ray or Jake? What future do you see yourself most aligned with? Remember what I expressed to everybody earlier: the only wrong choice is to leave here unchanged. So here's the deal. So you, you've just seen the problem, obviously, uh, you've seen two different futures. So let's make this real now, not just a story about Jake and Ray, but your story. I know you've all communicated this, that you feel that you relate more to Jake than you do to Ray. What would change if you started to live like Jake? I want to extend an invitation to you. Here's my invitation. You've named the future you don't want. You've described the future that you do want. The next step is simple. Schedule a conversation because we'll talk about how this applies to your life. Take a moment, schedule that conversation. It's on the house at no charge. Now, if you're just getting started, this is definitely your moment. And for people who may already have a policy, or maybe you have a few policies, but what's missing is the guidance— you know the truth. This is the perfect time to meet with your advisor and map out the next layer of your program. Are you ready to step into the future that you deserve? The only way to learn how to swim, folks, is to get in the pool. Text the word schedule. Do it now. Get that conversation booked. And I promise you, it's going to be an experience unlike any other because you're not going to be pressured to do a dang thing. We're just going to get you to clarity. Most people would rather die than think. Tell me, what would you feel like having a peaceful, stress-free way of life financially? You've all heard the expression The pursuit of happiness— it is meant to be created, not meant to be pursued. Just take a moment to think about your thinking, not