The Most Frequently Asked Questions About Becoming Your Own Banker

People believe that the process of becoming your own banker has absolutely anything to do with life insurance. It doesn't. The life insurance is just the tool. If you put the best tool for the job in the hands of an incompetent, not only is that person not going to turn out any good work with the tool, they're going to break the tool. It's just a tool to implement a process.

So the following questions are going to be very specific to the process of becoming a banker, the infinite banking concept, and the family bank. So one frequently asked question is, how do I get started? Like, if I want to get started on the journey of becoming a banker, like, what's the first step and what does the journey look like in terms of education? And where should I even get started?

I mean, if you want to learn how to swim, the first thing you need to do is get her swim trunks. You got to get equipped to get started. And the way you get equipped to get started before you get in the pool to learn how to swim, right, you've got to read R. Nelson Nash's book titled Becoming youg Own Banker. That is a must read. It's a 92 page book. Wrote it for all of you. And having had the good fortune and having been blessed to be mentored directly by Nelson for so many years, the second step would be to watch the Nelson Nash documentary film which is available@nelsonnashfilm.com and when you get there, there's a one hour documentary that'll give you a deeper glimpse into the essence of just how incredible Nelson was. Those two resources alone should serve as enough inspiration for you to begin rethinking your thinking and to develop an understanding of the problem. And what a lot of people in the general public do is they dive headfirst into the solution end of the pool without having an understanding of the problem in the shallow end of the pool. What I believe that all of my teammates do such a remarkable job at is focusing first on helping you get clarity on the problem so that when the solution's presented to you, you'll know exactly what to do because you have clarity and it will actually matter to you. And so that's where it all began for me in my journey was reading R. Nelson Nash's book. And so that's what we encourage people who are starting to do. And our banker's vault YouTube channel, our wealth Without Bay street podcast. These are all resources that have been created to share with you all of the expanded awareness and knowledge that we've learned over the years and that Nelson shared with us because he can't possibly cram decades of wisdom into a 92 page read. It's impossible. And so what we do with all this additional content is we share with you additional perspective and additional thinking on what Nelson wrote in the book, becoming your own banker.

Now, Jason, reading Nelson's book, getting educated on the problem, that's exactly the way to get started. And once they've consumed the content, what would be the next step for someone who's still considering implementing the process in their life?

Well, you've got to talk to someone who practices the process in their own life. And there wouldn't be anyone on our team that you would be connected with that does not practice this process in their own lives. And that's not just our authorized infinite banking practitioners, that's everyone on our team. That's a prerequisite for being a teammate of ours. You've got to be demonstrating that you can do this in your own life so that you can speak from a place of authenticity and integrity when you're helping someone get to clarity. And so having connection, asking questions, sharing your insights, it's so important. This is a process. The infinite banking concept is not a financial plan. It's a lifestyle. It's not some plan with a bunch of fancy graphs and a bunch of terminology and a bunch of noise. It's meant to be a lifestyle. And I think that for those clients of ours who really have made it, that they're not concerned with all the noise that's going on out there in the world right now. Think about inflation. What's inflating for most people is their blood pressure. When they look at their investment accounts and they look at everything that they've worked so hard to accumulate because financial entertainers have told them, don't sweat it, it always comes back. And that may in fact be true. But on whose schedule? That's what they fail to clarify. Oh, the markets always come back. My question would be very simple. On my schedule or on yours, or on yours, like whose schedule do the markets come back on? And so our clients net worth is growing every day through all of this turmoil. And when we shared leading up to this period of inflation, this period of rapidly rising interest rates, the years long beforehand when we were sharing, you are preparing to shield yourself from when this happens. When interest rates rise and we see rapid inflation, et cetera, people didn't really truly grasp or understand because for most clients, they had only experienced riding that roller coaster throughout their lifetime. They couldn't Fathom going through another period of turmoil without any volatility at all. And so clients are giving us feedback and saying, this is exactly what you told us. What happened?

Someone has met with us, they've gone through the process, they've seen how this can be applied in their life and they go through the application, they get approved. One of the frequently asked questions in the meeting is what does client journey look like? Addison and Financial?

That's such a good question. So what does the client journey look like? Once you've been approved and you're ready to go, I want you to take a moment and think about an occasion in your life where you had the very best experience at a restaurant that was recommended to you. Now I want you to think about that experience where it was just amazing from start to finish. The moment you were greeted walking into the restaurant, the atmosphere, the quality and presentation and taste of the food, the whole experience from start to finish was just absolutely incredible. You're going to experience very similar feelings in your dealings with us. We communicate frequently and effectively. You'll be coached and mentored. You will have access to a client portal that has a treasure trove of resources for you to tap into 247 so that you're not reliant upon ascendance hours of operation. You're only reliant upon a stable Internet connection from any device. Wherever you are in the world. You get to network with other like minded people. And when questions come up in the quarterly group client coaching, the answers become the most valuable to everybody who's in attendance. And when you meet with your advisor, your advisor is going to be be there as a coach, not to be responsible for you, but to be responsible to you and to continually bring you back to the two most important words in the title of this book, your own. We want to coach you to take control of this function as it relates to your needs. We don't want you to be dependent upon and develop a dependency on an advisor. The advisor is there to coach you to be able to do this for you so that you can truly take control of this function in your life. Because believe me, that is your path, your journey to creating a peaceful, stress free way of life financially.

I'm living proof of that.

For those who've done a lot of research on this process and they've followed a YouTube channel, they've followed Jason and Richard on a podcast, those who are experiencing this for the first time in terms of to become your banker process, the tool that we use Jason to implement this process is Participating dividend paying whole life policy. Could you please share why do we use this tool? Why participating whole life policy? Why not a universal life policy?

There are many different types of insurance contracts and they all have a purpose. And so it's not that one type of insurance contract is good, bad or otherwise when compared to another. Every type of insurance contract just is. It just is. It has its own set of characteristics in terms of control, guarantees, liquidity, access, taxes, volatility, and so much more. So when you think of a dividend paying participating whole life insurance contract.

And you start to review and develop an understanding of contractually guaranteed daily cash value accrual, you pay no tax on that daily accrual. If you're a real estate investor or a business owner and you're using corporate surplus and it's a corporate owned policy, all of that growth is exempt from the passive investment income tax rules. The cash values of the policies cannot go backward. When death comes, there's a tax free windfall of money that shows up exactly when it's needed the most. You become the banker as it relates to those things you need to finance throughout your lifetime. And this is the only type of contract that provides all of the guarantees necessary to create a peaceful, stress free way of life financially. And so if you know all these attributes, the logical questions are, how much capital do I not want residing there? That's a fairly logical question. The second logical question is how long can I pay the premium for? If I know that that is the energy that grows my banking system.

Then when do I want to stop directing my financial energy to my system? When do I want to start directing my financial energy to someone else's? Because whenever the question comes up, maybe it's on your list, I'm going to skip ahead of you. How soon can I stop paying the premium? The real question is how soon can I start redirecting all my financial energy to someone else's system? If you truly understand the problem, you would never ask that question.

The question you would be asking your advisor is how long can I pay the premium for? Because the real question is how long can I direct all of my financial energy into a system that I own, that I control, where the money never leaves my system?

We're speaking about insurance and life insurance. Participating Whole life, Universal life talked about the attributes. One of the frequently asked question is how are the insurance companies protected in the event of failing financially? Like, how are policies protected?

Wow, that's a really good question. If you think about the past 176 years, in our country, all of the calamity that's happened financially and has had an impact on finance in general, the economy at large. The most financially solvent institutions on the planet are life insurance companies, the carriers that we work with. There hasn't been a single year since inception where they have failed to declare and pay dividends to their participating policy owners. That should be a pretty clear smoke signal of where to find a great location to build your warehouse of wealth.

I'm going to talk a little bit about the life insurance companies and then gradually make my way into some questions specifically on the product, because those questions do come up and people have heard you say this many times, that ideally speaking, if you want to implement the process of becoming a banker, it should be done with a mutual life insurance company. Could you expand on that thought process?

If you're understanding or researching the infinite banking concept, the process of becoming your own banker and you're thinking about the tool to implement it. Nelson always said, and he references this a few times in his book, but he expanded quite a bit on this over the years. When you're dealing with a mutual company, they are responsive only to the participating policy owners. There's no other group that is applying pressure or persuading the board or persuading the insurance company on chasing quarterly results versus dealing in 100 year theoretical lifespans. There are no stockholders in the deal. When you're dealing with a stock company, that company is responsive firstly to the stockholders of the company. Irrefutable for me, I want to be a co owner of a business where they are responsive solely to me and to the other co owners of the company who are contributing financial energy to that business. Stockholders buy stock, that's true, but I don't want to be sharing divisible surplus with any other group of people. And I certainly don't want the company to be persuaded because they have to be responsive to another group before us as participating policy owners. And here's the bottom line and nobody talks about this. What a shocker. What about client service? Well, if I have a choice between two restaurants and they both make the pasta dish the very same way, but when you walk into one restaurant, the red carpet's rolled out, you're treated like royalty and you go into the other restaurant and it's not very well kept, it's not very clean, think about service and client care.

Believe it or not, that's important to us. The clients that we bring on and become policy owners, we want them to be really well treated and we want the carrier that we're working with to be an extension of our team and to provide the very same care and to really provide great service. Everybody wants to talk about rates and how much money they can dump into a policy and who's got the best dividend this year compared to last year. None of that is relevant to your lifelong journey with the implementation of a process. The illustration that you have on your policy is not going to be what the policy actually looks like a year from now, a decade from now, two decades from now, three decades from now. But if you're dealing with a mutual life company, their mandate is to be responsive solely to you as a participating policy owner. There's no one else for them to be responsive to. There are a lot of good stock companies out there, but my experience personally as a policy owner with those stock companies is that the client care when you compare one to a mutual company, not even close.

So, Jason, diving into some of the product questions and starting with the premium. So the product is participating dividend paying, whole life policy. It's a life insurance policy. It needs premium. People sometimes just get too hung up on what should they start. And they assume sometimes that this is only for people who are a lot of money. You got to put a lot of money in to get this going to achieve the success that you want to achieve. So, so that may be on folks, some, some people's mind. So could you speak about just premium and how does that relate to the process of becoming a banker, not just the product itself?

I opened up my first bank account when I was a kid.

I didn't have a lot of money.

What the bank wanted was the money. They were happy to take that. And so the whole idea is to remember that you're already prioritizing where 100% of your financial resources go. You're already doing that. Whatever amount of financial resources you have, if that's a dollar figure that you want to compute and say, I've got a dollar of financial resources, I'm already prioritizing where every penny of that dollar is going. So all I have to do is possess the desire to implement this process. So we've checked that box. You've got the desire. The second is you have to go through a period of introspection where you examine where you've prioritized all your financial resources presently and what portion of those financial resources you want to redeploy and reprioritize. That's it. It's not complex. And the good thing is that you already Get a sharp example of what becoming your own banker is all about. Because you're the one that gets to make the decision of how much premium you want to start with. That's entirely up to you. You're in a position of total and absolute control of where you want to begin. But just remember, there has to be a desire to change. Recognize the fact that you're already allocating 100% of your financial resources somewhere. You just gotta decide what portion of it you want to begin redirecting into a system that you own and you control. And then gradually and incrementally, over years, many years.

You will take more and more control of the banking function as it relates to your needs. And each incremental positive step forward, and each incremental positive uptick in that percentage of the banking function that you control in your life directly contributes to a corresponding reduction in stress.

Again, just myths around life insurance in general.

Folks think that there's actually two different buckets when it comes to participating in whole life policy. One is the cash value, the other is death benefit. And then when they meet, they're like, hey, this is how much premium I want to put in. And I want the most premium going into the cash value bucket.

All I can tell you, I mean, is cash value is just the net present value of the future payment of a death benefit. Cash value isn't really cash. Like, the insurance company doesn't have a vault with 400,000 drawers in there where they're putting a little bit of money into the cash value drawers every day. Cash value is the net present value of a future payment of a death benefit. The insurance company is contractually obligated to ensure that those two figures match by age 100 of the life insured. So every single day the value is increasing and you get to borrow against that accumulating value. And your borrowing is what creates that real money that you get to go out and use and deploy in a variety of different things. And so the buckets that you're describing, it's not an accurate depiction of what's actually occurring. You have a unilateral binding contract.

That has a death benefit line item, a cash value line item that must grow to match that ever increasing death benefit. You've got paid up additions, you've got a breakdown of the premium that's going into the minimum required, and then the flexible option, which is the accelerated deposit portion. And the cash value is just a value that is growing to match a value which is a total death benefit. The money that you Use through the implementation of this process is the life insurance company's money.

And believe me, especially when you're dealing with a mutual company.

They love dealing with the front of the line. And guess who's standing right in the front of the line? The participating policy owners. You. And so it's nice to know that you're the number one priority and that you're always going to be well served and taken care of. Thinking of the restaurant analogy that I.

Utilized earlier, suggestion, the contrast you're guarantee is cash values must grow every single day to match the total death benefit by age 100. So can anything economy wise impact or stop the cash value from ever growing?

I mean, I suppose you could call the insurance company and say, hey, interest rates are rising, inflation's out of control, could you not grow my cash value every day?

They're going to politely decline your request.

One of the questions that comes up all the time, Jason, is because of the environment that we in the inflationary environment and question is so can whole life policy itself catch up to inflation? The way inflation is skyrocketing, the growth.

Of the policy, the way that the policy accelerates beats the pants off of inflation. If you think about the example that Nelson described, what happened in the policy's response to inflation and he said, I want you to help me understand something. I paid $388 in premium and the dividend check that I received this year was more than $4,000. How am I doing as it relates to keeping up with inflation? Because the premium can never go up, it can go down because of the flexible portion. Right. So you have control over that lever, which is great, but the premium can never go up. And so that cash value accumulation as the policy gets more seasoned year in, year out, year in, year out, you're going to beat the pants off of inflation.

Premium can never go up. So if you start today, let's just say it's 5000 per in premium, that 5000 today is worth more than 5000 next year and the year after and year after. To be locking in technically weaker dollars today to gain future stronger dollars in policy as cash values and dividends. Yeah.

And that has nothing to do with becoming your own banker.

That's just the nature of the product.

That's the one thing that R. Nelson Nash said to me so often throughout the years. He said a fatal error in thinking is that people believe that the process of becoming your own banker has absolutely anything to do with life insurance. It doesn't. The life insurance is just the tool. If you put the best tool for the job in the hands of an incompetent. Not only is that person not going to turn out any good work with the tool, they're going to break the tool. It's just a tool to implement a process where we need to continually think about. Our thinking is in the process, not the product. The insurance company is going to administer the daily growth of that policy if you never utilized it, if you never accessed a single policy loan.

Speaking about cash value grocers and one of the other frequently asked question what's the rate of return on a policy? And I think I can get a better rate of return investing my dollars somewhere else versus the policy. So why should I do this?

Anything that you invest money in involves the transfer of your money and the control of that money to someone else. A return isn't a return until it's vested, until it's realized. A dividend paying, participating whole life insurance contract never has been and never will be an investment. It's a warehouse for your capital so that you can from that warehouse you can go and invest money to generate rates of return without ever interrupting the daily accumulation that's happening inside your own aquarium of capital. And so again, this all begins with the way that we think that question is triggered by comparison. I'm trying to think should I store my money here or should I store my money somewhere else? And the decision factor is going to be the rate of return. If you want to take control of the banking function as it relates to your needs and control how you finance the things in your life, which can certainly include investment opportunities to generate rates of return, there's no better place to store capital than here. It just doesn't exist. And it just so happens to be the greatest exemption in the tax code that exists today. And if you can go and get whatever rate of return you desire and still have your own capital growing uninterrupted on a daily basis and attracting no tax on that daily growth. And you know that it cannot go backward. And you co own the company that's lending you the money and you're borrowing it on your terms on demand, you're in control. How much of your capital do you not want residing there?

We understand there's readily available access to capital A what's the interest rate to access that capital? And then how does that interest rate correlate with marketplace? That's obvious question that comes up. But then the other part of the question is okay, well we understand that this is about owning the business together. Co Ownership. But then logically is it because the dividends are going to be more than the interest charged by the insurance companies? That's why I should be doing this.

Interest rates go up, they go down, the process of banking goes on no matter what. And this is all a function of where you want to transfer the financial energy which is yours. Where do you want your financial energy being transferred to? If you and I, Sarblo owned a Safeway grocery store, would we ever want to do our grocery shopping at Walmart regardless of the price?

We won't, no.

Because we don't want to transfer the profitability to someone else's grocery store. It's all a function and matter of where the money is flowing to, who that money's being put to work for and for how long. So when you have your financial energy flowing to the company that you co own and their mandate is to put that money to work for the owners of the company and their mandate is to declare and pay dividends every year to their co owners. And the primary factor in determining that dividend is based on the contribution principle. So the more you contribute to the net earnings of the company you co own, the larger the divisible surplus that can be created and the more surplus that gets distributed to everyone who co owns the company. And you just happen to participate a little bit more in that surplus because of your net contribution and the group of policies in your group's contribution to the earnings of the company. Try asking yourself this question. Where should I direct all the financial energy of this transaction that I'm about to make? Should I direct it to the company that I co own or should I direct it to someone else's?

It's not about the function of rate, it's all about from where do you access money and when you repay it, who gets the money? How much of that money is actually put to work for you? And when you're ready to re access what you paid back, how much of that you can re access? And if you're able to re access more than the rate, then how does the rate even matter? What's the rate of return on dividend? What's the dividend scale interest rate?

You know, wow, you gotta look at this particular company because their dividend scale interest rate is x x percent and there's no understanding or no clarification provided as to how that all works to eventually determine A that the insurance company has certainty that they can confidently declare and pay dividends over a multi year time frame and B the formula that is applied to the net contribution principle to determine how much of a dividend in dollars is actually paid to each particular policy based on how many years it's been in force, what block it belongs to, how that particular block contributed to the net earnings of the insurance company, and so much more. But there's an episode that Richard and I did where we talk about dividend scale interest rates, and that's on the Wealth Without Bay Street Channel would wholeheartedly encourage people, if they want to do a deeper dive into that, just maybe more so for the trivia of understanding it, when you finish watching that episode, you will have a higher degree of knowledge than 99% of the industry as it relates to dividend scale interest rates.

One of the things that people get really hung up on is if they. I'm just using this as an example. If the dividend scale interest rate is 6% and I'm putting $20,000 as premium, the dividend that I should expect is 6% of 20,000, which is 1200 bucks. Not at all. They're not even connected.

That would never be an accurate depiction of what's happening inside of that particular policy and how the dividend yield in dollars is actually determined for that particular policy.

Other question on the policy itself, Jason, let's just say we get started. Someone gets started with their system of policies in the family, because we always talk about a system versus a policy. One policy just cannot get the job done.

That's right.

We get started. We have three years in, we have four years in. Life happens. What are our options?

Well, first and foremost, right, you've got to be dealing with whatever's happening in your life at that time. And there's such a variety of flexibility in maintaining the policy, even in a circumstance where there's a permanent absence of capital. God forbid, if the policy owner said, look, I'm never going to earn another dime of income, I will never be able to put any additional capital into this policy under any circumstance. So there are so many different flexible levers that can be pulled, and there's so many different options. And so that's why if you run into a situation like that, you've got to get in touch with your coach right away. That's a 911 to your coach. Our tendency when we're faced with an absence of control, okay, I'm not controlling this situation. Something's happened to me. And that absence of control manifests itself in two ways, fear and anger. And when you're in fear or you're in anger, there are A few ways to remedy that quite easily. You can start looking at what are all the expenses I can eliminate from my life right now. Okay. I just need to shut down the car insurance. I got to shut down my life insurance. I got to shut down. Right. You got to turn all these things off. Versus I've got to get in touch with somebody who can help me through this. So call your coach and your coach will help you through that the best way that he or she can and get things back on track the best way that you can. Thank goodness there are options. So it's not like, oh my God, everything that you've put into this policy has gone bye, bye and really sorry what's happening to you, but there's nothing that can be done. That would never be the outcome. But you got to get in touch with your coach. Like if you let things continue.

Down the wrong path and then you get in touch with your coach when you're at the 11th hour, then it's going to be really difficult for your coach to help you. So the sooner you get in touch, the better.

One of the things I've heard you say this so many times is when life happens because it's going to happen, there's no escaping. It's always planning for it. You would be in a much better, stronger position if your wealth is residing in an entity that you control 100%.

Yeah.

Versus you have lack of control. Because when you control things, you have great options. Whereas if you in a time where there's lack of control, then that's where it becomes very extremely bothersome. So.

Absolutely. And. And you just hit the nail on the head. I just said that if you're in fear or you're in anger, it's because there's an absence of control.

Yeah.

The more control you have when an event happens, the less fear and the less anger will manifest itself because you're in a position of total control.

One question that comes up all the time is because it is life insurance, we should do more premium on our kids versus us because this can be better on our children versus us as parents.

Oh, wow. Yeah. You know, I can say over the years that, that I've heard that looking at it from this vantage point, you know, if you're building a family banking system.

And the tool is the insurance contracts. Well, the insurance company's general rule of thumb is that the children would have no more than 50% of the total death benefit that the parents have. If you are creating a larger total sum of death benefit on your lives as parents or on your lives as grandparents.

Then you are able to create a much larger system for the children and the grandchildren so that when the children become parents and grandparents and when the grandchildren become parents and grandparents, future generations can automatically have much more total death benefit in their program, which of course means much more total cash value, which of course means much more money being kept in the family. So it's really important again to get with your coach and say, here's what I'm thinking, much like you described, right? We want to put more money into our system, but we think we need to put more money in place on the kids. Well, the coach will say, hey, walk me through your train of thought there. Like I want to understand your thinking before I share with you what my thinking is. And then the coach will walk you through and it may end up being the way to go. Or the coach says, yeah, you know what, this is actually the right way to go based on everything that you already have in your life insurance program already. Absolutely. We should get more money in on children's policies. Or here are the reasons that I think it would be a good idea for you to grow your own program on your own life and the long term, the long range, the long range advantages of doing that.

You know, we deal with a lot of individuals, business owners, we have investor now one of the questions that they may have is should we do this personally or should we do this corporately or where should we even begin, personal or corporate?

There are advantages to corporate owned life insurance that are not related to the process of becoming your own banker. So again, it's important to talk to your advisor and your advisor can articulate what those advantages are personally is where the greatest advantage is to implementing the process. If you're planning to take care of personal financial objectives, if you have corporate financial objectives, your corporation can also implement the process. But there are some key, key, key advantages. If you own a company and you've got surplus capital, also known as retained earnings.

Ask yourself this question, who do I want retaining them? The commercial bank or the insurance company that I co own?

Some business owners may think about, okay, this is really good in terms of the process of becoming a banker. And I understand the policy design, but I want to get my accountant's opinion on the policy. And most of the times accountants are not life licensed advisors or they have, they may not understand the process of becoming a banker. So what would your response be to a business owner who's actually thinking about seeking accounting advice on it?

Well, you know, triggering My sense of humor, I would say that I would never go to my dentist to ask for a second opinion on a cardiovascular procedure. An accountant is typically the trusted professional that a business owner is going to get in contact with to say, you know, the tax advantages have been explained to me, but I really just want to truly trust but verify that that is in fact the case. And the accountant should be indicating I'm in no position to provide you with any advice on the placement of life insurance because my advice to you can be construed as advice that a licensed advisor would be giving you. And if I give you the wrong advice and God forbid the unthinkable happens to you, I'm going to be in a lot of hot water financially. And I don't know any business professional, an accountant or an attorney or any other professional who would want to put themselves in that potential situation. An accountant is dealing with taxes, the tax code. An accountant does not receive formal training on the sale and placement of dividend paying, participating whole life insurance contracts. So the accountant naturally would not be in a position to advise you on whether or not that's something you should or shouldn't do.

When we start a policy, for example, we implemented the policy, we get started, we don't have a dollar for dollar access. For example, if you put $20,000 as premium, we're not going to be able to access $20,000 immediately.

Right. If I opened up a grocery store and I capitalized my business and then I walked in the first day of its operation and I cleaned out the cash registers, do I have any money to operate for the rest of the week?

Hey, not only am I going to load my car up with all the food that I can put into a cart and not pay for it, but could you do me a favor, Sharblo, and empty all the cash registers? Because I'm the owner and I'm going to go ahead and take all that money.

Like you're starting a new business that never existed before. And so you've got to treat it like a business and you want the financial energy flowing to that business. You don't want to strip all the resources out of your business the day after you opened it. What long range business thinker would ever want to do that?

Absolutely. So just in, you know, yourself and your family, you've been practicing the concept for more than 15 years. So your family banking system is very different today than what it was when you first got started. You know, one of the things you talk about is instant gratification, such A.

It'S become such a, a human condition, right, because we've been conditioned. Instant food, instant coffee. I use that analogy of Amazon and it's so true. Like you order a package from Amazon and in some cases it can be delivered to your doorstep the same day. And so we come to rely upon instant gratification.

One of the frequently asked question, if this process is such an amazing process, why aren't many people doing it? Why isn't this mainstream financial information?

Just think about this for a moment. Who are the largest purchasers of dividend paying, participating whole life insurance contracts as individuals? I'm not talking about entities. It's the wealthy. And yet you have financial entertainers out there who tell you that by the time you achieve wealth you don't need insurance anymore, you're self insured. So the extremely wealthy are either really stupid and they never got that advice or they know something that you and I don't. Which one do you think it is?

Well, they know something that we don't.

And we're teaching the general public exactly that. How could it be that you're so calm through all this turmoil? Aren't you worried? You know what I'm worried about? What I'm worried about is what our grandkids are going to be left with in the way of the state of this, this world. And that's why at the same time, when I think about all the innovation that's happening, all of the positive great things that are happening in the world, I have an extremely high degree of optimism.

But I'm not worried about what the stock market's going to be doing three months from now or three years from now or ten years from now. I could care less. Peaceful, stress free way of life financially.

One of the questions that we get when it comes to source of premium is okay, what should be the sources of premium that we should consider? We understand we have to capitalize, we have to put premium in, we got to deposit money. But what are the sources that we can consider to have for premium?

Well, you can use coins, you can use $10 bills, $20 bills, $100 bills, $1,000 bills. You can write a check, you can deliver the money yourself directly to the life insurance company.

So all sources can be premium, like income, savings. One of the specific sources Jason always comes up is the registered accounts like RRSPs.

If you've got money that resides presently in a registered account like an rsp, maybe it's invested in mutual funds or money market. Those could be sources of premium. But again it's really important, especially if you're dealing with a registered account that whomever the designated tax professional is that's advising you through the completion of your annual tax returns that you understand that there will be tax consequences. And once you have clarity on what those tax consequences are, the good news is, is that you own that account, you get to decide what you do with it. And so yes, you know, we have a whole process around that and that's all vetted with compliance at the life insurance carrier. They supplied the compliance documentation that we need to provide to explain that if you take money out of a registered account, what those consequences are and if you're using it as a source of premium, that you understand what those consequences are. So yeah, those can all be sources of premium. And we have to share that, you know, we have to share that through the application process where the money is coming from to take care of the premium.

Absolutely. So individually, yes, your registered accounts TFSA as Jason mentioned, can be sources including income and savings. And corporately you retain earnings can be the source of premium for corporate owned policy. Now addition, I'm going to just switch gears here a bit and talk a little bit about life insurance in general need for insurance because that's also one of the questions is I understand participating whole life policy, understand all the living benefits of being the banker. It's amazing, it's fantastic. But I also understand I have a need for insurance. How does one go about roughly calculating how much insurance does one need? And if whole life policy designed for the purpose of becoming a banker, doesn't meet that need for insurance, what other options that they can use?

Today there's a combination of participating coverage with term life insurance. The process of determining what the insurance need is, there are factors that go into that calculation. Your net income presently, the net spendable income as a household, and what percentage of your net income contributes to the total household net income? If something happened to you and you passed away, well, your income passes away with you. And so how many years do you want that income to be replaced for? And then what additional expenses would be triggered as a result of your premature death? If you have children, maybe you had some plans, maybe you had already been saving to send your children away to post secondary education and you want the death benefit to be able to take care of that in a windfall of money. We at ascendant, all of our advisors must of course be life licensed. And so we have a duty of care to determine how much insurance is needed and to present that need to you, that's fulfilling our duty of care. And if the participating policy is inadequate to take care of the amount that's needed, then your advisor would be explaining, here are some other options to bridge that gap. It's ultimately up to the consumer at that point to say, I recognize the need, I want to apply for what's needed, or I'm okay, starting at this lower amount and I will gradually and incrementally bridge that gap over a period of time. So it's a needs analysis process. It's time well spent with your advisor to review that. And your advisor will not only determine the need, but present solutions to meet it.

The book Becoming a Banker, the Infinite Banking Concept, authored by Nelson, the pioneer and founder of the process. This book was authored in the year 2000.

Yeah.

So the question that comes up is, well, the examples or the case studies that Nelson has in his book, like those are based on the year 2000. Like is, is this still relevant today?

Of course it'll be relevant tomorrow. It'll be relevant 30 years from now. Because Nelson, in the book Becoming youg Own Banker, he does give you a preview to the tool. Right. He's actually got some policy illustrations in there. But he, in the, the book, he addresses that because the fifth edition of the book came out long after the year 2000, and the fifth edition is the only one that's being sold in the marketplace right now. If all we did was maybe add one additional year of premium, instead of funding the policy for four years, we fund it for five, and the net effect actually is better, even with lower dividends and with different attributes in the policy. So he said this is not meant to be a snapshot in time where if you hadn't have purchased a policy in the year 2000, then you're out.

Of luck when it comes to source of premium. Can I use my HELOC and start a policy?

The answer is you could use your HELOC for anything that your heart desires. Nelson would often say that he wouldn't recommend that somebody borrow their way into the banking business, but it is possible a person could do that. Yes.

And the last question would be Ascending Financial. So we talked about the client journey, but how much does Ascending Financial Advisors or call coaches charge for the continuation of coaching that we're going to provide to clients going forward? And also, if you, if I may ask you to speak about, how does Ascending Financial get paid for the value that we bring into our clients?

We're not applying fees for servicing, coaching and ongoing mentoring. And so that's all part of how we show up in the marketplace and what we do. We are compensated in Canada in Canadian funds directly from the life insurance company. We don't set the rate. Insurance company sets that rate. But we're blessed. You know, we run a very good business and we serve a lot of people and we'll only continue to serve more. But we don't transfer cost of coaching and mentoring to our clients. You know, we're compensated very well for what we do.