Without THIS Nothing Else Happens (A Canadian Wealth Foundation)

Banking is the most important business in the world. And this is what Nelson taught us. Think about it, without the process of banking, nothing happens financially. Anything that you want to do, whether that's go buy a stick of gum or if that's invest in your next rental property in Canada, everything starts with the foundation of banking. Because money has to flow and somebody has to perform that distribution function. And every time money flows, there's a cost of doing business and someone is recapturing that cost. And likely today it isn't you, but it can be.

Now imagine the foundation we're talking about, real estate investing and those sort of things. You're probably not going to buy a piece of real estate that's built on a dirt, dirt foundation or it has a cracked or a crumbling foundation. It's probably not going to last you very long. Anything that you want to do in life, whether that's building a strong, healthy body, well, you got to, you got to have a strong foundation, eat the right food, have a nice program in place, maybe get some support, some accountability partners, whatever, that's all a part of the foundation. So that's what we're going to do today is we are setting the foundation to learn how to implement the process of becoming your own banker, the infinite banking concept. And the stronger your foundation, with your education, your coaching and your system, the more wealth you're going to be able to create and the easier this process is going to be for you. So without further ado, let's dive right in. Who was R. Nelson Nash? So who was R. Nelson Nash? This is a quote that he coined in the year 1994 when he finally got the banks, as he referred to the snakes and dragons out of his life. What a peaceful, stress free way of life it is when you get the banks out of your life. And if you're a real estate investor, you know exactly what I'm talking about. All the hoops that you have to jump through just to get a qualification. You'll know that you are capable of becoming your own banker. You're going to have clarity, clarity on the problem, you'll have clarity on the solution, and you'll know exactly what you can do. And that's the most important piece in my mind. It's all about what you can do. Because when we focus on what we can control, then we're making a difference. If we focus on all the other things that are going on, we're powerless and we feel weak and we feel small. So I encourage you as we go through that, think about the actions that you can take, what you can change in the process to make a difference. You will feel like one of our past attendees who said that they found hope in a new way, that they could create their own peaceful, stress free financial life. Because there are a lot of people walking around in Canada right now that feel pretty hopeless. They feel pretty powerless. They are not really sure what the future holds for them. So if you can leave feeling like you can create a peaceful, stress free life, you can avoid what is the opposite of stress free. It looks a little bit like this. And I love this slide. Every single time I see it, I laugh because this little girl represents every single one of us has experienced this feeling before. Like, oh, right. So that's what the opposite of stress free looks like. Now, what have we been taught? What have we been told? What do you need to do to create wealth? Well, you have to put your money at risk. The more risk, the more reward. You've been taught to put your money in stocks or bonds or mutual funds, commodities, all those kinds of things. So you effectively put your money in a financial prison. You face some kind of a penalty, whether that's a sales fee, a tax or a loss of growth or whatever if you go and access that money. So it's effectively in a prison. And then you go to someone else's bank. Now that is such a key bit of language there. Someone else. If it's someone else's bank, you're playing by someone else's rules, right? You go to someone else's bank when you need to access the money. You. And it simply doesn't have to be that way. It's absolutely absurd. Now I'm telling you that if you've been handing control of your money over to somebody else, you might not be in the best situation right now, but it's okay because it is not your fault. You know, we always do the best we can with the knowledge and resources that we have. It's not your fault. Now the question is, you're here already. Are you committed to becoming your own banker? Are you willing to commit to improve anything that you're now doing financially that is preventing you from becoming your own bankers? Well, everybody, welcome to commitment. Enjoy your stay. That's how you make a difference, is getting committed to things. I discovered the path to a peaceful, stress free financial way, the hard way. Now I joke a little bit when I say that, but just for context, I'm turning 38 years young here in about a month or so and I've been implementing the process of becoming your own banker now for about four or five years. And I've been aggressively growing my system in the last three years. And I've been licensed in the industry of life insurance for 11 years this year, actually. But the first six, seven years I was in the business because I wanted to make a difference for people. I wanted to learn so I could help people deal with the flow of money and debt. And, you know, I didn't even know when I first got in the industry that I'd be dealing with life insurance. But I also selfishly wanted to learn those things for myself. And I mistakenly thought that that's actually what I was going to learn when I got into the business. And I'm not knocking the industry or anybody else, but I found in my experience that it was really a lot about just pushing product versus solving problems. So fortunately for me, I didn't quit. I didn't give up. I was able to find R. Nelson Nash's book, and I was able to find the practitioner program and eventually get a mentor and then eventually join the Ascendant financial team. So I'm very grateful for that. But prior to the last four or five years or so, when I was a young man and I first came out to Alberta from New Brunswick, that's where I'm originally from, all I thought, like, my family doesn't have a wealthy background and we have many generations of poverty in my family. So I was on a mission to kind of transform that. And I thought, well, hey, if I just get a really good job and I work really hard and I make more dollars per hour and I get a pension, I'll eventually be free and I'll be able to do more things for my family and my kids and all those kinds of things. And as I started to go through that apprenticeship and I was in the construction industry, I started to learn the more I made, the more they took. So the more you make, the more they take, right? And I was effectively putting my money in prison. I was using credit cards and debt. I was doing all the same things that everybody else is taught to. I was financing cars and focusing on interest rates and all those kinds of things. And money was constantly flowing away from my family, and I constantly had to go and work harder to make more money to keep up with everything. And when I was about 26 years old, I got a very interesting and unique opportunity to actually compete. Some of my teammates might not even be aware of this. I competed on a Canadian television show called My Rona Home. My Rona Home and it was a local show and it was here in Calgary and I competed against another family. My family and I, we went through this whole process to get to qualify for it. Went from like a thousand families that, that applied all the way down. They boiled it down to two families and by the grace of God or the higher power of your choice, we got selected and we were on this TV show. It was an awesome experience and we actually had an opportunity to win a brand new home, fully furnished, but we actually did the renovations and built the interior and it was a big competition and all that, right? So that's all well and good, it was an amazing experience. But when you give a 26 year old guy or a family the keys to a mortgage free home and they're starting to read books and learn about investing and it seems really easy, right? So I took a lot of big swings, right? I went and I had great credit and I had good income and I was able to qualify for a large amount of line of credit and I made a lot of mistakes. You know, I don't know if you're a fight fan or not or even baseball, but when you take big swings and you watch those fights, a lot of times the big swings, the guy is able to see it coming from a mile away and they miss often. And unfortunately that's what happened for me many, many times. I took big swings and I missed a lot. But the good news is you either win or you learn. So I learned a lot in those first sort of 10, 15 years of working and investing and, and being a family man. And I get to bring all that value to the conversations with my clients. And like I said, I'm grateful to say now that we're implementing the process of becoming your own banker, we get to enjoy our capital growing every single day and I get to be patient and allow opportunities to track me down rather than me the other way around. And I get to sleep well at night knowing that my family's protected, God forbid anything were to happen to me. And my wife told me that, she tells me frequently now that she's so grateful that we're together and that we worked hard and that we didn't give up, that she can now relax because she can take care of the kids and do what she needs to do and feed them good healthy food and the bills are paid and all that kind of stuff. So that was sort of a quick high level to my path to a peaceful, stress free financial life. And we now control all of the payment streams all the flow of the money in our home. Most people believe that they need someone else to take care of their money. Most people believe that it's necessary, as I said earlier, to take risk in order to grow it. Nothing wrong with taking risk, nothing wrong with investing, but you simply don't have to in order to grow it. Most people know next to nothing to the process of banking and its importance in their lives and wellbeing and how to create wealth from the process of banking. Now, here's the truth. Truth number one is that the difference between you getting stressed or staying relaxed financially is who controls the banking function in your life function. Truth number two is you don't have to put your money in prison for decades and rely on someone else to achieve the financial abundance that you deserve today. You just don't have to, you don't have to be rich to become your own banker. It's all about getting started rather than how much you get started with. Just get started because we can't get the time back. Who is this for? This is a really important question. Who's this actually for? Well, it's for you. The process of becoming your own bank, or the infinite banking concept is for you. Because we all have the need for the use of money in banking. That's just how it works. So this is for you. Now, as I said earlier, let's get into how the infinite banking concept got started. Tom, I'm going to take you back in time a little bit. And this is a story about Nelson's journey you may be familiar with in the 1980s. It's interesting that we might be going through a similar situation right now. But in 1980s, inflation went wild, jumped to 18%, the interest rates went through the roof. 21.5% is what it peaked at in. So that's what Nelson had to deal with. Nelson was doing quite well in the real estate industry at that time. He was just taught, hey, you know, if you just keep borrowing from banks and you use somebody else's money and put that into maybe a land or do a flip or a rental property, all you're on the hook for is the interest that you have to pay to the bank. And then when you flip that home, you get all the profit. Well, that's all very true, but the problem is, is nobody actually taught Nelson what would happen if the interest rate lever went the other way. And so he was stuck with $500,000 of mortgage debt at 21.5% plus, because that's the prime rate he was paying. 23.5%, 23% plus. And so it was costing him a lot of money just to be able to service that debt. And he literally fell to his knees night after night, praying to God or the higher power of your choice for a solution. And sometimes, again, it's those hard times that, that call us to go looking for something different. So we'll expand on that as we go. Now everyone needs a heart. Would you agree? I want to tell you a story about Nelson's journey. One of the things that Nelson was really great at was creating analogies to help us wrap our mind around how this process works, how money works, how the flow of money works. Don't quote me on this year, but back in, I think it was 1989, after Nelson started to implement the process of becoming your own banker, around, I believe, 1982, 84, he had been working on this and he actually wasn't really coaching anybody on the process at this point because everybody thought he was crazy, including his wife Mary. Because as he continued to earn income and as he would come into a windfall, he didn't pile that money into someone else's bank. He actually continued to expand his banking system and build more policies because he knew that that was the way for him to actually control the function in his life. And so when he got to about 1984, probably about halfway through that journey of firing the snakes and dragons, as he would say, he had a quarter BYP chest surgery. And they opened him up and they took his heart out of his chest so they could do that work, the good work that the doctors do. But they hooked him up to something called a heart and lung machine. And the job of the heart and lung machine is to pump and circulate the blood through the body to keep them alive for a couple of hours while they did the work. And now Nelson didn't remember that experience because obviously he was under for the entire thing, but he kind of got a breakthrough around it. He realized that he was survived. He was merely surviving during that process. He was. He wasn't actually living. He wasn't experiencing life, but he was surviving. So that heart and lung machine did the important job of keeping the blood flowing to keep him to or allow him to survive, but he wasn't actually living. And that's what Nelson said. As it relates to the banking process in your life, allowing someone else to control the banking function, the flow of money, and capture that energy in your life is equivalent to living off a heart and lung machine. If someone else is the Banker, in your life, you're merely surviving. Financially, you're not living, you're not thriving. Banking is the most important business in the world. And this is what Nelson taught us. Think about it. Without the process of banking, nothing happens financially. Anything that you want to do, whether that's go buy a stick of gum or if that's invest in your next rental property in Canada, everything starts with the foundation of banking. Because money has to flow and somebody has to perform that distribution function. And every time money flows, there's a cost of doing business and someone is recapturing that cost. And likely today it isn't you, but it can be. The banking system pumps money, as I said, through, or just like that heart and lung machine, what the banking system actually does is it pumps money through the economy and it puts it where it's needed. That's what it does. And all that money is going to flow. Some of that money is going to flow through our hands, and some of it's going to flow through your family's hands. But the interesting thing about it is that it's all flowing, right? But where does it actually all wind up? So before I share where it winds up, let me create an analogy for you here. I want you to picture a globe. Now, there's water, there's lakes and streams and rivers, there's all these different pools of water, but there's actually only one pool of water on the entire globe. It's the ocean. And just because the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic, the Pacific, they're all connected, they have different names. So even though there's a lake somewhere in Europe, you know, it heats up, it evaporates, it gets pulled into the clouds and then it rains. Maybe it lands here somewhere in Canada, probably in the form of sleet or snow, but it comes down and it lands here. You know, we're going to drink some of that. It's going to flow through our bodies, it's going to go through rivers, lakes and streams. But where is it ultimately all going to wind up? It's all going to wind up right back in the ocean, because there's only one pool of water on planet Earth. And much like there's only one pool of water on planet Earth, there's actually only one pool of money. So when that money's flowing through, it doesn't matter if it's in Europe or China or Canada, the United States, it doesn't matter if it's a bank or a life insurance company or an investment firm. Different currencies and denominations the money's being managed in all different areas, but ultimately there's only one pool of money. And it all winds up right back in the banking system. So the money is always flowing right back to the bank. They have use and control over all the money. The issue is, or a question would be how much of the banking function do you control as it relates to your needs, needs, and I'll dare to say wants as well. How much do you actually control? Remember, there's only one pool of money in the world. And what Nelson saw was that he was actually pumping money in the wrong direction. When I say pumping money, like we're all, we're earning income and that money has to flow, it has to be deposited and we're flowing that money through someone else's bank. So they're actually harnessing the energy and the growth potential of that money. And when you want to go access money or when he wanted to go access money, he had to go through bankers and toll takers and gatekeepers who were all making money off of him, making money off the hard work that, excuse me, that he was doing and they were abusing him. And let me ask you, has that ever happened to you?

Now he realized what he needed to do was crank up large life insurance premiums. Well, you can't do that overnight.

Everyone thought that he was crazy. As I mentioned earlier. Why is he putting money into these life insurance policies, including his wife Mary?

You have to get it done incrementally over time. Why are we putting money into these policies? Because the policy itself, as you're going to discover later, is the tool that we use to implement the process of becoming your own banker. And we can use the policy system to access value to achieve objectives that we want to achieve rather than accessing the value from someone else's bank so that we can control the stream of payments. So he's cranking up these policies and, and people are thinking like, why are you doing that? Why are you not just paying off the debt? But he saw something that other people didn't see, that pumping money into the life insurance company instead of pumping it into the bank allows the life insurance company to get use and control over that money. They're the most financially solvent businesses in the world. And when he started these policies with a mutually owned insurance company, he actually became a co owner in the life insurance company. Well, if they're a co owner in the life insurance company and the life insurance company is creating profit, who are they sharing that profit with? Well, the owners, much like a bank. Right? So we can own the insurance company and pump that energy through a company, a system that we own, we control, and we can actually benefit from. That's what he meant by pumping money into the system in the wrong way.