Why Should You Consider The Infinite Banking Concept A Client Journey

There's this great conversation that takes place about your own thinking and how your thinking leads to how your future can grow around your system. And you, you did the work. I didn't jump in and call you and say, hey Clayton, why don't you put your money in jars? And then why don't you set up all these automated transfers? And then, hey Clayton, once you have enough money in the account once, give me a call, we'll get you a policy like it didn't, that's, it's not how it happens. The exact opposite. Right, right. And I think that's important for people to take away because they kind of want this roadmap of how do you do everything? But the reality is how you do everything is different than how I do it and how Jason does it. And so you need to find your way and then by actually doing it, you're going to create capacity to grow and to expand. So how exactly do you decide to just implement the infinite banking concept without even understand how it works? Why would you even consider doing that? Well, we're going to find out today because we've got a incredible guest, a client of mine, Clayton Smith, joining us now. Clayton is a certified engineering technologist. He understands mapping and geom mapping and all kinds of crazy important things around data. He's got a 25 year amazing experience based out of the city of Edmonton. He now focuses all that knowledge base and that energy on real estate, media and mapping, doing cool drone footage and all kinds of amazing things for both realtors and even for people in government who need, need work done in that environment. So really, really cool aspects with his, his company C5 Projects. Now Clayton has embraced the infinite banking concept. He's been an infinite banker for a number of years and I have some of the most epically incredible meetings with Clayton and our discussions take really diverse and fun tracks and so I'm excited about having him on the program for a while. And so Clayton, thank you for joining Jason and I on the, on the program today.

Well, thank you very much, Richard. It's a pleasure to be here. I hope you didn't over promise with your intro there, but sounds pretty good so far.

Clayton, tell us a little bit more about your business. It sounds really interesting. This was the first time that we had an opportunity to be introduced to each other and it sounds interesting, share a little bit more about the context of what your business does and the value that it creates.

Well, thank you, Jason. I kind of of stumbled onto the idea about a year ago just on A road trip. I was kind of on a little bit of a. I call it a sabbatical. You know, it's. Sometimes you get these unexpected opportunities, as we say in life. And so I went on a sabbatical and I came out to bc, which is actually where I'm at right now for the moment. I was out on a walk, and I saw. Walk by a real estate office on Vancouver Island. And the real estate office had these nice pictures of houses, and they had these. These maps. They had floor plans with each of the. Each of the houses. And I thought, huh, well, I can do that. I can make those things up. And. And so I started to dig into that a little bit and looked into one particular opportunity. It was. There was sort of a franchise that was attached to it, but I. I thought I wanted to go in a little bit of a different direction, and I wanted to take a lot of the. A lot of the experience that I've had over the years and some of the interests that I've had and kind of combine that into sort of a business that I wanted to do. And the more I kind of looked into things, I got some more ideas and I started picking up some equipment. I started buying some. I started. I bought a laser. Laser, you know, a lidar laser measuring device. I bought a 360 camera, and these were just kind of, at that point were just kind of toys to play with. And then I bought a drone. And I thought, okay, well, this is kind of interesting and, and fun. And then, and then I talked to a friend of mine who was a real estate agent, known him for years, and we talked about it a little more and. And it kind of sounded like he would be my ideal client and he could definitely help me get started with some business. And, and so I thought about it a little more. I thought, okay, well, maybe what the heck, let's just get this thing started. And it didn't really feel real until I. I bought the commercial liability insurance and all that good stuff for $2,000 and switched my car over to a commercial policy and all that sort of stuff. And I thought, okay, well, now I got to make some money to feed this, these overhead expenses here now. So as time went on, I just started to do a little bit of work for. For this client. I took some drone footage, started making some videos of properties, and over the last several months, we've had a chance to do quite a bit of business there and have made some. Made a number of videos for properties. It tends to be that. That's that's a big chunk of my business now is, is making videos for properties to really showcase them. Highlight the, highlight the offering, tell a little bit of a story about the properties and know, show people, show people a compelling reason why they should get excited to buy it.

Oh, that's really, really good. And you caught the infinite banking concept intuitively knowing that you wanted to begin implementing it with, without being in a place where you had complete clarity or the deepest understanding that maybe you were seeking.

Why? Well, I guess I first came across the concept years ago and, and was intrigued by it. And then I, I had another, another opportunity to, to start implementing it. We, we decided to sell our house and it was in 2016. I think there were, there, you know, the economy in Alberta was kind of starting to go on the downslide. We can get into some of the political reasons as to why, but we'll, we'll take a long time in this, in this chat to do that. But suffice it to say, we sold our house in early 2016. So, you know, we kind of, and then we had that, that, that equity from the house. We cashed in some of that and it's like, okay, well, I got some of this. Okay, I can put it into an rrsp, which I did for some of it, paid down some other debts, which I did there. And, and then I thought, you know what? I've always wanted to try this infinite banking thing. And there was one fellow that I knew, Richard, we'd met a number of years ago just in, just from real estate meetings and so forth years before. So I thought, I'm going to give Richard a shout. And we met. And by that time I already decided I wanted to do it. I just wasn't sure on the exact mechanics of, of it and how it all worked. And Richard gave me the book how to become your own banker. And I skimmed through it and I thought, okay, well, I already know I want to do this anyway, so I'll skim through it. Skim through it and, and let's get going. And Richard asked me a bunch of questions about it and things like that, and I thought, h, yeah, okay, well, let's, let's just go ahead and, and we got started.

That's wonderful. Yeah. The, the fun thing is, you know, I think Clayton gives himself maybe not as much service as he needs to because he, he asks a lot of questions and he's very inquisitive. He's a very curious person. I, I, I naturally gravitate to people who also have A thirst for knowledge. You like to know things and, you know, and you, you put a lot of time and effort into thinking through what a lot of your questions are. So, I mean, we've had a lot of great meetings since that day and, and beyond. And it's led to growing your system. You know, you have, every member of the family is involved in the family system and you know, there's been a lot of, of growth and stuff that's happened in there. And of course, living in a world where the world itself around us changes. As you mentioned, the political environment leads to the economic aspect. So being in Alberta, there's ups and downs and over the last decade, we've seen a lot of those things. We can, Everyone who's from or familiar with what's been going on Alberta will know that. And so that's created both opportunities and, and challenges along the way. But the infinite banking concept or the, the, the system of policies that you have has, has been, you know, growing and maturing over that time frame. And your background in real estate, you know, we met through real estate investment circles, you remember, of the Rain Group, for a long time, as was I, as was Jason. So in fact, literally before we hit the record button, we were doing a shout out to the amazing Don Campbell and how much we value his great take on what's behind the curtain, as he used to call it. And so I think there's a great aspect of your real estate background that really is kind of like a connection point to how this infinite banking concept is showing up in your life and probably even to a large degree, how it became a part of your life in 2016, what comes up for you when you think about, you know, the, the knowledge base you have about real estate and also being a private lender and then how the infinite banking concept sort of intersect in those environments.

Well, yeah, now that you mentioned it, there were a number of things that did intrigue me about the infinite banking concept. And I think the, the thing that probably took the longest, longest amount of time for me to wrap my head around was the fact that you, you borrow back out of your policy and there's no set repayment terms by the, by the insurance company. It's just you just borrow it out and they don't care if you never pay it back because they know you're good for it, because when you die, they get the money back. So they. Of course you do. There is interest that accrues the whole time. So I mean, it is in your interest to pay that down as soon as you can. But the, having, the, having the amount of control over those repayment terms in my mind I think was huge. You know, we, we talked about particular scenarios when, when I started those policies up, but I thought okay, well there's this big policy premium that's going to be due here. What happens if we, if I lose my job? And, and we talked about scenarios to, to go around that. And, and as it turned out a few years later I had the opportunity to exercise that, that contingency plan. So we, we've been, you know, just, and it, and it actually, it's been a resource, a resource for me to draw on and utilize during the time that, you know, I've been in a, in a transition from going from an employee to, to now a business owner. So it's, it's been, I found it's been a very, very useful tool and it's a very unique tool that most people don't, don't know and they don't understand it. And I don't know. For some crazy reason I just, just decided to embrace the whole concept.

Yeah, it's having, having a degree of control, it, the desire for any degree of control over how you finance things. We find that with all the people that we meet with and talk to, which is, we're in conversation constantly about this concept with people who have varying degrees of knowledge. And when you began your journey with this concept, you, one of the things that, sensing that you did realize is that you're not taking control of the entire banking function in your life as it relates to your needs. It's meant to be achieved gradually and incrementally. But you saw the advantage of control and you didn't need a hundred percent control to get started. You, you said, okay, I know I'm going to have some degree of control. And that sort of compelled you to say this is, this is really important to me. This is a unique, a unique advantage of conducting my financial affairs this way. And we meet with people who have a varying sense of, well, if I can't control it all, then maybe I'll just wait until I can before I get started. And it's like you can't read about, about push ups. You gotta do them. Whether you start being able to do two or you're much more physically fit and you can do a hundred, like you can't read about it. You got to just get down and start doing them. And then you have a good coach that walks you through proper form so you don't injure yourself. In other words, you know, don't, don't steal the peas and repay your policy loans and all those great things. But it's, it's really interesting to hear, you know, your perspective, especially considering your engineering background and yeah. Realizing that when something is designed properly and there's also contingency and buffer built into that design, it merits having a really close look under the hood to say, hey, how is this thing put together?

Yeah, agreed. And I don't even know if I could really say that. I still don't fully understand how it all works. I know Richard and I have talked a number of times and we talk about the internal rate of return on the policies and all that. And I'm just like, okay, okay, that's, that's good. For some reason it just, in my mind, it just, it just, it just works. And I think that the, the big thing for me was the, it, it was the control aspect that I, that I, that I really enjoyed about this. And it's to the point I look at every other type of investment now and I, and I look at, I look at it through a lens of degree of control that I have when it comes to things like, like an RSP or an rsp, like any kind of registered government savings program. To me they're almost like a jail for your money. You're very limited on how much control you have. Yes, there is the tax shelter aspect of it. So they're, you know, for depending on a person's financial plan, I mean, it may or may not make sense. But for me now I look at, at the fact that, you know, the amount of control you give up I think is, I think it kind of diminishes the, the tax, tax deferral aspect because you're still going to make, you're still going to pay taxes on it at some point anyways and you don't really get to enjoy that money or the use of that money during the whole time that it's in that registered plan. And you know, philosophically, you know, the, I'm kind of of the mind that registration leads to confiscation and the more money that you have in a registered plan. Well, I think it just, it's just a bigger target, a big juicy target for high taxing governments. And we don't know anything about that in Canada here, do we? So I think that if you can get it outside of that, you're, you kind of change your view on the tax shelter aspect and you want to, you want to look at it as the control shelter aspect. You know, how much, how much control over my money can I can I really get from these various vehicles? So I, I stopped contributing to, to RSPS well before I, before I went into my, my employee to business owner transition. I stopped, I stopped contributing to RRSPS then and I focused mainly on just building up my policy room.

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Go into the whole government standard. No, not at all. We'll, we'll save that for now. I think, I think due to, due to disclosures, I probably can't go too far into it. So.

But, but needless to say, you, you found yourself with an opportunity to transition out of your past career and, and that, that freedom, I mean we had several meetings about that and around how you have multiple policies. How, how's the premium going to work, really getting clear again on what the minimum is versus what the potential is and understanding where you're at in the system. How when you put a dollar in, you're getting more than a dollar back on the system already and giving yourself a little bit of breathing room and peace of mind to know that there's, there's, it's not as restrictive, you know, and I think also an important piece of that. You know, something you mentioned earlier, the idea of not having to repay loans, it's not that you don't have to, but just knowing that the potential is there, there's the knowledge. When you're learning, when people are exploring this concept, they hear, oh great, I have control over my loans. That sounds really good. But just because it sounds good and you hear that and you might know that to be true, to actually experience it, is different. And I think what you were really trying to hit home on is you were aware, you read it on the book, you read the papers, we had the meetings, you understood, but you didn't really truly feel it until you had the experience of, oh yeah, I've got these outstanding loans. Like no one's showing up in a van with a Life company logo on the side and a bunch of heavyset guido looking fellas came out with baseball bats asking me for a loan repayment. So there, there's the piece of like all of a sudden having that real awareness even though you knew that you didn't really know. And I feel like you've gone through that experience now and that's sort of what you're referencing. Am I on track there?

Yeah, I would, I'd say you captured it pretty well. Yeah, yeah. The, you know, I've gone in circles around this a number of times about the control aspect and, and that was a, that was a big one. The, the fact that you can you control your repayment terms and that gives you the Flexibility to, to invest the money how you want to. And it also, it also makes you consider what you are investing into. Yeah, you know, I, anybody that's done any kind of business in the past, you know, I've got, I've got several, several examples of some dogs and some, some boneheaded decisions that I've made that have cost, cost a lot of money. And you know, you, you have to take your lessons, you have to take your lumps. And when you're, when you're borrowing that money out of a policy to make an investment, you do have to make some calculations. And you know, what happens if this investment doesn't turn out? It's like, okay, well, yeah, there's, yeah, the policy is still growing. It's going to take a little more time to pay the loan back. But you know, that all kind of factors into the calculation. And when you look at your rate of return on making a particular investment, like I recently made a private loan that was secured on, across a few properties and vehicles. And so I looked at the, at the source of the funds and it was a combination of lines of credit and policy loans. And as I have more money coming in, my plan for that is any kind of money coming in is basically going to go straight to the policy or it'll just go, you know, pay down any credit lines that I have and then go to the policy. For me, I look at it as one or it's going to, it's going to happen anyways. But if I kind of get into that habit of running that money through the policies, then just kind of keeps it on the radar all the time. And I'm keeping that, those, some of those numbers at the forefront.

Well, and when you initiated that borrowing, you did so from the life insurance company without reducing the asset's value.

That's right.

And that's, that's one thing that we, we communicate so often, especially nowadays when we're in a different interest rate environment than we've been accustomed to for many years. And so when people really grasp that element of it, okay, I can contribute the amount of capital to the system that I've chosen to be the amount of capital that's comfortable and affordable. I can borrow against this asset without reducing its value and without triggering a taxable event. I'm paying no tax on the daily buildup. I'm paying no tax on the death benefit proceeds. The policy itself is the greatest exemption that exists in the Canadian and American tax code. How much of my capital do I not want residing there?

Right.

Because from that place you can go and do these things that you like. A sharp example, you said you had a high caliber opportunity, presumably that it was high caliber to lend capital and you were able to take advantage of that high caliber opportunity. But it wasn't an all or nothing meaning you didn't have all of the financial energy available from your system of policies, so you utilized that in combination with existing lines of credit. Well, don't banks joint venture on deals all the time?

Sure.

Hey, you take a portion of your capital pool, I'll take a portion of mine, we'll put it into this deal and everybody wins. It's the very same thing. You're just sitting in a different seat.

Now and with a little more control of the process and of how it's executed. Yeah, yeah.

I think people really need to take heed of something you stated, Clayton, and it's that the habit, you know, you've, you have developed and you've put a lot of focus on developing the habit of having capital or money or income as it comes in going to the policy first. And that's goes down to behavior, it goes down to mindset. And I know when we first started this, it was more about hey, what's left over that we can use to fund premiums or to build our system with. And over the period of years, through a lot of really fun, very engaging, very thinking, curiosity oriented conversations that we've had, very enjoyable for a lot of reasons, but a lot of it has been, hey, well what if we did this? Oh, and then what if. And so there's like little discoveries that kind of take place. And we've moved from hey, dealing with the money that we have left over, which is what most people are trained in our brain gets us to think about, to now what about the flow of money that's going through our hands. And you've really transitioned a lot of things there. And another thing kind of comes up for me is given the circumstance of transitioning from, you know, working for someone else to working for yourself, there's ability, a bit of an ability to, you know, for lack of better terms, like control some of your income to some degree, you can't necessarily control your next client. But if you have, if you know that you're in a different income tax position now, you have taxable accounts, registered accounts, right. You can now control a little bit better your ability to remove struck strategically that capital, melt those things down in now a preferential tax. The whole purpose of those is to be able to take them out in a tax preferential environment and you've, you've, you found yourself in a position where that's created and so there's a decid. Well, where do we do with it? Well, hey, we, we still need to pay premium. We still want to pay premium. Well, now we have a way that we can start exiting capital from ABC system and moving them over into our XYZ system that we've created and we could do it in a strategic format. So there's been a lot of really cool things that have kind of transpired over the journey so far that's shown almost a, a breadth of opportunities on how you can allocate your own funds.

Well, yeah, it's given, given me a chance to experiment with a lot of, a lot of ideas that I'd had over the years. I know before the transition, you and I had actually talked about, about, like the idea popped into my head and I remember we were discussing this about collapsing my RRSP and just getting it all into my policies because to me it made more sense from a control aspect and from just, well, mostly on the control aspect. And as far as what I was doing with my RRSPs, they were mostly in cash, so I wasn't doing a lot with them. And then the same with my, my pension fund as well from work. So, you know, there's been opportunities now to transition a lot of that out of the, out of those, the money jails, as I call them, and get them into, you know, into policies and into just working. So, you know, during that, during that time where I was on a, on a sabbatical, I thought, okay, well, wait a second. This is, this is kind of the time where we're supposed to be collapsing RRSPs. You know, maybe not this soon in life, but when your income drops, that's the idea behind an rrsp. You take it out when you're in a lower tax environment or lower tax bracket. So I thought, okay, well, I'm in a pretty low tax bracket now. Now is the time to start pulling this stuff out. And so I've been doing that and I've had some pretty, you know, as far as my, my refunds have gone. I mean, yeah, it was a free loan to the government for a while when I pulled the money out. And then they had to give some of that back to me. But I've had a chance to now cycle that back through my policies and through some of my, my other investing activities.

That's incredible. And so to any of our, you know, newer viewers Newer listeners, what would you say to them about how, you know, you went about investigating this concept? And what would you say to them in your own words.

Start as soon as you can? You know, looking back, I, if I had, if I had started, started these policies in my 20s, I probably, well, I mean, it would have been in a far stronger financial position by the time I got, by the time I turned 40 a number of years ago. And I think that in hindsight, for me, for, for the way my mind works, it probably would have been, it probably would have made more sense to build equity inside of a life insurance policy than it would have been to buy real estate. The fact, the, the fact is that the, that the policies and the, the, the lending ability on those, you know, it works like a heloc, but you're, you've got far more control because you don't have the, the monthly payments that are required at the end. So you have total control over your repayment schedule. And sometimes you, you need some money to, to do a project, well, you might not get paid from that project for two months or six months or, well, knowing that at least you don't have a cash flow issue during that time while you're waiting for your, your money to come back. And then when your money comes back in, well, boom, you just dump it back into your, in your policy, pay the loan off and go on to the next thing. So starting early is probably a big thing. You know, thinking back, just as I'm talking, thinking back to earlier in our chat here, you, you'd asked about the experience in real estate and how that relates back to some of my thinking now. And I think that, Richard, something you said early on when we were getting in, getting the policy started, I, you said that it was basically like real estate without walls. And once I, once I started getting into it, I thought, yeah, this is, this, this has almost all the financial benefits of real estate without the political risk of property taxes skyrocketing by 7% a year this year, next year, the year after that. You know, you don't have to worry about unclogging a toilet with an insurance policy. I mean, it's not quite as, you know, perfectly matched like that or juxtaposed like that. But there are a lot of benefits. And when you look at the, you, when you look at the amount of time that it takes to build equity in a policy versus building equity in real estate, if you were to think about. And this is, this is something that I thought of when I first got involved in real estate. So if property values go nowhere for 25 years, at least you've got some pay down. So you've got some equity building up just from your, your, you know, your rental partners, your customers, your tenants, as we, as we, some people call them, they're helping you to pay down that, that mortgage over a number of years. Well, it's a little different here because you're not necessarily borrowing the money to build equity in your policies, although you can. And with that was another experiment that, that we had an opportunity to. Because I did borrow during, well, when I, when I had my job. I mean, I borrowed money to max out my, my contribution room in my policy.

And being in the position where you can decide to what degree and to how do you want to go about building your future. And also the, you know, I think what you're really trying to tie into, Clayton, is something that I think our listeners should understand is recognizing that you have the ability to plan around known events. So this is something that Nelson didn't come out and tell me this directly, and I don't know if he did for you, Jason, but it's kind of like, I think something that just accumulated of like, repetition over time. You know, he talked about planning for windfalls and planning for windfalls. And we think about a windfall as we're going to sell property. Maybe there's a death claim and a state value in the future. There's something of that nature. But so that's, that's planning for windfalls, but there's also planning for known events. So known events would be like, my kids are going to be exiting school and, or eggs. You know, they're. So we're. No, they're going to take over their own expenses. They're going to move out of the house. I don't have to feed, you know, two ginormous teenagers, whatever, steak dinners three times a week and they don't eat, you know, 18 pounds of meat and ground beef or whatever. So like, what is that cost base? Well, he used to talk about how.

All that extra cash flow that would come back.

Yeah, and, and, and so there are known events like that and you know, being aware of them, being familiar with them and seeing, seeing people with families, like large families and thinking about what, just what they're spending on their food budget or they got, their kids are in gymnastics, they're in hockey, they're in dance class, they're in all these things, you know. Okay, so what is that costing you? Like, recently I did an experience with somebody and their kids are in a competitive sport. And Jason, you're very familiar with that. And I had them go through and actually add up, what does it cost them for the tournaments, for the outfits, for the equipment that they need, for the gas and the fuel that they do every week? What is it costing them for the actual cost to, to attend these sessions for private coaching? And before they know it, they actually did the spreadsheet and they, they didn't realize it was $32,000 a year. Yeah, $32,000 a year of after tax money. So they're spending a full salary, every single year of gross income of one, one of the partners, one of the family members, just to support the vision of what they want to do for their kids. Now, your kids are only going to be that age at one time. There's a reason they want to do that. There's some, there's competition, there's skills that they want them to learn, there's relationships they want them to build. There's a, there's value in that. It's not a financial value. It's a value of experience that you want your kids to have. And, and what is that going to mean for them in the future? So you're making a decision about what value do you want to provide or, and, or extract into the future. But it's not necessarily monetary, but there's a monetary cost to creating that value. And so you take that into consideration. Okay, great. We got $32,000 a year. Well, we're going to do that for how many more years? Roughly about three or four more years. And now we're going to start having the kids start taking over those expenses. And we're going to slowly bring that down based on they're going to have to pay for this, this, and this, and then eventually we're not paying for it at all anymore. Okay, well, that's, that's six years out and it's phasing down. And then we're going to. And so, like, you can now think through that experience of what that future looks like. And if you know that that's going to happen and it's reasonably known. I mean, you can't 100% predict the future, but you can be very reasonable about what's a high probability likely occurrence. And then you could start changing things that you do today based on that reasonably known outcome, including the way you think about funding your system. Maybe you might owe on your system a little bit more today because you know that in three years, because you started earlier, you Got that next policy. Let's just say now in three or four years, you're going to actually start replenishing the pool because. But you didn't have to wait. You. You gained three extra years on the back end of your life. Three extra dividends that are building up over time. So there's. I'm not suggesting that everyone would go about doing that, but it's a thinking exercise because Nelson taught us it's all about how we think.

Yeah.

And it has nothing to do with, should I invest my money in X, should I invest my money in Y, should I invest my money in Zed? Should I invest my money in. Insert whatever financial product here you're dealing with the money that's already flowing through the family's hands and thinking about when it's going to be flowing into the family's hands. Big difference. Big difference.

That reminds me. That reminds me of something that, that, you know, we talked about before, Richard. I used to have these savings jars, right. So it'd be a savings jar for vacations and for just spending and things like that. And the illustration that you went through a long time ago was how, you know, you. You're building up the savings. Building up the savings, and then you kill the savings, and then you have to replenish that account again, and then you kill it again. Well, instead of doing that, you know, it finally made sense to me after a while. It's like, well, why not get, get that money into the policy first and let that continually compound for as long as the policy is in service or so for the rest of my life, presumably. And I'll have opportunities to pull that money back out of the policy again in the form of a policy loan. And then all I have to do is take the money that's coming in anyway that I would normally save in a. In a. In a jar, so to speak, and I would just pay the. Pay the policy loan back. And so it's the same amount of money, basically, that's kind of flowing through. Instead, I'm just running it through the policy. And as I'm running it through the policy, I'm allowing that continual compounding to keep on going for the rest of my life. So it made a lot more sense after I started doing it. Of course, it started to make a lot of. A lot of sense. And all of these things that I've done with the policies, they've kind of been experimental. And I had an opportunity years ago to kind of take a chunk of money and get a policy started and it was kind of an experiment. And it's in a lot of ways that that experiment has turned out fairly, fairly well. And probably it probably allowed me to, you know, take this opportunity, you know, to go on the, the, the entrepreneurial journey now and, you know, versus if I hadn't gotten it started, it might have, it might have held me back from making a, you know, the choice to whether to stay or to, to, you know, head down this path or not. So. So yeah, it's I guess like life, life is but a series of experiments when you think about it. We can get philosophical about that, but yeah, I imagine we'll want to keep things on track here.

The late Bob Shields, God rest his soul, he wrote the book titled you don't have to die to win. And one thing that he shared this was not too long before he passed away, he said, if you really want to save money, repay policy loans. And Clayton, you just described, you just described that activity based on your own firsthand, real experience.

Experimentation. Yeah.

And so it made me think of Bob Shiels and some of the things, his nuggets of wisdom that he used to share.

There's one really cool thing that, you know, Nathan, that, sorry, Clayton started to do early on, which I thought was interesting, and he kind of shared with me how he was going about doing. I thought, wow, that's really cool. Like, would you, would you record a bit of a video just telling me about that? And this is a number of years ago, maybe it's in 2018, 2017 that we did this.

Right?

So actually folks of our clients can go to the Ascendant membership site and they can see this video. It's in there. And it kind of circled back to the jars a little bit. But it was, you know, you put a little spreadsheet together and you were starting to be an honest banker and pay yourself and starting to do it with, you know, the family, with your wife and your. And your children on smaller items, smaller expenses. You went and bought clothes. Okay, well, everyone's got clothes in their budget, but instead of just buying the clothes, you were taking these smaller expenses, things in the hundred dollar range or even less, and you were making a repayment schedule on those little items.

Yes.

And doing it on a bi weekly basis. And you would break it down to these small increments. Now there's a little bit of work, don't get me wrong, there's a little bit of work in that, but part of the work in doing that was about going through the behavioral, habitual, mental experience. Of, well, if I can do it on this big scale, why can't I do it on the little scale? And, and getting a little bit more clear about that. And you weren't taking a policy loan to do this 100 item. Like, people start to think, oh, I need to go take a policy loan to do it. Like, no, I, I took money. It's money was in my savings account or whatever. I had to go buy the clothes we need. You know, my daughter needed new shoes. So the money's being spent. Let's be intentional, like get really clear on how we're replacing it and let's add 10% on it. So that's one thing that you started to do very early on. And I haven't seen a lot of other people really begin doing it in that way. And so I really want to commend you for that. Not only, but like part of that clean, I think is important to express because that's part of your learning style, it's part of your learning journey. So the way that you began to implement this at the micro level enhanced how you could think about doing it on the macro level. And I think that's an important takeaway for our listeners to understand that practice begins with practice. You know, Nelson or Jason talked about the push ups. You have to do something and it doesn't have to be this big grand thing. It doesn't have to be, you know, I need $45,000 for a flip project on a real estate deal. Like people or I need, oh, I gotta buy a new truck. And it's an $80,000 truck. I need to have enough money to go do that tomorrow. I'm like, how about, I'm gonna go buy a, you know, I'm gonna go buy an Oilers hockey Jersey and they're 200 or whatever. They're gonna be a lot more after this next series is finished. And they're, you know, they're gonna, they're gonna, we're gonna go repay that to our system. So there's a way to bring this down at the, at the, at the moderate level and get incremental practice. And that incremental practice builds to larger and larger ideas and results and opportunities. And I think that's kind of what the journey has been for you. Even though we've maybe never stated it like that.

Yeah, you know, that reminds me. Yeah, that, that is, that's kind of how I got started in. You know, I looked at it as experimenting or practicing. But yeah, I, I mentioned before I had the, these savings Jars. So we would have a savings jar for vacation, for example, or just for spending. So yeah, how I, how I started doing that was to just put some of these lessons into, into practice. So I would, if I wanted to go on a, on a weekend getaway and say it was $500, well, if I had a thousand dollars saved up in my, you know, vacation fund, I would take that into a number of payments over several weeks, right? And then I would just take that off of my. I actually had automatic transfers set up to put that money back into the, into the account. And so the account would grow just from, just from doing that. And it was money coming in anyway because it was from a job. And so I just timed the payments to go into this other. Or time the transfer to go from the account that my paycheck came into. And then that same day it went to the other account. So the other account was still kind of growing. And so I thought about that, you know, after a while, probably a year or two of doing that, and I thought, oh, okay, well, that's, this is kind of how it's work, how it works. This is what Richard was talking about. And then I just decided to just. It just made sense at that point to just put the money into the policy first and then take it back out from there. Because with the, with the, pulling the money, when you pull the money out of the savings account, you're stopping any kind of compounding effect. Even though bank accounts weren't paying any interest back then anyways, and they're still really not. But at least when the money is put into the policy, you're always, you're taking advantage of that compound growth. So it just made sense for me to just run through the policies at that point.

What's key about that is that's that experience and that practice is what led to natural expansion. So people say, well, how do I grow and how do I expand my system? Like, well, we'd asked Nelson. He said, well, as soon as, as soon as your mind can conceive of doing so. So because you were doing the stuff, it prompted the question, hey, I need to talk to Richard. Hey, Richard. But doing this, like, maybe I should just get another policy. And I'm like, okay, well, maybe you should do that. Walk me through your thought process. Help me show, show me more about what you're doing so we can see if it makes sense to expand versus Cool Clayton. Let's go ahead and get that illustration done and get it submitted right now. You know what I mean? So There's. There's this great conversation that takes place about your own thinking and how your thinking leads to, you know, how your future can grow around your system. And you. You did the work. I didn't, I didn't jump in and call you and say, hey, Clayton, why don't you put your money in jars? And then why don't you set up all these automated transfers? And then, hey, Clayton, once you have enough money in the account, once you give me a call, we'll get you a policy. Like it didn't. That's. It's not how it happens. The exact opposite. Right, right. And I think that's important for people to take away because they kind of want this roadmap of how do you do everything? But the reality is how you do everything is different than how I do it and how Jason does it. And so you need to find your way. And then by actually doing it, you're going to create capacity to grow and to expand.

There's two most important words in the title of this book, your own. That's what Nelson was trying to impart upon people, is that this is about becoming your own banker and doing it in such a way where you truly feel like you're the one in a position of control, but you're exercising your imagination. You're thinking about your thinking. Not Richard's, not Jason's, but your thinking. And then you're putting a process in place that works for you and for your family. And so, Peyton, today was awesome. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for being here with us. And Rich, do you want to take us across the Dunn line?

Yeah, let's do it. Clayton, as always, I always appreciate our conversations. They're much more than just having a chat about a policy. We go down very many different rabbit holes, which is always fun. So I appreciate that about you and just your. Your general openness. And now, you may not know this, of course, but when you decided to come on our program today to share a little bit about what your journey with this process has been, you don't realize, but someone's going to watch this, and that might be the tipping scale for them to decide that this is something they need to implement in your life. And so in that regard, you're already showing up as a hero. But what we really just want to understand is who would you most want to be a hero to?

Well, my kids. I have started policies. Started policies a number of years ago for the kids. And, you know, I. I was kind of realistic, you know, when it came to. To Parenthood, It's a lot of times you're, when you tell kids something, you've got to do something, you got to think of something a certain way, they tend to do the opposite. So I, what my philosophy was was just kind of to be somewhat influential and influential, maybe plant some seeds of thought into their minds and then maybe Sometime in their mid-20s they might go, oh yeah, you know what, dad was talking about this years ago and he was kind of right. And, and some of that is starting to happen. My, both of my kids are now in their early 20s. My oldest daughter is working, she's got a full time job and she's, we're starting to have some conversations every now and then about her, you know, kind of taking over the policy, what that would entail and things like that, and how she would buy the policy and, and then in turn take it over and it would be a financial instrument for her to utilize down the road. And if she started now in her mid-20s, then by the time she was my age, in my mid-40s, mid, late-40s now, I could conceivably be financially free just from, not just from the policy itself, but the kind of thinking that it requires to be able to utilize it. And by looking at, at money flowing through your life in a, in a whole different lens, I just implementing that at an early age will lead to financial freedom, I think so. So to, to answer your question, yeah, if I, if I could be a hero, I would be a hero to my, to my kids. And if there's, you know, one or two or a handful of people that are watching this sometime down the road, maybe next week or, you know, a week after, whenever it's posted or in a year and it kind of turns the light bulb on for them, well, then that's great too.

Well, and that's about the right quantity of our audience. You know, one, two people.

I'm just kidding.

We are sincerely grateful for our North American audience that is growing each and every day. And so Clayton, thank you so much again being with us and to all of our viewers, you, you just saw another video show up that we are recommending to you because there's no such thing as having arrived at knowledge. And courtesy of our wonderful editing team. They have shared this video that we're recommending so that you can continue your journey of learning. So gentlemen, make the rest of your week outstanding. This was a lot of fun. Have a great rest of your day, guys.

Thank you very much. You as well. Take care of.