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Mike Crawford interview transcript.

Chris Bay:

We’re starting down this road of interviewing our team members at Life Success Legacy so that you, the listeners, can get to know us a little bit, but really part of it is for you to hear the diverse ways that we came to know about life’s Infinite Banking and how we implemented it in our own personal lives. Everybody on our team were clients at one point, and we applied Infinite Banking in our own lives. Then many of us joined Life Success & Legacy because of how it impacted our lives. This podcast is going to be talking with Michael Crawford, one of our team members here. These podcasts are because of Michael; he does a lot of the background technology work. He manages our website, the podcast, and other things for us. Today we’re going to get to hear his story. Michael, give us a sense of where you were in life. When you first learned about the Infinite Banking concept, give us age, family, that kind of stuff.

Michael Crawford:

Sure, I would have been 32 years old. I was working in Baldwin city for a software development company, and I was working a lot of hours and very stressed. It was a good, fun job. I’m very much grateful for it because I’ve learned so much about technology and implementing proper marketing strategies and things of that nature that the time that I spent there was more than valuable.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

But also at that same time, when I learned about Infinite Banking, my wife was pregnant with our son.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

And about 6-7 months pregnant stuff.

Chris Bay:

What was your introduction to Infinite Banking?

Michael Crawford:

Well, our office as a software development company, we didn’t get a lot of walk-ins as you might think. We normally dealt with people via email or phone calls or went to their place of business to learn a little bit about them and who they were rather than come to us. One afternoon this gentleman walked in, had a bunch of stuff in his hand, and he goes, I think I need to talk to you, and he pointed right at me, and I thought, do I know this guy from somewhere?

Chris Bay:

Right.

Michael Crawford:

Well, it turns out it was Mike Everett, the founder of Life Success & Legacy. He was in desperate need of a website rebuild.

Chris Bay:

Okay.

Michael Crawford:

So that was my first introduction to Mike Everett.

Chris Bay:

Okay. So, you were introduced to Mike Everett, and then how did it place that you were introduced to Infinite Banking?

Michael Crawford:

Well, you see Mike, didn’t try to sell me on anything at all. In fact, when he sat down, he gave me an overview of the company that he was trying to really take to the next level. He handed me a packet of information between flyers, brochures, handwritten things that were just notes about what he wanted the new website to look like.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Crawford:

And last but definitely not least was Nelson’s book.

Chris Bay:

Oh okay.

Michael Crawford:

And being Mike Everett, if you know him at all or have listened to his podcast, he takes the look at the diving board, the high dive, jumps off, and then determines if there’s water after he’s jumped off.

Chris Bay:

Right.

Michael Crawford:

Same thing occurred with this website. He gave me all this information. He asked how much it would cost. We wrote up a contract; he signed a check that day.

Chris Bay:

Wow.

Michael Crawford:

That was the fastest sale I’ve ever made. And then began the process of building the site, which just by a pure reading [crosstalk 00:03:56].

Chris Bay:

Osmosis [inaudible 00:03:57] yeah.

Michael Crawford:

In osmosis. I started absorbing some of the information and considering that my wife was six, seven months pregnant, falling asleep on the couch.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Crawford:

Early. I did the first cardinal sin that we teach people not to do. And I read the book after nine o’clock.

Chris Bay:

So, we’re two for two on our team of people reading Nelson’s book after nine o’clock. Interesting. We tell everybody not to read it after nine o’clock, and both you and Everett have both started reading it late at night.

Michael Crawford:

As it turns out, it was more a matter of like I started reading the material on the website and transferring it to the new website. And I kept thinking to myself; this information is very pertinent to where I was in life. I was adding a new human to the world with my wife. And, finances were obviously a concern [crosstalk 00:04:48].

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Crawford:

Always are right. Most families have that discussion weekly, monthly, quarterly, whatever.

Chris Bay:

Right.

Michael Crawford:

You know, sometimes when they don’t want to, they have it.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Crawford:

In my head, I was just like, is there a better way? Where I was, we did not have a 401k program. So everything I did was on my own.

Chris Bay:

Right.

Michael Crawford:

I had to be the researcher, I had to be the investigator.

Chris Bay:

And you had been a business owner as well. Right.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah, exactly. I used to own an automotive repair shop in Lawrence, Kansas. And you know, in fact, when the economy took a downturn in 2008, that was one of the first things we had to get rid of was our match on our 401k. So I also took a drastic hit, like everybody else in that time. I had a very bitter taste in my mouth pertaining to these qualified plans.

Chris Bay:

So you’re curious about something else. There’s got to [crosstalk 00:05:38].

Michael Crawford:

You know.

Chris Bay:

Be something else out there.

Michael Crawford:

I had read just enough information to know. I didn’t want to get involved with the Dave Ramsey stuff and his stuff; his teachings were fantastic. But it just didn’t seem like it was the lifestyle that I wanted.

Chris Bay:

Right.

Michael Crawford:

I have read about other things that you can do other types of investments and not only did they seem too risky, they required me to manage them constantly.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

As I was sitting there thinking about raising a new child and the life changes that were already about to take place, the idea of undertaking additional responsibilities to manage money that wasn’t guaranteed to grow seemed daunting.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. I bet. And you were how old at that time? About [crosstalk 00:06:22].

Michael Crawford:

32.

Chris Bay:

32 or so.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

That’s pretty high stress.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah. And it’s not unique. I’m not unique in that. Right.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Crawford:

That’s what has drawn me towards Infinite Banking, more than anything is the idea that it can be and is for anyone.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Crawford:

Whether you’re a college student or whether you are in your fifties or sixties.

Chris Bay:

Or even seventies.

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

It is called the Infinite Banking concept because of that exact thing. It is infinite in the possibilities of application and infinite in who can actually join it.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. Okay. So you read the book.

Michael Crawford:

Yes.

Chris Bay:

And what was the next step, and what was your timeframe from the time when you start reading the book to the time when you and Mary said, we’re starting a policy.

Michael Crawford:

Well, I read the book in November, maybe middle of November. I called Mike that very next morning at like 7:15 because I just knew he’d be awake. And I said, dude if this is not complete garbage, we’ve got to sit down and talk. There’s got to be something to this if this is not just a scam.

Chris Bay:

Mm-mm (negative).

Michael Crawford:

And he said, all right, let’s do it. We schedule an appointment. In fact, no, I take that back. We did not schedule an appointment. He said you know what? We have a boot camp coming up. It’s our first time doing these things in Lawrence, Kansas. We’re going to do an introduction to this concept, and I’m going to walk through some book review stuff with everybody. I’d like you to join; they’re free to do.

Chris Bay:

Right.

Michael Crawford:

And I said, okay. He said it’d be really good if your wife could make it. And I said, well, she’s pregnant. We’ll see how she feels that day.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

Fast forward to now, January, it was the middle-end of January. I went to this boot camp, and I took three full pages of notes that day. I went home, and my wife was convinced that they had served a Kool-Aid.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

At the event and that, I have now joined a cult.

Chris Bay:

Right.

Michael Crawford:

And that being said, she shut me up after about 10 minutes of talking and said, I’m not interested in hearing about this right now. We’re trying to have a child.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

And I thought, okay, well that may be that. I couldn’t let it die though.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Crawford:

I was becoming a little disgruntled in my job just because of the time investments, more than anything. And the fear that that would continue when my child arrived.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Crawford:

I didn’t want to feel like I missed out on his infancy.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

The more I contemplated that, I was like, I’ve got to find a plan. And then things have got to start coming together.

Chris Bay:

Like Mike Everett, this was not only in your brain thinking about you personally, how to manage your money, how finance things in your life; you were also looking at the potential of it being [crosstalk 00:09:00].

Michael Crawford:

Exactly.

Chris Bay:

A career change.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah. For more than any reason, it was the word hope I wrote it down. And I think I still have those notes. I wrote the word hope down at least seven times that day at that first boot camp. That was something that we lacked was the hope that there was something out there that could work.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

For the hope that our finances would not be the topic of an argument every now and then, especially now you’re bringing a kid around, you’ve got more expenses and hospital bills.

Chris Bay:

Right.

Michael Crawford:

Doctor bills and this, that, and the other. So yeah, absolutely, it was sort of a mind shift where I had to make a decision whether or not I wanted to continue down the path I was on or find something that would fulfill me more.

Chris Bay:

That’s awesome.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

So you came to a bootcamp?

Michael Crawford:

I did. Yeah.

Chris Bay:

And then what happened after that?

Michael Crawford:

Well, like I said, I went home wife shut me up after a few minutes. I said, okay, well then if you won’t go or listen to that, let’s have Mike come over and do a presentation for us.

Chris Bay:

How’d that go?

Michael Crawford:

Because he’s offered to do that. It scared the living crap out of her; to be real honest, it was so intense. She was so stressed anyway with being pregnant. It freaked her out. But she knew that there was something to it if I was really that into it. That I was continually bringing it up. And she trusts me, but also she knows that I wouldn’t have ever put us in a position of high risk.

Chris Bay:

Right.

Michael Crawford:

Or completely turning our world upside down if I didn’t have to.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Crawford:

And so Mike said, okay, well, that didn’t work out as well. Come to this next boot camp. It was March like fifth or something like that.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Crawford:

And so, at eight and a half months, virtually eight months pregnant, little over eight months pregnant, we come to this boot. She comes to this boot camp with me, and there was like ten people there, I think.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. And I remember it so clearly because I’ve known mary for years.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

When she was in high school.

Michael Crawford:

Exactly.

Chris Bay:

I remember just seeing her, she was so pregnant.

Michael Crawford:

Yes. Long story short, she got interested in it because she realized that there was something to it. She felt very comfortable with you, Chris. And she became more comfortable with Mike as that boot camp went along because she saw the event. I think for her seeing other people there and hearing some other people’s stories [crosstalk 00:11:18].

Chris Bay:

Right.

Michael Crawford:

Associated with it and even hearing yours and Mike’s in a different light than just sitting in our living room really made a point to her. It was a very few short days later that our son was born. And we decided to go ahead and get this thing started.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. So Milo’s born. How did you start with policies?

Michael Crawford:

Mary and I both did a policy on each other.

Chris Bay:

Okay.

Michael Crawford:

Or on ourselves.

Chris Bay:

Right.

Michael Crawford:

We did a $5,000 annual premium policy on both of us.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Crawford:

And we drew up a plan with you guys in the software that we had available. Without changing our cash flow, excuse me, we found out that we could be debt-free in about eight years.

Chris Bay:

Okay. So how long ago was that?

Michael Crawford:

Three policy years.

Chris Bay:

Three policy years.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

Okay.

Michael Crawford:

A little over two years ago.

Chris Bay:

Okay. So a little over two years ago. Can you give us just a real quick update? You mentioned hope.

Michael Crawford:

Yes.

Chris Bay:

How’s that hope playing out?

Michael Crawford:

It’s fantastic. We actually used part of our policy this year. Once we paid our premium to go on our first vacation in a very long time. We actually went to Chicago to see the musical Hamilton and to goof around a little bit. It was our first time leaving our son behind, which was hard and exciting at the same time.

Chris Bay:

Right.

Michael Crawford:

We also paid off my student loan. We, in fact, just got the email yesterday that congratulated us that our student loan was paid off. We are down to a couple of car loans, and our mortgage as really our only debt. And we started with, what was it, roughly $250,000 worth of debt.

Chris Bay:

Wow.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah, it’s been pretty amazing. And to be Frank, we haven’t implemented as efficiently as we should have.

Chris Bay:

Maybe not as efficiently, but aren’t you even ahead of schedule though.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah, we’re a little bit ahead of schedule. Some of it was because of a small windfall that came our way in the form of a bonus for Mary that we were able to reinvest.

Chris Bay:

Okay.

Michael Crawford:

In our policies.

Chris Bay:

Right.

Michael Crawford:

Last year. Honestly, we’ve just become smarter with our money.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Crawford:

Like to be real honest, it’s not so much that we’re making more money or being given gobs of cash by other sources, but we are learned how to be very smart with the use of our money. And not change the things that we want to do, but alter the things that we don’t need to do.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

It’s just been really good because now we have that open conversation instead of arguing about the money.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Crawford:

We are actually talking openly about, okay, well, what if we take this money and do this with it? And having you guys as coaches has been unbelievable because it’s taken the stress off of our relationship where you guys can be the mediators.

Chris Bay:

Right.

Michael Crawford:

It sounds odd to say it that way, but honestly it is refreshing.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. Well, we all know finances is one of the top stressors in a marriage.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

It’s one of the top stressors for us as Americans, and that impacts our health [crosstalk 00:14:22].

Michael Crawford:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

And our relationships and everything. So with IBC, so many times, it relieves that stress.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

One thing that I didn’t ask you about, and I’m curious if you touch on it, is how did you capitalize your plan and your policies?

Michael Crawford:

Yeah, so we didn’t have any money. We were saving every penny we had just for our child’s birth because we knew that that was not going to be free. When I had left some other jobs and moved past owning my own business, et cetera, I had a few IRAs, and Mary had some old Roths from another company that she had worked for. And all told, we were able to cash those out, pay the penalties and taxes upfront.

Chris Bay:

Right.

Michael Crawford:

And capitalized our system saved a little bit behind because we knew that first year would be rough with the new child, and some of the unknown expenses. We’ve been able to honestly, by the grace of God, pay all of our premiums with fresh money.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Crawford:

And so it’s been a very fun and exciting adventure.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

Learning how to take better advantage of our current assets.

Chris Bay:

It’s a great story. What I love, I wish we had a camera right now that people could be seen because sitting here between us.

Michael Crawford:

Yup.

Chris Bay:

Is a brand new policy that you just received.

Michael Crawford:

I did.

Chris Bay:

Tell the audience real quick. As we wrap up.

Michael Crawford:

Yup.

Chris Bay:

What is this policy?

Michael Crawford:

Well, this is a policy for our son, Milo.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

It’s pretty exciting too, sorry, to get him started on something that will forever change his life. He’ll never.

Chris Bay:

Changes lives. We think about Nelson’s number one principle, think long-term.

Michael Crawford:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Bay:

And for us as guys, often we think about our families.

Michael Crawford:

Yup.

Chris Bay:

Our kids, those kinds of things.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

And that’s exactly what you’re doing. You got a policy on your son.

Michael Crawford:

Well, and what I was going to say is he’ll never have to borrow money from an institution.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

He’ll never know the fear of not being able to make a payment or, and it’s not for the fact that I’m a wealthy person, but by taking advantage of something that has been in place for 250 plus years and utilizing it for our benefit will forever change his and our lives.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. So thanks [crosstalk 00:16:47].

Michael Crawford:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

For sharing your story. Thanks for sharing your heart. Michael Crawford, you are a blessing to this organization and just as a friend.

Michael Crawford:

Thanks Chris, appreciate that [crosstalk 00:17:00].

Chris Bay:

To our listeners, thanks again for joining us on these podcasts. You are getting a sense of who we are. We are a heart-driven organization. We love helping people. Please check out our website at lifesuccesslegacy.com, which Mike Crawford that you have to hear today. He is the man who makes that thing happen. If you have not read Nelson Nash’s book, get a copy of it and read it. Again, don’t read it after nine o’clock like all of us did. Thanks again for joining us.

 

Chris Bay Interview. Transcript

Michael Crawford:

All right, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Michael Crawford, and yes, you may have noticed I am not the voice of Chris Bay. That is because today’s podcast, if you’ve been following our podcast series, is on our team, and Chris Bay is the next victim.

Chris Bay:

Nice. Nice.

Michael Crawford:

He is in the hot seat, as it were, and we’re going to go through a little bit about how he got started in Infinite Banking and tell a little bit of his story and give some insight into how it’s working for him and where he sees it going. How are you doing, Chris?

Chris Bay:

I’m doing great, yeah.

Michael Crawford:

Awesome.

Chris Bay:

Doing great. Love talking about this topic.

Michael Crawford:

Yes, you do. You’re not used to the position though, right?

Chris Bay:

No.

Michael Crawford:

You’re the one asking the questions.

Chris Bay:

I’d much rather be asking the questions, but I think our story will connect with some people out there.

Michael Crawford:

Absolutely. I agree 100 percent. So let’s dive in. I want to start from the beginning. Your story is unique in how you got started, and I think it’s pertinent for a lot of people. Because we all have different stories on how our money came to be where it is, and learning a little bit about where yours came from and how you took advantage of your next steps with the Infinite Banking Concept, I think the people would like to hear about.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. Well, at the time when I was in introduced to the Infinite Banking Concept, I was working as an elementary school principal, and my wife and I had worked pretty hard and made a lot of choices and sacrifices to be single-income family so that we could invest in our two daughters. And so at the time, we actually had been practicing the teachings of Dave Ramsey for actually about seven years. And I will tell you, that was a source of frustration and a source of conflict in our relationship, and the word you use in your podcast was hope.

The hope for us was so far down the road using this approach, Dave Ramsey’s approach, that our hope was very little. We were not going on vacations. We were not going out to eat very often, and it was really frustrating. And I was working my tail off, doing the best I knew how to do to provide for my family, but we were not doing it very well. I remember, Sean reminds me that we were negotiating with medical care providers who were providing services for our daughters and for our family because we didn’t have the money to pay it, so it was tough.

Michael Crawford:

Right. And so when you talk about the stress, was it the stress that you were experiencing in your financial picture that led you to investigate alternatives?

Chris Bay:

Yeah. In fact, I remember there was a teacher that I was working with, and this would have been back in 2007, the fall of 2007, and she had taught for over 30 years, and she came in and said, “I’m going to retire in the spring.” We were celebrating her career. And she came back in in the… Sorry, that was the fall of 2007. In the spring of 2008, so think about the world and financially what was going on, she came back in and said, “I’m not going to be able to retire.”

Michael Crawford:

Hm.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. I filed that away in my brain, because I thought… Are we good?

Michael Crawford:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Bay:

Oh, okay. I filed that away in my brain, because I thought where we all have been told to put our money, it’s not safe.

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

And so I’m working my tail off to do all this and I’m putting it at risk. Who’s to say, depending on the timing of the market going up or down, that it’s going to be there for me when we need it?

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

I didn’t have a solution at that time, but I knew what the world was doing, all the things I’ve been told and taught was not working. The buy term and invest the difference that we hear from Dave Ramsey all the time and others, I didn’t want to go that route because I had seen it doesn’t work.

Michael Crawford:

So that was 10 years ago, because it’s currently late, well, middle fall here in 2017.

Chris Bay:

Right, right.

Michael Crawford:

And so that was 10 years ago today. Kind of give us a timeline from that point until you officially got introduced to infinite banking and how that took place.

Chris Bay:

Okay. It probably was a little over seven years, probably between seven and eight years ago that I was introduced to it. It was actually from two different conversations with dads, two separate dads that were volunteering in our elementary school where I was a principal. And I had developed trust with them, relationships with them. One was a business owner in town, and I asked Dave, I said, “Dave, do you mind me asking as a business guy how do you think about and manage your money?” And he said, “Have you ever heard of the Infinite Banking Concept?”, which I had not. And so he said, “I’d really recommend you check it out.” Research, I heard that and I don’t even know if I dug into it much at that point. It was probably about two months later that I went to another dad, and I asked Doug, and I said the same question, and he came back with the exact same answer.

Michael Crawford:

So two different sources.

Chris Bay:

Two sources, same answer.

Michael Crawford:

Got you.

Chris Bay:

The Infinite Banking Concept. So I said, “Okay, how do I learn? This is crazy that two of you have told me this and I’ve never heard of this. What do I do?” And he said, “Well, you need to read this black book, Nelson’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker, and you need to get ahold of this guy who lives down in Baldwin.” And I said, “Who’s that?” He said, “Well, it’s Mike Everett.” Well, crazy thing is, I actually had known Mike Everett back when I was in college. His niece and I knew each other in college, and so I had met Mike through Heather. So anyway, started, got ahold of the book. In fact, I think Mike gave me the book, and we always charge people for the book so they have a little skin in the game to read it. I don’t think I actually paid him the 20 bucks until like a year later when I was actually a client of his. But that all comes out in the wash anyway, right?

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

So anyway, for us, unlike you and Mike Everett, I’m the slow guy, and we all joke about it here within our team. But I’m the slow guy, and Shawn and I, my wife Shawn, we researched this thing inside and out. I read the blogs, the websites, the pros, the cons, Kiplinger’s, Forbes. I read everything about this thing.

Michael Crawford:

Got you.

Chris Bay:

And Mike was coming to our house and teaching us the concept about once every month or so. This took place over a nine-month period, and it was actually Shawn at one point, my wife, grabbed my arm. She said, “This just makes sense.”

Michael Crawford:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

And so at that point is when we made the decision to go ahead and start our first policies.

Michael Crawford:

Okay. So to recap there, you kind of had something stuck in your brain in 2007 when the financial crash occurred.

Chris Bay:

Yep.

Michael Crawford:

A couple of years later, two individuals who you trusted both of them on separate conversations told you about Infinite Banking Concept. So it only took you, what, four years to make a decision on something?

Chris Bay:

I didn’t have the solution at the beginning.

Michael Crawford:

Got you, yeah.

Chris Bay:

That’s right. That’s right. No, but I’ll own that. I’ll own that.

Michael Crawford:

No, fair enough. But 2000-what, ’11?

Chris Bay:

Yeah, probably.

Michael Crawford:

’10, ’11-

Chris Bay:

Yeah, somewhere in that.

Michael Crawford:

– is when you got your first policy. Can you tell the listeners your story on how you capitalized it? Because the way you guys capitalized it is actually very beneficial to many of our existing and potential clients.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. Well, in our boot camps, we always tell people, “You’ve got a pool of money somewhere. You may not know it, but you do.” I didn’t think I had a pool of money.

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

We had been doing Dave Ramsey, so we didn’t have a whole bunch of consumer debt, smaller things, those kinds of things, but we had our mortgage.

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

Well, as we started looking at things, we actually had equity in our home. And so what Mike helped us do is put together a plan where we could leverage. And I don’t even remember if Mike suggested it or we came up with it. I don’t recall, but we leveraged a home equity line of credit to get our first policy. We started four policies; one of myself, one on my wife, and one on each of my daughters.

Michael Crawford:

Okay.

Chris Bay:

And that was really important for a couple of reasons. One, my wife had previously had thyroid cancer and she was now cancer-free for 10 years, and so we were for sure starting a policy on her.

Michael Crawford:

Absolutely.

Chris Bay:

And we saw the power of you start a policy on somebody when they’re healthy, because you never know. I mean, she was young.

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

So you start a policy as soon as you have the opportunity to, and we have other team members that’ll talk about that.

Michael Crawford:

Absolutely.

Chris Bay:

So we started four policies. We leveraged the equity in our home and took out a line of credit, and that’s how we got our policy started. Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

Okay, so you used the HELOC or home equity line of credit to capitalize your system. Tell the listeners going from a nine-month investigation to what kind of policies did you guys do?

Chris Bay:

Well, people who work with us will soon find that we have no secrets. We will show our policies, our policy loans, cash value. We have no problem with doing that because we’re just full disclosure. Mike was not suggesting this, by the way.

Michael Crawford:

Right. Absolutely.

Chris Bay:

He was suggesting, I think, maybe like a $20,000 annual premium policy for us. Well, as I learned through my investigation that premiums are deposits into a system that I own and control, and so do I want my deposits to be large or small?

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

Secondly, I know because of the power of compounding interest, the sooner I start and the bigger I start, the better.

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

So Shawn and I actually leveraged the equity in our home, and we started cumulative premiums for our four policies of $50,000 a year in life insurance premiums.

Michael Crawford:

Wow.

Chris Bay:

Which people hear that and they just freak out.

Michael Crawford:

Absolutely. Well, I mean, I think anybody would have a reason for pause when they don’t understand the end game or if they’re thinking short-term, which is one of Nelson’s principles. And so you only really had your mortgage to eliminate at that point.

Chris Bay:

Yeah, because part of that was I was still working for the school district.

Michael Crawford:

Oh, right.

Chris Bay:

So I had Kansas Public Retirement. We call it KPERS. I had 403b’s through the school district, but I couldn’t access any of that because I worked for them.

Michael Crawford:

Exactly. And so it was locked up tight.

Chris Bay:

It was locked up tight. Man, that fired me up, which spurred me then further in my investigation of IBC.

Michael Crawford:

Exactly.

Chris Bay:

Because I was thinking, “This is supposed to be my money and I can’t access it?”

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

That was really frustrating.

Michael Crawford:

No access to your own money, so you use the HELOC. You start huge $50,000 annual premium policies cumulatively. Give us a synopsis of where you’re at along that timeline after you started your policies.

Chris Bay:

Yeah, it was about probably two and a half, three years later, and I’m now, instead of reading educational literature in bed at night, I’m now reading things on infinite banking and Austrian economics. Here’s the thing. It’s a beautiful thing when your wife has such confidence in you, and she turns to me in bed and says, “You know, you’d be really good at teaching people that.” That opened up all kinds of possibilities, and so we made the decision to… Actually, I resigned from the school district three years after we started our policies. I remember having the conversation with Mike Everett in his office, and he thought I was going to warm up. You know, “What are you going to do? Do this on the side?” We didn’t. We burned the ships. We went 100 percent. Remember, I was single income after 22 years in the school system. Completely resigned and left to go 100 percent commission. When I tell people that, you’ve got to know that I believe in this concept 100 percent.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah, and I think it shows that you were dedicated to helping other people change their lives the way yours had been changed, right?

Chris Bay:

Yeah. It’s incredibly powerful.

Michael Crawford:

Absolutely.

Chris Bay:

My daughters, I’ve got a freshman in college now, which we’re using our policies to strategically do her tuition and all that. I’ve got another daughter who is a sophomore in high school, and much like you, they’re never going to have to borrow money from an institution.

Michael Crawford:

It’s very refreshing.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

So we’re changing the trajectory for our families.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah. Well, okay. I’m going to wrap this up, but I want to ask you a question that people often ask us, and that is, how long did it take you when you first started to get out of debt? Because we’re all fighting the wind current, as we say. And if you’ve listened to our other podcasts, you’ll know what that term really means, but it means basically the debt in our lives and the things that are working against us in our life financially. How long did you and Shawn have your policies in place before you had paid off all of your outside debt?

Chris Bay:

Well, we’re a little different, because we couldn’t get access to our pool through my 403b’s and KPERS and things like that. Had we been able to get to that, we probably could have turned our wind current the very first month.

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

But we couldn’t get access to that.

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

So we were leveraging the home equity line of credit. So for us then, when I resigned from the school district, I did get access to those dollars. Then we were able to turn our wind current on our mortgage, the home equity line of credit, all of that, 26 months. We could have been debt-free of outside debt month one, which sounds crazy to people.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Bay:

But I want to say this. When we did access our 403b and our KPERS, we got all of it. We went after all of it, so there was huge taxes, huge penalties. But I want to tell you that we recouped, by turning our wind current and using IBC, we recouped all of those taxes and all of those penalties in eight months.

Michael Crawford:

Wow. Eight months.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

Not even a year for you to recoup all of the debt that was incurred, associated with not the debt, but the taxes and penalties that were associated with your qualified plans.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

That’s amazing.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

Well, Chris, thank you very much for giving us a piece of your story. You’ll hear more of all of our stories in future podcasts as we continue to work through the Life Success Legacy team, and introduce you to their stories and how we all got started. For those of you who are continual listeners, you’ll know that we always suggest if you haven’t read Nelson’s book that we have a copy of it on our website, lifesuccesslegacy.com. Keep your ears and eyes peeled for future podcasts. We look forward to our next adventure. Thanks, Chris.

Chris Bay:

Absolutely. Thanks.

Mike Everett Interview. Transcript

Chris Bay:

Welcome to the Life Success Legacy Podcast. My name is Chris Bay and I’m joined today with the founder of Life Success & Legacy, Mike Everett.

Chris Bay:

Thanks to our listeners for joining us today. This next set of podcasts are going to be a little bit different. What we want to do is we want to introduce you to the team members of Life Success & Legacy and our stories as to how we got introduced to the Infinite Banking Concept. How we learned about it, how long did we study and research it, how it’s impacted our lives, et cetera. So today what we want to do, and each of our stories is unique and diverse, and you may find that you connect with some of these different stories because we all have very different stories of how we were introduced to IBC. Today what we’re going to do is focus on Mike Everett, the founder of Life Success & Legacy and how he was introduced to the infinite banking concept. How it’s impacted his life and where he is today with his IBC strategy.

Chris Bay:

So, Mike, why don’t you start off with telling us, take us back to the day when you were introduced to the Infinite Banking Concept. How old were you? Where were you in life? With kids and that kind of thing.

Mike Everett:

Well, I had just turned 50 years old and I was a little bit disenfranchised with where I was in my career in the property-casualty business. And then I had gone into Applebee’s after church one day and all of a sudden this guy made a beeline over to our table and said, “Hey Mike-”

Chris Bay:

So you knew him?

Mike Everett:

I did.

Chris Bay:

Okay.

Mike Everett:

I did.

Chris Bay:

Okay.

Mike Everett:

Yeah. He basically asked, he says, “If I could show you and Linda a way to recover the entire cost of all the cars you purchase the rest of your life, would you be interested?” And I said, “Well, who wouldn’t?”

Mike Everett:

Long story short, he sent me the book. It came on that following Wednesday in a Manila envelope. So I opened this envelope, out comes a book, out comes a letter that tells you exactly how to read the book. And the book we’re talking about obviously is Becoming Your Own Banker by Nelson Nash. And along with all of that, there was a bill for $22 there. And I literally hollered in at Linda. I go, “Honey.” I said, “He sent us a bill with the book.” This is a book he wanted me to read. So I was a little upset about it. So I just took the bill and I tore it up and I threw the trash. So literally I threw this book over by where I do all my reading and this was Wednesday. So Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday came along. Right after the news, the book somehow made it to the top of the pile.

Mike Everett:

And so I said to Linda, she was getting ready bed and I said, “I’m going to read this book.” I said, “I’m going to read it tonight.” Because it was only 92 pages. So I started in on it at 10:30 at night, began to read it and-

Chris Bay:

Oh, wait a second because that goes against everything we tell people.

Mike Everett:

It does.

Chris Bay:

Please do not read this book after eight or nine o’clock at night because it’ll mess with your sleep.

Mike Everett:

Well, let me just tell you, after my first reading, I was so excited. I did exactly what the letter said and I read it a second time and finished my second reading at 1:30 AM and immediately went in and woke my wife up and said, “Honey, I know what I’m going to do for a new career.”

Chris Bay:

So, you weren’t just thinking about how this could impact your financial life. You were looking at it in addition to because it was so powerful to you.

Mike Everett:

It was.

Chris Bay:

It just made sense to you.

Mike Everett:

It did. As many of the people who know me, I’m the guy who jumps off the high board and I don’t really check to see if there’s water in the pool. So literally I have decided at 1:30 AM that I was changing careers, just like that. But it wasn’t a giant shift in my career change. I went from property-casualty insurance to dividend paying whole life insurance. So it was all in the same family, just a little bit more specific, a little bit more focused.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. That makes sense.

Mike Everett:

I woke up at 7:00 AM and started calling this guy’s office at 8:00 in the morning only to find out that their office doesn’t open until 9:00. I left three voicemails between 8:00 and 9:00 AM in the morning, I was that amped up about it.

Chris Bay:

So you went to work with him?

Mike Everett:

I did.

Chris Bay:

Okay.

Mike Everett:

I did.

Chris Bay:

Tell me about just your personal IBC experience. When did you start your policies? How did you get started? Those kinds of things.

Mike Everett:

I immediately did two applications the first time I met with him within that first week. I decided to do a policy on myself and a policy on my wife. But then all of a sudden it dawned on me, I didn’t have any money. So I had to figure out how to go get money. So literally I went down to the bank and one of the loan officers-

Chris Bay:

This is going to be exhibit two of what not to do, right?

Mike Everett:

It is.

Chris Bay:

Are there future exhibits?

Mike Everett:

Well, I’ll just tell you. I went about it a different way, let’s put it that way. But there’s a really great ending to this story.

Chris Bay:

Absolutely.

Mike Everett:

I went down and borrowed money to do policies for my wife and I. Number one, I tell people don’t do that unless you have equity in a place that you can use. I had no equity. So I borrowed money, started my first policies and then off we go.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. So at that point, tell me where you were in life with family. And what was your thought process in terms of how is this going to benefit you or family or who’s going to benefit from this?

Mike Everett:

I think my daughter was a sophomore or junior in high school and my son was already out of college. So this was a pretty big shift for us because I had started to then think about infinite banking in a completely different way.

Mike Everett:

First off, when you buy life insurance, normally you buy life insurance because you love someone. It is that simple. You’re actually not buying it for yourself, you’re buying it for the people that you love and care about. So when I was buying my policies for Linda and I just knew deep down that these were not for me, they were for the next generation.

Chris Bay:

So you didn’t see how this IBC thing was really going to benefit you in the meantime?

Mike Everett:

No.

Chris Bay:

Okay.

Mike Everett:

But let’s just go back to Nelson’s number one principle, think long-term. So I knew when I was purchasing the policies that somewhere down the way my family was going to benefit.

Chris Bay:

Right. So talk to me about implementation of your IBC strategy. How did that go in the early years?

Mike Everett:

Well, there were about 25 to 35 of us. Some real small number where we literally, we were learning this thing as fast as we could. We were going around wherever Nelson was, we’d go. We’ve needed information because literally it felt like something so new and so different. But yet it was so exciting because we just needed information. So literally we were doing three, four, five seminars a year and going to places wherever Nelson was, or having him come to Lawrence, Kansas and learning about IBC. It was pretty darn exciting because nobody had ever taught me about something like this that can set people so free in their financial life.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. So fast forward for me now, how long has it been since you started your first policies?

Mike Everett:

Well, I just paid my 13th premium, so 13 policy years. But I’ve only been in this for a little more than 12 years and this is all part of the learning that we help with clients learn. But, so I started out with two policies. I think in the first year I had five policies. I borrowed all the money to do this, which I was telling you, I was an idiot. But…

Chris Bay:

How’s that played out for you now?

Mike Everett:

Well, now it’s played out unbelievably because what happened was, as life grew and things changed quickly, so did a number of things in my life that made it easier to purchase additional policies. Now we have 16 life insurance policies. They’re not all on me. I’ve got some on me, some on Linda, some on Kurt, some on Karen, some on the grandkids. So-

Chris Bay:

I know at one point Nelson had 49 life insurance policies and now you’re up to 16 policies.

Mike Everett:

16.

Chris Bay:

That’s right. Yeah. Have you learned a few things from the time you started that you might put in the category of wisdom that you can share with your clients-

Mike Everett:

Let’s put it this way, let’s go back to day one when I went to the bank and borrowed money. Now, because of the way we’ve assembled our team and the learning curve that I’ve gone through and the things that were misfortunes to me, can greatly benefit the clients that we work with. We can see a little bit further down the road to where we can help somebody avoid the mistakes that I made.

Chris Bay:

Absolutely. Mike, thanks for sharing your story. When we do our live boot camps, when you do share your story, it always has the room just rolling. And at first, just honestly, it used to freak me out because you just messed it all up so bad. But the beauty of it is, even as bad as you messed it up in the beginning-

Mike Everett:

It still works.

Chris Bay:

… it still works.

Mike Everett:

It does.

Chris Bay:

That is what’s amazing to me. So thanks for sharing your story-

Mike Everett:

You bet Chris.

Chris Bay:

… appreciate that. To the listeners, our next podcasts are going to be you getting a chance to know the rest of the team of Life Success & Legacy and how we got introduced to this crazy thing called the infinite banking concept. Check out our website, lifesuccesslegacy.com. And if you have not read Nelson Nash’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker, we cannot encourage you strongly enough to do that. Thanks for joining us.

Is IBC a Scam? Transcript

Chris Bay:

Welcome to the life success legacy podcast. My name is Chris Bay and I’m joined today with the founder of Life Success & Legacy, Mike Everett. Mike, today we want to talk about a question that if you do too much Googling it doesn’t take you long to find the question, “Is IBC a scam?”

Mike Everett:

All right.

Chris Bay:

So when people bring that up in their investigation of the Infinite Banking concept, we always tell them education research, those kinds of things are going to tell you whether it is or not. We know it’s not. Everybody on our team was a client at one point.

Mike Everett:

Correct.

Chris Bay:

So including myself, this is something that we experienced personally. And then I personally left a 22 year career to teach other people how to apply Infinite Banking into their lives.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

The way that I got there was through educating myself. So walk us through the education process that helps people understand and learn why IBC truly is not a scam.

Mike Everett:

Well, first off you’re using a 250 plus year old product called dividend paying whole life insurance, number one. Number two, because we are using a dividend paying whole life insurance, all we’re doing is we’re re-engineering or reallocating the money. So literally we’re using this product that’s been around for all these years. So how could it be a scam if we’re using a product that is sanctioned by every state in America, and we’re utilizing it as a financing option in somebody’s life? We don’t really do anything but educate people about dividend paying whole life insurance. But the Infinite Banking concept just happens to be a strategy that we use.

Chris Bay:

It’s not fancy.

Mike Everett:

It’s not.

Chris Bay:

I tell people all the time, it’s not fancy, it’s not sexy. It is simply dividend paying whole life insurance. And then what Nelson introduced in his book, Becoming Your Own Banker, is simply re-engineering it.

Mike Everett:

A hundred percent.

Chris Bay:

De emphasizing the death benefit, emphasizing the cash value part of it, and then you have a tool that you can use to finance your entire life. That can be debt. That can be your living expenses. That can be investment. That can be business. It can be all kinds of… It could be your family members debt. Some of our clients, they’re doing very well for themselves simply by financing their extended family’s debt. They have become the bank for those people.

Mike Everett:

A couple of questions that we always ask somebody is, “Would you spend $0 to find out the possibilities? Or would you take two steps backward to go 10 steps forward?”

Chris Bay:

Unpack that a little bit. That, “Would you be willing to spend zero to see what was possible?” If a client contacted us, and we always encourage people to just call us, we love teaching this concept to people. We will never ask you. We aren’t going to try and sell to you. We just want to educate people. And when we do that, it becomes pretty clear. So can you talk about for that $0 that they’re going to pay, what do people get as they go through our education process?

Mike Everett:

Well, literally when we say spend $0, we’re talking about potentially doing one of our online webinars or attending one of our boot camps. We don’t charge anybody any money to find out what’s possible in their lives. The only money that they will ever spend, ever with us, they’re going to spend $20 if they buy the book, it’s 25 on the website, cause we got to send it to you. So we’re going to charge you five bucks, even though it costs me 6.95 to send it to them. But the bottom line is we want people to educate themselves, spend some time learning about this, because if half of what we’re telling people really does work, it would be totally worth their time to check it out.

Chris Bay:

If it were a scam do we think that our existing clients would be coming back to us to open new policies?

Mike Everett:

They would not. And I’ll tell you where this all came from. This came from back in the late seventies, early eighties, when a company called AL Williams was doing buy term invest the difference, they got kicked out of all 50 states. That should tell you something. But part of the reason why it’s been coined it’s a scam, is life insurance agents in general have not done very well in educating themselves about the products that they sell. We do. We spend hours and hours and hours educating ourselves of what is the best possibilities. What is the best design? What is the best strategy for each and every customer?

Chris Bay:

Yeah, it’s interesting. Since the time that I came on board with Life Success & Legacy, of my client base, and I’m going to say it’s, I’m going to guess, I know it’s probably about 170 or more now. Not one client has dropped their policy. Not one. Now I attribute that to several things. One, is we do an unbelievable job in my opinion of educating people up front.

Mike Everett:

Yes, we do.

Chris Bay:

And we do not let them move forward with this until they understand what they’re doing.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

And that if there’s a marriage that both parties are on board.

Mike Everett:

That’s right.

Chris Bay:

Secondly, we do an unbelievable job, in my opinion, of not overextending people. We design policies. We design IVC strategies to address their needs, to solve their problems.

Thirdly, we become their coaches going forward. You and I know that all day long we’re getting emails, text messages, phone calls from our clients, and they’re paying how much for our…

Mike Everett:

Zero.

Chris Bay:

Zero. We become their coaches going forward. One of our biggest challenges that we face is when we have clients who this really clicks in for them and they get down the road a little bit using their policies, they see the power of it with their lives, they want to start new policies right away.

Mike Everett:

Right away.

Chris Bay:

And what do we do?

Mike Everett:

We have to pull them off the ledge.

Chris Bay:

So many times we’re saying, “Yes, we understand, but you’ve got to wait. We got to capitalize this what your system that you’ve got in place first. And then we’ll go from there.” So yeah, we’ve got returning clients who are wanting to do more policies, not one of my clients has dropped their policy. It’s because of all these reasons that we listed. And that truly is a reason why, if you do all that, you know it’s not a scam.

Mike Everett:

That’s right.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. Well, it’s a good question. There’s, of course, lots of information out there. I’ll finish with this. I’ve read some stuff out there on the internet, around looking at IBC. And the main thing that people forget when they start analyzing it is, they look at it as an investment. It is not an investment. In fact, in Nelson Nash’s book on page three, second column, first full paragraph, it says “IBC is not about investments of any kind. It is a way to finance your needs in your life.” And that certainly can include in vestments, right?

Mike Everett:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

Good discussion, Mike. Thanks for the time. For those of you listening in, again, we encourage you to go to our website, lifesuccesslegacy.com. If you have not read Nelson Nash’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker, it is a life changing read. Again, it is not a how-to book. It is a book about imagination and possibilities. If you want to see what is really possible in your life, we will charge you $0 to find out. Just give us a call. Thanks for joining us.

Whole Life Insurance is bad, right? Transcript

Chris Bay:

Welcome to the Life Success & Legacy Podcast. My name is Chris Bay, and I’m joined today with the founder of Life Success & Legacy, Mike Everett.

So Mike, today, I want to address one of the questions that was a huge stumbling block for me. When Shawn and I first were introduced to this concept of Infinite Banking and I got a hold of Nelson Nash’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker, and I read it multiple times, there were pieces that really fit and made sense to me. But I had a mental block, and that was because I had been taught that whole life insurance was the worst place in the world to put our money.

Mike Everett:

We hear this over and over.

Chris Bay:

So let’s dig into that. There’s a lot of people out there, a lot of financial people, a lot of financial personalities, that are out in the world that are saying whole life insurance is the worst place in the world to put your money. Why did they say that?

Mike Everett:

Well, if you go and you look at a traditional whole life insurance policy and the way it’s designed, I really would tend to lean towards what those personalities have said, that whole life insurance is a bad place to put money.

But if you go back a couple of generations right now and you think, “Where did people put money before 401ks and IRAs became the traditional place to put money … ”

Chris Bay:

Tax qualified plans.

Mike Everett:

You got it.

Chris Bay:

Before those every came about.

Mike Everett:

I’m going to just tell you. The only place most of those people, and you’re talking about my grandparents and my great-grandparents, they only had one place that they could … Well, excuse me, two. They put it in whole life insurance programs, policies, or they put it under the mattress at home. That’s the only place that they did.

But if you go back and you think like Nelson does, you think long term. Whole life insurance is the safest place you can put your money regardless of how it’s designed. But because of the way in which we go about re-engineering the way the money is allocated in the policy, it’s the safest, best place in the world, and it’s got more guarantees than anything that somebody would put their money in.

Chris Bay:

Yeah, I think from my standpoint, or at least how I was taught to think about money, it’s because whole life insurance may be traditionally designed, which was designed to emphasize the death benefit. You want to pay as little as possible.

Mike Everett:

That’s right.

Chris Bay:

Right? Well, when you look at that and you’re looking at it purely as an investment, that maybe it doesn’t match up to some other things. But honestly, I’ve seen some work out there by some folks, where actually it can even show up to be better than some of the investments that are out there.

Mike Everett:

Well, in Nelson’s book, I’m going to just tell you, he uses a couple of examples, one with the twins and one with the equipment financing. If you look at this over the long haul, I’m just telling you, it outperforms the market. It outperforms inflation.

Chris Bay:

What’s interesting, when we read Nelson’s book, the examples in the book aren’t even designed-

Mike Everett:

They are not.

Chris Bay:

… to emphasize the cash value part, which is how we would design it for people.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

Why did he do that?

Mike Everett:

Well, the reason why he did that was he wanted to make sure people knew that it would work even if the policy wasn’t designed properly.

Chris Bay:

If it’s designed traditionally to emphasize death benefit-

Mike Everett:

The death benefit.

Chris Bay:

… and pay as little into it as possible, there’s some debate amongst people whether it would be better to do that versus some other things.

But when you start factoring in that a policy could be designed to de-emphasize the death benefit and you could emphasize the cash value portion of it, and then you introduce the whole concept of using it for banking, financing your financing needs in your life, there is no comparison.

Mike Everett:

There’s not. One of the questions that we always ask people right this very minute, “What is more important to you, cash or life insurance death benefit?” What do they all say?

Chris Bay:

Cash.

Mike Everett:

Cash every single time. What if there was a program out there where you could put money in and have access to it income tax-free all along the days of your life. We need cash from right now til the day we die. We only need death benefit one day. We can show you through the program, through IBC, through the policy, that if you did this all along your life, not only would you have access and be able to utilize the cash that’s flowing in and out of your money; but at the time of your death, you’ll end up having two, three, four, five times more death benefit than what you could purchase right now.

Chris Bay:

You know how I would phrase it is, so many of us look at, whether it’s whole life or an investment or whatever, we look at it as an either/or. Really what this is about is a yes/both.

Mike Everett:

That’s exactly right.

Chris Bay:

If you really want to invest in the market or other types of things, you can do that.

Mike Everett:

Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Bay:

But if you’re smart, you’re going to run your money through your IBC system, get all the guarantees that they offer, and then take loans against your policy and go do the stuff that you love to do.

Mike Everett:

Exactly.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. It’s a great question. It’s a hard one in our culture because so many of us have been told that whole life insurance is bad, bad place to put our money. But truth be told, it’s actually the best place in the world to store our money. It’s foundational to a whole financial economic system for ourselves.

Mike Everett:

It is.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. Great discussion, Mike. Thanks.

Folks who are listening, we encourage you as always to go to our website, lifesuccesslegacy.com. If you have not read Nelson Nash’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker, please get yourself a copy of that and spend the time to read it at least once, if not more.

Is Infinite Banking Sustainable transcript

Chris Bay:

Welcome to the Life Success Legacy Podcast. My name is Chris Bay and I’m joined today with the founder of Life Success & Legacy, Mike Everett. Hey Mike, one of the other questions that we run into amongst the variety of questions that are out there has to do with, okay, once people get to the idea where they’re like, this really makes sense, why would everyone not be doing this? Right? Then they start thinking, well, what if everyone started doing it? Could the life insurance companies handle that? Is it financially sustainable if everyone started doing this? So what I’d like for you to do is talk a little bit about how insurance companies, how they design this, the work that they do, the actuaries do, the engineers of the life insurance companies, and how it truly is sustainable.

Mike Everett:

Well, first of all, life insurance actuaries work with 10 million selected lives. That means that they know how many people are going to die every year, regardless of what’s going on. And they can do this very, very accurately, number one. Number two, I guess I start to think about whole life insurance in the term of IBC, because most people, when they go to buy life insurance, what do they buy? They buy term insurance. So it’s really just a little tiny premium to get a great big death benefit. And that’s the way 90% of the people out there are buying life insurance. So you have 10ish percent that are out there buying whole life insurance, but they don’t understand how the policy can be re-engineered so they can start utilizing their cash. So you think about it from a life insurance company’s standpoint, they’re normally used to getting 300, 500, 1,000, or $2,000 for premium for term life insurance.

And Oh, by the way, term life insurance is one of their most profitable centers. So you think about it from a life insurance company’s standpoint, and you said, is this sustainable if everybody starts doing it? Well, most of the people that we work with, at least a great percentage, their premium amounts aren’t two or three or $4,000 a year. They’re five and 10 and 15 and $20,000 a year. So from a life insurance company’s standpoint, do they want a little money sent to them? Or do they want a lot of money sent to them? The more, the better. So part of the thing is we have to get people to understand that the whole life insurance company knows what they’re doing when they’re designing the policy.

Chris Bay:

So in our culture though, we always hear people talk about high risk investments. You want to get your money into higher risks because you have higher returns, greater returns, those kinds of things. Can you talk about the risk involved in kind of the investment thing? Because life insurance companies are doing something with that money. Right?

Mike Everett:

They are.

Chris Bay:

And isn’t that putting my money at risk?

Mike Everett:

Well, here’s the nice thing. When you work with a hundred year old companies, and all the companies that we work with are more than a hundred years old. That means that they’ve been doing the same thing day in, day out, day in, day out for more than a hundred years. In fact, one of the insurance companies that we work with has paid dividends for more than a hundred years. So they’re not putting any of the money at risk. So what they’re doing is they are taking those premium dollars and they are taking those out and investing them in very, very conservative ways so it’s not putting any of the money at risk.

Chris Bay:

Bonds, things like that.

Mike Everett:

Yeah. Very simple investments. [crosstalk 00:04:15].

Chris Bay:

Things that are [crosstalk 00:04:16].

Mike Everett:

Guaranteed.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. Guaranteed. That’s right. And that’s one of the surprising things to people. It actually was really attractive to me because, back in my days when I was a principal, I remember a teacher came in, would have been in 2008 and she was ready to retire. And then come the spring when the market crashed, she couldn’t retire.

Mike Everett:

The 2008 meltdown.

Chris Bay:

That’s right. And I didn’t know about IBC at that time, but when I heard that story, I filed that away in my head. And I thought, I don’t want my money at risk. I wonder if there’s a way to do, a place to put my money where I can benefit from it. And it’s not at risk like her money was.

Mike Everett:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. So there’s also some regulations with life insurance. Right? That kind of guarantees that they’ve got to have a certain number of reserves and those kinds of things. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Mike Everett:

Well, in the banking industry, I’m going to start with the banking industry. The banking industry, when you put a dollar on deposit at the bank, so you’re saving a dollar, they have the ability to loan out $10. That’s called fractional reserve banking. So here’s the deal. You and I put a dollar in and they’re able to loan out 10. So the question that we always ask is where did they get the $9 to loan out? Well, they got it from thin air because the federal government, the federal reserve, said that you guys can do this. If you get a dollar in, you can loan out 10. Now you think about that from a customer’s or a client’s standpoint. Is their money at risk. Yes, it is. There is so much stress on that money. That’s why you hear about banks going down all the time. A life insurance company, on the other hand is when you put a dollar in, they have to have a dollar set aside for death claims and the life and death claims, dividends, et cetera, et cetera. So there is absolutely zero stress on that money at all.

Chris Bay:

So when a person, let’s say that Joe, we’ll just take Joe as a name. Let’s say that Joe is issued a policy. At that point, day one, if he were to pass away, that company has to have the ability to pay that death claim. Right?

Mike Everett:

Yes, they do.

Chris Bay:

Okay. And they’ve got to have, by law, they’ve got to have reserves.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

Can you talk a little bit about that number? The amount of reserves and then also really the companies that we work with and how safe they are.

Mike Everett:

The average life insurance company is required by law to have at least a hundred percent in reserves, a hundred percent. So that means that you have to have a hundred percent of the money set aside so if everybody dies on the same day, guess what? We can pay a hundred percent of the death claims.

Chris Bay:

Even in a catastrophic event.

Mike Everett:

Even in a catastrophic event.

Chris Bay:

They have to be prepared for that.

Mike Everett:

That is correct.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Mike Everett:

But the companies that we work with have 600 plus percent in reserves. They have six times more than anybody else out there in order to make sure that there is absolutely zero stress on your money plus the fact that they can actually guarantee that they will honor the contract that they have made with you through whole life insurance.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. It just came to mind, a lot of times and what’s out there in terms of financial conversations and stuff, the term diversification comes up, and people will ask from time to time, they’ll say, well, Chris, don’t you diversify? And my way of thinking is, well, the reason that we diversify a lot of times is because there’s risk.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

But if there’s no risk involved, is there a need to diversify?

Mike Everett:

None.

Chris Bay:

None.

Mike Everett:

Zero. Nada.

Chris Bay:

Now, if I have cash value, I can use that for a lot of different reasons. Right?

Mike Everett:

Absolutely.

Chris Bay:

What are some of the ways that people utilize their cash value?

Mike Everett:

Well, we show them how to take policy loans against their policy to pay off credit card debt, to pay off student loan debt, to pay off auto loans, and even mortgages. So imagine if we were able to actually utilize a policy loan to get somebody debt-free how simple would their life be?

Chris Bay:

Okay. So one is turning the wind current that we’ve talked about in previous podcasts.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

That’s one. What are some other ways that people use their cash values?

Mike Everett:

Well, some of the, sometimes what they do is they use them to go on vacation. They use them to pay for their kids’ college.

Chris Bay:

So living expenses.

Mike Everett:

That’s exactly right.

Chris Bay:

So once you’ve paid off debt, you can then utilize it for what we talk about the second pillar. And that is financing your life. Right?

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

What about businesses? Business opportunities?

Mike Everett:

Well, it’s amazing when you have a pool of cash available business opportunities find you, so you’d have the freedom to be able to invest so to speak in another business, whether it be real estate or whatever you choose.

Chris Bay:

Nelson talks about the golden rule in his book. What’s that golden rule mean?

Mike Everett:

Those who have the gold, make the rules.

Chris Bay:

That’s right. So there’s opportunities for people. And we have clients like this that they have started business opportunities, utilizing their cash value and their policies. They’ve taken loans to start businesses. They’ve used it for real estate. And let’s just say, somebody loves the stock market.

Mike Everett:

They can go do that too.

Chris Bay:

Couldn’t they borrow from their policy, against their policy…

Mike Everett:

Yeah. That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

… take a loan against their policy and go invested in this great stock that they heard about, they got a tip about? They’ve got the guaranteed growth from their policy, plus the death benefit. Right? And yet they can still take a loan against their policy and go and invest it in this great tip that they got.

Mike Everett:

Absolutely.

Chris Bay:

So there’s all kinds of ways that they can do it and limit their risk factor and actually be safe with their money as well. And have lots of flexibility with it. Well, Mike, thanks for talking through that. A lot of people wonder if it is sustainable, if everyone started doing it. And clearly as you’ve explained, it’s very safe. Life insurance companies are built for this kind of thing. Please join us in future podcasts. I’m Chris Bay joined today by Mike Everett, the founder of Life Success & Legacy. Check out our website by the same name, Live Success, and Legacy. If you have not read Nelson Nash’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker, you can get a copy of that on our website. We highly recommend that you educate yourself in reading that book and utilizing some of the other resources we have on our website.

Is IBC too good to be true transcript

Chris Bay:

Welcome to the Life Success & Legacy podcast. My name is Chris Bay and I’m joined today with the founder of Life Success & Legacy, Mike Everett.

Hey, Mike. In all the conversations that we have with people, there’s several questions that continually come up. We talked about another one in a different podcast earlier. The one I want to tackle right now is pretty common. And it is once people start to learn about this, especially after they’ve come to one of our boot camps, they say, “This sounds too good to be true.” Right?

Mike Everett:

We hear that all the time.

Chris Bay:

All the time, yeah. So when you first learned about IBC, you read the book and everything. Did you have the same feeling?

Mike Everett:

Well, being an entrepreneur, I didn’t have the same feeling because I always look a little bit on the super positive side of everything. So after I got done with the book, the second time, I literally thought I’m leaving a career and I’m doing this full time because it did sound too good to be true. But I thought, okay, I was 50 years old. I’d been doing what everybody else was doing. I was putting money into my 401K, my IRAs and mutual funds. I even had a stock account, but yet wasn’t getting ahead. So there was a part of me that said, “Yeah, it sounds too good to be true.” But there was a part of me that goes, “Wow, if this thing works…”

Chris Bay:

Well, let’s be real. Knowing different personalities and such, your personality is going to be a quick start. I mean, you’re going to see something and you’re going to process it in the snap of fingers. You’re like, “This works. I want to get into this. Let’s go.”

Mike Everett:

Yeah, let’s go.

Chris Bay:

But not everybody’s like that.

Mike Everett:

That’s right.

Chris Bay:

Present company included.

Mike Everett:

That’s right.

Chris Bay:

So for some people it’s not this, “Wow, I’ve tried all this.” Not everybody was at the stage of life where you are when you were introduced and not everybody’s had a chance to try all those things. And so, all they’ve heard out in the media and in the financial thinking is different ways to manage money. Then they get introduced to IBC and the common question is, “It sounds too good to be true.” Right?

Mike Everett:

That is true.

Chris Bay:

So talk to us a little bit about those kinds of things. When people come to us and they say, “It sounds too good to be true.” How do you talk to them about it?

Mike Everett:

Well, I get back to some pretty basic stuff. Is number one, you got to think long term. You hear that thing, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Well, we take a different approach and we think you ought to do some more research and spend some time with us and let us educate you. Because if we can somehow educate you, you’re going to be able to see IBC in a different light. And one of the things that Nelson has said that is IBC is caught not taught. There’s a certain portion of us that can learn that, but there’s a certain portion of you that says, “Golly, this just sounds right.”

Chris Bay:

That’s how it was for me. But it took me a long time to get to that point. And part of my, I mean, just being honest, part of my stumbling block was that it used whole life insurance. And from my previous exposure to financial information, whole life insurance was the worst place in the world to put money.

Mike Everett:

We hear that all the time.

Chris Bay:

Absolutely, right? So we tell people to research it. We tell people to educate themselves. We tell people to come to our boot camps, go to our websites, all those kinds of things. Right?

Mike Everett:

That’s right.

Chris Bay:

Now, do you push people to make a decision?

Mike Everett:

No, absolutely not. We want people, we want husbands and wives, we want partners to be fully on board with each other.

Chris Bay:

Talk about that husband and wives thing.

Mike Everett:

Well, I’ll tell you what I learned. I learned the hard way. Me, being an entrepreneur type, one of the things I want to do is just get out and talk to people. I want to talk to anybody and everybody about IBC. That’s how excited I am about this. But learning that the hard way was tough for me because sometimes I would just go and see just the husband or I would just talk to the wife and I can tell you exactly what’s going to happen. Is if I talk to one without the other, I’m going to have to tell the other one the same exact thing and spend the same exact amount of time with them again. So we really believe that husbands and wives are going to do this together. They are going to share in the experience before they proceed. We will not talk to one spouse or the other without the other one.

Chris Bay:

I just had a conversation with somebody recently and it was the husband and we were talking about IBC and he was wanting to meet. And he’s like, “Yeah, my wife trusts me and all that.” And I said, “Let me give you an example. Let’s say that your wife and you have talked about doing some counseling, okay? And your wife goes to a counselor and they’ve had maybe three, four sessions. So they’ve developed some rapport. They’ve gone a little deep. They’ve had those conversations and then they invite you to the next session. How effective is that going to be? How comfortable are you going to feel? Right? Is there going to have to be some going back and covering some groundwork with that?” And this is the same thing.

Mike Everett:

Yeah. That’s why we don’t push the sale.

Chris Bay:

We don’t. And we really are pushing for mutual purpose, mutual understanding with the couple. And it doesn’t mean that both parties have to know every cell of every spreadsheet and all that, but we want to help them get on the same page because we talk about this all the time, this is so much bigger than just numbers.

Mike Everett:

It is.

Chris Bay:

And what is one of the top stressors to a marriage?

Mike Everett:

Money.

Chris Bay:

Absolutely. So if we can take away, or at least reduce one of those key stressors in a marriage, how much power does that give to a couple?

Mike Everett:

It is truly unbelievable. My wife and I have experienced it ourselves. And I know that you guys have as well.

Chris Bay:

Absolutely. Yeah, that’s good.

It’s interesting when, we do our boot camps, this is almost a quote from your mouth. You say, “We want you to be skeptical.”

Mike Everett:

Absolutely.

Chris Bay:

Why do you say that?

Mike Everett:

Well, part of it is, if somebody comes in a little bit skeptical, what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to educate and then we’ve got to educate again. And then we’ve got to educate again, because we believe that education is the key piece to why somebody would think that Infinite Banking would even work. Because we were taught to be skeptical about everything with our money.

Well, what we’re doing is, in this education piece and this, we are teaching people. We are empowering people in a way that no other financial group is doing throughout the entire U.S.

Chris Bay:

Yeah, when people come to our boot camps and they see us wearing shorts and tennis shoes and we’re goofing around and having fun, talking about money and things, they’re always a little surprised, but it’s refreshing. People laugh. They leave having… They’ve had a good time. They haven’t felt pressured. And they feel like they walked away with a new perspective on money and really with hope.

Mike Everett:

Well, this is why we offer every other Tuesday, a webinar free of charge, regardless of what state or where you’re at in life. We offer those every other Tuesday, you ought to go to lifesuccesslegacy.com and check out, under bootcamps, and find out when our… Tuesday evening from 6:45 to 8:00 PM Central. It’s unbelievable.

But when we aren’t doing our Tuesday evenings, we do these boot camps. We do a boot camp one, which is really just a gigantic book review. And then we do a boot camp two, but this is where we offer people a live version of exactly what we do. But we do it in a fun, no pressure atmosphere, where you can ask questions. You can be skeptical. You can throw things at us if you want to. We want people to be skeptical. We want them to think, “Golly, this just does sound too good to be true.” But once they get in and they find out that they can control things in their own way, it’s unbelievable what happens.

Chris Bay:

Yeah, so it really is too good to be true, isn’t it? It actually is true and it is good.

Mike Everett:

That’s right.

Chris Bay:

That’s right.

Well, thanks for listening. Again, we point you to our website, lifesuccesslegacy.com and check out some of our other resources that we have there. I’ve got some other podcasts for you to check out as well. Thanks again for joining us.

Chris Bay:

Welcome to the Life Success Legacy podcast. My name is Chris Bay and I’m joined today with the founder of Life Success & Legacy, Mike Everett. Hey Mike, over the years as we have talked with people about the Infinite Banking Concept, there’s lots and lots of questions that come up. There’s one that we hear frequently, and that is why haven’t I heard of IBC before, right? Have you ever heard that before?

Mike Everett:

I’ve heard that so many times, it’s unbelievable. Yeah.

Chris Bay:

And it’s a legit question, right?

Mike Everett:

It is.

Chris Bay:

Personally, I had never heard about it until, back in the day when I was an elementary school principal and I went to one of my dad’s, who was a business owner in town, and I said, “How do you manage your finances?” And he said, “Have you ever heard of Infinite Banking, IBC?” I said, “No.” So right there, I was thinking, why haven’t I heard of this? Why has no one taught me this?

Mike Everett:

Well-

Chris Bay:

You hadn’t heard of it either right?

Mike Everett:

No, I hadn’t.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Mike Everett:

Well, there’s several reasons probably why people haven’t heard about it. Number one, Nelson didn’t write his book, Becoming Your Own Banker, until 2000. What he did though, was he utilized the Infinite Banking Concept for about 20 to 30 years prior to writing his book because he wanted to know that it worked. Secondly, there’s not enough practitioners, guys like us, who are effectively teaching the Infinite Banking Concept. Third, most of the people, and this includes potential clients and advisors, don’t take the necessary time to educate themselves and understand the true power of Infinite Banking or IBC.

Chris Bay:

Right, right. Now, let me ask you this. You and I had not heard about Infinite Banking beforehand and Nelson hadn’t written his book until 2000, but were people or organizations or somebody out there using the concept in general and then Nelson added to it? Corporations were using this, right?

Mike Everett:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Chris Bay:

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Mike Everett:

Well, individuals, corporations, businesses have been using this for centuries, actually. All that Nelson did was, he refined the process through Becoming Your Own Banker in the Infinite Banking Concept. And all he did was he learned that there was a better way to engineer or reallocate the money inside the life insurance policy. It’s really that simple.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. So I always think about Nelson, the key pieces that he added is he looked at how a dividend paying whole life insurance policy could be designed more effectively for financing our own needs.

Mike Everett:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

So that was one of the things. And then he brought that together for a common people and taught banking concepts along with it. And that’s really what he’s done for us.

Mike Everett:

Well, and the crazy thing about it is, the question is why haven’t I heard about IBC before? Nothing in our conventional financial wisdom leans towards this. Nothing. But yet, all it is is taking a 250, 260 year old product and re-engineering the way the policy works and making it so the individual, the company, the corporation can learn how to control their own money by investing in themselves.

Chris Bay:

So I’m going to ask you a different question now. I haven’t heard about it and we’re saying conventional financial wisdom out there is teaching other things. Why is the financial institutions out there, financial planners, investment companies, all those kinds of people, why are they not teaching this concept?

Mike Everett:

Because they won’t make as much money, and they’re not taking near, near enough time to educate themselves. It’s too much work.

Chris Bay:

You know what I love about IBC personally? Is that it is about autonomy. It’s about me having control of my money and not everybody wants to take that control. When you look at traditional financial planners and that kind of thing, it’s managed money. It’s me giving control to somebody else.

Mike Everett:

You have given all of the control to somebody else. And that kind of just goes back to the thought process is, we know that this isn’t for everybody and we’re okay with that. So the question that we always ask people is, where do you store and invest your money?

Chris Bay:

Yeah, that’s a good question to ask.

Mike Everett:

Yep.

Chris Bay:

All right. Hey, thanks for spending the time. For those of you listening, check out some of our new podcasts coming up. As always, we encourage you to go to our website, lifesuccesslegacy.com. Got a lot of resources on there available to people. Check it out.

Chris Bay:

Welcome to the Life Success Legacy podcast. My name is Chris Bay, and I’m joined today with the founder of Life Success & Legacy, Mike Everett. Mike, in our last podcast we started to talk about the policy design for Infinite Banking. And one of the phrases that you used is, “What’s more important to people? Is it cash, or is it death benefit?” And obviously, for most of our life, cash is more important than death benefit. So now what we want to do is dig in a little bit more into how we design the policies to emphasize the cash value, and then how that is utilized to, for example, turn the wind current, or, people use their cash value for investment purposes, retirement purposes, a variety of things. So can you talk a little bit about the two pieces of a policy design, and what I’m getting into is the base portion and typically what it generates, and then the paid-up addition portion and what it generates.

Mike Everett:

Okay. Traditionally, once again, life insurance was designed almost 100% for death benefit. So one of the things that Nelson discovered was, if you can reengineer or rearrange the way the premium is allocated internally with the policy, there are these two pieces that you’re talking about. We have the base premium. The base premium purchases almost 100% of the death benefit in the life insurance contract. So basically what you’re doing is, you’re taking a certain percentage of the premium and you’re allocating it to what we call the base premium.

Chris Bay:

So in a traditional life insurance policy, most, if not 100% of that premium, is going to go to base-

Mike Everett:

That’s true.

Chris Bay:

… and so it’s going to be 100% going towards death benefit.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

Okay. So how is this different?

Mike Everett:

Well, then Nelson realized that there was a way to actually create cash in your life insurance contract by adding a piece called the paid-up additions rider. This paid-up additions rider, what it does is it creates almost 100% cash value available in the contract that people can access. Now, there is a certain portion that purchases a little bit of death benefit. Remember, it’s a life insurance contract, but yet, I asked the question again, what’s more important right now, cash or death benefit? We’ve all said cash. We’ve said this a number of times, but we want to reiterate this to the people listening because cash is king, and if we can get access to that cash in some sort of way, and still have the life insurance contract in place, why wouldn’t a person want to do this?

Chris Bay:

Let’s put this into specifics for people. Let’s say that I come to you and I say, “Hey, I want to start an Infinite Banking concept policy. And I want to be able to put, I’m going to say, $10,000 annually into this policy.” Break that out for me, then. If I’m putting money into it, when do I get access to the cash value that I can then utilize for turning wind current and other things?

Mike Everett:

Well, if you were going to put $10,000 in, then there’s a certain way to allocate these dollars. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to take 40% of those dollars or $4,000 of that 10,000, and we’re going to buy the base portion of the policy. Then we’re going to take $6,000 or 60% of those dollars and buy the paid-up additions rider. Now, the easiest way to explain the paid-up additions rider is the Apollo rocket. You know, when it goes up into space, it gets up into space and it’s on the Apollo rocket. It’s got these turbo boosters. Well, after they get up into space, what do they do with the turbo boosters?

Chris Bay:

They drop off.

Mike Everett:

That’s exactly correct, but they need those two turbo boosters to get the rocket up into space. With the way that Nelson created the Infinite Banking concept, you need the turbo boosters or the paid-up additions rider in order to get this thing up and going.

Chris Bay:

So it’s flooding it with cash.

Mike Everett:

That is correct. Now, your question was, when do you have access to that cash? With the companies that we utilize, you can have access to that cash within the first month of starting your Infinite Banking Concept policy.

Chris Bay:

Now, when you say that you’re talking about an annual premium, so someone would pay the full 10,000 upfront.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

We also have clients who, for various reasons, they decide to do a monthly premium. So would they get access to that money right away?

Mike Everett:

They would not.

Chris Bay:

Okay.

Mike Everett:

Because, the way you explain that to people is, if you were going to write a check on your checking account, how much can you have access to? With whatever you’ve got in there?

Chris Bay:

Right.

Mike Everett:

So if you have somebody who pays an annual premium, they have access to their portion or their 60% of their policy when they pay that premium in the first 30 days. But if you have somebody who goes on a monthly plan, it’s going to take them the full 12 months or annual premium of monthly payments in order to have access to those dollars. In the great big scheme of things, it doesn’t make any difference.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. Yeah. So, if I understand correctly, when we put a chunk of money in, I’m going to get access, or I can borrow against my policy-

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

… and really that’s a loan. It’s called a policy loan, but it’s not really money from my policy. It’s really a loan from the company.

Mike Everett:

That’s true.

Chris Bay:

And they’re using my policy as collateral, which is an unbelievable trade of this is that our policy stays fully intact and it continues to compound and grow for us on the full, let’s say it’s $10,000, even though I’ve pulled out a loan for $6,000.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

So, we’re never interrupting the compounding interest of our policy.

Mike Everett:

Eighth wonder of the world.

Chris Bay:

It’s unbelievable. Now, some people might say, “Well, I just put in 10,000 and I’m only getting access to six.” Well, let’s talk about capitalization and thinking of our policies as businesses a little bit.

Mike Everett:

Well, we’re going to go back to Nelson’s three main principles. Number one, you’ve got to think long-term. Remember, Nelson was trained as a forester, so he thinks 20, 30, 40, 50 years in advance. Infinite Banking is a long-term thought process, so we tell people, “If you’re not in this for the long haul, this is not a good thing for you.” But number two, you can’t be afraid to capitalize. That means that you have got to put some money into this thing in order for it to work. If you think traditionally about life insurance, and it doesn’t matter if it’s term or whole life or universal life, most of the financial gurus out there say, “Let’s buy as much death benefit as we can and put as little premium in there as we can.” With Infinite Banking, it is completely opposite. We’re wanting to flood this thing with as much cash as we can get and get as little a death benefit as possible in order for you to be able to access the cash efficiently in your own life.

Chris Bay:

In fact, we call our premiums, premium deposits because it deposits into a banking system, really, that we own and control. So, if it’s a deposit into your banking system, do you want that deposit to be a little or a lot?

Mike Everett:

I want it to be a lot, but we need to be careful here because, this is called the Infinite Banking Concept. But we want to reiterate that we’re life insurance guys, and you are purchasing a life insurance policy. And in that purchase, you are creating absolute control of that contract. So you get to decide or control where 100% of that investment goes when you access that cash through a policy loan.

Chris Bay:

Okay. I want to take you back to your analogy of the space shuttle.

Mike Everett:

Correct.

Chris Bay:

Or the Apollo, or whatever it was that you used. And you talked about those booster rockets falling off. And that is what we call the flexible paid-up addition rider.

Mike Everett:

Correct.

Chris Bay:

That flexible piece is an important word. And you talked about, on the rocket, those falling off. Does the flexible PUA, the paid-up addition rider, do those ever fall off the policies, and why?

Mike Everett:

Well, once again, it’s called flexible because you have the flexibility of deciding what you want to do with that. We personally would like people to leave that flexible paid-up addition rider on there, but we can adjust the premium or keep it flexible enough to where you have a place to put some additional cash if you want to. Or you can actually reduce that to a minimum flexible paid-up addition rider payment of $100. Remember earlier we talked about 6,000, but then it goes to a hundred. So that creates a whole bunch of cash flow on your side of the fence, so to speak, when we help you understand how the policy is designed.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. It’d be easier if we had some visuals for people to teach them this next concept. But in theory, if we think of our policies as businesses.

Mike Everett:

Correct.

Chris Bay:

And let’s say we’re in the business and let’s use McDonald’s as an example. Obviously McDonald’s started with one restaurant. Well, now they’re everywhere across the world, right? They franchised them. So if we think of our policies as businesses, are we able to franchise our policies?

Mike Everett:

Absolutely.

Chris Bay:

Nelson, I think, we know this. I’m not sure he says it in his book, but at one point he had 49 life insurance policies.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

And I think you’re up to what? 17 now?

Mike Everett:

16. Almost 17.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. And in, gosh, seven years, I guess of doing my plan, we’re up to six policies. Explain to people why in the world would they want to start adding additional policies?

Mike Everett:

If you look at your policies as a business and your one policies or two policies or three policies are doing well, why wouldn’t you want to go and start more? All we’re trying to do is create a system to where you control 100% of your own cash flow. So, bottom line is, Nelson on page 48 talks about expanding the system to accommodate all your income. He’s helping people think through, why in the world would you want to continue to build policies? But the way we design the policies is, your policy is going to get better every year, regardless of the economy, regardless of the financial landscape in our country. So if that’s true, why wouldn’t you want additional policies at certain time periods as you’re growing this thing?

Chris Bay:

And, theoretically, we’re able to show people that they could actually start a additional policy of roughly the same size every five years without any additional cash out of pocket.

Mike Everett:

That’s true.

Chris Bay:

And so, eventually, aren’t they going to be capped on how much life insurance they could get?

Mike Everett:

There’s a possibility of that happening, but it really takes a large number of years. 15, 20, 25 years before they really need to worry about that.

Chris Bay:

Okay. And obviously we coach people through all of that.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

That’s part of the strategic planning that we do with people. My great topic, for some people this may be a little too much in the weeds for them, but I think there’s probably some folks out there that, I know this for a fact, that they like to understand the design of the policy and why it’s different than a traditional life insurance policy would be designed. In the future podcasts, what we’d like to do is get into some of the applications of how people are utilizing their policies in their life for the different ways that they do that, whether it’s for business, addressing debt, college financing, things like that.

So, to our listeners, thanks for joining us. Lots more information on our website at lifesuccesslegacy.com. If you haven’t got yourself a copy of Nelson Nash’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker, you can get that at our website as well. We encourage you to read it. Come back and join us again.

Chris Bay:

Welcome to the Life Success & Legacy podcast. My name is Chris Bay, and I’m joined today with the founder of Life Success & Legacy, Mike Everett.

Mike, we’ve talked in previous podcasts about how Nelson came to discover that whole life insurance, if designed properly, can be an unbelievable tool for really privatized banking, and controlling your own finances and all that. So, what we’d like to accomplish in this podcast is to educate people about different types of life insurance, why whole life insurance is the tool to be used, and why is this type designed differently for the purposes of Infinite Banking? So to begin with, can you just kind of give our listeners a broad perspective on the different types of life insurance that are out there, and why people buy life insurance?

Mike Everett:

Well, traditionally, life insurance was bought for one reason. It was bought for death benefit. If you go back, I’m going to say 40, 50, 60, 70 years, there was really numbers of different kinds of products out there in the life insurance industry, but the only difference was the design of what was going on. Some people, if you go back to my grandpa’s era, what they did was they bought whole life insurance and they bought it for death benefit. What they planned on doing was, they just planned on putting money aside just like you would for a savings account, but they just stored money into a life insurance policy.

There were all kinds of products out there. There was a 20 pay life. That means that you could pay the premium for 20 years and then it was paid up for the rest of the time. There was life paid up at 65. So you paid the premium until age 65, and then the policy paid for itself. Then you had your ordinary life or permanent life insurance, and you paid the premium all the way up to age 99. Basically what happened was, in all of those policies, the traditional life insurance policy, which was bought specifically for death benefit, the policy endowed at age 100. Meaning the death benefit amount and the cash value amount were equal amounts. What they did was, they turned around and they gave you the cash and said, “Hey, thanks a bunch for paying on this thing and thanks for not dying.”

Chris Bay:

I know from my past history in finances, personal, we were following some teachings of Dave Ramsey. Dave is famous for encouraging people to buy term and invest the rest. So can you just talk about term life insurance?

Mike Everett:

Term life insurance is exactly like renting an apartment. You’re basically renting your life insurance policy for a certain time period. There are all kinds of time periods that you can do. You can do annual renewable term. That means that you pay the premium every year and every year the premium goes up. It’s called attained age. As you get older, what happens to the cost of life insurance? It goes up because you’re just a little bit closer to death. That’s annual renewable term. You can get 5-year level, 10-year level, 15, 20, and even up to 30-year level.

If you think about it from an insurance company standpoint, the insurance company offers term life insurance for whatever time period you choose. Five years, you pay the premium for five years and at the end of five years, the premium goes up and you choose another term. 10 years, 15 years, 20 years and so on. If you think about it from a life insurance company standpoint, they just want you to pay your premium. They’d like you to not die. Right before you die, what they’d like you to do is, they’d like you to cancel your life insurance. Term life insurance is the number one profit center of most life insurance companies out there. So why wouldn’t they do that?

Chris Bay:

Yeah, so Infinite Banking obviously does not use term.

Mike Everett:

They do not.

Chris Bay:

You mentioned earlier that term life insurance is kind of like renting life insurance.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

So if we make that correlation to our living situations, if we’re renting, we’re not building equity.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

Okay. So then the option is then whole life insurance, and that’s kind of like buying a house where you’re building equity and that equity, we use the term cash value. Can you talk a little bit about whole life insurance and the cash value piece and why that is so important to the concept of Infinite Banking?

Mike Everett:

Well, this is one of the awesome things that Nelson discovered was, he realized through his own trials and his own tribulations, that there was a way that he was building equity. What ended up happening was, he had incurred a tremendous amount of debt. At the time that this had all come due, interest rates had soared extremely high, like 18, 19, 20, 21%. He realized that he had all kinds of equity, or all kinds of value in his life insurance policies, that he could tap into.

Instead of borrowing the money from traditional financial institutions at 18 to 21%, he was able to go to his life insurance policies and do a policy loan. Borrow against the cash value of his life insurance policy and be able to pay off some debts that he had out there. This is exactly what Nelson discovered in his book, Becoming Your Own Banker.

Chris Bay:

So, with a whole life insurance policy, you’re building equity, which can be borrowed against from the life insurance company and then utilized for many different purposes.

Mike Everett:

Correct.

Chris Bay:

Can you talk a little bit about the design of the whole life policy, because the traditional whole life policy… If I went down to some life insurance company and said, “hey, I want X amount of coverage.”, they’re going to design the plan a certain way, but if you went to an Infinite Banking coach, they’re going to design it differently. What are those differences?

Mike Everett:

In a traditional life insurance format, you’re buying literally a hundred percent death benefit. One of the questions that we ask every potential client is, “if we had to ask you right now, what was more important to you, cash or life insurance death benefit, what would you say?”

Chris Bay:

I’m going to say, “cash.”

Mike Everett:

It’s cash every single time. What if there was a way to design the policy where you could have both in ample supply? You would not only have death benefit, but you’d have the cash that you need now. We need cash from right now until the day we die. We only need death benefit one day. What if there was a way to design the policy to emphasize the cash value now, still get a death benefit, but yet really, we need the death benefit 20, 30, 40 years from now, not today. This, once again, was the beauty of what Nelson discovered. He realized there was a way to completely re-engineer the policy to work for you today and still have the death benefit when you needed it 20, 30, 40 years from now.

Chris Bay:

In the middle of Nelson’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker, he uses an example of a business person. He’s an equipment finance person, and he shows a couple of examples. One is first, this business owner simply putting money into his policy and just letting it be life insurance. It turns out to be a really incredible result for him. Then what Nelson shows is, if he actually uses the cash value of his policy and takes loans and utilizes that to finance his business expenses in his life, that he actually ends up with a better result. Simply by using his policy to finance everything in his life. That, sometimes for people, is a hard leap to make.

We always encourage them. If you think like a banker… In fact, in our boot camps, we say, “we’re going to remove your brain from your skull today and we’re going to replace it with a banker’s brain.” We want you to think like a banker. How do banks make money? If we can apply that to utilizing their own whole life insurance policy, but having it designed to emphasize the cash value portion versus the death benefit, it’s an unbelievable tool for banking.

Mike, thanks for explaining some of the ins and outs of life insurance. This is a topic that I think is going to take a little bit more explaining. I think what we’ll do is do another podcast that digs in a little bit deeper. We’re going to talk about the base portion of the policy. We’re going to talk about the paid-up addition portion of it and how those policies really can be thought of as businesses and how we can actually franchise our policies. Thanks for the information. Listeners, thanks for joining us and catch us on our next podcast.

Chris Bay:Welcome to the Life Success Legacy podcast. My name is Chris Bay and I’m joined today with the founder of Life Success & Legacy, Mike Everett.

Chris Bay:

Mike, today we want to talk about something that comes up a lot of times in our boot camps, in our seminars that we do, as people start to learn about the Infinite Banking Concept, they want to know well how does this apply to me? How do I get started? So I guess probably the best place to start with that is going back and talking about the wind current and how most people, not everybody, but most people are really fighting what we call a headwind. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Mike Everett:

Well, in some of our older podcasts we talk about a headwind tailwind, but we’re going to just specifically talk about the headwind right now. What is the headwind when you’re talking about your finances? Do we have a mortgage on the house? That’s a headwind. Do we have a loan on the car or cars? That’s a headwind. Do we have credit card debt? We have student loan debt or bank loan debt. That is what we call a headwind.

Mike Everett:

And if you think about it, when you get paid on Friday where does the money go? It goes to the bank. And then after you get that money in your bank what do you do with it? You have to make your house and cars and credit cards and student loans and bank loan payments before anything else happens. That is what we call the headwind, you are fighting a wind current because that money is not under any of your control.

Chris Bay:

And in Nelson’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker, he talks about the headwind and he talks in terms of interest and the amount of interest that the average American is sending out the window. Talk about that amount and what that’s doing to people’s lives.

Mike Everett:

Well, Nelson talks about the interest that we spend on all of that outside debt so to speak. He says that it’s 34,5% after taxes. So can you imagine the headwind that people are really truly fighting after taxes, that almost 35% of their money is going to interest alone?

Chris Bay:

Wow.

Mike Everett:

That’s a mountain.

Chris Bay:

It is. And yet our mindset, what we’ve been taught to think about money is, okay, we’re financing all this stuff in our life and yet we’re trying to save how much and put it towards retirement or some kind of tax qualified plan, an investment or so forth. And how much are we actually sending away for those types of things?

Mike Everett:

Well, for investments, for your 401K, IRAs, mutual funds and the like, you’re supposed to be saving somewhere between five and 10%. So if you think about it you’re sending 34,5% and supposedly saving five to 10%. Well none of that even makes sense if you really turned around and you looked at it according to the airplane world. If you were fighting a headwind of 345 miles an hour let’s say, and you’re… Let’s just say you’re saving 10% and your airplane goes 100 miles an hour, well, you’re going backwards.

Mike Everett:

And the financial gurus out there are saying, “Well, oh by the way maybe we could get your airplane to go five miles an hour more.”

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Mike Everett:

So none of this really makes any sense to be honest with you, but that’s the awesome thing about what Nelson Nash’s book becoming your own banker has taught people. There is a way to change the headwind into a tailwind.

Chris Bay:

Well, I always… When I talk with people it just makes sense when you say, “Okay, so average America has 34,5% of their dollars leaving their control in interest.

Mike Everett:

Yep.

Chris Bay:

And they’re sending another five to 10% to investments, and those investments are not guaranteed.

Mike Everett:

No they’re not.

Chris Bay:

So what would you rather have? Would you rather have the maybe eight to 12% maybe return on an investment or would you rather have the 34,5% that’s going to interest, that if you just turn the wind current from a headwind to a tailwind it’s guaranteed to you. I mean it’s pretty obvious right?

Mike Everett:

It is obvious.

Chris Bay:

Okay, so let’s talk about that. We talk in terms of outside debt, that’s money that we’re sending out to somebody else, car loans, student loans, mortgages, those kinds of things. And inside debt, we want to switch that outside debt to our side and make it inside debt and then we’re making those payments to ourselves. Can you describe how that happens?

Mike Everett:

Well, one of the things that we get people to understand is we are trying to get these things under our control, which is then the inside debt that we’re talking about. So imagine if all of a sudden you were able to create a system where you controlled your car payments and credit card payments, student loan payments, and even possibly your mortgage.

Mike Everett:

So think about those payments that you are planning on paying for the next five, 10, 20, 30 years to somebody else, and then all of a sudden we were able to create a system to where you were making those payments to yourself. This is when economic value-added comes into the picture, EVA, which is one of the most powerful things in Nelson’s book. And really all we’re doing is we’re adding value, we’re telling people, “Your money has a cost.”

Mike Everett:

And what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to transfer that control that you were making to outside debt to your control and now you make those payments to yourself. It completely changes the way you think about your money.

Chris Bay:

So if I’m able to switch my outside debt where I’m paying to other people, and I shift it over to my side of the scales where it’s now inside debt, and I’m an honest banker and I apply economic value-added, that means I’m making those same payments to myself which then I get to reuse those dollars, don’t I?

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

Okay. So here’s the question that people always have, and if I’m listening right now to the podcast, I’m saying, “Well that sounds great but how do I get the outside debt to my side of the scale and make it inside debt?” That’s the question we want to answer right now.

Mike Everett:

Well, part of that thought process is how does this apply to me?

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Everett:

Okay, so people go… Just like you said, this all sounds fine and great, but how do I get this thing going for me? We have what we call activators and we teach this in our boot camps. People go, “Well, how do I get started?”

Mike Everett:

Well, we throw the question out to the group, where would you find money if you were thinking about doing something like infinite banking? And some of the things that come back to us are home equity lines of credit, cash, CDs that are setting in the bank. We even have some people utilize their 401ks. There are all kinds of ways for you to access dollars and create your own activator in order to get Infinite Banking implemented in your life.

Chris Bay:

Well, I remember examples like so many of us, and this would be us included back when we were doing another program, a financial program, as we were paying extra on our debts. So we were sending extra money to somebody else that we were losing control of that money. We have folks who… Basically what it is is with Infinite Banking is we were trying to increase the amount of money that people are using and controlling and sending their direction rather than sending it out of their control to somebody else.

Chris Bay:

We want to increase the pool of money that they can control. And we help… As you mentioned, it’s all… It’s unique. It’s individual. And where do people find out what can work for them, when does that happen?

Mike Everett:

Well, it happens in a number of different ways. It really happens mostly when they come to one of our boot camps or if they go to one of our online boot camps that we do every other Tuesday. We have these online boot camps where we’re creating ways that they can educate themselves to get the tools that they need in order to make the decisions of whether or not infinite banking is for them.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. And what’s always surprising is people may not think that they have a pool of money that they have control of, and that’s where the coaching sessions that we do with them is we help them discover where that pool of money is that they have control of and how they can leverage that pool of money to turn their outside debt to inside debt and start taking advantage of those dollars and getting multiple uses of those dollars.

Mike Everett:

Chris, this could happen really quickly for some people because everybody has a pool. Every single person has a pool but nobody has ever showed them how to take advantage of the pool that they have access to.

Chris Bay:

So when we do our client conversations we talk with people about what are their goals, those things, and a lot of times debt is one of the things that they’re concerned about. Give the listeners just a feeling of in general, how quickly are people able to shift their outside debt to inside debt?

Mike Everett:

Well, it really depends on the access that people have to their own pool. The average client, and I’m just talking about the average client, can be 100% out of debt, to any outside debt, any other financial institution I’m talking about, in five to eight years.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Mike Everett:

But we do have some people that have the ability to change that wind current in the first year.

Chris Bay:

Yeah, yeah. Some cases the first month, which that sounds insane to people probably but it’s pretty fun to be a part of designing those. Mike, I appreciate you talking about how people can get started. This may seem a little vague to folks and really for the best… The best way for them to find out, I always tell people, “Would you be willing to spend $0 to see what was possible?”

Mike Everett:

Absolutely.

Chris Bay:

I don’t know why you wouldn’t, but if people want to find out they can contact us through our website at lifesuccesslegacy.com.

Chris Bay:

Again, we always encourage people to educate themselves through either coming to one of our boot camps, joining us on a webinar. They can register for all of those on our website. And of course we encourage them to order Nelson Nash’s book, becoming your own banker, off of our website, and read that and educate themselves.

Chris Bay:

Next podcast we’re going to get into and it may take a couple of podcasts, and that’s getting into policy design. Why are the policies for IBC different than what you might find in other circumstances. Mike, thanks for joining us and listeners, thanks for joining us.

Chris Bay:

Welcome to the Life Success & Legacy Podcast. My name is Chris Bay and I’m joined today with the Founder of Life Success & Legacy, Mike Everett. Hey Mike, we’re excited today to talk a little bit on a topic that is foundational to Life Success & Legacy, and that is who is Life Success & Legacy? Because a lot of times people are like, “Okay, great. I’ve researched this Infinite Banking thing and I’m interested in learning more about it, but who are these people that are going to be teaching me, designing plans, working with us?” So, I was just wondering, tell us a little bit about how Life Success & Legacy has come together, what drives it, and we can dig into more details about that.

Mike Everett:

Well, Chris, it’s funny that we’re discussing that today. I remember a trip that you and I had made to Iowa.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Everett:

And on our way home, you started firing questions at me right and left about what my passions were, why I enjoyed Infinite Banking, what is it that we were trying to achieve? And I remember it to be not just an informational Q&A, but there was some pretty intense, emotional stuff that was going on too, to find out what this thing was all about and where were we going with it?

Chris Bay:

I remember that conversation. It was a good one.

Mike Everett:

It was. And then I remember by the time we had got done with our four and a half hour trip, you had given me a few things to think about. But then the question that arose was, why does Life Success & Legacy exist? And I think what culminated from that whole conversation that we had literally four and a half hours was to inspire financial hope and freedom by revealing little known truths about money while investing in trusting long-term relationships.

Chris Bay:

I remember that conversation well, like it was yesterday. I remember it was dark and I had my phone out and I still have in my notes the results of that conversation. Because as you were talking and I was asking you questions, for me as somebody who is new to the organization, I wanted to know more about what was this whole thing about. Why were we really doing it? To me, it’s got to be purpose driven and it’s got to be bigger than just helping people with their money. It’s got to be a broader scope, a broader purpose. And so yeah, you did a fantastic job of answering the questions that I was asking. And then we just put it together in this, I guess, purpose statement, we just call it why we exist. I want to break it down just a little bit. When you look at the different sections, there’s three different sections to that why we exist. Can you talk about those different sections?

Mike Everett:

Well, I’m going to start with the last line, investing in trusting long-term relationships. This is really about friendships, it’s about relationships. And when we turn around and we’re talking and teaching and educating people about Infinite Banking, and trying to get them to say, “Why would we invest our money with you? Or why would we trust you to handle this thing in our lives?” We realized that there must be a tremendous amount of trust in the relationship. We don’t want the relationship to happen for the next 12 to 18 months, we want the relationships to happen for the next 30, 40, 50 years.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Everett:

And so that is where I would start, number one. Number two is we’re giving people information. We are educating people in ways that 99.9% of all financial planners will not take the time or the energy to give them these kinds of truths about money. So trusting long-term relationships, little known truths about money, but yet where we’re all trying to go is we want financial hope and freedom.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Everett:

So there is a great big picture here that we are trying to create for our clients, but yet in the midst of all of this education, we are giving them the tools that no other financial institution or no other financial guru will take the time to give to them.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. The first part of why we exist to inspire financial hope and freedom actually goes, in my view, even beyond that. Because so many times there’s a barrier for people to really create the life that they want and that barrier is their finances.

Mike Everett:

Yep.

Chris Bay:

And so once we teach some of these truths about money and they apply the Infinite Banking concept in their financial world and they take control of that process, all of a sudden it opens up all kinds of possibilities for our clients to actually create the lives that they want. I mean, we’ve got quite a few people that have quit their jobs because they’ve been able to remove those barriers and they are actually now pursuing dreams that they’ve had for many, many years in their life. That to me is really rewarding and it’s motivating. And it’s one of the reasons that I love doing the work that we do.

So I want to touch on that second piece about teaching little known trues about money. Talk to us a little bit about the philosophy of Life Success & Legacy and educating people. Do people have to be qualified to work with Life Success Legacy? What does it cost to come to a bootcamp to learn? When we design plans as a team for our clients, what is involved in the cost and those kinds of things?

Mike Everett:

Well, one of the things that we have discussed at length is we shouldn’t get paid until we add value to somebody. So when we put together a plan or an illustration or an educational seminar, or a bootcamp, or a one-on-one conversation, we don’t charge anybody anything. The only cost that someone might have is the cost of Nelson Nash’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker. The cost to them is $20. If they’re standing in front of us, everybody’s got a $20 bill in their pocket. So we charge $20 because we want people to have a little bit of skin in the game before we move forward. And usually, if people will buy the book, they’ll take time to read it. But once again, we have these educational bootcamps and we have educational online bootcamps, and we don’t charge anybody anything to attend any of those things because we would like people to investigate and spend some time investing in themselves, time, energy, a little bit of money, in order to find out if Infinite Banking is really for them.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. I tell people back in my education days, the 22 years I spent in education, I spent a lot of time designing strategies and plans for kids to try and help them be motivated to be in school, and some of them just really did not want to be there. And so I made a promise to myself in working with clients, I’m not designing behavior plans for the clients. I’m only working with the people who want to learn about this concept. So in my mind, if people are willing to come halfway, I’ll meet them halfway and I will teach them as long as they want to learn about this concept, until they decide they want to move forward, or they say, “Chris, I just don’t think this is for us.”

Tell me a little bit about the team. Because when you first started, we joke about this all the time as you being a rugged individualist out there, moving along solo, but now there’s a team with Life Success & Legacy. Talk a little bit about that team, how the pieces fit together, and how people have come to join the team.

Mike Everett:

Well, let’s touch on the rugged individualist for just a second. You and I, we literally kid back and forth on this. When I first got started in this, I told you within a couple of months of you coming on board was that you were probably going to be out on your own in the next 18 to 24 months. But in the midst of all of that, there were some pieces that were missing in Life Success & Legacy that you brought to the table. So, you were the first piece, or the first edition, the first team member, along with myself, that brought Life Success & Legacy to where it is today.

I am a shoot from the hip kind of guy, there’s not much organization, let’s get done what needs to be done right now. But you brought this organizational thought process and this let’s get some things done that would make sense for the organization, not just in the next two to three weeks or two to three months, but for the next four, five, six, 10, 15 years from now. And that’s really what we’re doing with Infinite Banking, we’re making people think long-term, and I never did that personally. So me to say that I’m thankful for Chris Bay is pretty incredible. And then all of a sudden it was just like, now we were at a place where it made sense that maybe we should build a small organization.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Everett:

I remember when we got started, I was calling people and having people do website stuff, I was designing brochures and I was doing all this on my computer. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but then all of a sudden I got introduced to a guy by the name of Mike Crawford.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Mike Everett:

And this guy is just a wiz with social media, with our website, with some of the internet stuff and how we’re even creating these podcasts. So him to come on board as part of a team too, now that’s our Lawrence team, and now what we’ve started to do is we’ve started to build out from that. We have Chris Garret’s out in Pennsylvania, we’ve got Clint Bradfield down-

Chris Bay:

Wichita.

Mike Everett:

…in Wichita. And then we’ve got Joe Frazier out in Western, Nebraska.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. Matt Zimmer up in North Dakota.

Mike Everett:

I’m telling you. So this thing is continuing to build, and we’re still adding pieces to this puzzle, which is very, very exciting.

Chris Bay:

The thing that I’ve really enjoyed as this organization has grown is that each person who joins, and we’re pretty selective in who we add to the-

Mike Everett:

Very.

Chris Bay:

Integrity has got to be a huge piece of it. But we know whether they have integrity because every single person who’s joined our team has been a client.

Mike Everett:

That’s right.

Chris Bay:

There’s nobody who has come in and they’re already an IBC coach or a life insurance agent, or somebody out there doing this work. These are people like myself, like you, like Crawford, and others who were in other professions. And they experienced IBC personally, and what it can bring to their life. And they were so impassioned by it that they chose to join on, to teach other people about this.

Well, I love the organization that we are. I feel like we’re doing things the right way. I think some of the common values go back to that, why does Life Success Legacy exist? And it is, it goes back to inspiring financial hope and freedom, it’s about educating people about money in a different way, and it’s about long-term trusting relationships. How many of our clients now are our friends?

Mike Everett:

It’s pretty incredible. In fact, how many texts a week? How many phone calls a week? How many emails a week do we get from clients just saying, “Hey, thank you,” or, “Hey, I’ve got a question about this,” or “How do I implement that?” So it’s very exciting stuff.

Chris Bay:

That’s right. Well, thanks for sharing with that, Mike. Our next podcast that we’re going to talk about is, well, okay, so we’ve learned a little bit about Infinite Banking, we’ve learned a little bit about who Life Success & Legacy is, how do people get started? How do you take those first steps getting started? So we’ll look forward to that conversation next. Thanks for joining us.

Chris Bay:Welcome to the Life Success Legacy podcast. My name is Chris Bay and I’m joined today with the founder of Life Success & Legacy, Mike Everett. Hey Mike, we’ve been talking about the four areas that Infinite Banking can address for people. First was eliminating debt rapidly, typically in 3 to 8 years, by turning the wind current. Our last podcast we did, we talked about how to finance everything in your life and applying economic value added or EVA, or as Nelson says, “Don’t steal the peas.”

Chris Bay:

In this next conversation, what I’d like to talk about that I think is going to be really interesting to people, and that is how to get tax-free retirement. Most of us have come up during a time period where we have been told to put our money into certain kinds of tax qualified plans or markets or things like that. So what I’d like for you to do is kind of describe the landscape of what most people know about. Most of the noise that we hear out there about retirement. Let’s talk about that first. And then what we want to do is transition to what are alternatives for that.

Mike Everett:

Okay. So here’s the way I did things before I learned about the Infinite Banking concept. I got taught to put my money aside into a 401(k), an IRA, a mutual fund, and I was going to do this systematically over a time period.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Everett:

You start out when you’re 25 to 35 years old and you start putting your money aside. Now, you’re supposed to do it systematically, and you’re going to do it tax-free right now, is that correct?

Chris Bay:

That is correct.

Mike Everett:

Okay. So you’re going to think through this thing with a customer or a client and help them understand why these things do or do not work. So one of the questions that I ask right off the bat is, are income tax is going to go up or down?

Chris Bay:

And if you look historically, the answer is yes.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

It’s going to go up.

Mike Everett:

The second question I would ask somebody is, number two, the money that you have in your checking account or under your mattress, is it worth more today or is it worth more tomorrow?

Chris Bay:

Today due to inflation.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct. Well, they keep cranking out dollars in the basement of the White House. And so the dollars are going down. Well, number three, when thinking of income taxes, you want to pay on the seed, the little amount, or do you want to pay on the harvest, the big amount?

Chris Bay:

I’d rather pay on the little amount.

Mike Everett:

But yet everything that we’ve been taught to do with our money, we take money, we set it aside income tax-free into a retirement plan, an IRA, a mutual fund, and it grows income tax-free. And then 20 or 30 years from now is when we start pulling money out. And you and I both agree that income taxes are going to go up and the value of the dollars are going to go down. So the dollars that we’d have access to 20 or 30 years from now are worth less or worthless, whichever you like.

Chris Bay:

So we’re paying higher taxes with dollars that are worth less. And all those tax qualified plans are assuming that that money is going to increase. But I remember a conversation with a teacher back in 2007, 2008, who came in and announced in the fall that she was getting ready to retire. And we celebrated. And yet in the spring, she came back into my office and said, “I’m not going to be able to retire.” And the reason was, what happened in 2007, 2008?

Mike Everett:

We had our fallout [crosstalk 00:03:42] financially.

Chris Bay:

That’s right. So the market crashed. So her money that was sitting in one of those tax qualified plans, they lost a great amount of it.

Mike Everett:

I guess. So the question is, was there money guaranteed?

Chris Bay:

No.

Mike Everett:

There you go.

Chris Bay:

So I filed that away in my head. That was before I knew about Infinite Banking. When I started learning about Infinite Banking and that my money was in some, in a vehicle that was safe, not only safe, but guaranteed by contract to grow, that gave me security. I love that. Okay. So we’ve talked a little bit about how people have been told to put their money into something, [crosstalk 00:04:17] those tax qualified plans. So now I’ve never heard about IBC, let’s pretend, and I want to learn about an alternative. And I’m curious about retirement. Talk to me about what IBC can do for retirement.

Mike Everett:

Well, we talk about this all the time. Really what we’re doing is we’re re-engineering a life insurance policy, so people can have access to their money in an income tax-free environment. So one of the things that Nelson says is people want access to those dollars. Well, they have access to those dollars in an income tax-free environment, because we’re going to show them how to borrow those dollars out of there without actually making the system or the contract null and void.

Chris Bay:

Right.

Mike Everett:

So what we’re trying to do is… I chuckle about this. I say, “How big a check can you write from your checking account?” Well, how much have you put in? The same is true with either your retirement through a 401(k) or with your life insurance policy, the cash values are the equity that you have, how much have you put in? So the more you put in, the greater value you have, that means that the dollars that you have access to will have greater value as well. This isn’t rocket science what we’re doing.

Chris Bay:

Right. So as we’re putting those dollars in, and I like to think of my premiums, my life insurance premiums, rather than thinking of them as bills, I think of them as deposits. And I want to put in as big a deposits as I can so that I have money to take out and finance my life. But also I’m thinking ahead to, let’s say, I want retirement, or as Nelson calls it, passive income, that’s money that comes to us and we don’t have to do anything to earn it. So if I want to be able to pull money from my life insurance policy as retirement money and live on that, how does that work and how does it impact my overall policy?

Mike Everett:

Well, a great example would be in the Equipment Financing section in Nelson’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker. By the way, you can get that on our website at lifesuccesslegacy.com. In this particular section of Nelson’s book, it goes into a great detail about a guy who has a policy. He creates his own policy. And then in the very first section, it talks about him just putting the money in there and never using it.

Chris Bay:

Just leaving it as life insurance, [crosstalk 00:06:50] he really doesn’t understand IBC.

Mike Everett:

He absolutely doesn’t. And so what he does is he makes his premium payments and he leaves all of the money on deposit with the life insurance company. Now, the great thing about it is after he does that, after he gets to retirement age, he has access to $92,000 a year in retirement income. Now, if you knew somebody who got $92,000 a year, you’d be excited, but then Nelson goes into detail in a number of different ways. And we’re just going to move right to the end of the Equipment Financing section, where the more he used it to finance all of the stuff in his life, trucks and equipment, et cetera, et cetera.

Mike Everett:

He had access to more dollars because he utilized the policy and he implemented economic value added. And he made all of those payments back to himself over a time period. So instead of taking $92,000 out a year, he had access to $225,000 a year. The question I always ask then is, did it have anything to do with the insurance company? It had absolutely nothing to do with the insurance company. It had to do with how he functioned with his own dollars.

Chris Bay:

I love that because what it does is it puts the onus, it puts the control on me. And when people say, “Well, what with Infinite Banking can go wrong? What’s the risk.” We always say, “We are the risk.”

Mike Everett:

You are.

Chris Bay:

If we don’t treat the system right. If we don’t apply economic value added, and we don’t put the peas back on the shelf, we are the ones who can mess it up, but it’s not at the risk of the market or anybody else. Well, so then I know in that case of the Equipment Financing in the book that Nelson wrote, I notice that the cash value continues to grow even though he’s pulling out $225,000 a year, how does that happen?

Mike Everett:

Well, by the time you get down the road, the dividends are so large inside these things what’s happening is it’s continuing to buy paid up additions, which adds to the base of the policy, which turned around, increases the death benefit in these things. It’s not magic, but it seems like it’s magic.

Chris Bay:

So he’s pulling out $225,000 a year, right? And his cash value is still continuing to grow, which for a lot of people, one of their main concerns is am I going to run out of money in my retirement? And when you capitalize a policy like this and you let the system grow, the beautiful thing is you’ll never have to worry about running out of money. And oh, by the way, in that Equipment Financing, how much death benefit did he pass on?

Mike Everett:

Well, in the early stages, it was $1.3 million. But as he moved down the road, it was three, four, $5 million. So the numbers just get bigger the more you use it.

Chris Bay:

And that policy was designed for cash value, banking purposes, not death benefit.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

So isn’t that amazing that we can use it now, but then still be able to pass on assets to our beneficiaries in the future?

Mike Everett:

It’s opposite of everything we learned about money.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. That’s good. Mike, thanks for talking through us a little bit about retirement and passive income and the use of Infinite Banking. Again, we encourage our folks to go to our website lifesuccesslegacy.com. If you haven’t downloaded our eBook, Financial Planning Has Failed by Kim Butler, good friend of ours, we encourage you to do that, that’s free. And also you can access order a book by Nelson Nash, Becoming Your Own Banker. Our next podcast we’re going to talk about is thinking long-term, which is Nelson’s number one principle, and that is, how do you pass on assets tax-free to your future generations? Join us for that. Hey Mike. Thanks a lot.

Mike Everett:

Thanks, Chris.

Chris Bay:

Welcome to the Life Success & Legacy podcast. My name is Chris Bay and I’m joined today with the founder of Life Success & Legacy, Mike Everett. Hey Mike, last time when we were talking on our podcast, we talked about how to turn the headwind into a tailwind and designing plans, where we get people a debt-free in a short amount of time, typically three to eight years, without actually changing their cashflow. Today what I’d like to do is deal with the second aspect of what infinite banking can do for people and that is actually, once you’re debt-free, learning how to finance everything in your life or your business. So we talk a lot about the concept of EVA, economic value added. What does that mean? Where did it come from and why is that important when you think about creating your own banking system? Can you talk a little bit about that Eva and why it’s important?

Mike Everett:

Economic value added is probably the second most important topic that we talk about. Obviously changing the wind currents number one, economic value added would be number two. The bottom line is all the concept amounts to is the recognition of the fact that your capital has a cost, as well as that which you have borrowed from banks. So the easiest way to explain that is on this side of the scale, and I always do this with folks, on this side of the scale, you’ve got your house, your cars, your credit cards, et cetera, you have to make those payments, correct?

Chris Bay:

Correct.

Mike Everett:

Okay. So what if in this relatively short time we can move all of that debt to your side of the scale, meaning that means that you own the debt, the house, the cars, the credit cards, et cetera. So imagine if infinite banking is not a part of your life right now, do you have to make the payments for your house, cars, credit cards, et cetera?

Chris Bay:

Absolutely. We call that outside debt.

Mike Everett:

That is correct. So what happens if we shift all that debt to inside debt, economic value added, what we’re doing is we’re adding value to your dollars by giving you the opportunity to make those payments to yourself.

Chris Bay:

So I’m interested, when we talk about if we have a loan at the bank, are they going to give you that money for free?

Mike Everett:

They are not.

Chris Bay:

Okay. So I always ask people, do you care more about your banker than yourself? And obviously they chuckle and they say, well, no, of course not. So if the bank is going to charge you whatever percentage, then wouldn’t, you care more about yourself and charge yourself at least that amount. So let’s take a car loan. Okay. Talk us through how you might apply EVA with a car loan.

Mike Everett:

Okay. So let’s just take a conventional bank to start with. They charge you, let’s say, anywhere from 1.9 to 8%. Okay. Do you have to make those payments?

Chris Bay:

Absolutely.

Mike Everett:

Okay. So if all of a sudden you got yourself to where you own the debt, let’s say we used the activator that we talked about in the previous podcast, or we utilized an asset to pay off that debt. Imagine if you were making that car payment to yourself, would you want to pay yourself a small interest rate or a large interest rate? Remember, it’s your money. Part of the thing is getting people to make the mind shift, to pay themselves whatever interest rate they are comfortable with. I personally, when I borrow money from myself, I charge myself 10% on every loan and people go, you charge yourself 10%, and I go absolutely, because it’s my money and I’m paying myself. So it’s huge.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. When we do our boot camps for folks, I always try to say if the most important thing we could do today is if I could take a banker’s brain and plop it inside your skull so that everything that we’re teaching you today, you would look at it from a banker’s perspective, it completely changes everything. If you’re a banker, don’t you want everybody to bring their loans through your bank?

Mike Everett:

Absolutely.

Chris Bay:

And don’t you want to charge them interest?

Mike Everett:

As much as you can.

Chris Bay:

Exactly. So why not charge yourself that interest? Because now that’s additional capital going into a system that is guaranteed to grow and compound and you have access to it again. So the more you put into it, the more it’s going to grow and be available to you and know, by the way, when you pull that money out, your policy is still growing and compounding as if you’d never touched it.

Mike Everett:

It’s unbelievable.

Chris Bay:

I don’t know another financial vehicle that allows you to do that.

Mike Everett:

There’s not one out there.

Chris Bay:

That’s the brilliance of Nelson Nash and earlier you referenced a quote from Nelson when you were talking about EVA…

Mike Everett:

Right.

Chris Bay:

…Direct quote from the book, Nelson’s book is Becoming Your Own Banker and we have a copy of that available for you on our website at lifesuccesslegacy.com, and again, we always encourage people to get a copy of that and read it. In the book he will reference, and we’ll talk just a little bit about it, but to learn more about it, you’re going to want to get a copy of Nelson’s book and read it, but he talks about putting the peas back on the shelf. Just touch on that real quickly.

Mike Everett:

Well, basically if you own the grocery store, you want to be able to go to your own grocery store to purchase groceries.

Chris Bay:

Right.

Mike Everett:

Nelson used a can of peas in his book but what we do is we literally show people how every dollar that flows through their hands can be just like that can of peas. But we would really encourage people to get a copy of the book so they can go into a little bit more detail on the grocery store, in the book.

Chris Bay:

Yeah, absolutely. Because the principle is we always teach people is don’t steal the can of peas. That’s actually Nelson’s number three principle.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

Number one is, think long-term. Number two is…

Mike Everett:

Don’t be afraid to capitalize.

Chris Bay:

Don’t be afraid to capitalize. And number three is…

Mike Everett:

Don’t steal the peas.

Chris Bay:

Don’t steal the peas. So if you want to learn more about not stealing the peas and how to finance everything in your life, once you’re debt-free, encourage you to get a copy of Nelson’s book off of our website, lifesuccesslegacy.com. So today we talked about how to finance everything in your life with economic value added or not stealing the peas. Our next podcast, we’re going to be talking about something that I think would be important to a lot of people. Don’t miss that podcast. It is about how to get to tax-free retirement, or as Nelson calls it, passive income. Thanks for joining us.

Mike Everett:

Thanks Chris.

Chris Bay:

Welcome to the Life Success & Legacy Podcast. My name is Chris Bay and I’m joined today with the founder of Life Success & Legacy, Mike Everett. Hey Mike. On our last podcast, we talked about the four things that Infinite Banking can do for somebody. The first thing we talked about is how it can eliminate debt rapidly. Which for most of our clients, that happens in about three to eight years in general, for some it’s sooner. For some it’s actually the first month, which sounds crazy. For us, for my family, it took us 26 months. But in general, for most people, it takes somewhere in the range of three to eight years. And we talk about that, being able to do that by turning our headwind into a tailwind. And we’ll talk more about that today. The second thing it does is it teaches us how to finance everything in our life.

The third thing that Infinite Banking can do for folks is it can give us tax-free retirement. And then the last thing, the fourth thing, is tax-free wealth transfer. And that’s passing on our assets to our future generations or other philanthropic organizations that we care about, churches, organizations and such. So on this podcast, what I’d like to do is really dig into that first thing. And that is, how do we eliminate debt rapidly using Infinite Banking? And we talk a lot about shifting the headwind of interest through financing and shifting it to a tailwind. For those listeners, I’m a runner, and at my age, when I’ve got a headwind that I’m facing, when I’m out running on the lobby, instead of feeling about 47 years old, now I feel about 67 years old. But man, when that wind changes and it comes around behind me, all of a sudden I’m feeling 37 again. So that wind makes a huge difference. Can you explain a little bit about shifting that headwind that people are facing and financing to a tailwind?

Mike Everett:

Well, when people come to us, usually their debt load is pretty heavy. Let’s just talk about some of the things that they’re spending their money on. They’ve got mortgages, they’ve got car loans, they’ve got credit card debt, usually multiple credit cards. They’ve also got some student loans and even business owners have business loans, equipment, vehicles, et cetera, et cetera. So, changing the headwind into a tailwind is kind of a big deal, because if you think about all the things that we’re sending money out on, we’ve got all these things that we’re … we get paid on Friday, what do we do? We send our house, our car, our credit card, our student loan payments. How much is left over for us? Not very much. So imagine if there was a way to shift the wind current to where all of a sudden you weren’t making those payments to somebody else, but you were making those payments to yourself. What kind of freedom would that create?

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Mike Everett:

It’s pretty incredible.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. Nelson Nash, in the book, Becoming Your Own Banker, which we always recommend people get a copy from our website, lifesuccesslegacy.com and read that book. Nelson talks about the wind current in the context of airplanes. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Mike Everett:

Well, if you think about it, you were just talking about it as a runner. A perfect example is, imagine if you had a plane and you were flying into a 345 mile an hour wind.

Chris Bay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Everett:

Your efficiency of your plane wouldn’t be very good. But if all of a sudden you wait for the winds to shift and all of a sudden you’ve got that 345 mile an hour wind behind you, how fast are you going to get there?

Chris Bay:

Pretty fast.

Mike Everett:

Pretty quick. It’s amazing when you get to explain that to a customer when it comes to their finances.

Chris Bay:

And I remember when I was first learning about all this, we didn’t have a huge headwind because we were really a save up and then pay cash for things.

Mike Everett:

Right.

Chris Bay:

So we really didn’t have a wind going at all, either a headwind or a tailwind. But our problem was, let’s say our airplane’s traveling 100 miles an hour, we’re trying to figure out how to make it go 105 miles an hour by, let’s not go out to eat quite as often or let’s cut our cable bill, those kinds of things. That’s pretty hard to get excited about when you’re going from 100 to 105 miles an hour. When reality is, if we can turn that headwind completely into a tailwind, we can really get going.

Mike Everett:

You change the tailwind quickly if you can control the cash flow. But most of the financial industry does not ever explain it that way. You said something about getting the airplane to go 105 miles an hour. That’s just like the financial professional trying to tell you, oh, by the way, we can give you three to 5% more on your investments. When in fact, all you’re doing is, you’re stopping the headwind from 345 miles an hour into 340. You see, it still doesn’t change the wind current that much and so you’re still fighting it

Chris Bay:

Just to clarify for the listeners, you’re using 345 miles an hour of a headwind or a tailwind, where does that come from?

Mike Everett:

That comes from the interest rate that Nelson says the average family is paying towards debt. It’s just house, cars, credit cards, student loans, et cetera. Add them together and you usually have an average of about 34 and a half percent that people are spending on interest alone after they pay their income taxes.

Chris Bay:

When I first read about that, I found that fascinating. So when I think about every dollar that passes through my hand, right off the bat, 20, 25, 28% goes to taxes.

Mike Everett:

Correct.

Chris Bay:

I never even see it. Right?

Mike Everett:

Yep.

Chris Bay:

Then on top of that, let’s add 34 and a half percent that’s going to interest. So you’re adding that up in your head?

Mike Everett:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

Then let’s say I’m trying to send money to my company, 401k or IRA, which by the way, is not guaranteed to grow and I don’t have control of it. And they’re using it-

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

… while it’s sitting over there. So I am now trying to live on the remaining amount.

Mike Everett:

Which isn’t very much.

Chris Bay:

Whereas, if I can turn the wind current and I can add that 34 and a half percent of interest going my direction, it’s dramatically changing our cashflow.

Mike Everett:

Let’s just pretend that you only have access to not the 34 and a half percent, but let’s say you have access to 10 to 15% of that.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Mike Everett:

It’s gigantic.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. Okay. So we talk about how we design plans for people and that we can eliminate debt and build capital at the same time, without changing their cashflow. How is it possible? Explain a little bit about, how is it when we do plans for people that we’re able to eliminate debt rapidly without changing their cashflow, we’re just changing where it’s flowing.

Mike Everett:

Well, part of that comes from having assets or what we call an activator. If you have an activator or an asset that’s sitting there doing nothing for you and we’re able to access that to be able to eliminate a car or a credit card or a student loan debt, then all of a sudden you have the payment that you were making to somebody else, but now you have the availability of making that payment to yourself. So the bottom line is, what we’ve done is, we’ve changed the wind current of those one, two or three items that you were sending money out the door. Now you’re getting the opportunity to send the money in the door.

Chris Bay:

Wow.

Mike Everett:

Changes things pretty dramatically.

Chris Bay:

I was just working on a plan the other day for a client, where we were able to eliminate all of their debt, including their mortgage, in four years and one month, without changing their cashflow and recoup everything tax-free within the fifth year. So not only are they debt free, but they have all the equity in their home and everything else within five years. I mean, when we get to share that with people, it really inspires possibilities for them.

Mike Everett:

A lot of times you’ll get calls like we did just a little bit ago, where people are having trouble sleeping.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Mike Everett:

Because they’re looking at these things and they’re going, I can’t believe that you can do this for us, but we do.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. Well, as always, we want to encourage our listeners to go to our website, lifesuccesslegacy.com. If you don’t have a copy of Nelson Nash’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker, we again really encourage you to purchase one of those. Also, we have a free downloadable e-book called Financial Planning Has Failed. And the next podcast that we’re going to tackle is the second element of Infinite Banking. And that is, how do you finance everything in your life? So if you’re debt free, then what do you do? Please join us for our next podcast. Thanks.

Mike Everett:

Thanks Chris.

Chris Bay:Welcome to the Life Success & Legacy podcast. My name is Chris Bay, and I’m joined today with the founder of Life Success & Legacy, Mike Everett. Last week, we talked, Mike, about how you were introduced to the Infinite Banking Concept. What I’d like to do is dig a little bit deeper now into what is the Infinite Banking Concept.

Chris Bay:

When we are conducting our Infinite Banking Boot Camps, we talk about the four things that Infinite Banking does. The first of which is that it reduces debt rapidly by turning the wind current. The second thing we do is we teach people how to finance everything in their life and actually earn the interest that they might be losing by taking loans at banks or other financial institutions or the interest they might be losing because they’re paying cash. The third thing that Infinite Banking does is it provides a tax-free retirement. Then the last thing, the fourth thing, is tax-free wealth transfer. So what I’d like to do is have a conversation about each of those a little bit.

Mike Everett:

Sounds good.

Chris Bay:

The first thing of what is IBC, reducing debt rapidly by turning the wind current. People are amazed, and I know you feel this way. When you’re able to show somebody a plan and you show them what’s possible in a very short amount of time really, they get excited, you’re excited, I’m excited, we’re all excited about what’s possible. The power of it is turning the wind current. So can you kind of describe what is the wind current that people are facing, that kind of headwind tailwind thing?

Mike Everett:

Well, when we’re going into detail with people on how to rapidly eliminate outside debt, people don’t even think through all of the payments that they’re making to somebody else, the house payment, the car payment, the credit card payments, the student loan payments. Imagine if you were just putting part or half of those payments into your own system. So what I normally do is I help people just think through about all of the money that’s going out the door. What if some or all of that money was coming back to them in some sort of way? That’s what we call changing the wind current.

Chris Bay:

Okay, so then how does that happen? I mean, if we’re thinking about shifting the wind current and we’re turning those payments from going to somebody else to now, all of a sudden, it’s going to themselves, how do you go about doing that?

Mike Everett:

Well, first of all, you teach them about economic value added, EVA, which is really one of the most powerful things that we teach. What people don’t understand is our money has a cost in some sort of way. So if we’re trying to get people to understand about the costs that they have towards their money, if they were making payments to Visa and MasterCard and Ford Motor Credit and Countrywide Homes for all of the different things that they were paying money towards, what would happen if we taught them how to actually make those payments to themselves? Our question to most people is if you were making all or part of those payments to you, how fast would your money grow?

Chris Bay:

The amazing thing is so once we turn that wind current for a family or for a business, that money they were making payments on was going to somebody else and they never got to see it again-

Mike Everett:

Ever.

Chris Bay:

… but when we turn that wind current, and now all of a sudden that headwind turns into a tailwind, it’s now flowing to them and don’t they get to reuse that money.

Mike Everett:

They have access to it in an income-tax-free environment. That’s what blows people away, but this is what separates us from everybody else. We show them how to have more than one use of that dollar over and over and over.

Chris Bay:

So talk to me a little bit about how rapidly because that very first thing is that we reduce debt rapidly. Give me a range. Give me, in general, over the hundreds of clients that you’ve helped turn their wind currents, generally, when are they able to pay off their outside debt?

Mike Everett:

I would say the average client, and I’m just talking average, is 100% out of debt in a five to eight year range. When you’re showing people this kind of thing, they’re always going, “Well, there’s no way that this is possible,” but once you understand what the wind current is and how you can control the wind current, it makes all the difference in the world.

Chris Bay:

That’s pretty powerful. Now, I have a little personal story along with that just because you were my coach originally in Infinite Banking.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

When we were able to turn our wind current, we were able to pay off our outside debt in 26 months.

Mike Everett:

Unreal.

Chris Bay:

It’s unbelievable. We have clients that will actually be debt free in the very first month of starting their plan.

Mike Everett:

That’s correct.

Chris Bay:

Now, not everybody’s that way.

Mike Everett:

No.

Chris Bay:

So give me a long stretch. What would you say is the longest it’s taken one of your clients to be completely debt free? You’re talking about mortgage. You’re talking about student loans. You’re talking about business debt, any kind of debt at all. What is the longest that you can recall that it’s taken somebody to be debt free from that outside debt to somebody else?

Mike Everett:

Somewhere around 11 to 12 years. 11 to 12 years, but yet when we go out and get a mortgage, we get it for 30 years. So if you turn around and you tell somebody, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to get you 18 to 23 years on your mortgage,” I don’t think we have a problem.

Chris Bay:

No, and when you think about it if a mortgage is, let’s say, 30 years long and the amount of interest that you pay during that time period, if you were able to shrink that mortgage down to let’s just say 10 years, think of the amount of interest that you save somebody.

Mike Everett:

It’s tens of thousands of dollars, probably close to… On a quarter of a million dollar house, it’s like a $100,000. The numbers are just astronomical.

Chris Bay:

Yeah, one of the data points that I like to share in our Boot Camps is that the average American over a lifetime… and we’re talking mortgages, student loans, car debt, credit card debt, all of that… the average American is going to lose $600,000 just in interest over a lifetime. We can teach people not only how to save that $600,000 in interest, but actually make that $600,000, which sounds too good to be true.

Mike Everett:

It does.

Chris Bay:

Okay, so the very first thing IBC does is it reduces debt rapidly by turning the wind current. Second, teaching people how to finance everything. Now, that one I find takes the most teaching. People don’t get that.

Mike Everett:

It does.

Chris Bay:

So once I’m debt free, how does this thing work for me? How is it that I finance things in my life? Can you give some examples or paint a picture for us?

Mike Everett:

The greatest example we give is how to finance a car. When we go out and we buy cars, we either save up money for three or four years and pay cash or we go down to the bank and finance it. What we’re going to do is we’re going to just kind of stick on the cash guy for just a little bit because this’ll be the hardest guy to get to understand why we do what we do. He saves money, but then the minute he buys a car, he’s back down to zero. Then he has to continue to do that over a lifetime with all of his cars.

Mike Everett:

So imagine if you created a system where you had access to that money, but it continued to grow over time. When I say grow over time, I’m talking about exponential growth. What we’re doing is we’re just getting… You remember we talked about being able to use that dollar over and over again. That’s what we’re talking about in being able to finance things, but we buy washers and dryers, we buy cars, we go on vacation, we have credit card debt. We learn how to finance everything that we purchase through the Infinite Banking Concept.

Chris Bay:

One of the things that strikes me is that because I was a cash guy and we followed Dave Ramsey’s plan for seven years. We didn’t go on vacations. We didn’t go out to eat very much. I mean, we weren’t having very much fun, and we were slowly getting our debt snowball… We were slowly getting that debt paid down, but not nearly as rapidly as we did when we started Infinite Banking.

Mike Everett:

Right.

Chris Bay:

The piece that struck me is if I’m paying cash, that means I’m saving up a pool of cash and then I’m going and paying cash for that item. Every single time I am killing the compounding interest.

Mike Everett:

You are.

Chris Bay:

Every single time I’m starting over. So I’m never really building up anything with that, that approach.

Mike Everett:

Correct.

Chris Bay:

Whereas with Infinite Banking, not only am I really going to be able to pay cash, but I’m also having my money compounding and growing for me, and it’s never interrupted.

Mike Everett:

Correct.

Chris Bay:

Pretty powerful overlay [crosstalk 00:00:09:47].

Mike Everett:

It is. It’s big.

Chris Bay:

Okay, let’s jump into the third thing. Is there such thing as tax-free retirement? Well, we say yes. How does that happen?

Mike Everett:

Well, of course once again, there’s only one pool of money, but what we’re trying to do is we’re creating a system to where you are controlling the entire pool of money that you have access to. So when we’re taking those payments that we were making for cars and homes and credit cards and vacations and stuff and continuing to reuse that money, then what we’re doing is we’re creating a larger pool and it’s still compounding. But at one point in time, you’re going to want to start to access that money, the larger pool, for income. Instead of you utilizing a 401K or an IRA or a mutual fund that is going to have tax on it, we’re going to show you how to take policy loans and be able to access that money in an income-tax-free environment.

Chris Bay:

There’s been many, many examples that we’ve looked at. In Nelson’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker which we highly recommend to all of our listeners to get a copy and read it, Nelson shows many examples of when people are pulling that money out… as he calls it, passive income, retirement income, whatever you want to call it… and you’re pulling it out as a loan, it’s not taxed. In many cases, if you’ve capitalized your system and given it time to do what it needs to do, even though you’re pulling out living expenses, pulling out income, it’s still growing and compounding. So the question of… and I find this with a lot of my clients that are in their fifties or sixties, their biggest concern is they’re going to run out of money in retirement. Well, in this situation, they never have to worry about running out of money.

Mike Everett:

Nope.

Chris Bay:

Nope. That lets you sleep pretty well at night.

Mike Everett:

It does.

Chris Bay:

Okay, so that’s tax-free retirement. How about the fourth thing IBC does? That is tax-free wealth transfer. Powerful.

Mike Everett:

It’s gigantic. When you think about some of the wealthy families, they’ve continued to do this for generations, for literally for hundreds of years. What we’re trying to show people is this life insurance policy that they put together, even though we’re able to use it along the way, what we’re doing is we’re guaranteeing that they’re going to be able to direct 100% of the direction of that money through this wealth transfer. It’s pretty unbelievable.

Chris Bay:

It makes me think of Nelson’s number one principle, and that is?

Mike Everett:

Think longterm.

Chris Bay:

Think longterm, brother. So when you’re talking about think longterm, what are you thinking?

Mike Everett:

I’m thinking of my grandkids. I’m thinking of my great grandkids. So literally when we go to work with families, we’re talking about two and three generations from now. When you’re thinking like that, you’re going to be able to create a wealth transfer that people won’t believe is possible.

Chris Bay:

One of the things that I learned at this last Nelson Nash Institute Think Tank was the phrase “Rags to rags in three generations.” What that means for the listeners is that one generation works their tail off and they build some wealth. Then that wealth gets transferred onto the next generation, but by the time that wealth gets transferred to the third generation, it’s gone. The problem in that is the knowledge has not been passed on from one generation to the next. One of the things that we do at Life Success & Legacy is that we work with generations within families so that not just the initial generation, but future generations, are learning how this works.

Mike Everett:

Yeah, we want to sit down with families. We want them to understand that when they hand that baton off, it has to do with money, everybody knows what’s going on.

Chris Bay:

That’s right. That’s right. So that’s really kind of the big picture, four things that Infinite Banking can do. Obviously, there’s a lot more education that goes into this. Nelson’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker, is available on our website at lifesuccesslegacy.com. We highly encourage everyone to read it. This is just the beginning. That book is a 10-hour course of instruction. Our boot camps that we do are typically about three hours long, and we have those both through web conferences as well as live around in different regions. Mike, thanks for joining me.

Mike Everett:

Thanks, Chris.

Chris Bay:

I look forward to our next conversation.

Mike Everett:

You bet. Have a great day.