153: The Investment Model That Protects Your Wealth From Banks

Whether you're letting your money sit in the bank, hoping that the less than 1% interest is going to benefit you somehow, you greatly enrich the bank, you realize the volume of dollars you're transferring away for every time you access a bank for a loan, a credit card, mortgage. If you could reclaim that, that's all the difference in the world to your family. This concept has many layers, and the foundational layer is the reclamation of the concept of banking. The banking is beneath, behind, around literally all of the power structures in the world. What they didn't tell you with the 401k is the government will come and take a quarter, a third. Dine now is going to raise our debt to $58 trillion over the course of the next 10 years. Exactly how are they going to pay for the $58 trillion? It looks like I'm paying a premium for life insurance. But when you realize there's a mathematical certainty that every dollar you put in will now be coming back to you with interest, then it's not paying a premium, it's capitalizing a bank. So you've probably heard about diversifying investments and saving for the future. But what about becoming your own bank and opting out of high interest loans and difficult decisions about whether to sell off an asset? As a single woman and a mother, my whole system exhaled when I learned about the specific and unique whole life insurance policies that my now friends Josh and Ken offer. So unlike crypto stocks and even gold, you can borrow the money that you invest in this policy even days after you deposit it. You can actually choose never to pay it back because it comes off of the death benefit, which is exponentially more than you put in over the years. And your policy keeps compounding and growing as if you didn't touch it. There's nothing else based on my research, not one other type of investment that allows for that. every other investment or asset depreciates the minute you liquidate it and by the way try not paying back your home loan or heloc the strategy is super flexible and it's super low stress these guys go above and beyond to make sure that you and your family are set up with the best policy and i've now referred them hundreds of folks who have given me the same feedback i'm pretty skilled i think at attracting sleeper resources that are game-changing so i am delighted to put you on Schedule a free call with them at kellybroganmd.com forward slash whole. So stay tuned for my conversation with my whole life insurance policy strategist, Josh, where we unpack all of the whys and hows of infinite banking. Hi, and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I am Dr. Kelly Brogan. You might be wondering why I am talking about investments and what business I have to be talking about even business at all. Other than that, I have a tremendous amount of experience doing things, quote unquote, wrong. Okay, so there's no mistakes. However, there is limited information. There is limited awareness. And there just aren't a lot of folks in the space of sovereignty, if we want to call it that, right? So awareness around privacy matters, awareness around navigating through and outside of the matrix, who are also presenting very attractive, viable options for wealth and legacy and the capacity to build your resources and let them build and grow in the background. So this stewardship concept. So I have been a single mom, single woman for a number of years now. And I remember the moment. It was, I don't know, probably three years ago or so. that I had this like silent scream of, I can't possibly do this forever. Like, I don't want to provide until I die, right? Like, who knows what's in my destiny and, you know, what kind of partnership and who knows, right? So I've really left that up to God. And the reality, and maybe men experience this too, but I'm pretty sure in a woman's body, this lands differently. The reality that I could need to pay the bills, let alone have resources and money to play, travel, buy beautiful things, all of those glorious experiences that I love and have grown attached to, that I could be responsible for doing this for the rest of my life. So this is where the concept of a 401k or some sort of retirement support, this is where it comes from because we recognize at a certain point, we need to just enjoy life. And that often that permission slip is called currency, right? And we're not here to get into what money is, you know, that's a separate conversation. But suffice it to say that we are talking about the, you know, statutory realm of fiat. We're talking about the money that gives you permission to make the choices and have the experiences that you want. Okay. So I had this moment, I was like, I don't want to do this forever, but I don't know what's coming and I don't know how to otherwise exhale in my system. So I started to explore different investments, right? So what investments pay dividends, right? Like what investments allow me to benefit while they are accruing? And I really got a jolt when around that same time, my bank account, so I operate through trusts and that my bank account associated came under investigation, like full scale. Okay, I've never even actually heard of something like this. And you would think it had to do with, you know, my notoriety or whatever, but it actually was related to a particular transfer from a particular place in the world. And it just set off a flag. Okay, so that's when I realized that even though it feels nice to have some money in the bank just in case, and that allows my system, you know, to some extent to relax, to just like keep a little bundle of it in my account, that it could literally be wiped. And I've had many colleagues in the activist space to whom this has actually happened, where the clawback of your money in your bank account is a thing. That's when I started to learn about this concept of infinite banking. And I started to hear about it in the circles, collegial circles that I run in. I started to be confronted with the possibility of a life insurance policy as an investment vehicle, whether or not I needed one. Like, am I actually going to be thinking about setting my kids up when I die? Like, what even is a life insurance policy for? Enter, because this is how my life works. Literally through a connection, I meet Josh. And I have had this concept explained to me many times. And this was the first time that it actually made sense. and my body recognized the opportunity. So my body is what told me, yes, this is how you love your future self, Kelly, is you invest in this way and through this particular means. And in my case, in the space of what now will be about seven years, I will be in a position to never, maybe need to take out a mortgage or a loan. And the moment that I invested in this vehicle, I could, well, I was actually technically probably two days, I could access the funds. Because every other investment vehicle, what happens? You put your money there and then it's constricting because you can't access it unless you want to jeopardize the investment. You sell your crypto, your crypto is not growing anymore. You sell your gold, same thing. Many of these, you can't even touch for long periods of time. So that constriction is like a kind of binding that happens when you diversify your investments to the extent that you can't access them. And then that money is almost like somewhere else doing something else. It doesn't feel fluidly connected to you. And again, I'm talking about all of this from my body, right? So this is how I make decisions these days. I recognize that not every single life insurance broker is made equally, right? That there are specific resources, that there is a level of integrity, that there are dimensions of reliability that are pretty unique to particular people who do this in a particular way. I've done my best. I mean, when it comes to economics and finances and so many aspects of this sector of life, I would consider this a masculine sector of life. It's been a real stretch for me to mature into taking responsibility. And then it feels really good once it's clear. So I wanted to start, Josh, with just a very basic introduction into the concept of infinite banking, because I have heard about this concept, again, in the sovereignty world for many years. But you are you're not some special new age kind of, you know, freedom seeking. I mean, I know we share values. It just happens to be that way. But you also you you traffic in the matrix. Right. So this is the kind of thing that let's say there is a woman listening and her husband is not entirely on board with a lot of the exiting the matrix stuff that we're all up to. That is completely fine because this can be a very right, like a secular kind of. So, yeah, with that, like what actually does infinite banking mean? And then we can get into these particular kinds of policies. Infinite banking is a way to take charge of your finances. is it was really, I'm going to hold up a book and we can talk about it later, but Becoming Your Own Banker by R. Nelson Nash, the one who really innovated this system of using whole life insurance for the equity value and for the features of how that value grows, of how the equity grows, the protections it offers, the fact that it's always been above the tax system, the taxation system. I mean, the product itself and these institutions, especially the ones we work with, predate the IRS by some by 75 years before the IRS came into existence. And it's about the freedom to not have to work with a bank. And more importantly, to recognize how much of your wealth you transfer to banks in your life. Whether it was the very first time you got a, remember the old bank books? You got a bank book at your local bank in Randolph, Massachusetts, and you went in, you had your bank book, and you actually looked it and tallied the dollars and cents. Who does that anymore, right? And you didn't know it then, but as soon as you put a dollar into that bank, you did the bank a world of good, and you started hurting yourself. Reason being, a bank will take your money. This is all banks, and it's not even a knock on banks. It's just how the system works. There's a pool of money and it has to flow. And the ones who control the flow of that money have always been banks. The cost, by the way, of the flow of any transaction is interest, a finance charge. And whether you're letting your money sit in the bank, hoping that the one or many times less than 1% interest is going to benefit you somehow. And we can address individually. Someone might have capital one. What's in my wallet? I have 4%. Okay. read the fine print. That is cyclical, highly cyclical. But not only do you hinder yourself by keeping your money in a bank, you greatly enrich the bank because their business is making loans. In fact, it's such a good business. Nelson Nash recognized that you want to be in that business. You want to have a side hustle as a banker owning your own bank. And of course, that sounds outrageous, but we're not talking about a brick and mortar bank in the corner. We're not competing with Chase and the Bank of America, we're talking about the Bank of Kelly. I've probably read that before, right? The Bank of Lindsay, Robin, Michael, or Cammie, the Bank of Josh, my family bank. Because you build this up over time, and then you begin to finance from within it, and you realize how much money, the volume of dollars you're transferring away for every time you access a bank for a loan, a credit card, mortgage. Well, if you could reclaim that, that's all the difference in the world to your family. And I mean, it's staggering to think of not just how much in raw interest dollars, call it the volume of interest, your average car, even a cheap secondhand car, you're transferring two, three, if you finance it, two, $3,000 of money to the financier, the dealership, the bank. And we always use, almost always use a car example, because most people have financed a car in their life. But it's not just that you lost two to three thousand dollars. Heck, call it two. Call it one thousand. It's the ability to invest that one thousand over your lifetime. And if you could capture that and have it in a place where you can really earn uninterrupted compound interest, which is that's the thing that it's very attractive to earn compound interests. But in most cases, that string of compounding is broken by a market downturn or by a withdrawal from your bank. And like Kelly said very, very succinctly, when you access money in your bank, you're not slowing down or resetting or hindering the compound factor that over a lifetime makes all the difference, particularly when you're putting that money in that otherwise would have transferred to someone else's banking system. I can't help but smile. Whenever you say, I wish I did it earlier, me too. I mean, everyone has that me too about starting earlier. I remember sitting in Pensacola with someone trying to sell me a life insurance policy, but I was 22, flight school. I know it doesn't look like it. I can play alternatively a hippie or a rabbi on TV, right? And I like both. But I said, no, I don't want this. This is not for me. It wasn't even the same concept. It was just the idea of why start a life insurance policy at 22 when I'm the world is my oyster. And it was it was great. But oh, man, if I had started at 22 instead of 38, which is what I met my my now my senior partner, but then my life insurance agent and then my mentor in the business, Ken Shapiro. And man, if we started earlier. But the fact that I started at a time when someone asked me, actually, I asked Ken, what do you do for a living? He said, let me show you. What are you doing Sunday night? And he tried to sell me my first policy. It was great because you mentioned death benefit. I had three kids or 2.99 at the time and no life insurance. So there's an obligation, too, to care for a family. And there's a place. I'll push back a little. There is even a place for term life insurance just for the obligation of caring for your family and their needs in case a breadwinner is not there. But that's just what makes that enriches the whole thing. It's there. Even if you don't want it, it's a natural byproduct of funding a life insurance policy. It's going to be there. And if you care about transferring it to children or a legacy, a next generation, a third generation, a charity, a foundation, you can bequeath the death benefit to really anything with a tax number. So charities, et cetera, a trust that has its own way of distributing the funds. It's such flexibility that comes, it goes right around probate or anything that would normally happen in an estate transfer. it's a trust in and of itself. And we haven't talked about the, please don't let us forget to talk about the privacy benefits of being within a life insurance policy, as opposed to being, letting your money be in the bank. But that's the real difference. So to sum that word salad up is capturing the interest that you would have spent with someone else's bank, growing it over a lifetime to great benefit for yourself and your family. Absolutely. So this concept has many layers and the foundational layer is the reclamation of the concept of banking, which the more you know, you know, the banking is beneath behind around literally all of the power structures in the world. So the reclamation of that is no small feat. But then we're talking also about the vehicle of life insurance. I also, I think I funded like for a year or two, some life insurance policy when I first had kids. I didn't even know what kind it was. And then I started to tell myself, well, I don't have all this extra money lying around and it wasn't a priority, right? So there may be people listening who do have extra money lying around. And I think I'm particularly talking to those folks. However, I also want to just share the educational value of understanding that there is life insurance. But what we're talking about is whole life insurance. And more specifically, and this is why I often feel like a bit of a matchmaker between these extraordinary resources and my inspiration. On top of whole life insurance is a specific broker. Who knows? Broker is that what you call yourself? I don't know, human. Who knows what they're doing? Thank you. Okay. Who knows what they're doing and who has the relationships and connections and network to reliable institutions, organizations that deliver. Right So all that like a beautiful layer cake of opportunity here And it took me a little bit of time to understand how it is that this investment vehicle is different from other ones right Like is different from 401k or even a HELOC you know loan or like what actually is special about And you've mentioned a couple of the aspects like privacy, the capacity to transfer, let's say, to your kids, the control of this asset is we'll get into that some more. I want to talk about the ROI, the liquidity we've mentioned. I just want to really double click on that and make sure everybody hears that because I don't think there's, you tell me, a comparable asset that you can liquidate without, if I'm using the words correctly, depreciating the asset itself. And then again, you can hang on to it if you want to or not. So again, if you're really in the sort of Nelson Nash approach, you would treat it like a bank. You would pay yourself back, maybe with interest, right? I get all of that. But I also just think it's kind of exciting to have this opportunity to literally transition out of the bank psychology. Because for me, that was necessary. Like if I'm not going to keep my comfort buffer in a bank account, I need to be able, especially as a single mom, access it if needed. What if something happens of the house and I need ready access to 30 grand or whatever, and it's locked up now in something that I'm going to lose, let's say Bitcoin or whatever, I'm going to lose if I sell it, then there's the tax ramifications, quote unquote, if you participate in that. And this is entirely avoids all of that, the market volatility and the list of what makes this unique seems very, very long. So yeah, I just wanted to sort of like lay that out. And then maybe you can talk a little bit about what you feel like makes these whole life policies unique. The first thing that came to my mind was risk. So a 401k, any technically, these are called IRS qualified retirement plans, 401k IRA, SEP IRA, Roth IRA. These are all going to be vehicles that will rise and fall with market risk in general. You might have a self-directed, you might think you know the best investment to put your money into within the tax structure there, and you might be deferring taxes. But one of the very first things I cover with new clients or prospective clients is the perilous really cliff that the country is on vis-a-vis the national debt. And you can just Google debt in the news, Google budget or anything, whether you love or hate the current administration, what no political jersey has done is address the spending that gets us in this debt. What do you think would happen faster? Some Congress reigns in spending or some Congress raises taxes to try to address the national debt. Well, I think it's raising taxes. And anytime you're in a system of deferred taxation, which is your traditional 401k, you know, with or without your company's match. All of these are dangerous in that in the future, the government will come and tax your gains when you come to withdraw that money at the time of distribution, at the time of what you want to be your retirement. And that million dollars they showed you as I remember this back to that story. And when I was 22, son, you're going to have a million dollars by the time you're 40. Okay, that was within life insurance. But I remember the same thing with talking to investment advisors. Oh, man, you start young, you're going to be a millionaire by the time you're in your 40s, 50s. What they didn't tell you with a 401k is the government will come and take a quarter, a third. Where must our taxes be to address what they're about to sign now is going to raise our debt to 58 trillion over the course of the next 10 years. Exactly how are they going to pay for the 58 trillion? I'm not going to – we'll be apolitical because both sides stink. I remember I'm sure I told you that that that belief of mine that no matter what the political jersey without coming to ruin, we have to raise taxes at some point because historically they haven't cut spending. So there's the risk of future taxation or changing, moving the goalposts, changing the law, which Congress could do. We know we told you fifty nine and a half was the penalty free age of taking your retirement. But now we're going to move that to 60, 61. They're already moving the retirement age for Social Security. Our parents were older than me. I'm 52 next month. My parents' retirement age was 65. Mine's 67 and a half. If you look at the Social Security guidelines, full retirement age. So there's the taxation risk. There's the risk of the market performing. What if, and a lot of my thinking and beliefs is based on personal experience, What if you wanted to retire like my parents in 2009 and your 401k and everything that you have in the market, your entire retirement fund is now cut in half. How far does it go? You know, at that at that circumstance, you have to work into your 70s, which they literally did before selling their house and moving down here to be with us. God bless them. So it's the risk of the market, the risk of taxes, the risk of of, you know, the foibles of lawmakers back to the market. A president could say something and crash the market overnight. Who wants to be involved in that kind of risk? Where we are in a place with life insurance, which again predates the stock market even, predates the IRS more importantly, is a place where we know our money is guaranteed to grow. And when we design what's called a life insurance illustration, which are highly specified and individualized, but you will see here's the guarantee and here is the projection. The projection is, I can assure you, conservative, because they've never missed a dividend payment, the companies we work with, in their 100 plus years of operation. through literal war and famine. I get two of my oldest companies through the civil war and all the wars and dips and bubbles and popped bubbles and recessions and depressions since then, they've always paid a dividend to their policy owners. So when you're building on that, and when you cut through the noise of modern marketing, where do you want to retire? Your retirement savings, they'll call it, are in the market. But if it has a risk of loss, even a little loss or half its value or worse, is it really savings? It's purely an investment by definition. And what we have in the situation of infinite banking is truly, by definition, savings. You can bank on it. Another thing we cover with the clients not to, okay, yes, to beat up the governmental systems a little bit. When you walk into a bank and see that bronze There's a FDIC plaque, some eagle holding who knows what wheat and a flag. I should look more closely. But you feel, wow, there's something behind this. I can feel confident my money is safe. Can you, though? Because the FDIC claims to insure $18 trillion on deposit with $120 billion in their fund. If you do the math, it's less than 2% of account holders in America that could possibly be covered by the FDIC. anytime. What's their plan? Well, of course, it'll be that we have to print money to cover that. A whole different ballgame, but printing money is what sort of got us into this mess in the first place. So we covered what makes it different than traditional investing or saving or planning is the lack of risk, the guarantees of growth. What else? The flexibility of designing this for your circumstances. If you are of modest means, well, you can develop and design a modest policy to grow incrementally. If you have money to put away, you can far exceed the limits the government puts on you for an IRA or even a SEP IRA, usually a $75,000 max or 55 max, 75% of your income. The government puts limits on these because they don't want to give too good of a deal to you, the citizen. On the other hand, life insurance, you can design whatever you want. And if your means are to put a million dollars away in one lump sum, you can do that. So the flexibility, the separation from the traditional systems that really are the government giving a band-aid to a deep wound that they created with the system of taxation and the frivolous spending out of Washington. And so this is something that rides above all of that noise and lets you take control of your family's finances, either incrementally, but surely, like Kelly and I experienced better today than than tomorrow. You know, I wish I could have started at 22, but I'm glad I started at 38. And if anyone hasn't heard of this or started doing this, you know, that that rings true. Better to start as soon as you hear about it. How far would you jump in your car on the I-95 in New York and you can't wait to get to Disneyland and the sign says two hours to Bangor, Maine. And you say, wait a minute, I'm going the wrong direction. How long do you want to go in the wrong direction before someone says you should try this? Try making a 180. Try doing something nonconventional and see what this can do for you. Make sense? Absolutely. Do you only work with Americans or is this something that can be extrapolated? Great question. No, not only Americans, foreign nationals, even non-citizens, even non-permanent residents, even someone just on a work visa, even someone on a travel visa can get approved for a policy. There are caveats. They have to have a certain, called a nexus of ownership in the United States. So usually a U.S. bank account, it's a no-brainer if they own property in America. And most of the companies are going to want, well, not want, they need them. They require them to be in America for their underwriting, because at the end of the day, it is life insurance. So there's health matters. You know, age and health is what prices life insurance. And inside every policy, if you probably were going to ask, well, there is a price of life insurance. But the way we design this, that's overcome. And that contributes to the strength of the the equity of this policy over time. So what the situation becomes, I might be, it looks like I'm paying a premium for life insurance. But when you realize there's a mathematical certainty that every dollar you put in will now be coming back to you with interest, then it's not paying a premium, paying a premium merely. It's capitalizing a bank. So, yes, you can. You can be a non-citizen. But the case by case basis, and depending on company as well, different companies have different rules. And we find the solution for the clients, not trying to wedge everybody into one company and their own set of rules. It's highly case by case. And so in the customization, is there an age beyond which this doesn't really make a ton of sense? Obviously, you and I have already established that the earlier, the better. And right, like even if you have kids and you have investment money at your disposal, like starting policies on your kids is a good idea. Right. So do you think there's an I mean, it's impossible to generalize, but do you think there's an age beyond which this may not be the ideal investment? I would say just from thinking of our most seasoned clients, past early 70s becomes challenging because of the price of insurance and the ability or the desire to pay a premium for, you know, even, you know, seven or eight years. When someone starts to think, I don't I don't want to have to pay the premium into my late 70s. I just want to be taking out at that time. Well, there is a solution. If it's not the best fit for an individual's age and health, then anyone with whom they have it or for whom they have an insurable interest, a child, a grandchild, they can develop a policy on that person and pay their premium, i.e. capitalize this banking system with a much younger, healthier person and still maintain control of all the funds that go in and out of that policy. Right. And this is why this is also a family reclamation, right? Because it's bringing back the resources to your family and insulating it from these outside interests in a powerful way. So what actually is the nature of the investment? Meaning like what's actually happening? And I think it's for some of us, maybe I'm projecting, but for some of us, it's hard to get outside of the sort of like the stock market thinking. And how would it be different than, you know, a term life insurance or an IUL, like in terms of the actual investing that's happening? Well, term is completely on its own because term is renting insurance for a term. And once you outlive or stop paying, the term insurance policy will disappear. In fact, 98% of term policies are outlived or dropped. So if your dad held it all the way to the end, that's more rare. But he's in the 98% because he outlived it. And now it's gone. You could convert it. Like he got nothing. I just want to think he got nothing out of that. I know. Like literally got nothing. Just paid into it for decades and no benefit. I know. But starting as a young man or young woman, it's very, I mean, the price is, it's not negligible, but it's very reasonable. And there are some, you know, I have clients in my community with, you know, well, a lot of kids, guys. And there might be a teacher at a private school not making it. All they can afford is term, but they have the, they really do have the duty, I feel, to protect their family. Nobody wants to end up on God's Rebid on a GoFundMe page or a surviving spouse. but so term is its own thing it has a place i i don't knock it because there are there is a place for it and even some of my clients who want to participate in infinite banking but their policies with you know within the parameters that they can uh build and afford or establish it might come out to a quarter million half a million of death benefit but they have three four young children Well, we might also buy a term policy to supplement the protection element. So that's term. To the investment vehicle for whole life, and I'll also include versus IUL, what that is, an indexed universal life. Well, whole life has been the most unattractive and boring and successful investment vehicle for life insurance companies for 200 years. And what do they invest in primarily is, you know, to peel back the onion, no secrets at all. It's U.S. bonds, it's corporate bonds, and it's very large real estate development projects, usually where they have an office and are developing something where they're going to be a leaseholder for many different businesses within their buildings. Go down any main interest that you'll probably run into a Guardian building, a New York Life building. So those are the three main things. Their portion of actual stocks is usually between 1% to 3% of their overall portfolios. And some of the companies we work with are $15 billion, $20 billion, $30 billion or more. The largest is or the largest company out there. Mass mutual is something like 250 billion. But what they're doing is creating a conservative return for themselves to cover the death benefit risk. They know that there's going to be death benefits to pay out any given year. And they can statistically do this with the mortality. It's called the mortality tables that they use the science of not my forte, but, you know, predicting how many people will pass away. by a given age with a given started health range. Well, that's the basis of life insurance, that with what's called the theory of large numbers, the law of large numbers, where they know that there will be death benefits to pay. And by arranging their companies to grow enough to pay the death benefits, they have a conservative track record of having what's left over, this divisible remainder, a dividend, to pay each policyholder. And that's come in year after year, again, through literal war and famine. I think during the, it was either right after 9-11 or right after the crash in 2008, four of the biggest mutuals in New York took out a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal. You know, we've paid our policyholders through every year of the current crisis because they want to make that clear that they are, it's called non-market correlated. The stock market is not life insurance investment. Life insurance, and they do it, and not to Shrippercro. They take my premiums, Kelly's and everyone else's, and they invest those premiums, but it is in the most conservatively long range and you could say boring, unsexy vehicles that you can. Now that whole life That what has worked and we don tinker with it what really makes a difference is what we do with our portion of the equity If we start banking with what we developing that when we can realize profits like a bank And I will come back to IUL because you brought it up. And if you want me to, Index Universal Life, I'll come back to that. But one more thing about banks, they take our dollars, pay us pennies in the dollar, a percent or less. I'll give you a story within a story, if I may. I moved to Florida from New York. I probably told you the story. And my wife and I had a nice nest egg in our Chase account before I knew any of this. I think we had a disclosure. I mean, we had like $86,000 in Chase checking. And we come down to southern South Florida. We're looking for the perfect two-story home with a basement. Took us five. I'm kidding. We know there's no basements down here. That's why we didn't find a home. And my accountant down here, my new CPA said, he's doing my 2011 taxes. This is the spring of 2012. Where is your 1099 for your Chase account? And I'm floundering. Oh, my gosh, where is it? I was 38. Yeah. And I thought I was going to get audited. I thought it was a horrible thing. I didn't have that 1099 INT for the interest I earned in Chase. He goes, relax. You know what he was doing here. Take your calculator. Log in. What's your checking? What's the APY, the annual percentage yield? I go 0.04%. He goes, okay, now take your balance and figure out your interest. 86,000 times 0.0004. That's the math. I made 34 bucks. Maybe 34. I made 34 bucks, George. He goes, you are a, didn't call me a nice word there. He belittled my intelligence. And he taught me a lesson. You keep your money in the bank. you're basically giving it to them for free. Here's my point. What's the bank doing with my 86,000? They're lending it between nine to 19 times, hypothecating the money. This is the FDIC. This is fractional reserve banking. They take my, say, 100,000, and they're lending out 10 times that to be conservative in the forms of mortgages. At the time, probably 5%, then down to three now up to six, seven with excellent credit. Car loans, 2% to 8%. Worse, subprime car loans, 20%. Business loans in the teens, anyone taking a business loan below double digits. HELOCs in the high single digits, personal loans in the high single digits to low double digits. The bank is making bank. Credit cards, 30% Amex now. So it does such a world of good for the bank to put your money there. They love it. And if you can do that, if you can start incrementally or in a very short order, depending on the amount of money you can finance or not finance, put into your bank, capitalize, well, that's where the money is. The interest, and when you start financing through your bank instead of Bank of America to beat them up, Chase, that's when you really see the rates of return on your life insurance policy start to grow. So you could be passive and it will grow, or you can not only build a bank, but utilize it. And that's, by the way, sets us apart, I believe, is the time we take to model a loan with someone. Hey, the dealership offered me this. What could I do with my policy? And we'll go over that line by line to say, well, if you take a five-year loan, if you take a seven-year loan, some people are offered seven-year loans on cars now because the interest is so high. Here's what the volume of dollars, here's how many dollars you would give Honda if you finance through them. Here's what you're going to earn if you're the bank. That's what really accounts towards the growth of a whole life policy, what it's designed properly to receive that extra money, which is something you have to really be trained in. And we're at our agency, Real Change Financial, that's what we're trained in through the Nelson National Institute. Now to bring it back to IUL, what separates indexed universal life, which is probably even more prevalent than social media. I mean, I have a face for radio, right? So we're not so much on social media yet. But what I see of others is IUL, indexed universal life that has that has promises that really don't hold up because in that circumstance, it's a type of insurance with its term cup. But it's not term that ends in 10, 15, 20 years. It's term insurance that ends at age 85, 90. It's coupled to an investment vehicle, which is buying a index of usually of the S&P 500. And the problem with that is as you get older, the cost of insurance must rise. Not the case with the whole life where everything is factored from the very beginning. But again, now I'm talking about IUL, Indexed Universal Life. the older you get the more this is what I almost invested in this is what a lot of my friends are like oh dang oops it gets lumped in and honestly gives whole life a very bad rap in a lot of circles that are not educated about these nuances or experienced in the way that you are so yeah it's again it can be a little confusing all these terms but this is something you may have heard of and obviously why I prefer to work with somebody who knows what they're talking about because it can be a sleight of hand almost. I see some of the social media spots, TikTok, et cetera, talking about IUL, IBC with IUL. And the real challenge is if the market has a bad year, your policy growth has a bad year. Not negative because they do protect you from reversing. But if there's no growth in the cash basis of that policy and you're getting older and the cost of insurance has a fee per year that must be paid, well, your policy could go backwards. Never the case with properly designed IBC, infinite banking concept, with whole life. So we have to make a distinction between the two because unfortunately what's more prevalent is, again, people who are more savvy. They might be more savvy in social media, but probably not as studied in life insurance in the industry. But so that, I think that addresses term IUL and what we do in whole life. Sure. Perfect. Maybe you're doing a lot right. You're working out, you're eating decently, and still your body feels puffy, your hair feels thinner, and your skin feels creepy. You were taught to call that aging, but I am choosing not to. I don't believe that beauty is vanity. I believe it's a hobby. It's a skill. It's something that you can practice and learn at any age. So I'm hosting a free beauty backroom live stream event for midlife women who are ready to glow up and feel leaner, stronger, and more radiant than they have perhaps in their entire life. I will be sharing exactly what I've done over the past couple of months to do just that. So 2026 is your rebrand year. Come play with me, kellybroganmd.com forward slash BB. So I want to, if we could do sort of like a sample easy numbers illustration, I know that this is infinitely customizable and I know that you're qualified to offer that. And I would say the from my perspective, this is the kind of vehicle really any investment is something you turn toward when you want to develop a relationship to your I don't know, my language, like your future self. And you're not if you're not ready for that, you're just not ready for this. Totally fine. But there comes a moment in many of our lives where we start to feel like, I know there's something I should be doing with my money other than just spending it every month and keeping it sitting in a bank. So maybe you can talk us through a modest policy or whatever, or you can even talk about mine, which I don't think would be considered a modest policy per se. And what happens over the course of funding the term, And then what happens after? And and just reinforce sort of like the access that you have to the money. What you told me was like literally two days after investing. Yeah. So when we design a policy, say I want to say I want to I have a goal of financing my own car, a thirty thousand dollar car. And I have nothing. I'm starting from square one. And I want to build an infinite banking policy that can accommodate that. So depending on age and health, so it doesn't matter if someone's not in the traditional, if you're not in the traditional medical system, we can work with you. In fact, better than others, because we've attenuated, we've trained our companies, the insurers that we work with. we're not employees of any one or several life insurance companies, independent agents, but they're used to us they're used to our people now yeah, she doesn't see the doctor he hasn't been to the doctor in 10 years it was such a lot of issue I didn't even remember being qualified maybe I don't need to get into the details that I didn't do much of anything like a physical or anything not to say that usually there's a home exam at home if we're going to scare anyone away Kelly Especially unqualified. Right. Well, you know, blood, urine, vitals, that's the type of underwriting that the type of health exam that goes into life insurance if someone has no other record. And by the way, if you go to the doctor every year, the government has all of your information. How do I know? Because life insurance companies can tap into it because you allow them with an application to access these electronic databases in case you didn't want your stuff securely in the government's hands. Wink, wink, that they're doing a good job as stewards of that information. Right. Only for our benefit do they save it. Anyway, I want to create a vehicle to buy a car. And I don't want to pay cash. If I pay cash, if I go to the dealership and pay $30,000 because it was in my checking account, I've lost the ability to earn interest on that $30,000 the rest of my life. So on the other hand, if I design a life insurance policy to accommodate that, there's going to be a certain amount of recurring yearly premium that will be established as a minimum to be able to fit that $30,000 that goes in. So it's so highly specified. I just say that the minimums are generally $50,000 or $100,000 in death benefit. And for someone, I'll just use $30,000 and over, that's probably going to be about $120,000, $150,000 a month in pure life insurance costs. Now, as a startup, that might seem unattractive. But remember, in the long run, every cent paid in will eventually become part of that equity. in addition to the $30,000 that I put in to finance that car. Deeper than that, Kelly, tell me if I could try to think or even pull up some old cases, but I know we have people of all ages here. Yeah, and it's totally customized. Yeah, exactly. For me, the concept that I came away with is that you design it, okay, and it's based on what you want out of it, right? So it's based on what works for you. And you can set up the payments, if you want to call them payments, investments, monthly or annually or semi-annually. And you are paying into a certain amount that is called term, right, for your policy. Some of it might be term. But it's like a certain total that you're getting to. In the context of what we design for infinite banking, when and if we add a component, which is term insurance, it's to raise – we didn't talk about this yet – it's to raise the death benefit to a point, and this is technical, where the death benefit is high enough that our equity in comparison to the death benefit will not fit into what the IRS does try to do, which is call it an investment vehicle, purely an investment vehicle. So to maintain that definition of life insurance, we need the death benefit high enough to accommodate the cash we want to put in, whether it's instantly or over the course of years. Of course, the death benefit grows each year. But that initial seven years is a period where the life insurance company will self audit because they have to report to the IRS if a policy has too much cash, too much, quote unquote, equity value. So what do we do? We add term insurance, which is a cost-effective way of raising the death benefit to the point of where we'll never fall into that category. And not to scare anyone, but it's not a situation where you can accidentally disturb the tax situation of your policy. You can't send in too much money accidentally and ruin the whole plan that we've carefully planned out. The insurer, the insurance company will say, why is your client sending in too much money? What would you like us to do with it? Refund it, et cetera. So they're very diligent in making sure on their own side, the life insurance company, that the taxation remains non-taxed forever for these policies. So any money that you withdraw from the policy is not taxable. Is that what you're saying? Certainly when you access your equity as a loan, it's not taxable. anything you withdraw which is below the basis you've paid in say over over a lifetime you've paid in half a million dollars and you've got uh three million dollars of of equity well as soon as you withdraw more than the with i'm talking about withdraw because that that word's very technical withdraw means to take money out of the policy permanently and never plan to pay it back in the form of a loan, well, that's taxable as income, whatever amount is above the basis you paid in. Getting technical, but we make it easy one-on-one and we would spare you from that situation. We don't want you to incur taxes by utilizing infinite banking. So it would be in the form of a loan. Correct. Typically, yeah. Right. The question that might flow from the, well, how am I going to live? How is this going to help me in retirement? The answer is by taking loans without the intent of paying back that loan. So as we described, the loan is separate from the growth of the policy. So even though there is a loan against the policy equity called the cash value, you're still earning your dividends year after year, your compound interest, as if you never access the money at all. And if you demise, fancy way to say pass away, the death benefit, when it's paid out, will cover the outstanding cost of that loan, the cost of the outstanding loan. So the death benefit becomes the ultimate collateral for whatever we do. So this is crude, I'm sorry, but this is what I heard in training a long time ago. It's not going to be that crude. Don't worry. When you take a loan as passive income in your seasoned years or whenever you just don't want to work because you have to and whenever you'd like to enjoy your policies, your infinite bank's equity value to live your life. Whenever you do that without the intent of paying it back, you're simply living off of your future dead self, meaning you had this death benefit. And like Kelly said a lot earlier, you can whittle that death benefit away and use it all in yourself. Or more commonly, when we design something, there's plenty left over for heirs. So yeah, in my case, it was like plenty, like to the point where it would be in my case. I wanted to also address there's an idea in infinite banking design that we don't have to necessarily deal with your money that's left over at the end of the month. Hey, I put $200 away into my money market fund. I put $200 away into my Robinhood account. It's not just that, as Nelson Nash describes it in becoming your own banker. eventually you kind of want to get to the place where all of your income, every penny can go into your policy as premium. And you're merely living off of a loan against the policy for your expenses. And I've, I've to say that again, you, everything you earn goes into the policy as premium. You're not limited to what you have left over your disposable income. And this is, this is advanced. This is for, No, but this is super important because this is part of the paradigmatic shift that we're talking about that took me a long time to wrap my mind around is that you're literally not operating with a bank in the classical way. So you're saying you make $5,000 a month instead of going, maybe in transition goes into a banking account, and then it goes to your policy. Infinite banking policy. And then, well, but I still have living expenses. I still have $4,000 a month in living expenses. Well, we've developed policies where I just did a couple of, what do they call it, a stress test on a client's policy where it's designed to, from the very get-go, thank God they make a month great We show them going in and coming out every single year from the get because that was their expenses And that policy can live into infinity Infinity in our world means age 120. If you happen to outlive your 120s, every penny will be given back to you as a tax-free endowment check rather than a death benefit. That's being a little facetious, but I want people to know that these policies are literally designed until age 120. And the paradigm shift beyond reclaiming the interest that you're transferring away, the wealth you're giving to someone else's bank, and it's not subheading. You're not just giving them $2,000 for the price of a car. You're giving them the advantage in earning an interest on that for their entire life cycle, whereas you want that for yourself. But not only is that the first paradigm shift, the other is if we run all of our income eventually. Even I'm not faint of heart, but I didn't do this. That 86,000 that I had in Chase that I talked about when I met my, again, my senior partner, I was brave enough to put a quarter of that into my newly designed policy. But eventually you learn that, well, if I want to expand my banking system, One way to do that is to put all of my income in, watch the miracle that that produces for you, even when you borrow every dime you need as an expense, even if you don't service those loans, meaning you're going to leave that meatball growing that loan until you're 90 years old. Well, your death benefit will pay for it with something left over for your kids if we design it the right way. and it is easier to do when you're younger, but not impossible to do when you're a little bit more, a little bit more mature. Amazing. And to me, that is what makes this extraordinarily unique. I don't know of a related investment vehicle that can support. Again, I am not like a very risk. I actually think women typically are more risk averse when it comes to this. And we love to have our little egg in the bank kind of a thing. So that's a lot of who I intend to speak to around this is making the shift to something that actually feels safer, more stable, more predictable. I mean, you've said to me that the particular companies, if that's the right word, that you work with, have like 100% payout record. Someone asked what financial ratings. They're all A-rated by S&P, Moody's and AM Best. They're all a century or older, the ones we work with, and they have never missed a dividend payment. That means broad rush. A dividend payment in life insurance means after the premiums have been collected, after the conservative investment has been returned on those premiums for a given year, after the death benefits have been paid out, after the expenses of running the company have been paid out. We have left over. Oh, sorry. After the 10% rainy day funds that we, that every company plans with, which is conservative and necessary, that's how they survive the Katrina's, the nine 11's and the, any spike in death is, has been always even COVID covered by the life insurance companies we work with because they plan for contingencies after all those expenses, they always, for all of their operating history, they range from 105 years to 178 years old, have all returned a dividend each year to their policy owners. So, you know, security is the name. And having that money, having that nest egg in a secure place is, you know, that's our ethos. Is it possible to generalize about, because this question has come up often to generalize about how, like what percentage the investment is accruing or it doesn't really work that way. It's a fair question. It's always the way we're trained to think. Just like we're trained to think that my, well, my car only costs 5% because that's the APR. Even if the volume of interest is $3,000 and the $3,000 compared to all the money you paid for the car is, you know, say you paid $30,000 on the car to the financier over the course of the loan. Well, that volume of interest might be 20% of all of your dollars. So we want to get away from, as much as we want to get away from annual percentage yields, I can tell you that a mature policy has earned between 5% and 6% over the history of whole life insurance. So now I say mature policy because in the beginning of every policy, you can't avoid it. You might finance, you might capitalize $100,000 and only be able to get out $80,000. And that looks like a bummer. That looks like a bad investment to people. And they're really not thinking long term. Why? First of all, why is there always diminished access to the money that I've paid as a premium? Because of the risk of death. We're buying a permanent death benefit. I go over this with a link or not link later, a video called, you know, the biggest thing people hate about IBC, because I want to show that clearly up front. No, you cannot have every dime you've put in right away. And that would be to most people a negative return on investment. And you're laughed out of the room. You know, I say in the video, what did you make in your 401k, Jack? I made 9% this quarter. Hey, great job. Kelly, what did you do with your life insurance? Well, I lost 15%. Oh, what a horrible investment, Kelly. You must have gotten robbed by these guys. But then when the bank is mature, and that can happen depending – it's a fair question too I'll raise by myself. It can happen between four and ten years depending on how aggressively you're funding. Then you have a vehicle where every dollar you put in is being tripled, quadrupled, quintupled if you were aggressive enough. and the same friends who were saying, oh, I like that investment now. Well, you can't just buy into it. You have to develop it. You have to grow your bank and it takes patience and discipline. So, you know, we can't get- And this is exactly the concept that I tried to preface with. It's like in terms of my policy, it's like about an eight-year ramp and I can access like what, about 80% or whatever of what I put in a couple of days after I put it in. So it's not that it's locked up Because as far as I all my other investments are are locked up and I can sell them and, you know, diminish the total investment value of whatever it is, including crypto. But I can't operate with this kind of liquidity. And then at the year mark, it's I call it like ballooning. I don't know. I'm sure that's like an inaccurate financial term. But like, yeah, when I look at the illustration, it's like very exciting. What happened? The exciting part, everyone knows that Kelly called life insurance exciting. The exciting part is, it is, it's so dorky, but it's when the compounding really kicks in. If you look at any compound growth curve, it looks flat until it starts exponentially rising. And that's when the dividends are coming in, tens of thousands of dollars a year tax-free. you can either take it out and live off of it, or you can let it go back into your equity and grow and continue the compounding factor. But it's highly case by case at that point. Totally. How long before you can use the investment to get a house loan? The idea that I love is that you don't ever get a house loan, right? In eight years, I'm not getting a mortgage anywhere because I can pull, I mean, unless I'm looking, whatever, unless I need like a $10 million home or something. But the amount that I can loan would be the equivalent of any mortgage I would need, right? That's the idea. It becomes the bank. I also know that, or I think rather, that it can be considered an asset that is valued by conventional banks as well. Is that right? Yeah. I'll give you that. If someone has 100,000 in equity, that means the cash value, Again, the cash value of their life insurance policy. A bank would say you want to pursue a loan. You could use that as collateral for someone else's bank loan that you're that you how deep to go into it. But, yeah, you can collateralize your policy. You can. Yes, that's sort of. You can access this. Let's be clear. What might be considered a downside is you can't act. The life insurance company won't extend you credit beyond your equity. however so that means we have to be honest banker with ourselves and build that equity up we're not like fdic banks that can lend out far more than we have in our coffers but so that's a kind of a positive because you're building an honest bank but then the the way we access that is not mother may i and i i thought about this earlier with you mentioned the heloc go ahead and get a heloc from the bank if you if they agree to your ability to take a loan if they agree to your credit worthiness your ability to repay if you if you put up the personal collateral which is probably the highest for heloc and um and and god forbid you miss a payment with what the type of loan we're talking about is when you have control of a policy's equity and you make a deal with yourself and And please, what are the 10,000 maniacs? I'm going somewhere with this, Kelly. Not lean on me. That's the other song. But trouble me as an agent, trouble me with how to develop this loan. And I make copious models before some of my clients tap into this ability. But when you're ready to take a loan, you're not asking for it. You're telling the life insurance company, this is my equity. send me this amount. Usually the question is, you know, which account should we send it to, sir, ma'am? They're not looking at your credit. They're not looking at your ability to repay. You're not showing them your pay stubs to show that you're the one who sets all those things. So, and not to get lost in the weeds. There is a cost of access to money. That's a paradigm shift people have to get used to. I have to pay to access my own money? Well, the answer is yes, and there's a good reason for it. But when we design our loan to compete with what's available in the commercial banking market, we're almost always going to come out with a positive, meaning the Chase Bank loan would cost me X amount of dollars. My policy loan will cost me half of that. However, if I have the mindset of paying back my own bank the way that Chase was going to make me payback, that's where I see the beneficence. And that's where I see the savings and the profit in taking a loan. Not to mention the fact that when I took that loan to repair my house or to refurbish, I'm still earning interest as if I never touched it. That's a point we'll come back to again and again. And those loans are not visible at all to credit agencies. I mean, that's just amazing. We're done. this happened after we spoke um the last time we spoke um when we met up face to face i had a client we designed the greatest plan in the world he was gonna capitalize his policy immediately take a loan to pay off his his work truck he's an ac guy so his truck is highly uh very important to him earning a living during underwriting his truck his current truck broke down and he came to me kind of sheepishly, I had to take a loan from a credit union. And I love the credit union, but all I could qualify was like 12.5%. And he had to do it. He had no other recourse because he didn't have his policy yet. So a few weeks later, as it turned out, his policy was complete. He made his payment. Days later, he took a loan from his policy and paid off his credit union. So what happened there? That $30,000 approximately is now gone from his credit report. So if nothing else changes a month later with a better income to debt ratio, his credit must go up. If he, you know, if you're one who cares about your credit score and now what really happened or what, what, what happened in addition, cause this, I found out months later, I asked him, Robert, we had a plan to make payments. Remember, I commonly ask. It's not a joke, but it's a way to get people thinking the right way. Think about your car loan. You have a loan, you're financing a car, a lease loan. How many payments do you plan on skipping? The answer is usually a chuckle and none. If I skip payments, they'll come and take my car. So I had asked this client, how many payments do you plan on skipping with that credit unit? 12.5%. None, because I can't skip payments. They'll take my car. What happened in real life? He's the banker. He requested his money. He got his loan from his policy, from his infinite banking concepts policy, paid off the credit union. That's gone, gone from his credit score. And now he has his own responsibility to pay back. What really happened? His wife got sick. And for a year, he made zero payments. and in retrospect as we're talking what was the cost to him okay one year of of simple interest rolls over into his so instead of paying that truck was so expensive it was a seven-year loan so now instead of making finishing his new loan in seven years he could plan to pay it off in eight years it doesn't matter the the more important thing is do they take your car away when you payments to make to make sure your wife could be healthy and recuperate and the answer is know. The subjective light bulb that went off when there was nobody looking over his shoulder but him or me when I call him up every year to ask him how the policy is going. And we run into something like that where when you are the banker, you're the loan officer, you're authorizing the loan to yourself. You're setting the payment amount per month if you want. And we can replicate that with any company, even automatic payments. But in this case, client decided I can't pay. Now go as much. And he told me, I love my credit union. Well, go ask them what happens if you want to skip a few payments because your wife is sick. And I didn't ask him quite like that. But in my mind, yeah, nobody cares. There's no mercy at the bank for an entire year's worth of payments. But when you're the one in charge of the repayments because you're the loan officer and we go over that so carefully with someone, especially their first second loan. Well, that's the real power in infinite banking. I love that. I love that. To me, that is super exciting. And it feels like an exhale, like it feels like the experience of investing that allows me to get excited about the potential for the future, but also for the here and now, like a safety quotient that somebody like me, who is not constituted for high risk investment, can feel comfortable, comfortable with. And I think this was an amazing overview. I know that there are people listening who have much more mathematical minds and who can probably go way deeper, dork out with you and like a very serious. They can super marry you if they want. Yeah. For me, this is like definitely the threshold. And part of the reason is just like developing your own bank takes patience and discipline. We absolutely this is not a get rich quick scheme. it is building it is creating a bank which is a strategy within a whole life insurance policy that takes time to learn properly it's not worth it to us if someone says even if they say i trust you let's do it right away we that's myself i know and i we i i think we still when i when i have the benefit of a one-on-one with somebody we we go over a lot of slides and a lot of information economic and well, and so someone says, mercy, no more, please, no more of the history of how bad it can get. Because these are things that infinite banking solves for. And it's not that you can't go invest with risk, you know, risk reward, the market, real estate is great. It's that if you're doing it out of your own bank and you're leveraging your policy and letting that compound interest continue to flow in while you're making those other investments, well, you have the best of both worlds. Or to somebody that has neither, neither life insurance nor investments, this is the safety blanket. This is the net before you do the trapeze act. Build yourself a safety net, a foundation which is guaranteed and permanent, which is IBC. Amazing. Thank you, Josh, so much. I'm excited to hear how this movement continues to grow through you. Thank you.