Mark Willis, CFP is a man on a mission to help you think differently about your money, your economy and your future. After graduating with six figures of student loan debt and discovering a way to turn his debt into real wealth as he watched everybody lose their retirement savings and home equity in 2008, he knew that he needed to find a more predictable way to meet his financial objectives and those of his clients.
Mark is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™, a three-time #1 Best Selling Author and the owner of Lake Growth Financial Services, a financial firm in Chicago, Illinois. Over the years, he has helped hundreds of his clients take back control of their financial future and build their businesses with proven, tax-efficient financial solutions. He specializes in building custom-tailored financial strategies that are unknown to typical stock-jockeys, attorneys, or other financial gurus. As host of the Not Your Average Financial Podcast™, he shares some of his strategies for working with real estate, paying for college without going broke, and creating an income in retirement you will not outlive. Mark works with people who want to grow their wealth in ways that are safe and predictable, to become their own source of financing, and create tax-free income in retirement.
Episode Highlights Here:
Pierce
Okay, let me let’s go practical here for a second. A lot of different ideas about this, right? You mentioned YouTube, right? We have these different products, insurance products are, you know, widely kind of talked about? Very, I think misunderstood? Because when you said something like, oh, insurance is the least sexiest thing we could be talking about right now. Yeah. But that’s if people don’t know what they’re doing with it. That’s right. What you’re doing with it is you’re self funding yourself, which is incredibly growing at 5%, even though you’re taking a loan out against it. So there’s a bunch of different products out there. That it seems like between different companies providing different contracts, can we just go over the top two, three different products out there? Maybe I don’t want to say competitors, but different products or different contracts out there shed some light on what each one does and how it’s different from what you’re talking about?
Mark
Yeah, sure. In fact, I’ve got an infographic I could share on my screen, if that would be helpful for you. Do you think that would be valuable and useful for your listeners and viewers? But if not, can we proceed?
Pierce
But let me see if I can get that over to you. Do you have the share screen button on the?
Mark
I do? I’ll see if I can make it. See what happens. All right. So here’s, here’s what it takes to build a true bank on yourself policy. And in essence, there are over 29 different features nuanced dials that need to be dialed in just right. Now listen, there are 400,000 Life insurance agents in the United States, Spears 400,000. Okay, it’s about one for every 800 Americans. That’s a lot. All right. So if there were 400,000 heart surgeons, and you could get your heart surgeons license in about two months. And you let’s say appears let’s say you desperately needed open heart surgery, God forbid, would you just stumble into anybody’s office and ask for them to cut you open? I hope not. No, not. What about if you had 400,000 elevator technicians, okay, and they could get their license in a month or two. All you want to do is get in that stinking elevator, push a button and Up you go. Right, right. But what we don’t see is all of the engineering and specifications necessary to design that elevator safely so that it goes up with speed and quietness and control. All we want to do is push that button and it works. But if it’s not designed properly, like you’re seeing here, if it’s if even just one of these dials is Miss time, Miss timed, you could have a you know, a policy that’s riddled with commissions grows way too slowly, is not paying you a dividend. Or even crucially, when you borrow against it, it can actually stop the growth of the cash. Now, candidly, many different financial professionals out there have their life insurance license, and they have a YouTube channel. And there you have it. Yeah. And now there’s a lot of good people out there with good intentions and I’m understanding of their desire to pass along the message that Nelson Nash who started this concept years ago, was promoting, but unfortunately, much like Kleenex and Xerox, the brand of infinite banking bank, you know, family wealth, banking, wealth, reserve banking, so many nicknames out there. There’s a lot of good people doing work out there for this. But in my years of meeting with literally thousands of families, I’ll see somebody and they’ll tell me, Mark, I’ve got one of those Oh, yeah, my agents set this up for me. And then they sent me the doc, I just had one this morning, just he sent me the document this morning. He’s put in 70 grand a year into a policy and the policy is going to stop growing when he borrows against it had another guy he has over 800 grand and a number of different policies. And he’s being charged egregious interest rates. In fact, the company which I won’t name will be actually going through a lawsuit right now. The insurance company is from its own policyholders because they believe that the interest is usury rates to borrow against their own life insurance. Now you tell me all you wanted to do and most of our clients want to do is get into a policy and start using it like a bank. But unfortunately, if their policy was not engineered properly, it’s a lookout bolo punch.
Pierce
Interesting. Okay. So there are multiple different spin offs of the bank on yourself concept. You know, and on the show we’ve had other people coming on and pitching the spin offs and they all sound great. You know, so, is there a particular contract or a particular product that has like 123 different elements in it that make it a bank on yourself versus an infinite bank? thinking or whatever and quickly just what are those?
Mark
Yeah, sure. Well, okay, so the story is, Nelson Nash started the whole concept in the late 70s. He started figuring this thing out, he started to promote it. He’s an evangelist for the concepts. He’s not a pastor. But he was an evangelist. Now he has since passed away. Several years ago, I had the great privilege of being taught by Him, and met with him and his family. But he has since passed on in the late 90s, started to realize that a lot of people were starting to use his language, and his books, but we’re using things like Indexed Universal Life contracts, which are not a contract I would recommend for this tool. Or they’d be using a whole life insurance policy that stopped the growth of the policy’s cash when you borrow against it. Now, let’s just use some real numbers here. So if you’ve got $100,000 of cash value, and you borrow 70 grand to maybe let’s say, do a real estate deal, or whatever you want to do. Most insurance will only give you growth, meaning the guaranteed interest and the possible dividends on the remaining 30,000 bucks you had 100 You borrowed out 70 Most are direct recognition. That’s the phrase now with bank on yourself designed policies. Nelson saw this happening with his original IP as intellectual property. He met up with someone named Pamela Yellen in the late 90s. And they together formed a bank on themselves. It was a joint venture between Nelson and Pamela Yellen, Pamela Yellen wrote some of the New York Times bestselling books on the topic like the bank on yourself revolution, and she protected the concept. She was more the pastor you might say, in that she put some branding around it, she put some intellectual property and trademarking around it. And crucially, and this is the most important part, she created a credentialed and authorized training program for the likes of you, and you and me, financial professionals. So CPAs, investment advisors, insurance agents, go through Pamela’s training. It took me about three and a half years to get the credentials to label myself as a bank on yourself professionally. Sure. So if you get nothing else out of this, just find a bank on yourself professionally. And there’s over 200 of us out there. If you work with a bank on yourself professionally, all of this minutia, that infographic I just showed you, we already incorporate that into our engineering, when we sit down and work with clients if this tool makes sense for the client that we’re working with.
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About Mark Willis
Mark Willis, CFP is a man on a mission to help you think differently about your money, your economy and your future. After graduating with six figures of student loan debt and discovering a way to turn his debt into real wealth as he watched everybody lose their retirement savings and home equity in 2008, he knew that he needed to find a more predictable way to meet his financial objectives and those of his clients.
Mark is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™, a three-time #1 Best Selling Author and the owner of Lake Growth Financial Services, a financial firm in Chicago, Illinois. Over the years, he has helped hundreds of his clients take back control of their financial future and build their businesses with proven, tax-efficient financial solutions. He specializes in building custom-tailored financial strategies that are unknown to typical stock-jockeys, attorneys, or other financial gurus. As host of the Not Your Average Financial Podcast™, he shares some of his strategies for working with real estate, paying for college without going broke, and creating an income in retirement you will not outlive. Mark works with people who want to grow their wealth in ways that are safe and predictable, to become their own source of financing, and create tax-free income in retirement.
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