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Nearly Half of All Americans Don’t Trust the Banks

 

For years, especially since the recession, Americans have been growing increasingly distrusting of the country’s banking system. People realize banks are getting rich off of their money, and that they’re paying loans back with alarming interest rates, essentially wasting thousands of dollars over the course of many years.

It comes as no surprise, then, that people have been slowly starting to take money out of their savings accounts and have begun using new means to invest in their future. Americans don’t trust banks!

A 2015 report by American Express highlighted just how much distrust there is among Americans of large banks. While a majority of people still keep their savings at a local bank, more than half of those people (53 percent) of all people who save in cash are planning on simply hiding bills at home. Additionally, 43 percent of Americans who are saving money do not plan to do so in a bank account at all.

This was a surprising revelation for many of the nation’s largest banks, and one that certainly does not bode well for their futures. Many of these banks depend on deposits and savings accounts to be able to give out loans and charge those same high-interest rates that have started to turn off their customers.

This is especially interesting in that most Americans are taught from a very young age that a bank is the safest, most reasonable place to build one’s savings. The reality, however, is that putting one’s hard-earned money in a savings account is no longer a good way to build savings, especially considering deposit accounts do not have legal protections, and that the Federal Reserve allows accounts to be frozen to protect the banks if necessary.

Another way

If you are one of the many Americans who no longer trusts the banks to build your savings, there is another way to protect yourself and build your future.

At Living Wealth, we use the concept of Infinite Banking to build wealth and save for the future. With this concept, you act as your own banker, paying yourself back in loan installments and avoiding giving the banks free money through interest.

For more information about this process, contact us today.

Nate Scott, Client Development Coach

Nate Scott joined Living Wealth, Inc. with a desire to help families and small businesses become financially free. It was there, under the wise leadership of Ray Poteet, that he learned the power of “Becoming Your Own Banker” through Private Family Financing (PFF) and has made it his mission to tell others so that they can feel the same sense of freedom and control that he enjoys today.

Nate loves to teach people the benefits of becoming their own banker and to coach them on how to successfully implement the system in their constantly changing lives. He longs for everyone to hear the truth about how money really works and to understand the power and freedom that Private Family Financing can bring to their families.

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Why the financial system is stacked against you

Do you ever feel that the financial deck is stacked against you?

For many of us, there’s so much money going out the door every month that it’s hard to get ahead, let alone secure your family’s future.

You may have gotten an inkling of it on that momentous day when you signed your mortgage papers. I remembered the first house I bought. Nervous and excited, I was intimidated by the big stack of paper I needed to read and sign. In that big stack of paper was a disclosure of the total cost of the mortgage.

My realtor jokingly told me not to look too closely at the number. For a good reason; it was shockingly big! Even at today’s low-interest rates, the total cost of $200,000 loan at a 3.95% interest rate over a 30-year period is a whopping $341,667.

Americans are being crushed by debt

The average American pays $280,000 in interest costs over his or her lifetime. It’s not just mortgages that sneakily take money from you; car loans, credit card debt, student and business debt all take their toll.

In fact, dental students typically graduate with an average of $247,277 of student debt. That’s on top of the business debt incurred by setting up a practice. Medical equipment is not cheap!

Most financial advisors advise us to pay down our debt as soon as possible and invest in the stock market. Let’s see how good this advice is…

Paying down your debt can be dangerous

On the face of it, quickly paying down debt seems like pretty good advice. The faster you pay down your debt, the less interest you pay right?

Yes, but this strategy can make you cash poor. Once you pay that money, it’s gone forever. What happens if you have a financial emergency or for several months in a row your business is down? That extra money you paid against your debt is no longer available to you to be used as a cushion, potentially leaving you exposed to financial hardship.

Investing into the stock market doesn’t work for the average investor

As it turns out, the average investor is shockingly bad at investing. Research from Richard Bernstein Advisors shows that for the 20-year period from 1993 to 2013, the average investor had an annualized return over just over 2%. That’s lower than the inflation rate!

It doesn’t take a math genius to realize that if you are only making 2% in the stock market but paying 4% or more in interest on your houses, cars and other debt, you not likely to build much wealth.

Did you know that banks are prohibited from investing in the stock market because it is too dangerous? For the sake of our wealth, maybe we should start thinking like a bank.

The Banking System of the Ultra-Rich

There is a way to grow your wealth safely; it has quietly been leveraged by the ultra-rich tax-free for decades. Instead of paying the bank the interest on the loan, you instead pay yourself. Essentially you become your own banker, self-financing your loans just like the big banks do. We call this system Infinite Banking.

Banks use BOLI (bank-owned life insurance) for their financing needs. The good news is that we can use dividend-paying whole life insurance

Think about it. What if on that $200,000 loan you got to keep that $140,000 in interest? Wouldn’t that be helpful to your balance sheet?

Additionally, thanks to the miracle of compounding interest and a little bit of patience, that $140,000 can turn into a much more significant number. In fact, in one scenario just financing nine $25,000 cars over your lifetime can create $892,253 in wealth!

What’s more, the money is yours to reuse for future needs, cars, houses, business financing, even vacations!

Do I need money to start?

One of the more frequent questions we get is whether you have to be rich to use this system. The good news is you can get started with very little money. However, you do need to have the discipline to be able to live within your means and stay within a budget.

Everyone can take control of their debt and build a wealth legacy for their family. If you would like to stop lining the pockets of the financial institutions and turn your debt into an asset rather than a liability, you should take advantage of the infinite banking system. To find out more, join one of our frequent online presentations that you can watch from the comfort of your home.

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The 3 Brilliant Secrets of the Financially Independent

If you’re an average adult in America today, you go out in the world and work. You get our money and just spend while hoping there’s money left over at the end of the month to put into savings.

I’m telling you that’s an easy way to find yourself in financial slavery.

Think about it.

If you were to sign a piece of paper and that paper was a contract saying that you would be my slave and you sign it, everything you produce would belong to who? It would belong to me.

Yet, you go out and you do work in the world and everyone else (the food people, the car people, the mortgage people, and the tax people) are the ones who get the money.

You did all the work but who got paid?

Everybody else. There’s no difference between having one master and many masters!

Now, let’s take a look at a few rules that can and will change your financial game entirely, and help you break free of your financial bonds.  

 

Rule Number 1 is to pay yourself first when you make money, and use that capital.

There are not many businesses that are able to move forward and profit without capital, either sweat, equity, or money. Either way, it needs capital in one sense. In the banking business, we need money. And we do that by paying ourselves first, not last.

Rule Number 2 is to start paying yourself interest when you use your own money.

The second rule is fairly obvious.

We know that when we borrow money from a bank, we pay them interest. When we borrow money from a credit card, we pay them interest.

When we take out a student loan, we pay them interest. We know that when we use other peoples’ money, we pay them interest.

But–how many times have you used your own money and paid yourself back with interest? If you’re like most people, the answer is probably never (before learning to become your own banker).

It’s just something we have never thought of doing. We haven’t been thinking like we are in the finance business.

 

However, our money is just as valuable as the bank’s money. In fact, it should be more valuable–because you worked for it.

Rule Number 3 is to focus on recapturing money, not just buying assets.

The majority of financial advisors and people we talk to about money are always trying to get you to buy assets, whether they are stocks, bonds, or real estate.  They’re trying to get you to buy an asset with your money.

I’m not saying those are bad things. In fact, there’s a way to do all those things using a life insurance policy.

But as far as banking is concerned, it’s more important to utilize a systematic approach to how you finance everything you buy and get all the money back.

If you know anything about banks, you can ask yourself: how many assets a bank needs to buy to make a profit?

They don’t need to buy any. And neither do we.

The goal is to get all the money back plus make a profit every time we use our money, just like the banks do when they lend us money.

So as far as banking is concerned, the focus should be on recapturing money and making a profit in the money business instead of relying on buying assets.

Once again, I am not against buying assets. But it isn’t the most profitable way to utilize your hard-earned money.

 

 

If you follow these three rules, you will have no problem becoming successful and making a profit in your banking business. These 3 rules are the key to your financial future; unlock it.

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Get out of the rat race- Bring the money back to you

Whether April Fool’s day is just around the corner or it has come and gone many of us still feel like fool when it comes to finances, retirement programs, money, and investments. I know that I felt this way until I learned about the Priviate Family Financing (PFF).  Ask yourself, “Have you ever been the fool when it came to investing your money?” Have you ever felt as if you just do not understand the money game? Have you ever been taught how money works? Money is simply a means of exchange. Think about your life … you work really hard you buy more assets, you work harder you buy more assets. You keep working hard and yet at the end of the day you are cash poor and asset rich.

Day after day you go to work and the food company’s get your money, the car dealership’s get your money, the housing industry gets your money, the IRS gets your money, and on it keeps on going. You are a slave to many people and everyone and everything gets your money and you wonder where did it all go? What if you paid yourself first? What if you were able to make every payment a payment into your bank account instead of a giving it to someone else? You can do this and the reason I know you can is I have been able to do it through Priviate Family Financing. I have been privileged to learn how to turn every depreciating asset into appreciating assets.

I know you are asking yourself “Is it really possible to turn depreciating assets into appreciating assets?” Yes, it is possible. You just have to learn how money works and start thinking like a banker. Banks are the biggest buyers of permanent whole life insurance in the world. Yes, whole life insurance. Do you believe banks are in the money business? If you do then banks are either stupid for buying dividend paying life insurance or they know something you don’t know. Dividend paying whole life insurance is the whole product that works with Infinite Banking. It is the whole product that allows you to become your own banker. Simply put the Priviate Family Financing concept teaches you how to purchase a permanent dividend paying whole life insurance policy through a mutual company. You are able to take a loan out from the insurance company, pay the loan back with interest and there is a bonus you have a death benefit too. This allows you to use your cash today. Banks don’t let your money sit they loan it out to you and charge you interest. When you purchase a life insurance policy you are thinking like a banker. You are depositing money and loaning it to yourself and paying it back with interest. Infinite Banking is the key to stop being a slave to everyone else and start paying yourself first.

In life we finance everything we purchase. If you knew you could buy a policy, take a loan out from that policy and buy a car and pay the loan back have you not become the banker? You paid the loan back with interest; therefore, the car just became an appreciating asset since you have the car and the money. You are creating your own Private Family Financing system. This means that over time every payment you make will be a deposit into your own account instead of going to someone else.

Through the Priviate Family Financing use your cash today, build wealth for you and your family. Let you money work for you today and the death benefit be the legacy you leave your family and loved ones. The wealth are doing this, the Banks are doing this so you can do it too. Your money is no different than their money they just use it differently.  Stop a being a fool when it comes to money and learn how you can gain Financial Freedom by thinking like a banker, paying yourself first, and using the Priviate Family Financing to pass on wealth to your family for generations to come.  The way to start is by learning more about Priviate Family Financing and how it can bring your financial freedom.

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Winning the Wealth Game by Playing It Safe – and Smart

The leaves are coming back; the grass is growing; it is spring! And that means time for spring cleaning. Cleaning your houses, cleaning out your closets, but how about cleaning up your finances?

The holidays are over and people normally spend lots of money over the winter. So as spring cleaning arrives why not clean up your finances and start something that will benefit you and your family for generations to come.

Most people deal with lots of debt in their life. I have been blessed to have been taught from a young age how to deal with finances. Most people start their adult life with debt. Whether from college, moving out, buying a car, there is a lot of expenses. And the older you get the more expenses you deal with.  You have to plan for retirement, maybe a wedding, or college for your kids. The expenses add up quickly and if you don’t know how to manage your money right debt is going to add up quickly as well.

There are multiple things out there you could try to help with money. But the one process I have been raised to use and have seen work is called infinite banking. This uses life insurance policies and allows you to take loans and pay yourself back. This allows you to in a sense become the bank.

Do you think a dollar is worth more today or in the future? The answer is today.  Our dollars will be weaker in the future.

And do you think that taxes are going to increase or decrease in the future?  There is no doubt about it.  Taxes will continue to increase. Do you want to pay taxes on the seed or the harvest?  Of course, we want to pay taxes on the seed and not the harvest.  By paying taxes on the seed, we save money because we are paying on less.

Yet retirement programs such as 401 K’s, want you to not have access to your money till later in life when your dollars are weak, taxes are higher, and you are now in a higher tax bracket.  It doesn’t make sense at all.

But we have found a program that isn’t like your typical retirement program.  You have access to your money NOW while your taxes are the lowest they will ever be and you are in the lowest tax bracket you will ever be in.

This program uses dividend paying whole life insurance as the vehicle to achieve financial freedom for retirement as well as many other things. But this program has some extra perks.  It has a death benefit.  Plus, we can use the cash value while we are still living.  Can it get any better than this?

So you owe it to yourself.  If you are wanting to clean up your finances, check out infinite banking.  That is what the financial gurus call this.  Infinite Banking will provide you financial freedom.

There are a few ways you can learn more about infinite banking.  First, you could check out the beginner’s course videos at the website www.lifestylebanking.com . Or if you like to read, the book, The Tree of Wealth: How to Build a Legacy, explains infinite banking very well.  Also, you can always contact any of us at Living Wealth through our website: www.livingwealth.com .  We would be more than happy to answer your questions or explain infinite banking.  The next step is up to you.  It’s time to think outside of the box with infinite banking.

 

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Ray Poteet Explains How to Turn Your Life Insurance Policy into a Nest Egg With Infinite Banking

Our founder Ray Poteet was recently interviewed in an OptimizedGeek podcast, where he explained how infinite banking can turn a life insurance policy into a nest egg.

For readers that haven’t heard of infinite banking before, it’s a way to create your own private bank that you use instead of a conventional bank; for loans, for storing money, for financing cars, vacations, houses and education.

Many Americans are familiar with a 401K as a retirement savings vehicle, but infinite banking is much more powerful. For example: you can benefit from the life insurance policy by taking loans out rather than having to wait until retirement to access the money. And over time, since you are paying yourself interest rather than to the bank and due to the miracle of compound interest, your wealth grows exponentially.

Ray shares on the podcast that by using infinite banking since 2001 for just financing the cars for his family of 5 primary drivers, the system has created $700,000 in wealth.

Listen to the podcast and get an in-depth explanation of how infinite banking works.

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The 3 Main Problems with Traditional Retirement Planning – and how to fix them

When planning for retirement, it can become easy to obfuscate the future. Maybe you are 30 years from retirement age – are trying to make the right decisions today to set yourself up financially for your Golden Years might seem like an impossible task. Or on the other hand, maybe you are 3 months away from retirement and want to be confident that what you’ve built will last. You might ask – how are the two situations at all similar? Well, they both come down to analyzing your priorities when retirement comes. To accurately do so, you’ll also need a proper sense of what it takes to make those priorities come to fruition. Most of it comes down to 3 major elements: income, liquidity, and legacy – things that some don’t consider when retirement planning. Let’s break down what each of these means for you.

1. Income

Income isn’t a word that is really thrown around when discussing retirement. Instead, the “Nest Egg” mentality is more common in retirement planning culture. However, it is important to remember that the goal of retirement is not to see who has the most money piled up, but who can generate the most income from the assets they’ve accumulated.
Cash Flow is always king –, you know that you have a good month when your income is greater than your expenses regardless of how much money you have in the bank. The same thing applies in retirement. Most individuals are trusting their retirement assets in mutual funds and the stock market; unfortunately, these assets are focused more on appreciation than they are on cash flow, and one bad year near retirement can wipe you out (remember 2008… not a good year for those wanting to retire).
If your plan is solely based on “Nest Egg”, it might be time to look into ways to generate an income to live off of in retirement.

2. Liquidity

Retiring off of a pension, Social Security, rental income, or income from an annuity is great, but if you do not have a reserve fund set aside for emergencies, you can be in for a rude awakening. Once you’ve figured out how you will generate the income you need in retirement, now it’s time to focus on your liquidity.
There will always be expenses that are unforeseeable and that don’t quite fit in your monthly budget. In retirement, these unexpected expenses can come from many places: a medical emergency, long term care expenses, or even the usual culprits like buying a car or going on a vacation to see the grandkids.
You want to make sure that you have funds set aside that are not correlated to your income stream. By setting yourself up in this manner, you can use these funds when an emergency or unexpected expense comes along without having to worry about selling off assets that are producing your monthly income.

3. Legacy

After building your income stream and creating a liquid pool of reserves, your final priority should be on building your legacy. We don’t get to take any of our possessions with us on the other side, so making an estate plan for what we leave behind is crucial.
Some assets are better than others to own when it comes to preparing to leave an inheritance. One of the best assets to own at the time of death is Whole Life Insurance. Many times the Death Benefit will be exponentially larger than what was paid into the policy in premiums, allowing you to pass on a legacy for pennies on the dollar. Another great perk is that the Death Benefit can be passed down Income Tax-Free to your heirs, and if set up properly, can bypass any Estate Taxes as well.

With the many misconceptions on retirement planning that are floating around these days, it’s good to refocus ourselves on the key elements of retirement so that we can make a proper plan. If you are interested in learning Living Wealth’s approach to wealth building and retirement, you can access our Beginner’s Course for free by clicking here.

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Top 3 Ways to Have Your Money Work for You Without Messing with the Stock Market

For many of us, the Stock Market has been presented to us as the premiere method for attaining wealth for wealth building and retirement. However, with the uncertainty attached to the markets, lack of control, and volatility in the world economies, many of us are searching for alternative ways to work with our money.

Unless you have a mind akin to Warren Buffet, you probably won’t be one to amass a fortune in the Stock Market. It can seem like there’s a veil in front of the Wall St. world for the average investor.  No matter the way you feel about Wall Street, it is nice to know that there are other ways to make money, perhaps ways that help you keep better control of your money while providing greater growth opportunity.

Let’s take a moment to look  at some alternative options you have available to have your money work for you:

1. Real Estate

The world of Real Estate investing offers some very unique advantages that can be utilized regardless of whether the stock market is up or down. Not only is there the potential for appreciation of asset value when the housing market goes up, but many have found great success creating a cash flow empire in Real Estate through rental properties and apartment complexes.

The power lies in your ability to leverage borrowed money when investing in real estate. We forget that real estate operate slightly differently than other investments. Although you only may have put 20% down to buy a property, you get the benefit of the full investment when you look at return when you sell that property in 5 or 10 years.

Then, you get into the tax advantages. Often, you can deduct your entire mortgage interest from your taxable income. Depreciation deduction allows you to deduct on the part of your property used for rental purposes, keeping down your reportable net income and reducing your taxes. Reverse Mortgages and Cash-Out Refinancing options to put cash back in your pocket without losing the properties themselves.

With all these options, there is one absolute necessity: EDUCATION. Real Estate can be extremely lucrative, but the best investors are those that spend the time educating themselves, as any business owner educates themselves in their field. Conveniently, we live in an era of great accessibility to information and educational materials – books, audiobooks, blogs, podcasts – the tools are out there.

 

 

2. Dividend-Paying Whole Life Insurance

401k programs and IRA’s had a virtual “takeover” of the retirement marketplace in the 1980’s. Because of it, society lost its interest in the whole life insurance policies of previous generations. More recently, however, these policies are slowly coming back and gaining steam in the marketplace as benefits are rediscovered. Whole life insurance, like real estate, has some incredible advantages when compared to other tools for wealth building.

1. Cash Value inside a policy grows tax-deferred, and can be accessed tax-free at any time through a policy loan. Taxes represent one of the greatest threats to wealthbuilding. Because of it, accessing money on a tax – free basis (without penalties) is incredibly valuable.
2. Whole Life Insurance policies are guaranteed to grow. When using a Mutual Life Insurance Company, your policy is eligible for additional growth through dividends.
3. The policy loan feature allows policyholders to leverage the cash value of the policy. This is similar to how the Real Estate investors can access the equity of their properties without having to sell the asset. This allows your policies to continue to grow as if no money was taken out.

The death benefit payout then passes income tax-free to your heirs. When thinking on the scale of building intergenerational wealth, that’s an incredible advantage.

 

3. Private Family Financing

 

Private Family Financing, our implementation process for Infinite Banking, is an innovative way to use the advantages of Whole Life Insurance to enter the “financing” business.

The goal of Private Family Financing is to use your policies to take over all of your car loans, mortgages, student loans, business loans, credit card debt, etc. Once these debts have been paid off, we can now take all of the payments that used to be leaving your hands and send them back to your policies! You are essentially making all the money that the banks and finance companies were making off you, and it’s all done on a tax-free basis! You’ve essentially “invested” in debt, and turned your liabilities into assets.

However, why only focus on your own debts? Many of us have children, parents, siblings, and grandchildren, who all have mortgages, car loans, credit card debt with other banks. By keeping all this money within the family, the opportunity arises to create a large financing enterprise.

There’s this misconception that the stock market is where you go to make money. Films like “The Wolf of Wall Street” portray the stock market man who is out of his mind with money and assets. However, that doesn’t portray a reality for the majority of investors. There are simply better, smarter options for some people. Exploring those options and educating yourself on how you might leverage them is always the best first step.

 

 

 

 

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