Cash flow really is king. It’s business 101. You can have a profitable enterprise, but if you have poor cash flow you can get yourself into financial trouble pretty quickly and even go broke. Liquidity is highly important,
especially in a recessionary environment, and must be watched constantly by the money manager at the steering wheel of a business.
Ramsey’s First Problem: 12% Returns on
Mutual Funds?!
Regarding the first problem, Ramsey’s figure of 12%
returns on a mutual fund is an unfair benchmark to hold
against a whole life policy. Ramsey doesn’t specify
exactly what kind of mutual fund he is considering,
but for returns that high they must be heavily equitybased
We must never forget that beyond all of
the outstanding attributes of a properly designed dividend-paying Whole Life
insurance contract and how it works, policy loans are a completely separate
undertaking and are a central feature of the Infinite Banking Concept.
We are specifically discussing a tax strategy that calls for taking the cash flows that are already earmarked for paying your taxes and re-routing them through a correctly designed IBC policy that has the capacity to adjust to your particular situation and provide the freedom to not be dependent on outside bankers. As before, I want to emphasize that this idea does NOT reduce your tax liability—I am simply presenting options for people to redirect cash flows that would occur anyway.
I can incentivize you do just that by showing you a way to fund a large
Infinite Banking Concept (IBC)-type life insurance policy, while using cashflows that are dedicated to paying your taxes.
A common method of showing the public the power of Nelson Nash’s
Infinite Banking Concept” (IBC) is to stress its feature of “constant
compounding.” In contrast to many other asset classes, dividend-paying
Whole Life insurance always increases in value. Indeed, some proponents of
IBC enthusiastically declare: “There’s nothing else like it!”
The central message of Nelson Nash in BYOB is that everybody needs to rely (at least implicitly) on financing for life’s major purchases. Even if you buy a car
with cash, you are forfeiting the opportunity of investing that cash and earning a return on it. So even people who always “pay cash” still experience the same implicit tradeoffs between spending now versus later. Therefore, Nash argues, the real question is whether you are going to obtain your financing from a bank controlled by outsiders, versus a bank that you control.
I spend a lot of time motivating difficult financial topics by constructing “thought experiments.” In a thought experiment, you can only focus on one or maybe two moving parts, while holding everything else constant. This is the
way to isolate the impact of the factor you want to understand. However, it means the whole exercise is necessarily unrealistic
In his classic work Becoming Your Own Banker, Nelson Nash claims that the standard approach to life insurance has things backwards. Consumers have been taught to get their desired death benefit for as little outlay as possible.
Nowadays the average American has been taught to believe that a very responsible financial strategy is to plunk as much of his paycheck every month as possible into a “diversified” and “conservative” mix of stocks and, if he wants to really play it safe, to mix in some government bonds. Naturally the acme of savvy saving is supposed to be a tax-qualified vehicle such as a Roth IRA for the self-employed, a 401(k) for salaried employees, or a 403(b) for educators.
In the 20th century, households used actual savings accounts at the bank—which were distinct from checking accounts. Households also invested directly in bonds and life insurance.
