The Source of the Source of Nelson Nash’s Infinite Banking Concept

Watch the seminar that started it all

It’s shocking and sad to me that the bit of history I’m about to share with you is known only by an alarmingly small sliver of the population. If you are at all in the orbit of the IBC — as an adviser, consumer, enthusiast, or some combination thereof — you really should know it.

The source of learning about the Infinite Banking Concept (IBC) is Nelson Nash’s book Becoming Your Own Banker (BYOB). You cannot speak authoritatively about the IBC without more than one thorough reading of BYOB.

But very few people I speak to on a day-to-day basis know the source of BYOB.

For years prior to the publication of Becoming Your Own Banker in 2000, Nelson traveled the country and delivered lengthy, hours-long seminars where he taught the IBC. The material Nelson used in that seminar became the book Becoming Your Own Banker. In other words, the source of the source of the Infinite Banking Concept was Nelson’s live, in-person seminar.

Here’s how it worked. Nelson charged a very modest speaker fee — modest even for the already modest market price for outside speakers — to individual financial professionals to his seminar. The financial professional would then invite his or her clients, potential clients, and, occasionally, members of the public. Because Nelson offered his seminar at such a modest fee, financial professionals could pass on the generosity by charging an even more modest fee for his or her people to attend. For instance, when I first saw Nelson, I think I paid about $60.

Very often, attendees of the seminar would be inspired by Nelson’s message. It was customary, then, for the inspired attendees to turn to the sponsoring adviser for guidance and coaching on proper, individualized implementation of Nelson’s Concept. Of course, this involved the purchase of properly structured, dividend-paying whole life insurance from a mutual company.

When all was said and done, Nelson received his modest speaker fee and had the opportunity to share his life’s work with an excited and receptive audience who all paid to be there (Nelson would later tell many of us that the last 20 years of his life — the time when he performed his seminar most frequently — were his happiest). Attendees got to see Nelson, whose presentation skill would put many of the modern internet guru, financial entertainer types to absolute shame, for the price of a nice dinner out. Some attendees even came away with a plan and the product necessary to secede from the cartelized, commercial banking system, to reclaim control of the banking function in their lifetime, to arrange for private, tax-free passive cash-flow late in life, and to prepare to pass on a financial legacy to their loved ones orders of magnitude greater than they ever thought possible — all at the same time. The adviser came away with one or more (usually more) new clients who were well on their way to becoming their own ‘banker.’

Not a bad deal. At his most active, Nelson would deliver forty of these seminars in a year. To say the least, the man was in high demand. Keep in mind, this was well before the flourishing of social media. The outpouring of demand for Nelson’s seminar was due to two simple things: word-of-mouth and the quality of Nelson’s teaching. What he would later say about his Concept applied equally to the source of demand for his seminar: it’s ridiculously simple. He just knew how to teach.

The stories you see in Becoming Your Own Banker are the stories Nelson shared in his seminar, except brought to life with vibrant, humorous, Southern polish, and often with complementary, unpublished anecdotes. Many things he shared on the seminar circuit are lost forever to the unrecorded past. Those of us who saw him more than once — and some of us far more than once — kick ourselves for not video- and audio-recording every minute of our time with him.

Nelson “graduated” on March 27, 2019, so obviously we can no longer see the man himself live in action. There is a quintessentially Nelsonian lecture of his on YouTube at a financial advisory event. Those who go through the Nelson Nash Institute’s (NNI) Authorized IBC Practitioner program get access to past lectures at the annual IBC Think Tank, at many of which Nelson spoke. Access to these presentations, is, in my view, worth the price of admission to the program alone.

And yes, I do realize that it costs about $1,500, last time I checked, to join in the NNI in the first year. Those who balk at a price like that for financial training might consider comparing it to that charged for other programs by the online, financial entertainment class, all of whom, by the way, are essentially selling how they think you should — wait for it — develop access to capital in order to finance the acquisition and sale of real estate and/or businesses (no, I don’t mean the free webinars — I mean the things at the bottom of those click funnels you’ve into which you may have already been tossed). I would rather pay to learn how to fish (how to accumulate and deploy my own capital) than pay more to learn where to buy the fish (how to become dependent on third party capital). That the financial entertainment industry has succeeded in persuading untold numbers of new, enthusiastic entrepreneurs to pay to learn how to become dependent is stunning and sad.

Fewer people who are familiar with the history I’ve shared above know that you can still watch a recording of Nelson’s seminar without going back in time and without becoming a financial professional and an Authorized IBC Practitioner.

At the NNI store (not the easiest to navigate) you can find this page where you can buy a six-hour DVD version of Nelson’s seminar recorded back in 2012. At $199, it isn’t cheap, but it’s also not $1,500 plus a career change. If you’re considering implementing the IBC in order to one day accommodate all of your and your family’s need for capital, then $199 is a drop in the bucket. Frankly, you should watch it more than once.

I’ve also found that many Authorized IBC Practitioners, perhaps including those who I know read my blog, don’t know that you can purchase the seminar DVD with necessary rights that allow you to show it to your current and potential clients (this link only works for Auth. IBC Practitioners).

Up until now, I’ve failed, myself, to utilize this and make it reasonably accessible to my people on a regular basis. This will soon be rectified; clients of mine should stay tuned here and to The Capitalist, to which you can subscribe at my website, for further updates.

In sum, you should know that Becoming Your Own Banker came about just as Nelson’s discovery of his Concept did: in bottom-up, decentralized, individualistic fashion. It was the amalgamation of, and textbook to, his own seminar, which, sadly, we will not have the opportunity to see live again. This is how the movement for decentralized accumulation of and control over capital started: one man, masterfully sharing his vision to other individuals who voluntarily chose to spend their time, money, and energy to see him. Just as he used to tell me, “just one more,” individual by individual, in true grassroots fashion. History should, and if I have anything to do with it, it will, remember not only Nelsons’ Concept, but his methods too, which, thanks to the happy overlap of technological advance and Nelson’s teaching years, we can still witness.