“What Could Prevent Me from Doing IBC?” [Part 1/5]
A discussion of obstacles to implementing the Infinite Banking Concept. Obstacle #1: “I don’t like (or have time) to read.”
Series Introduction
Let me be crystal-clear from the outset, the Infinite Banking Concept (IBC) can and does work for just about anyone. Even people who are uninsurable can still acquire IBC-style policies by insuring the lives of valued family members, friends, or business associates.
This series is not about the technical questions or objections you might have to the IBC, like the (flawed) idea that you have to pay interest to borrow “your” own money (it’s not really yours) or the accusation that life insurance is the worst place in the world to put money. This series is about objections that often come before all of that.
This subject didn’t drop out of left field. Nelson Nash himself — creator of the IBC — devotes a portion of the second part of his book, Becoming Your Own Banker (BYOB), to what he calls the “human problems.” These are the psychological problems that, all of the technicalities and mechanics of life insurance aside, will definitely obstruct your attempts to implement the IBC.
You can overcome these obstacles. If you’re serious about the truth of money and capital, what I’m about to list and explain in this series won’t stop you. I’ll even go so far as to say that if it’s your mission to legitimately demonstrate why (you think) the IBC is flawed, then it would be to your benefit to surmount these obstacles first and then to challenge the concepts and technical details. It would make your case stronger.
Finally, the main audience for this series is the group of individuals who have heard something about the IBC (maybe even through this blog) and are considering getting started. If the items in this series don’t bother or apply to you, then you’re that much closer to successful implementation. That’s one of the leading themes of this blog — to sort out the things that folks interested in learning about the IBC may or may not have thought about.
Let’s get started.
I don’t like (or have time) to read
I am personally a reader, but I have an academic background so that basically excludes me from meaningful comparisons to people living in the real world. Since plunging into the financial business, I have come face to face with the fact that not everyone likes to read. Fewer like to read about money. And even fewer like to read about the economics of money.
More pressing than an individual’s attitude to money is the severity of scarcity of his time. The modern man — and woman — is unceasingly busy. Jobs, family, spiritual, and leisure activities consume much of our most valuable (and uniquely non-reproducible) asset.
Combine these two facts and you can understand the background of this particular obstacle to implementing the IBC.
Look, well-designed, properly-selected, dividend-paying whole life insurance is an extremely robust asset. Exceptional, financially sophisticated folks who have an intimate knowledge of the conventional options of access to capital and “think long range” (decades ahead) in Nelsons’ words, can see the value in an “IBC-style” whole life policy. Most of us are occupied with caring for our families and excelling in our work — we don’t ruminate on the philosophy of finance.
But that is the power of BYOB. It is an (amazingly short) treatise in financial philosophy. Those, by the way, are my own words. Nelson has a way of writing where, by the end of it all, you realize you’ve experienced a total paradigm shift in your thinking about money. You might not even have realized just what was happening. In the same way that time flies when you’re having fun, your presuppositions about the nature of money transform when you read Nelson’s down to earth prose.
This is what you miss if you don’t read BYOB.
Whatever the obstacle is that is preventing you from reading this particular brand of non-fiction, if you are interested in the truth about money, I encourage you to discard it. Anyone can buy select, well-designed dividend-paying whole life insurance. Only someone who has read BYOB can practice the Infinite Banking Concept. Don’t get me wrong, the former is just as legitimate as the latter, but if the IBC is your goal, BYOB is the way to go.
A caveat: there are other books about the IBC. Those written by my Ph.D. dissertation adviser, Dr. Robert Murphy, I’ve read. The others, I haven’t, though I have browsed through many. The fact remains, and I know personally that some authors of other books that allude to the IBC will tell you that, BYOB remains the gold-standard in IBC education — pun intended.
My point is that you don’t have to read everything. BYOB will get the job done (I believe that future books on the IBC would do well to explicitly acknowledge this fact and focus on developing certain elements in further, original directions — but I digress.). As far as non-fiction financial and economics books go — or all books for that matter — BYOB is not a tall order. We’re talking 92 pages, big print, full-page illustrations, a proper dose of humor throughout, and free-flowing clarity. For context, I read it twice the day Amazon dropped it on my doorstep.
To take it a step further, you could say that BYOB is the most efficient text you could hope for to add to your knowledge and shift your thinking. If giant books with arguments that ought to have been distilled to a fraction of their total page count frustrate you, BYOB will be eminently satisfying. Unlike some academic writers, Nelson approached his task in order to get to the point in the most effective way possible. You can judge his level of success, but I think you’ll be pleased.
Let me lay out what will happen if you start to talk to a financial professional and you have not read BYOB. First, you won’t know if what your agent is doing adheres to what Nelson teaches. The whole life insurance niche of the financial industry is not a monolith, and many financial professionals genuinely believe that they can offer their clients IBC-style policies even though they themselves have not poured over and studied BYOB. Without preliminary knowledge that you yourself went and attained with a thorough reading of the book, you’ll have nothing but the agent’s say-so to verify that what you’re getting is what the creator of the IBC himself would suggest. You wouldn’t try to drive a car without first learning something about how it operates from an authoritative source. The same principle applies here.
Second, while reading BYOB may take time (anywhere from a few hours to a few days), learning it solely from your agent will take even longer. Nelson used to travel the country giving a ten-hour seminar covering the content of the BYOB. Imagine how long it will take someone other than Nelson to convey the same material. The email chains, phone tag rounds, and other forms of inefficiently spent hours will pile up on your and your agent’s shoulders.
I’ve heard the following objection to this: “If you’re the expert, why don’t you just explain it to me? Isn’t that what you’re paid for anyway? Why do I have to do all the work?”
This is a fair criticism. After all, your auto mechanic doesn’t ask you to read a text on engine systems before he agrees to change your oil. However, implementing the IBC is less like getting an oil change and more like custom-building a house. This isn’t the type of transaction where the consumer should fully outsource the educational requirements of the task at hand to the expert. The custom-home purchaser will work intimately with his architect and/or general contractor (GC) in order to establish a minimally sufficient level of understanding about just what the construction crews are doing. The architect may not have the home-buyer read a book, but maybe he should. No, the home buyer shouldn’t have to do “all the work” — the architect/GC will earn his keep — but he does the home buyer a disservice if he doesn’t share the optimal home-building educational resources with his client. The same is true for the IBC Practitioner.
Consider another example of a major decision (and transaction) that no one should have to tell you to “study up” for: a wedding. To the contrary, someone may even have to tell the one in charge of planning to do less, lest he (probably she) overwork herself. It may seem like a dramatic comparison, but time will reveal just how intimately intertwined a family’s financial and personal lives can (and will) be. If you’ll spend days just making sure the cake is right, the thought of spending at least that much time sorting out your financial strategy shouldn’t sound like a stretch.
Custom home buyers and soon-to-be newlyweds who neglect to grow in their understanding of what goes into their home and their Big Day will not only encounter surprise after unwanted surprise. They’ll also miss out on a unique opportunity for personal growth and self-improvement. BYOB is not just a book. It’s that sort of event that can radically transform your, and your future family’s, life experience. As with your home and your spouse, you don’t want to miss the opportunity to investigate and understand it.
