Infinite Banking Simplified

Michael Duryea: From the time that I was very young, even as a small boy, I remember having a lot of deep-seated fear about money. was something about money that made me afraid and uncertain. After I got married and started building a family, I began to ask God to send men into my life to teach me the truth about money that I did not know. That was when Ray Poteet and Nelson Nash came into my life. Hello everyone, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. It's always a privilege and a joy to be here with all of you. Today I wanna take a step back and just do an overview podcast Infinite Banking Simplified. Infinite Banking Simplified. at this there's so much information on the internet about Infinite Banking. and I learned about the infinite banking concept. This podcast is about the love affair that I have been having with infinite banking since that time to the Duryea financial podcast. you know, infinite banking has gone viral on certain social media accounts and there's all these companies out there doing things and there's a lot of information and it can really be information overload and a lot of people look at infinite banking from different perspectives. if talk to people about infinite banking, infinite banking means different things to different people. I want to make a podcast today about what does infinite banking mean to Michael? How does he simplify it? what Michael gets it from is from Ray Poteet and Nelson Nash. And where do see the most value for people and where do people get the most value from infinite banking? And how we simplify it down? Because really, ultimately, whatever we're in life, I have found that really the only things that matter are the simple things. Really simply, how does this benefit me? What pain is it addressing? What pain does it remove? And I'm going to start by telling you a short story here. Back in 2019, my wife and I bought our first home. We had rented up until then, we had rented a house and we had a really good landlord and so we did that for the first really half of our marriage we were renting. But then in 2019, we bought our first home. I got a traditional ⁓ from a commercial bank to that because I had only been doing infinite banking for about a year at that point and certainly didn't have enough cash values. built up to finance the whole mortgage myself and it didn't, you I was in the infant stages of learning infinite banking. So I got a traditional mortgage and I just remember that the whole underwriting process for the loan was incredibly frustrating and you had to like, it felt like the DMV, it felt like you had to answer the same questions over and over and over over again and you had to let everybody look at everything you... never wanted anybody to look at all of your tax returns, all of your bank statements, know, all of your every, I mean, you just had to unzip and show the world everything and basically make all of your finances public what it felt like, which nobody likes to do. And then I remember the day that we went to the title company to close on the house and it took like an hour just to sign everything, like sign this and then you sign this and then you sign this and then you sign this. And anyway, the whole process made me feel very small. And honestly, it made me feel like a financial slave. And it really did feel like putting myself in slavery to a big financial institution for the next 30 years of my life, you know. And it made me understand people ⁓ to pay off their houses early and as quickly as possible just to get the bank off their back. And you know, it was just a very unpleasant process. And then in 2023, I was able to finance the mortgage with my mother. And I remember that it was just so simple and so freeing and so easy. the whole process just felt so freeing and I didn't have to show anybody tax returns and I didn't have to show anybody any bank statements and I didn't have to, you know, I just had a discussion with, you know, my mother about our financial position and what we were able to offer and she wrote a $300,000 check to the title company. I wrote a $10,000 check to the title company. And when we went to the title company to close on the house, I think it took about five minutes. I think I'd signed two pieces of paper and they were like, thank you, have a nice day. And the whole process just made me feel so free because I was free. I wasn't being controlled by the dictates of some bank, you know, the place where I live and where my children sleep wasn't being controlled and collateralized by, you know, a giant corporate business anymore. the thing and then every month that I make my mortgage payment to my mother, that's money that stays in the family and gets leveraged in our policies and money's gonna reappear. ⁓ gets to use it now and gets used to fund premiums and more policy loans and more investments and then all that money gets multiplied and shows up in her estate tax free. Infinite banking is about controlling the financial environment in which you operate. It's about freeing yourself and your family members from the control of banks for generations to come. my oldest son is 11 years old, and if he gets married, let's say he gets married when he's 25. That's 14 years from now. In 14 years, let's say it's three weeks until the wedding and I tell him and his fiance, hey, I want to meet with you guys. And we sit down with them and I say, look, I've been putting money into life insurance policies for for Caspian, you know, since he was very young. And I just want you guys to know that I'll finance. with the family bank, anything that you guys wanna buy. The family will underwrite it and if you guys wanna buy a house or buy a car or spend money on education or make an investment or whatever you wanna do, family rule is you need to check with the family bank before you go finance something at any other bank so that you can hear all the terms and decide whether you wanna participate in it or not. ⁓ These are the benefits that you get if you participate and these are the benefits that you lose if you decide to do your financing with the world instead of with the family. And you know if you make all your payments on time I'll start transferring ownership of you know and you and you show faithfulness and good stewardship with the family bank. I'll start transferring ownership of these policies on you to you. And then you guys can own and control the leverage that I spent 25 years building for you. I'm going to feel pretty good about that when I get to do that. And every I'm going to be I'm going to feel pretty good about the fact that, you know, every payment that they're making for the things that they were going to buy anyway is making me richer in the short term and making them richer in the long term and making the whole family wealthier. mean, these weren't I'm not adding some expense into their life that they weren't going to have anyway. This is something that they were that they were going to buy anyway. And if the family didn't provide for it well, then they were going to have to shop. You know, they were gonna have to shop in the world for this kind of thing and they would have been, know, financing is a product and a service that people have to buy. It's unavoidable. Infinite banking is the recognition that there's always a cost of capital and you've got to shop for it somewhere. And most people don't have a family bank established where they can shop for money and financing. So they have to go to some other finance company ⁓ for financing. ⁓ they've got to finance the things of life somehow, whether they're... buying their own home or renting or whether they're buying cars outright with cash or getting loans, it doesn't really matter what they're doing. There's always a cost of financing. infinite banking ⁓ really about, ultimately, for me, it's about the feeling of being free. The feeling of being free. that comes from the reality of being free, that comes from my experience, that comes from the joy being able to finance, having the option to finance anything that I want without having to talk to a bank. A life insurance company is really just another finance company. That's really what it is, just like a bank. But what the life insurance company will do is it will offer me legal binding contracts that give me ownership of the equity and give me ownership of the cash flow, give me ownership of the leverage of leveraging my own liquid equity and put me in charge of the loan repayment terms and everything else. It privatizes financing. And as Nelson says in his book, there's two different ways of doing that. You can own bank. You can go start your own commercial bank and get a charter and raise all the money and do all these things. And I remember Ray told I'll never forget when he told me like three different times, he worked really hard with a group of people. Okay, we're going to start our own commercial bank. And each of the three times they just stopped and said, no thanks, because it was so much easier to just build a system of life insurance policies and handle all the financing privately. infinite banking concept is simply the recognition that you can do all financing you would ever want to do with the life insurance company. You don't have to use federal reserve system of commercial banks and lenders and and deposit companies, you don't have to use those finance companies. If you don't want to, you can establish your own in a completely different environment. Infinite banking is the recognition that ⁓ banks don't have any reserve requirements really to speak of anymore. I ⁓ got, I pull up Gemini right now on my computer and say, what are the reserve requirements? for banks now. It used to be The reserve, and you can, you know, can, can plug into your ⁓ AI as much as you want and go look it up for yourself. But the truth is that reserve requirements for banks are 0%. Now I'm going to ask it, I know the answer to this. When did reserve requirements for US banks go to ⁓ 0 March 26th, 2020, part of the COVID-19 epidemic. Life insurance companies have huge reserve requirements. They're required to hold in cash reserves everything that they've to their policyholders. I mean, ⁓ ⁓ there's just a million reasons why, but none of infinite banking comes from life insurance. I'm not an advocate of life insurance. A lot of, and it's so easy for people to think, ⁓ this is all about life insurance or Michael's a life insurance guy. I'm not a life insurance guy, I'm a freedom guy. And if an opportunity came along, if the banking laws in the United States changed, and the government came in and put in large reserve requirements for commercial banks, and I had the opportunity to open my own commercial bank with a group of other investors that I knew, know, that I knew and loved and trusted, or by myself, And if someone could demonstrate to me that there was less red tape in doing that, that it was safer, was less hassle, and I had more freedom and more control to control financing by doing that, I would abandon life insurance and go do that. I'm about freedom. But the reality is that life insurance in the United States right now and for a very long time, for the last hundred years, and even longer than that if you look back. life insurance has been a much better place to do financing for a very long time than the commercial banks. And the only real problem that exists is the fear of premium. So, when I say the word premium, everybody just thinks, ⁓ I made a hundred thousand dollar deposit in my bank. You we tend to think if you make a hundred thousand dollar deposit in the bank, that's a good thing. But if you pay a hundred thousand dollar life insurance premium, that's a really bad thing. And we've all been just deep, deep condition to think that. But the truth is that it's not, that's not true at all. That when you what a life insurance ⁓ premium on a dividend paying whole life insurance policy, a participating ⁓ dividend whole life insurance policy at a good mutual life insurance company, it has to be that. A whole life insurance premium is just a transfer of capital. That's all it is. A mutual life insurance company is just a depository, just like a commercial bank. And the contractual terms that you get for your deposits at the life insurance company are just astronomically better. But it's not because I believe in life insurance or something like that. It's because I believe in freedom and control. And I want to control the financing in my life. I want to be, in other words, I don't want to have to go through life for the rest of my life knowing that anytime I want to make a major purchase, I either have to have that much money stored in deposits somewhere because I can't access my investments whenever I want to. Like my investments are my investments. don't want to, you know, I don't want to go through the rest of my life having, know, ⁓ very limited number of options for how to finance something. I want to be able to finance things on my own terms and therefore I want to have a large pool of liquid cash available at any time. And you know you can do that with the gross stock mutual fund, can do that with T-bills, you can do that with you know CDs at your local credit union, you can do it with any any financial machine you want to use it for. But the simple reality for me is no one has ever shown me a better place to hold large, a large liquidity position to have available at all times, not just sometimes, at all times, so that no matter what big expense comes along in life, a home for me, a home for my son, a home for my grandson, a new truck, a new roof for the house, I want to send my son to aviation school for whatever that is, whatever it costs. you know, get into aviation. I want to make a, you know, I want to loan, you ⁓ $800,000 a friend so that he can start a construction business. You know, it doesn't ⁓ matter it is. think I, ⁓ whatever need for financing is, I want to be able to handle that myself. And the only way to do that ⁓ is build up a really large privately owned system of equity. liquid equity. mean if you went to the bank and said I want to borrow a million dollars and they said well we don't have that much money well like what would you think of that bank like you're in the business of having that much liquid money I mean if the bank doesn't have it they can't lend it. why they want deposits because ⁓ are the cheapest money that they can get. So that's what I want to do. I want the I want the feeling ⁓ freedom and control. that comes from the reality of freedom and control. And I've been through the pain of bank underwriting. Now, I've never been through the pain of bankruptcy, of not having enough cash flow to pay the mortgage on my house and having the bank repossess my house. But I do have a friend, and I'm not gonna even say what state he lives in, but I do have a friend where the bank is foreclosing on his house right now. And I'm watching this unfold in his life. it's horrible to watch. And I would never want to go through that. And I would want the flexibility with the family bank to say, okay, well, we can give you a 24-month reprieve or a 12-month reprieve on your payments while you get your feet back under you, rather than the bank coming along and just having this inhuman corporate for taking, you know, your home away from you where your children sleep. It's about removing that pain and removing the expectation of that pain that sits in the subconscious of so many people. That's what infinite banking is all about. At the beginning of his book, Nelson says, so conditioned to think of a life insurance premium as just an expense. You know, we're so conditioned that premium is just a bad thing, period, end of story, and keep it as small as possible or eliminate it. And so because we're conditioned to think like that, therefore with life insurance premiums, we view it as this annoying thing that we have to tolerate when we're done and maybe when we're older, we won't need it anymore so we can get rid of it. We're conditioned to think that way about premiums and therefore we keep our premiums as small as possible and that keeps our cash values as small as possible and so we end up being in the actual position in life where you never have a bunch of liquid equity at the life insurance company. And if you never have a bunch of liquid equity at the life insurance company, you never have a bunch of money there, you can never go through the experience of what it would be like to finance major items with a life insurance company. You never know what that feels like, you never know what it's like, you never go through the process, you never even try it. you know, something that Aslan tells Lucy in the Chronicles of Narnia, if you've ever read the Chronicles of Narnia, it's a children's fairy tale series by C.S. Lewis where he describes many of the greatest principles of life. My wife and I have often commented that The Chronicles of Narnia is the greatest catechism for children that we've ever encountered in our life. I mean, aside from the Bible itself, of course. The Chronicles of Narnia is like a catechism for children ⁓ ⁓ tale form. There's seven different books. And the lion character, says to Lucy, one of the children who wanders into this fairy tale, there's a point at which she has disobeyed him for a little while. and he's correcting her and disciplining her a little bit by having a of a stern conversation with her. And asks him, what would have happened if I had obeyed? And Aslan says, child, ⁓ no one ever told what would have happened. And so for me, when I encountered this concept, I thought, I don't want to get to be a hundred years old and think, I'll never know what would have happened if I had done what Nelson said to do. Nelson says is, at the beginning of the book, he says, ⁓ book is a workbook for a, it's basically a workbook for a 10-hour seminar that walks you through This is what would happen if you made your life insurance premiums as high as possible, as high as you could possibly stand. Well, what would happen if you did that? Well, you would have a large amount of cash value at the life insurance company. And then if you have a large amount of cash value, i.e. liquid equity at the life insurance company, that enables you to finance major items at the life insurance company because how much you can borrow from the life insurance company is dependent on how much cash value you have built up and the more premium you pay the more cash values you build up. And Nelson says this book is about the lifestyle, what kind of lifestyle results having really high premiums and lots of cash at the life insurance company. basically it permanent life insurance and scales it out into a business that can finance basically everything the family would ever need. And that's how it works. There's just so many things out there infinite banking and about how it really works, but it's really just the simple recognition that we've been conditioned that premium is bad. ⁓ It's only a bad thing. It's only an expense. and we should get rid of it as quickly as we can or keep it as small as possible. when that happens, ⁓ never get to try the lifestyle of what it would like to have really large premiums and therefore really large cash values and it would look like to be able to finance everything that you buy with the life insurance company rather than with the bank like we're currently doing it. Infinite banking is the recognition that you have to do banking with someone, know, somewhere. The things of life have got to be financed somehow. Why wouldn't we just redirect all that cash flow that I'm paying, and particularly my children and grandchildren, and then particularly to build a culture in the family where this is just what we do. Like, we don't finance things with the world anymore. We finance it with the family. to me, it's exactly like the... peasants who built the cathedrals in know, in the Ages. I've been to London, I've been to Westminster Abbey, I've been to Canterbury, I've seen Canterbury Cathedral, and you stand in these cathedrals and you're like, this is so beautiful and it's so ⁓ huge. How they do this? And then you go look up the history and you find out that it took three or, you know, two or three hundred years ⁓ to build some of these cathedrals and you realize, wow, the people that started building these cathedrals knew that they were never gonna see it completed. But they did it anyway. And I want to that that kind of thinking that would heal so many of the cultural problems that we're experiencing right now. Wendell Berry is ⁓ a author who writes, he lives on a farm and he writes beautiful novels and beautiful poetry. And one of the things that he says is, you know, you should plant trees. You should plant trees and you're never going to see them in their full glory. But do it anyway. Do it for your children. Do it for your grandchildren. And I can tell you that starting infinite banking from square one is like planting an oak tree from an acorn. That is the process of infinite banking. And did it from square one. ⁓ I it from scratch. And I'm never going to see it in its full flower and full glory. But I've got four boys. they're probably going to get married and they're probably going to have children and their children are probably going to have children. my prayer ⁓ my aim ⁓ to build a culture in our family where we a privately owned system of financing that we just use exclusively and every penny of interest that we spend for financing ⁓ the family is kept in the family. And not so we can get rich. I mean, it's about accumulating a certain family net worth. It's about being able know, I saw this wonderful post the other day from one of my pastors I listened to. Prince said, ⁓ a beautiful word that occurs many times in the Bible. In essence, it means you have all that you need and then some. You have blessings left over for others. The will of God is that we, as his people, should serve him with joy and gladness for the abundance of all things he has given to us. And I believe that that's true. It should be true of our time, our effort, our energy, and our finances, and everything that we have. We should have we should be able to move into abundance where we have everything that we need and we have some left over for others. my goal is to have an abundance left over for my children and grandchildren and to have taught them the stewardship principles of finance so that they can take over the family financing operation and it to finance everything that they and their grandchildren would need and to have a super abundance left over to be able to. support their church communities and their local charities and all the local efforts to this earth well that God has put ⁓ our charge and to take ground for the kingdom. Infinite banking is about being free, it's about being in control, it's about understanding that. The most profitable thing that we can do is not achieve some kind of net worth or income or rate of return, but it's to a system of financing that puts us in the driver's seat, that puts us in control of all the cash flow that's happening, both on the personal level and the business level. And infinite banking concept, ⁓ using structured life insurance policies is the best way that I have ever found to do that. And If someone can show me a better way to do that, I would love to know. And I've been asking that for years and I haven't seen it yet. So I'm continuing to do it the way that I've done it since 2017. that's infinite banking simplified. It's about a lifestyle. It's about a lifestyle of being able to live with the deep feeling of freedom and control. that comes from the reality of freedom and control, from eliminating commercial banks from your life and being control of the cash flow and the financing of everything that we finance for the things of life. So that's what infinite banking is all about. That's infinite banking simplified. It was a pleasure and a joy and an honor to be with you all here this week. Talk to you next week. Take care. God bless.