StackedLife - Authorized Infinite Banking

019 - Business Owner IBC Journey
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John Perrings: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. Welcome to the StackedLife Podcast. I'm happy today to introduce another member of the StackedLife team, Adrian Patel, who's joining us today. Adrian is also an authorized Infinite Banking practitioner. She's been practicing this in her own life for many years and decided to, just like I did, make a big career change and come over into the business and join StackedLife as a part of her practice.

So I'm very excited to welcome Adrian to the show today. And I, the reason I, I'm having her on is I want you to hear what Adrian's experience is not only in implementing IBC for her own life personally, but also now being in the business and. Seeing all the things that we see, how has this changed her outlook and, and what she sees with The Infinite Banking Concept, whole life insurance and, and finance in general.

Adrian, welcome to the show. Um, really happy you're here and happy [00:01:00] you've joined StackedLife. You've been, we've been working together for about a year now and I would like you to just tell us a little bit about your background, how you landed on implementing IBC and, what are your main thoughts about how IBC fit into your picture and how you got started.

Adrienne Patel: Sure. Thanks John. Thanks so much for having me on. And yeah, it's just, it's been a great experience learning from you and being part of your team, so super grateful to be here. I'll start from the beginning. I owned an op. Rated a small business for about 15 years. It's a senior caregiving agency. And over that time, just like John, we live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Super high cost of living area. And I think just as a small business owner, I. Started to develop this growing interest in personal finance. You know, I have a young family, I have a mortgage, and my income can be kind of lumpy as a small business owner. So I just, [00:02:00] I really started to put an emphasis on learning about personal finance and being as smart as I can with our family dollars. And so the first thing I landed on probably about 10 years ago was real estate. So I, there's a lot that I love about real estate. Um, and I, I wanted to have. Alternative streams of income. I love that there are tax benefits. I love that there's appreciation in, in the asset. So, um, kind of when I, when I invested in, started investing in real estate, I felt like my dollars were kind of doing multiple jobs and getting multiple benefits at the same time, which we can get into that later.

But I also now feel the same way about whole life insurance and Infinite Banking. So probably about five years ago, um, somebody that I follow in the real estate space, I've learned a lot from him. Someone who's on on Instagram a lot, he, was talking about this Infinite Banking Concept and whole life insurance.

And to be honest, I, I had heard that term before and. Thought it sounded a little too good to be true or you know, maybe some kind of [00:03:00] scheme. And also I had a lot of the same preconceptions about whole life insurance, to be honest. Like,

If you listen to mainstream, it's probably like you hear it's one of the worst places to put your money and. You know, you should buy term and invest the difference, you know, spend as little as possible on life insurance. So that was my mindset coming into it. But it's something that, that sparked my interest for me. Um, it was just a really basic aspect that he was sharing about Infinite Banking, and it was the fact that you can put your money into a specially designed whole life insurance policy. And when you do that, you build up equity in that policy, which is, we call cash value. And that cash value is guaranteed to grow and compound for the rest of your life. And at the same time while it's growing, you can access that money, uh, via a policy loan without interrupting that compounding and put it to work, to put it to work in your investments. And that kind of blew my mind. I was like, I, I didn't realize there was a place I could keep my money where it was gonna [00:04:00] grow. It was gonna protect my family, uh, provide for my retirement, and also allow me to invest and grow it outside the policy and get, you know, multiple returns on those same dollars. At once, and then you pay, you know, you pay down that policy loan and do it again, and it, it just becomes more and more efficient and more powerful over time. So, you know, for me that was the, my first exposure and that was enough for me to dig in. And when I get interested in something, I kind of become obsessive.

So I listen to every podcast that I could find. It didn't take me long to learn about Nelson Nash and, uh, the Nelson Nash Institute and the. Authorized practitioner program. So that's how I, that's how I found John. You looked like a, a good guy. You were in my area. And so by the time I came to you, I had read, Nelson's book.

I kind of knew that, pretty much knew that this was something I wanted in my life and for my family. And John was awesome at confirming what I think I already knew [00:05:00] guiding me a little bit and helping me get started. So that was enough for me to get started with Infinite Banking.

John Perrings: Yeah. What, just talking about that process not really about me, but just the process that we followed when you were a client. I don't think I said this during the introduction. Adrian started as a client of mine and implemented Infinite Banking in her own life and used this as she mentioned, to help her as a business owner and with her family.

Assuming you liked that process because you joined StackedLife what was it about that process that I think that you think made it easy for you to make a decision or arrive to a decision that this was going to work in your life?

Adrienne Patel: A number of things. I think your approach, John, it's very educational. No sales pressure, just answering questions. And the, what I love about this is whole life insurance has guarantees. So you could show me with certainty that this contract was gonna [00:06:00] perform in a certain way.

And, I knew how I wanted to. Implement it and use it in my own life and my own investments. That, that gave me a lot of reassurance. Yeah, I think you were able to clearly and simply answer all the questions and the hesitations that I had and yeah, I felt really comfortable moving forward after that.

John Perrings: And how is it different from what you were doing before?

Adrienne Patel: That's a good question. So the Infinite Banking, again, that's what initially drew me into this. I saw an immediate use a way that I could use it in my life. And essentially before I was, we were making real estate investments, investing in a handful of properties and we just. Save up that money inside our checking and savings account at the bank and go and save up until we had enough for a down payment. Spend that money and just do it all over again. Start saving up again. With Infinite Banking, however, you. If you save up that money inside your policy and leverage that cash value in initially when you start paying those premiums, we [00:07:00] have what we call the capitalization period in the IBC world, and you don't have access to as much as you've contributed in premium.

The first year, say you pay $20,000 in premium, you might have 13 or $14,000 available. The second year. A little bit more. And usually by the fourth or fifth year you put in that premium $20,000, you'll have an additional $20,000. And then there from there on out, you put in that $20,000, you might have 22 or 23 and it, it becomes a liquidity rocket ship.

But when you borrow against that cash value, you, that cash value doesn't come out of your policy. And this is the main difference that kind of blew my mind to wrap my head around. We still had that money in our family and, our family's whole life insurance policy that was gonna grow for the rest of my life, and yet I could leverage it and put it to work outside the policy.

For me, I think thinking through numbers helps me. If you might have your money on deposit down at the Wells Fargo and they're paying you a minuscule interest rate, maybe half [00:08:00] a percent, that's probably even generous.

And this is taking over the banking function.

So we're doing what banks do. So say you have your money, you have a hundred thousand dollars on deposit at Wells Fargo, and they're paying you 0.5% interest, which would be like $500. That's their cost to have that capital. And they're not doing that out of the goodness of their own hearts.

They're doing that because they're gonna take that money and go create another loan with it. Keep that money in motion, keep it moving. So maybe they go and, create a mortgage note with a 7% interest rate. So if you think about it they'll be making $7,000 off of that, that $100,000.

So that means their return on that money, their cost is 500, they're making 700. That's a 1400% return. It's massive. Banking is a highly profitable business. And what's different is that when I took over that function, I can start to make returns like that.

And, keep that money growing inside the policy while it's put to work outside the policy. Although there was a little bit, there's a little bit of a [00:09:00] delay at first. You don't have access to all of your money immediately in those initial years, you're gonna have access to even more and more down the road if you can look back past those first few years.

John Perrings: Yeah, it's just like starting any other business. If you put your money into a new business, I don't know anyone who would expect to be able to get that money right back out of the business. You're gonna, there, there are startup costs to any type of business.

And so that that's really. Pretty awesome. And we talk a lot about real estate and I don't invest in real estate directly like you do, so that's why I'm happy to have you on because you actually do this. And so I think it's great for people to be able to hear it from someone who actually invests in real estate themselves using The Infinite Banking Concept.

And so is it, would you say it's the acceleration you get from the fact that you can provide your own financing that really [00:10:00] attracted you to IBC for real estate, or what were the, top one or two things that, really locked this in for you?

Adrienne Patel: Yeah, it's the acceleration that you could get. I think number one that's what drew me to it. Since then, I've realized it's more than that, but I saw, directly with what I was already doing, how it could make my investing more efficient and more accelerated. But the other aspect is really the control that you have, when you're an investor and, you take a large loan from the bank, they are making a massive return. Like from that simple example I just shared and they have all the control. They could take that property back and, quickly if you're unable to make those payments, if something happens. So yeah, the control. Is really important. I've come to realize how huge that is. I think just I didn't dig too deep into the PUA, the terms of the policy loans, but, it's a, it's an amazing source of capital. You have complete control over this loan, when you request the loan. From the insurance company it's transferred to your account [00:11:00] within a matter of days. There's no application, no underwriting no terms, you can pay it back as quickly as you'd like. You can pay it back slowly if you'd like, if you need to. Life happens. So just having that flexibility, I think is really powerful and it's giving me so much more peace of mind having that control over my capital.

John Perrings: That's huge. And I think you hit the nail on the head. A lot of people when they start getting interested in Infinite Banking, it starts off as a rate of return type of conversation where they're like, they're just super excited about the returns that they can get, meaning they can make big improvements on their returns because they're actually providing the financing as well.

But then I think what ends up happening is a lot of people just start to realize how much the control matters and that piece of it, I think a lot of times it becomes more important to people over time than just improving the rate of return that they get [00:12:00] on their investments. And it only really takes one little hiccup to realize how much that control matters.

Just thinking of one example, I know a lot of people that were into house flipping and if you're, if you get caught in between a period of time when you thought you could flip a house and how long it actually took you just because, one thing goes wrong, like the cost of lumber increases or something like that, that we saw a couple years ago.

And then not having the payback terms that you would have to another source of financing. I think that really makes a huge difference.

Adrienne Patel: Yeah, no, absolutely. I agree. And I think for so long things were so great with real estate and all other investments, you forget about that. But yeah, I've. I think it's really important to keep that in mind and, assume that things aren't always gonna be going up and, going the same way that they have in the recent years.

So I feel like this just provides such a cushion and [00:13:00] control and just a really strategic, safe source of capital.

John Perrings: Yeah, it's like you can start wearing, multiple hats. A lot of real estate investors, they end up really just being like either the investor or almost really the customer these days. 'cause a lot of people are moving more towards like syndication type of opportunities.

Real Estate Investing
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John Perrings: Sometimes they're they'll want to do that because then they don't have to do the legwork on actually finding the investment. But even when they do do the legwork. They end up, they're just the investor and the money is either all theirs and they take all the risk with their money, or they have to go to an outside lender to get it, and that'll either be a bank

and/or a hard money lender. And so just imagine, the simplest way is just imagine becoming your own hard money lender to start where you're getting that smaller chunk of the investment capital that's required to get into it. And now you're, you'd probably know better than [00:14:00] me, Adrian, but what's hard money going for these days?

Like 10, 12%, something

Adrienne Patel: Yep. Yep. Somewhere around there.

John Perrings: Yeah, so imagine now you've got access to capital at somewhere around five from your life insurance policy, but you're gonna pay yourself back as the as the hard money lender. So you're paying back at 10%, you're capturing a spread on money you were gonna spend anyway.

And so this is a huge deal.

Starting Small with IBC
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Adrienne Patel: Yeah, absolutely. Something that I try to emphasize to people I talk to who are thinking about this, they have this impression that you have to start with a big number, you know, a big premium. But you know, You can start any, anywhere that you can that's comfortable for you. I look at this as a place to store your money.

We call it becoming your own banker. And, just think of this as your family bank. And if you start putting, whatever you can, we have some frameworks and some coaching that we take people through to show you what might be an ideal place for you to start. But, you start and, [00:15:00] even if you just take over a small piece of financing something in your life, whether it's an investment or your business or even an expense. Even financing your kids' college or, small parts of that. It doesn't have to be big, but the important piece is to start somewhere.

I think my first client said something that I always remember. She's she started to wrap her mind around it and she's oh, this is almost like playing a board game. Like you actually kind of learn as you go, because it's, you know, it's, it's a lot to take in. It's a

paradigm

shift. So yeah. It's

John Perrings: I've never heard that. That's a great way to think about it

Adrienne Patel: Yeah.

John Perrings: Just tacking onto what you said, the source material for all of this is of course Nelson Nash's book _Becoming Your Own Banker_. And you hit it on the head where it's like you don't have to start as.

The full bank, you can just be a banker in your life, right? So you can, you don't have to take over the entire banking function to start, but you gotta [00:16:00] start somewhere. So take over some of the banking function. And so that's where being your own banker makes a lot of sense, where you can just start financing where it makes the most sense for you and for the amounts that you're capable of.

You start where you're able to start and it doesn't matter where that is because , whatever level you're at, that's gonna be the impact that you're gonna have on your life, and you can just keep expanding it from there.

Adrienne Patel: Yep. Yep.

Absolutely.

John Perrings: What are you mostly working on? You're doing weekly real estate webinars, IBC for real estate webinars. What are you mostly conveying to people, currently, to the folks who are joining those?

Adrienne Patel: So I'm talking about yeah, I do two webinars. One is from a real estate perspective and one is from the perspective of entrepreneurs and business owners. Because I think those two populations tend to be a little more open to a new idea. And they often have a direct need, something that they could implement right away, [00:17:00] whether

it's, paying off their debt more efficiently or growing their business.

But yeah, what we focus on, and John helped me a ton with putting this presentation together. We look. Over the long term of what the strategy can do for your life and, for your loved ones. Of course, I first talk about what whole life is, what it isn't. I know there's a lot of misconceptions out there. So just to get people comfortable with, using this product, this asset as a platform from which to practice Infinite Banking to make your finances more efficient. But then the thing that I love sharing in this in this webinar is a model that John built in his practice that shows over 20 years, somebody who is saving $20,000 per year to invest in real estate. It could be any asset, it could be a cash flowing business or anything. But, in this example it was actually based off of some numbers from the real estate portfolio of a client in our practice. And what we show is though, even though those first initial years, when they're [00:18:00] contributing that premium, that $20,000 premium into their. IBD IBC designed whole life insurance policy. There is a lag. They give up some liquidity in those early years, but if you can look beyond that into 5, 6, 7 years or beyond you realize massive benefits from using this strategy. And so I think people, number one, it dispels the myth of, whole life insurance being a terrible place to, to keep your money or a terrible investment because this isn't

an investment. This is somewhere where we keep our money, we warehouse our wealth and then deploy it from there to make it more efficient. And in this model, we showed over 30 years. We're imagining this is a younger person who's, on the early side of their investing journey, but they end up over $2 million ahead in the long run from just contributing $20,000 per year. And that's because, they've taken over that banking function. If you look at a mortgage interest

statement for a new piece of real estate, look how much money goes to the bank. So if we can even begin to [00:19:00] recapture just a small portion of that it can be massively beneficial. And all along, this hypothetical person had control over those, those loans and that, that capital. So, it's pretty powerful.

John Perrings: Which again is huge because if any one thing happens, you're not just a hundred percent beholden to the bank to, make sure you're making those payments. You have more control over the payback terms. And so the way I like to describe that is, you're growing two asset classes at the same time.

Most real estate investors are just growing their real estate portfolio, but they're not really growing anything at the same time. Whereas when we're using The Infinite Banking Concept and we buy whole life insurance first as the place to store cash, because we're never pulling the money out of there, we're also growing the whole life insurance, which gets a very respectable

capital equivalent return, somewhere in the neighborhood of seven or 8% when you compare what [00:20:00] you'd have to get in another type of asset to get everything you get in whole life insurance. So you're growing both asset classes at the same time. And not to mention during the accumulation phase when you're, trying to grow at the early stages before you get into, the retirement and estate planning phase, you've got this massive death benefit to protect and potentially buy out all the loans so your family can just, live peacefully knowing that they can pay off all the loans and now just have a real estate portfolio at the end of everything.

Adrienne Patel: I think

that kind of parlays really well into another area that I'd love to talk

about that I'm really passionate about. I came into this from the IBC perspective, which I think is so important and I look at that as that's how I use this asset that we have now in the here and now in my life. But the other major, I think. Under appreciated and misunderstood power of having whole life insurance. Is that the way that it can unlock [00:21:00] your assets when you get to retirement?

And it can help us, basically. A lot of clients that we talk to, we can show them by incorporating this asset into their lives.

By the way, we try not to. Ask people to spend additional or, touch their investments. We wanna find, cashflow that they already have that they could redirect here. But oftentimes we can show them how to get on a path to stream 30 to 50% more income off of the exact same assets that they've built up over their life.

And this, this framework that we use is actually endorsed by one of the top retirement planning income PhDs in the country. Dr. Wade Phau. And I just think it's so powerful. We have a huge retirement income deficit in our country and, there's so much uncertainty around there with what's gonna happen with taxes and inflation.

So I think just I'm trying to sound the alarm about incorporating this strategy into people's financial lives. This could probably be a whole nother podcast talking about how this works [00:22:00] exactly, but I think

it's so powerful.

John Perrings: I agree, and we definitely have time to cover some of it today if you want. The idea is that, if you show up on the day of your retirement with an equal amount of retirement assets and death benefit, guaranteed permanent death benefit, you can massively increase how much retirement income you can get for the rest of your life with less risk.

Something you said a minute ago that, there's really a retirement problem right now where a lot of people are planning on retiring at some point, and they really just don't have the assets to back up that retirement. And a lot of 'em don't even realize it.

You and Adrian, you and I were at a. A LEAP Conference together stands for Lifetime Economic Acceleration Process. We're at a conference together and one of the presenters there showed some information. From a Federal Reserve study done in 2023. And in 2023, less than 10% of retirees had a [00:23:00] million dollars saved. So 90% of the people who retired in 2023 it's technically retired for the first time because some people retire and they end up having to go back to work because they realize they don't have enough money saved. 90% of the first time retirees had less than a million dollars saved.

And if you think about the typical 4% rule, that's only $40,000 a year to live on. And obviously depending on where you live, it matters. But we've seen the cost of living just kind of skyrocket over the last five years. And if, inflation adjusted, if you're in your sixties and you're retired.

By the way, not a lot of people realize this, but if you're already in your sixties, statistically you're likely to live to your nineties. That's another 30 years. Which is a, it's like a whole other phase of your life that people, I don't know that they're really planning for it. I see a lot of, conventional financial planning advice where they make mortality age 80 or 85 years old, [00:24:00] and I don't think that's

really a correct longevity to just assume that you're gonna, you're no longer gonna need an income at 80 or 85 years old. So I'm glad you brought this up. It's really pretty wild how much having a "certainty asset" as part of your overall financial picture just makes wor the world of difference because, we've had a weird.

10 or 15 years where we've just seen this insane bull market. But historically speaking, we experience three negative years out of every 10. So what do you do during those three negative years? And a lot of people just have no plan for that. And their regular retirement accounts have to account for those losses, and that's why they can't get as much money.

Adrienne Patel: Yeah. Yeah. I think the piece that, it was a light bulb moment for me is that, when you get to retirement, there's two kind of dollar [00:25:00] components to a whole life insurance policy. You have your cash value, which is like your equity that you've built up over the years that you have access to,

but say you retire at 65 and you have a death benefit that's, say your cash value is like 300,000, your death benefit might be a million. And so what this research shows is you know that cash value is uncorrelated - a guaranteed asset that's gonna be growing and compounding, by the way, by the time you hit retirement,

it's gonna be growing pretty efficiently, even for most people, even without contributing premiums. And what the research shows is that if you have at least three years of income worth of cash value in your whole life insurance policy. If there's a downturn in the market say, it's a bad year, especially early on in your retirement.

If the market takes a downturn and you are only, you only have those growth assets, say your IRA or 401k from which to stream your income, it can be devastating because you're killing off your worker bees. When you get to retirement, your [00:26:00] money is what's working for you.

And so, , it can be really difficult, if not impossible to build those assets back up if the money's down and then you withdraw on a down year. So simply by having this uncorrelated asset, this cash value a few years worth of income, we would coach our clients to instead take income from their life insurance policy.

In those years they could either withdraw the cash value at that point, you could take a loan against it. By that point the dividends are probably pretty healthy, it just gives you so much so much more optionality once you get to retirement too, to maintain that income and it can move you off of that 4% curve, which for the vast majority of people that's not enough to get by comfortably in retirement.

And, lots of times we can show people how they can. Even with more safety and security, take more like seven or 8% income off of those same assets just by having incorporated this along the way.

John Perrings: Yeah. And the key there is that because you have use of the cash value all [00:27:00] along the way, you can easily end up with the same amount of assets that you were going to end up with anyway, and a guaranteed permanent death benefit without coming out of pocket any more money. And so the way I describe the, what you're describing with the retirement timing, they call that sequence of returns risk, where the earlier you have down years in your retirement,

the more likely it is to create an unrecoverable problem for you because you have to, you need the money you need, unless you have a lot of flexibility with how much money you can live on, you have to liquidate more of your assets to get the income you need when the market goes down.

So you get this double whammy on your financial life. You lose money because the market's down and you have to take money out and you cannibalize all those shares you need for the, your account to recover when the market comes back. And a lot of times it just can never happen. Having the ability to switch over to a certainty asset can make or break you [00:28:00] essentially. And the thing is, you only get one shot at it. And so you don't get a mulligan or a do-over, you only get one chance at doing it, right? And so what happens is. People get so caught up in f the fear of missing out, "FOMO", fear of missing out on getting returns in their, stock market assets or whatever other assets they're working on that, by the time they get to the age when they might start thinking differently and realize, man I actually, I really wish I had something guaranteed. By then, it's too late. You've already set your trajectory and you have very few moves you can make at that point. You still can make some, but especially if you no longer qualify for life insurance, you're very limited on what you can do.

And so having this certainty asset from the beginning. By the way, when if you buy life insurance when in your twenties, thirties and forties it's a lot less expensive from a [00:29:00] premium perspective than it is when you're in your sixties and seventies. And unfortunately, a lot of people don't take this seriously till they're in their sixties and seventies when they're really looking at this and they're seeing things through a different lens.

When if we had just thought about this in our early years, it would've been so efficient to buy it then. And now everything's just running on autopilot by the time you get to your sixties and retirement age. So, super important to look at and I think more young people are starting to see through the, what a lot of people in our generation have been taught.

Sorry, Adrian, I'm not trying to throw you into my age bracket, I should say my generation. Do think people are starting to see past that a little bit. Like the common advice that life insurance is a horrible investment kind of thing. I think a lot of younger people are starting to really do their own research. Especially the Gen Z people, they don't trust anybody with what I'm seeing.

So they're doing a lot of their own [00:30:00] research and they're really thinking more critically about this stuff than, you know, maybe people in our generation. They take things more as like how they're given. But I'm seeing the Gen Z people, they're really.

Looking at things more critically. So I'm very excited about the young people.

Adrienne Patel: totally agree. I could see that we talked to a young guy a month or so ago. He's probably about 32 years old and, early in his career, making good money. He has, some good. Retirement accounts going. And he was more open to this than anyone

I had seen. And so we, we showed him this model.

And like I said, the beautiful thing is this has guarantees, like this product is going to do certain things and we are here to coach you, check in, make sure everything's calibrated make sure you're on track. But we help him, helped him implement this. He's not so much interested in the IBC aspect.

He was interested in, he had a father that passed away earlier. He has younger siblings, so he's interested in taking care of [00:31:00] them even though he is in his early thirties. And so he bought a whole life insurance policy. And we showed him like how he was gonna have this liquidity, this great source of capital, whether it's for an emergency or an opportunity along the way. And we are putting him on track to almost I think two and a half times increase his retirement income by 250%. If he stays on track. And the other great thing is, the, we build these plans with so much liquidity and so much flexibility. So, if there's one year where he has extra money, he wants to dump in, he can.

If there's one year where, he doesn't. He can't quite pay the full target premium. There's lots of flexibility to pay less. And if as his assets grow, we can recommend, you need to shift and get a little bit more insurance. So it's very liquid and flexible and I think that's a huge contrast to the traditional IRAs or 401(k)s, where you have that money locked away for decades on end, you just peek over the wall and [00:32:00] hope, hope it's doing okay. And I'm not against, I'm not against IRAs or 4 0 1 ks at all. I think, any saving is good, but it's really important to balance that out and realize that this might have a place in your portfolio.

And it can not only make your investing more efficient, but it can make your. Retirement income massively more efficient as well.

John Perrings: And something that just came to mind as you were saying that is a lot of people I think are on the path of, I call it the save up spend down lifestyle where they're just saving money. They don't really know what it's gonna end up growing to. And then they just have to hope they have enough to live on for the rest of their life whenever they want to retire or whatever it may be.

And when you were talking about having, 250% more income to live on, the way you get to that is you buy cash flowing assets. Things that are creating [00:33:00] additional income for you where, by the time you get to retirement, you have so much income coming in from your investments that you don't, you may not even need to, liquidate any of your savings or assets to live on it.

And that's a huge piece of it where cashflow becomes a a really important part of. How you're going to live in retirement as opposed to just trying to grow a big account, we teach you how to grow a big income and that I think, is gonna be a huge deal, especially for these younger people.

I mean, I also talk to a lot of people. You've heard of the "F.I.R.E." Movement what's that stand for? " Financially independent, retire early." and I talk to a lot of these folks and what I see them doing is just maxing out these qualified plans. And it's an interesting thing because.

I don't know if they realize this, but if you wanna retire early, you can't get to the qualified plan money. You know what I mean? So I'm not sure how they're landing on [00:34:00] putting their money into these, into these financial products that lack control and actually work against their desire to retire early.

But I. For whatever reason, I've seen quite a few people really, steering their money there. If you wanna retire early, you've gotta create income. You can't just save your way into a retire early because, what I think a lot of the people are not seeing by creating these big accounts, they have so much longevity on the other end of that retirement because they're retiring early, that they need those they cannot have any misses with what's gonna happen, in the markets.

Because if anything changes along those lines, it blows the whole thing up and they have so much further to go in retirement. By the way, the idea of retirement. People didn't live much past 65 when that retirement age was kinda arrived at, I don't really know even how 65 was arrived at, but [00:35:00] they didn't actually live much past that.

So retirement longevity was not really a consideration. Now people are living way past a retirement age, and if you're gonna retire early, you're gonna live even, you're gonna have an even longer runway that you're going to need. So I love all that stuff. You were just saying about, increasing retirement income because that's really the main thing.

Adrienne Patel: I think people just don't know what they don't know. I, before I got into this area, I absolutely would've assumed the only and best approach is just to build up this biggest pile of assets possible. And, hope it carries me through retirement. But there is a way to build in more certainty and efficiency.

Creating Multiple Income StreamsCreating Multiple Income Streams
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John Perrings: That's what our parents did. They saved and they, had a bunch of money to retire on. But I really don't think that's going to be enough. And I think. I think it's being shown that it's not enough. And so yeah the idea of just living on a lump sum, I think is very [00:36:00] dangerous.

And, so I'm really, feeling hopeful about the younger generation, learning how to layer their money so that they can create multiple rates of return and multiple income streams so that, they can do whatever they want. There's a lot of people talking about side hustles and, "quiet-quitting" your corporate job, which by the way I think having a corporate job is completely fine. And a lot of people have, they're watching TikTok and YouTube and stuff, and they're being coached into quitting. And there's nothing wrong with having a corporate job and having a steady income. But it, and if you know what to do with your money, you can create a scenario where you can, you know,

leave the corporate world or even work in a corporate job where you just don't have that much responsibility and you can live a great life because you have other income streams supporting what's going on.

Adrienne Patel: Yep.

Absolutely. I think the status quo is [00:37:00] to, work for someone else and save your money in a qualified plan and just give up that control. And I think, it's human nature. And I talked to that about this with a lot of my friends. I have a lot of really successful people around here, high income workers, and they're so busy with their work, with their children, with, helping aging parents. And it's like they're so conditioned to have somebody else. Taking care of their finances and watching over that. It's just, it feels overwhelming. And I think that's one of the big challenges I find is talking to people, especially in, my, our age group that have children at home and careers and aging parents. And so what I'm trying to instill is that this actually doesn't have to be complicated. We can show you a framework, a pretty simple, straightforward process. You will end up better off with this in your life and your children will end up even better off.

John Perrings: It is so true. It really is simple and just having. I just, a lot of times I just go back to what happened to me because you're right. Most people [00:38:00] don't know what they don't know. And when you're a fresh faced 22-year-old coming outta college, getting your first job, what are you taught when you get, when you land your first job, you go talk to an HR person that put a pile of benefit paperwork in front of you and they tell you to, Hey, you should try to max out this 401k 'cause you get a tax "deduction"

on the money. And so people just do this because that's like what they're told to do, but they don't realize how much you really need liquidity in your life to roll with the punches. My background in the startup world, startup employees are the first people to get laid off when the market goes down, and they're gonna have to go right back into that 401k and raid it

in order to pay the bills. And so having some liquidity, meaning money you can get to in a short period of time, which is exactly what whole life insurance offers you. Not only allows you to pay the bills when things are rough, but it lets you keep that money in your 401k if that's the thing you [00:39:00] like.

It lets you keep your money and your investments and not have to sell those investments during, tough times so that those can continue to grow and they can bounce back when the market comes back. It's just hugely important to have the control that we've been talking about.

Adrienne Patel: Yep. Absolutely. I think that's underappreciated.

John Perrings: You mentioned you're also a business owner. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your background as a business owner and what are you helping, what are you helping people with business owner clients with with regards to IBC?

IBC for Business Owners
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Adrienne Patel: Yeah, definitely. Like I said, I had a small senior caregiving agency, so providing home care for seniors in our community. And I think just as a business owner, a lot of the challenges that I faced were, I think the tendency is to put yourself last. Put, revenues back into your business and oftentimes, you pay yourself the smallest salary possible.

At least that was my tendency. You know [00:40:00] what we could get by on, luckily I have a spouse that earns an income as well. And then I think the other big piece of uncertainty is like retirement and an exit plan for business owners. And it's totally different from a W2 earner, you don't have this employer sponsored plan. And oftentimes your business, the sale of your business and a liquidity event is a big part of your retirement plan or hopes for retirement. And the problem is there's so much uncertainty around all of that. You don't know what's gonna happen in the market. Could it affect your business, your income? What if you become chronically IUL or disabled along the way? And then also, with the sale of your business, that's what if the timing's not right in the market or you don't get the price that you're expecting, or, if you're planning to pass it on to your children, what if they don't want that?

So I just see whole life insurance as, and Infinite Banking as a way for business owners to incorporate some more certainty. Oftentimes, they have some debt if they can, as at a. [00:41:00] Starting point, take over some of that debt and kind of become their own bank to make that more efficient, recapture some of that interest back into their lives. That's one aspect. And then the other is for retirement. Touching on the same things we talked about earlier. You're gonna have this death benefit in place to protect your loved ones when you pass away. You are gonna have liquidity in this contract that's gonna be compounding and growing all throughout your life.

So you know that's there for you too. Take advantage of an opportunity or an emergency or, pay yourself some extra if you need a little more liquidity. It just gives you so many more. Options and so much more control. So I think all of those aspects are just amplified for business owners. Another aspect, we haven't really talked too much about the protection side of whole life insurance, but as I've gotten a little bit older and had this in my life. For longer. I've really come to value that. And I think especially obviously it's a DA death benefit that's gonna pass on income tax free to your beneficiaries which is huge.

That money, [00:42:00] that cash value is gonna grow. You are not taxed on that growth throughout your life. You can access it tax free via a policy loan and then that, that death benefit passes on income tax free. So it's a really. Tax efficient way to transfer assets from one generation to the next.

But the other thing that I wanted to touch on is that there are. Living benefits for the policy holder in these contracts. For example, there's a chronic illness writer that says that if you are to become chronically ill, meaning you can't perform two of the activities of daily living for yourself, you have access to a large portion of that death benefit to pay for your care.

It's not long-term care insurance, but you know that death benefit is. Multiple times more than what you've contributed in cash value. And having worked in the senior care industry, I know this is an expense that people are hugely unprepared for. It's become so expensive paying for private caregiving.

It's not covered by Medicare. And so just having that safety net, that pool of assets there, for God [00:43:00] forbid, something should happen to me. I think it's a huge reassurance and I think that's, that's important to anybody, but especially business owners. Yeah. So I've really come to value the protection side and again, just the basics of permanent life insurance.

Like that death benefit is gonna be there when I die, not if I die within, the next 10 or 20 or 30 years. This is permanent insurance and that death benefit is only going to go up if you keep the policy in force.

John Perrings: Yeah, I think that's, those are all excellent points. And there, there's even another one which is just planning for what happens to the business if something should happen to you. For example, if you're in a partnership, your buy sell agreements should include some life insurance so that the other partner can buy the other partner out.

Or if, even if you don't have a partner. Does your family really know how to operate that business to the level that you do? And a lot of times what happens is if, the key person passes away the family really has a hard time [00:44:00] selling that business, they usually end up having to, fire sail that business 'cause they have no idea how to operate it or run it.

So having that death benefit come in to really take your time with that business. You could even afford to hire someone who knows how to sell that business to the right person at the right price. Those are all things that, I think business owners should be looking at.

Adrienne Patel: Yeah, that's a great point. Okay

John Perrings: all right, Adrian. So if anyone wants to talk to Adrian about any of these things that, that we're talking about, I'll include some links to her webinars that she's hosting weekly that you can register and really learn about, the real estate and the business and retirement side of things.

And it'll be a great way to get your head around some of these things that we touched on today.

Adrienne Patel: awesome.

John Perrings: And if any of this is resonating with you, we'll have links in the show notes of this podcast. And you can always go to StackedLife.com. You can book a free consultation with us right there. And if you do that, just make sure to mention this episode was the [00:45:00] one that brought you in.

Alright, thanks everyone. We'll see you on the next one.