One of the most common things I hear from people who’ve discovered The Infinite Banking Concept goes something like this: “I think I’m sold on this idea, but I don’t know what I’d actually DO with it once I have a policy.”

That hesitation is understandable. There’s a lot of content out there selling IBC as the key to some specific investment strategy, e.g., buy a policy, borrow against it, put it into this deal or that fund. And if you don’t have that specific strategy figured out yet, you can feel like you’re not ready.

I’m here to tell you that you are ready. Read on to find out why I’m so confident.

You don’t need a strategy to start

Here’s the most important thing to understand: It is really hard to mess up the Infinite Banking Concept and owning whole life insurance.

The only real way to “do it wrong” is by thinking short-term — being so focused on what you can do right now that you undermine the long-term potential of the process. That’s it. Everything else is workable.

This is because, at its core, Infinite Banking is about strategic capitalization, which is just saving money in a place that gives you a strategic advantage. Capitalization is not “limbo for money,” where it’s just sitting somewhere before the real strategy starts. Capitalization IS the strategy.

Even if you never take a policy loan. Even if you never deploy your capital into a single outside investment. What do you have?

You have your money in a guaranteed, tax-advantaged cash-equivalent asset earning somewhere in the 3–5% real range, which, by the way, is roughly 7% on a capital-equivalent basis when you account for taxes and fees. That is excellent for a liquid, no-strings-attached cash asset. Compare that to a big bank savings account earning next to nothing, or to CDs and bonds, which have terms attached to them.

When’s the last time you took a good look at your emergency fund?

Here’s a huge problem that I see, across the board: people have almost no liquidity. If one or two things go wrong, their whole plan falls apart. They either have to go into debt or they have to start over.

Like, if you have a family and don’t have life insurance (or enough of it), all the value you’ve built up so far, earmarked for your future plans, will likely have to be spent today if the worst happens, just for your family to maintain their standard of living.

But there’s another side to this problem that doesn’t get talked about as much: liquidity isn’t just for emergencies. It’s for opportunities.

Once your emergency fund grows beyond what you need for emergencies, that capital becomes your opportunity fund. And the best opportunities, the ones that actually move the needle, require cash.

So the question becomes: where should that cash sit while it waits? In a bank account earning 0.1%? Or in a whole life insurance policy where it’s growing tax-deferred, accessible tax-free, comes with a guaranteed death benefit, chronic/terminal illness protection, potentially protected from creditors in your state, and enhances your future retirement income strategies and estate planning at the same time?

That’s one chunk of money doing six or seven jobs at the same time.

Discernment is a financial superpower

Most people in the financial world are always chasing. Whatever investment is in front of them ends up getting their money, because they feel like they should always be doing something.

Discernment is a worthy quality in an investor. Having the ability to be patient, to evaluate carefully, to wait for the right opportunity can be the difference between “average returns” and something that’s life-changing. But discernment is a quality that most people never develop because they never build the foundation that makes it possible.

Think about 2008. The people who were over-invested and under-capitalized were forced to sell at lows, while people with cash were buying. The same scenario plays out in real estate, in private business deals, in every market cycle. The question is: are you positioning yourself to take advantage of changes we know are always coming, or will you have to react to them?

The best opportunities are unique to you

Nelson Nash, who wrote Becoming Your Own Banker (the source for all things related to the idea of “banking” with whole life insurance), talked about what he called the golden rule:

“He who has the gold makes the rules.”

This simply means that when you have cash, opportunities have a way of finding you!

And here’s what I’ve found to be consistently true for not only myself, but for many clients and friends, too: the best opportunities aren’t the ones you can access by logging into an app and clicking “buy.” They’re the ones that are specific to you. Your network, your market, your knowledge, and your timing.

Your neighbor wants to sell their investment property quickly and quietly. Your colleague needs a business partner who understands their industry. A piece of real estate becomes available that you understand intimately because you’ve been watching it for years. These opportunities don’t show up in your Robinhood app. They show up because you are who you are …and you have cash!

When you’re well-capitalized, you don’t have to force a strategy. You can just build your position, and the opportunities will come.

Practical uses that don’t require investing at all

IBC isn’t just for sophisticated investors. Here are three ways to use a policy that requires zero investing experience:

Debt elimination. The typical approach to paying off high-interest debt leaves you debt-free but broke. Many people prioritize sending money to financial institutions to get out of debt. There’s nothing wrong with getting out of debt, of course, but if you over-prioritize it, and anything goes wrong, you often end up just going right back into debt. Using policy loans to strategically pay off high-interest debt means that when the debt is gone (including your policy loan), you’re debt-free and also sitting on a bunch of money. You’re not starting from zero.

Financing your lifestyle. Remember, you finance everything you buy. You either pay interest to someone else when you use their money, or you give up interest you could have earned when you pay cash. You can’t eliminate this reality, but you can improve it dramatically with IBC. Using policy loans to finance recurring larger expenses — vehicles, property taxes, even vacations — keeps your capital cycling through your policy and working in your favor.

College funding. Most families either take on debt or pay for college out of pocket, and that money is gone forever. Using IBC, you become the banker. Your kids can take advantage of your well-capitalized position, use your money to pay for college, then pay you back on a schedule you design. Your cash value continues to compound, uninterrupted the entire time, so when the loan is paid back, you have the future value of that college expense to use and enjoy during your hard-earned retirement years. This improvement, alone, is huge.

Capitalizing IS the strategy

To do anything, you have to be capitalized first. Either for a day in a typical bank, or for the rest of your life if you do it strategically. By focusing on strategic capitalization, you don’t have to worry about what comes next. Because whatever that is, you’ll be positioned in a way that is hands-down better than any other way you might do it.

Interested?

Schedule a free consultation at StackedLife.com. I’ll take you through a short assessment to see if and how IBC might benefit you, and what the right next step looks like.

“Invest for the long term to get a ‘high’ average return” is kind of like a golden rule of Wall Street. And while investing for the long term and compounding for the long term can be good, with conventional investing, because of the volatility and risk, you must invest for the long term - or it doesn’t work. So it really ends up being nothing more than a justification. It’s an excuse to cover for the volatility and risk you’re taking on by buying into the stock market.

Locked in Regardless

With the conventional approach, you end up locking your money away and subjecting it to all the market volatility for decades. You either hard-lock your money away, in the case of a 401k or IRA, where you can’t get to it without paying taxes and penalties, or you lock it away in a regular brokerage account, because you can’t get to it without interrupting that averaging effect that “protects” you from market volatility. So you’re locking it away regardless. You have to keep it there. Otherwise, the average rate-of-return story falls apart.

And because of that, your money can really only do one thing at a time.

Think about what that means when you hit a financial bump in the road (which will happen): Job loss, a medical emergency, car or home repairs. Or on the opportunity side: an investment, starting a business, a career change. For example, when I changed careers from tech to financial services, I was only able to do that because I had a bunch of money saved. A lot of it in whole life insurance. I used policy loans to help pay the bills while getting started, and throughout, I never lost the growth of my whole life insurance cash value. If that money had been in a 401 (k), I couldn’t have gotten to it without paying taxes and penalties, and then losing the growth on it forever. Same with a brokerage account, less the penalties. You lose the use of your money in the near term in the hope of something good happening over the long term. And you have no idea whether or not that’s actually going to happen.

The Four Rules of Financial Institutions

The following clarifies why conventional advice is structured the way it is. Financial institutions have four rules:

1. They want us to contribute money to them.

2. And contribute money on an ongoing basis.

3. Then hold onto that money for as long as possible.

4. And distribute that money back to us in a limited manner.

Just look at your 401(k), and you'll know this is true.

When we put money into the stock market, or even worse, into 401 (k) s and other qualified plans, we are completely giving up control over our capital, and we have no idea what’s going to happen with it. We don’t know how much we’ll be able to contribute over the years. We don’t know what it’s going to grow to. We don’t know how much we’ll need in retirement. We have no idea what the taxes will be by the time we have to pay them, after deferring for decades. And so we don’t even know how much we can get later when we want or need it.

We’re entering into this agreement, where we’re taking all the risk and providing all the capital for nothing that we can count on in return. We’re trading all of that for a complete unknown.

What exactly about that is a “financial plan?”

Average Rates of Return: A Made-Up Metric

If you just invest for the long term, they say you’ll get whatever they’re saying these days, a 10, 12% average rate of return. They say this like it’s a foregone conclusion, and, unfortunately, there are really a lot of problems with this assumption.

The average return is simply the arithmetic average of the actual rates themselves. This calculation doesn’t have anything to do with the return you’ll actually get. If you go back and look at the entire history of the S&P 500 and look at rolling 30-year periods (1930 to 1959, 1931 to 1960, and so on), there are 67 thirty-year periods. The real return over any of those periods is significantly less than the average return 75% of the time.

And I’m not talking about just a little bit here. On average, it’s about 1.35% per year difference. Investing just $10,000/yr, this difference adds up to millions of dollars at the end of 30 years.

This is a real problem that a lot of people aren’t aware of. They’re just told they’ll get an average return of, say, 12%, but those numbers are completely made-up. Not only are they made-up numbers, but the made-up numbers are all based on past performance we know, with close to 100% certainty, will never happen again in exactly the same way. So the data is meaningless in terms of what’s actually going to happen with your money.

The Long Term Eventually Becomes the Short Term

There have been 10 and 20-year periods where you can have no growth or even lose money. We need to become aware of this because the long term eventually becomes the short term. As you approach retirement or need the money, that timeline becomes now. This is where sequence of returns risk comes in.

The conventional “invest-for-the-long-term” approach is really kind of a trap, because it demands that you do it. It’s required to overcome the volatility. But the real problem is that it doesn’t even solve the volatility problem! People invest for the long term, and then the dot-com bubble happens. Then 2008 happens. And it really, really matters when they happen.

If you’re retired and pulling money out to get income, and the market goes down, your income needs don’t typically change. So you have to sell more shares to get the income you need. Cannibalizing these shares, so to speak, makes it so that your account can never bounce back, even when the market goes back up. You can do all the best long-term investing that you want, and if 2008 hits you the year after you retire, well, that’s a problem. 40% of your money is gone in year 1 of your retirement. Not good.

And the thing is, we only get one shot at setting ourselves up for the later years. There are no do-overs!

The Save-Up, Spend-Down Life

Because everyone is only thinking about the accumulation phase of their life and locks themselves into just trying to create the “biggest account,” what ends up happening is we end up living what I call the save-up, spend-down lifestyle.

We give up control of our money, try to save as much as possible, but have no idea what will actually happen to it. So we’re in a constant state of worry over what the markets will do and how it’ll affect our plans. And then when we get to retirement, we spend it down. Maybe our heirs get a little bit. Our kids might get something, grandkids, but it’s always whatever’s left over. Our financial lives end up mostly just being about us. And that’s sad. It’s no wonder so many people are trying to make ends meet. It’s because our plans suck and they’re only designed for a single generation.

Not only that, but how many things have to go wrong for the save-up, spend-down strategy not to work? Really just one thing. If one thing goes wrong, it can blow the whole thing up. Which means, how many things have to go right? Everything has to go right in order for the typical plan to work out for us.

Everyone, in theory, knows we should plan for the worst-case scenario. But in practice, when it comes to our finances, everyone is planning for the best-case scenario — those 10, 12% average returns — based on historical market data that will never be repeated exactly again.

What Thinking Long Term Actually Looks Like

True long-term thinking requires a foundation that works in the short term as well. With the Infinite Banking Concept, we’re planning for 70 years, minimum. Whole life insurance policies go to age 121 and then are passed along to the next generation, guaranteed, on an income-tax-free basis. We’re planning for generations, but in our format, we are still maintaining control and liquidity today. This gives us the ability to navigate all the bumps in the road, roll with the punches, and take advantage of opportunities that come along, rather than only hoping to get whatever rate of return we end up getting in a market-based account.

Whole life insurance is a special, cash-equivalent asset that gets better every single year, no matter what happens in the market. It’s guaranteed to only go up, never down. Designed for the ultra-long term, and yet it provides liquidity when needed today, no questions asked. You can use the money for emergencies or opportunities, and it does not interrupt the compound growth on the cash value and the death benefit.

This is a key concept: uninterrupted compounding.

With Infinite Banking, you can use money in the short term via policy loans without sacrificing the long-term growth. The underlying cash value continues to compound as if you never touched it — because you didn’t. You borrowed money from the insurance company, collateralized by your cash value.

This is just leverage, which every investor is familiar with. And there is no safer and easier way to get leverage than with whole life insurance.

I have a client who was using margin to do other investments, and he faced margin calls and liquidity crunches because his money was tied up in the market. That’s one of the reasons he implemented IBC - to ensure he had a capital base that was not subject to market whims.

And here’s what we can do with policy loans. We can go buy an investment — real estate, commercial notes, starting a business, whatever it is. And when you pay that loan back, the whole life insurance grew the entire time. We’re giving multiple jobs to every dollar in our ecosystem.

This is why life insurance is sometimes called the “and” asset. You don’t have to choose between short-term access and long-term growth. The Infinite Banking Concept is the process, whole life insurance is the product, and together they allow us to have both.

You capitalize first (which is just a fancy way of saying saving money), which is long-term thinking. And then you use a policy loan to deploy that capital, to do all your investing. That’s what creates the growth. We use whole life insurance as our cash asset, and we use policy loans to deploy capital. The idea isn’t to get a high return inside the whole life insurance policy; the idea is to get a respectable return (better than anything else you could put it into that’s a cash equivalent) and then use that cash to create your higher returns outside the policy.

With whole life, we have a foundation that does five, six, seven jobs, or more. Liquidity through cash value. Guarantees. The death benefit, if the worst were to happen. Chronic illness and terminal illness protection through the accelerated death benefit riders. Creditor protection. No volatility. And built-in retirement and estate planning strategies.

A Life of Ever-Expanding Income

The best planners out there are planning decades in advance. They’re not planning just for themselves — they’re planning for their kids and their grandkids and their great-grandkids. And with the Infinite Banking Concept, we can make those plans and still have access and liquidity today to handle all the things we don’t know are coming around the bend.

I try to talk to people about what I call the life of ever-expanding income.

If you capitalize first with whole life insurance, then use policy loans to buy income-generating assets, by the time you get to retirement, you’ll probably have so much income coming in from outside sources — other than your job — that you won’t even need to spend anything down. You’ll just have income. And you’ll probably have more income than you could ever get by spending down your account.

Don’t let investing for the long term be an excuse for losing control of your money. You’ll never be in a worse position by having access to cash.

Think long term. Plan generationally. But never give up control in the process.

To learn more about how IBC might apply to your situation, schedule a free consultation at StackedLife.com.

Well, the real problem is that you lack control over your money and your cash flow.

Traditional financial planning prioritizes sending your money away to other people’s financial systems - the banks, Wall Street, and government-controlled retirement plans. It leaves you cash-poor and vulnerable, not only when life throws you a curveball but also when opportunities arise.

This is a bonus to a four-part podcast series on the top challenges people face in getting ahead financially. We’ve covered staying ahead of rising prices, dealing with financial instability and debt, navigating employment concerns, and challenging status quo financial planning. This article is a practical guide on the actual steps you can take to free up cash flow today.

“Buy low, sell high.” Everybody says it. Nobody does it.

Everyone knows the number one rule of investing is to buy low, sell high. Yet most people, because of the way their plans work, are just plowing money into the market over and over again, constantly buying regardless of price.

Warren Buffett famously said the best time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets, meaning it’s a good time to “buy low.” But the reality is that no one is actually set up to take advantage of these opportunities when they come along. They’re too hyper-focused on investing in whatever is in front of them, leaving themselves with no cash with which to buy.

Real opportunities aren’t just the next thing to invest in. Real opportunities are often once-in-a-lifetime moments. And they require one thing above all else: liquid capital under your control.

Liquidity changed my life

I can speak from personal experience. When I hit a crossroads in my career and wanted to shift from tech into financial services, implementing Infinite Banking for clients, I had the money because I’d already implemented IBC in my own life. I’d saved up a significant amount of cash, and it allowed me to change careers completely.

It’s a massive change to switch from a steady W2 paycheck into the sink-or-swim world of running your own business. There were significant challenges in changing careers and learning how to build a sustainable income from this business. My cash value life insurance was critical in getting through that period.

Now I’m in a career I love more than anything I’ve ever done professionally. I’m doing financially better than I ever did in my W2 career. I have a rewarding personal life with my family and relationships, and I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing.

Here’s the question: How do you assign a rate of return to that incredible improvement in life?

Not everything is about the dollars and percentages. The real opportunities that come along are usually very individual—they present themselves because of who you are, what you know, who you know, and where you’re located. You can’t necessarily predict them.

Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. With Infinite Banking, the preparation piece is capitalization. It’s being able to roll with the punches but also seize opportunities when they arise.

Dream cabin in Aspen

One of my colleagues recently bought his dream ski cabin in Aspen—right on the lift, ski in, ski out. It’s been his lifelong dream, and the only reason he was able to buy it was that he didn’t have to spend time securing financing like other buyers.

He had cash value in his whole life insurance policy. All he had to do was make a single phone call to the insurance company, and he had the cash within five business days. He bought the place while everyone else was scrambling through underwriting to get financing approved. He beat everybody else simply because he was liquid and had control.

This is what people miss. Everyone puts the cart before the horse, looking for high returns, cool investments, the next big thing, and financial hacks. Then, when one thing goes wrong, they either don’t have the liquidity to handle it and everything blows up, or worse, they’ve over-leveraged themselves without control over the payback terms, and it really blows everything up.

Back to the basics of Becoming Your Own Banker

All the details about policy design are secondary to having control over your capital. This is Infinite Banking 101. If this sounds foreign to you, you must read the book Becoming Your Own Banker by R. Nelson Nash. This is the source material for all things Infinite Banking.

There are people on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and elsewhere talking about Infinite Banking who have literally never read this book. They have no idea what they’re talking about. To them, it boils down to just designing high cash value policies, and boom, you’re doing Infinite Banking.

But that’s not the ultimate goal. What we’re doing is getting control over our capital so we can call the shots, roll with the punches, and take advantage of opportunities.

Ok - So where does this leave us if we need to find money within our existing cash flow to actually capitalize our own banking system?

Practical Strategies to Free Up Cash Flow

1. Eliminate or reduce retirement plan contributions

If you’re contributing to a 401(k) or any other retirement plan, that’s cash flow being diverted away from you today in exchange for the hope of some future benefit. It leaves you illiquid right now when you need it most.

Consider reducing or stopping those contributions and redirecting that cash flow to capitalize your own system through whole life insurance. You’re still saving, but now you have control and access to that capital.

2. Delay retirement plan contributions

You can also delay your retirement contributions for a period of time. One thing we know is that you can pretty much always contribute to retirement plans or other market-based accounts. What we don’t know is whether or not you’ll qualify for life insurance tomorrow.

A “401(k) delay” could be an appropriate strategy. Create some liquidity and guarantees today by redirecting cash flow from your 401(k) to whole life insurance. Over, for example, a 5-year period, two things will happen:

1. Your income will likely increase

2. The PUA portion of the policy will become less important for building cash value in the policy

These two factors will allow you to either stop paying the PUA portion of the policy and start contributing that cash flow to your 401(k), or you’ll likely then have enough cash flow to support both.

3. Additional Mortgage Payments

Many people make extra principal payments on their mortgage, thinking they’re getting ahead. But that money is now locked in your house with no liquidity. You can’t get to it without first getting a lender's permission.

Importantly, making extra payments to your mortgage is a very misunderstood strategy. Most people right now have historically very low mortgage interest rates, say 3%. Every extra payment you make over the schedule is, in fact, saving you interest on your mortgage. But it’s only saving you 3%. Those extra dollars are doing a “3% job.”

Those extra dollars could be doing a more important job of earning you more than 3%. Using those extra dollars to pay whole life insurance premiums would, for example, create maybe 4-5% growth (obviously, depending on age and health). And now you have some liquidity to deploy those dollars further to buy assets and create even more growth.

Rather than pre-pay your mortgage, instead, make your regular mortgage payment and redirect those extra payments to your life insurance policy, where you maintain control and access.

4. Credit Card Strategy

If you’re making more than the minimum payment on credit cards, that’s cash flow you could redirect. I’m not saying ignore your debt, but there’s a strategic way to approach it.

If you’re paying down a credit card faster than required, you’re reducing your debt but also reducing your liquidity. Sometimes it makes more sense to make the minimum payment, redirect the extra cash flow to build up your cash value, and then use a policy loan to pay off the credit card strategically.

When you’re done paying off all the debt, rather than resetting at zero, you end up with a bunch of cash value available to start working for you and creating growth.

5. 529 plans

Look at things like 529 plans. People put money into these college savings plans with all kinds of restrictions on how it can be used. What if your kid doesn’t go to college? What if they get a scholarship? What if you need that money for something else before they’re 18?

That’s cash flow going away from you with strings attached. You could fund a life insurance policy instead, and if you need the money for college, it’s there. If you don’t, you still have that capital for whatever else life brings.

6. Property taxes

Turn an annual expense into a wealth-building strategy. If you have annual property taxes due and you’re saving money for those property taxes anyway, you could divert that cash flow from your property tax savings and use it to pay premiums on your life insurance policy.

Then, at the end of the year, use a policy loan to pay your property taxes. You “save up” again for the following year by paying off the loan. Now you’ve freed up that capital all over again to pay your next property tax bill.

This is a way to find premium dollars that can be used to better capitalize your system, beyond just saving up and spending every single year.

7. What If There’s Nothing to Cut Today?

Let’s say you’ve looked at everything and there’s really nothing you can redirect. You’re not contributing to a 401k, you’re not making additional payments to your mortgage or credit card, you’re not contributing to a 529. You’re maxed out in terms of cash flow.

Here’s the one thing we can count on: everyone’s income typically increases over time. At a minimum, most people get a cost-of-living wage increase. But even more likely, promotions happen, you’ll move to new companies, or you’ll start a business.

So even though we don’t necessarily have anything we can do today to really divert cash flow to a place where it’s going to do more for us, we can still plan for tomorrow. We can start keeping track of our cash flow and, more importantly, start keeping track of the growth of our expenses in the future.

The problem with traditional budgets

The typical way people try to address cash flow is by putting themselves on a “financial diet,” also known as a budget, where they sacrifice their quality of life today. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck right now or struggling to save, that’s not a great option. It ends up being a short-term thing where you try to do it, then something comes up, and you can’t sustain it. The reality is that your standard of living is what it is right now.

A better way is not to try to change anything today. You don’t need to decrease what you’re doing today. If it can be done, great. But if it can’t, we want to make sure we capture the difference in the future.

Currence cash flow operating system

This is why I’ve rolled out Currence as a significant part of my practice. It’s a cash flow operating system for regular people like you and me. What it does is allow us to unconsciously save rather than unconsciously spend.

By using Currence, we’re able to slow the increase of our expenses in the future. We don’t have to eliminate the growth of our expenses, but we want to slow it down and not let it grow at the same rate as our income. By doing this, we can redirect freed-up money and start deploying it in ways that generate more income for us. Then it builds and builds from there.

When people use Currence, they find they’re saving about 600% more than the average American! By saving more, they can buy more assets that generate income. Even though they reduced the % growth of spending, the dollars they can spend are significantly higher because they have more income!

All wealth is created with the difference between income and expenses. So everything starts with your cash flow. If you don’t have control over this, nothing else really matters.

Process Over Products

This is what we want to focus on—processes, not necessarily investments or products. We want to operate with a process in mind, not just chase the next investment. Once we have the process in place, it doesn’t matter as much what the individual investments are.

As Nelson Nash says in Becoming Your Own Banker, when you have cash, opportunities have a way of finding you. Rather than searching for the next thing to put your money into, if you have money, you’ll almost definitely come across opportunities without even really trying.

---

John Perrings is an Authorized Infinite Banking Practitioner who has implemented IBC for hundreds of clients and educated thousands more through the StackedLife Podcast and financial resources at StackedLife.com.

TL;DR

My experience being laid off during two tech busts taught me a hard lesson: financial tactics fail, but principles endure. This article breaks down why chasing tactics is a losing game and how focusing on the core principles of Control, Safe Leverage, and Liquidity puts you in a position to win, no matter what.

I spent 20 years working in the tech world, specifically at startups. In 2000, and then again in 2008, I lived through major market corrections. And as you might guess, startup employees are often some of the first people to get laid off during those downturns.

At the time, my whole financial plan was the same as everyone else’s. I had some stock options and put everything else into a 401(k) and just kind of hoped it was all going to work out. But when the market crashed and my job disappeared, of course, I had to liquidate my retirement savings to pay the bills and found myself back at square one.

My strategy was built on a tactic, the startup hope-and-pray strategy, and when that tactic failed, the lack of a solid foundation was painfully obvious.

This is the critical distinction I want to talk about today: the difference between financial principles and financial tactics.

The Trap of Ever-Changing Tactics

When we talk about Infinite Banking, people often get caught up in the tactics. Tactics are the specific applications: using policy loans to invest in real estate, pay off debt, or do personal lending. They are simply ways to deploy capital.

The problem is that tactics are always changing. To give just one example, we don’t know what interest rates will be in the future. Economic conditions constantly shift, and the optimal tactic of today can become a liability tomorrow. If your entire strategy is based on a tactic, you end up living and dying by that tactic.

The Infinite Banking Concept is built on principles, not specific tactics. The principles stay the same, always.

Principle 1: Control

The creator of IBC, Nelson Nash, identified the fundamental problem we all face: we are caught in a perpetual cycle of financing through outside parties. We’re constantly prioritizing someone else’s financial system—sending our money to outside institutions where we give up control.

Just look at LEAP’s “4 Rules of the Financial Institutions”:

1. They want us to send them money.

2. They want us to send it on an ongoing, regularly scheduled basis—preferably on autopilot.

3. They want to hold onto that money for as long as possible.

4. And when we want it back, they distribute it back to us in a limited manner.

If that sounds extreme to you, just look at the typical qualified plan and you’ll see that this is true.

Most people are on autopilot, sending money away to systems that lock their money away, out of their control, for decades.

Control also means getting a handle on your cash flow.

Ask yourself this: how much money were you making five years ago? Now, ask yourself, are you saving the difference today? Almost no one can answer yes to that question. We all let our expenses grow in proportion to our income. That’s Parkinson's Law. To build wealth, you must create a system to capture the difference between your income and expenses first. That is the essence of control.

Principle 2: Safe Leverage & Liquidity

Investors love leverage, but most are using a risky form of it. They borrow from a bank or hard money lender and become subject to their terms and repayment schedules. If you're a house flipper, for example, any delay in the process of the flip puts you at massive risk because you’re on the lenders’ clock.

Most people are in what I call a “permission-based” system, where they must obtain financing by asking permission from outside lenders and then having to prove they qualify for it.

Infinite Banking provides a form of safe leverage through policy loans. The underlying collateral for the loan is your cash value, which the insurance company itself guarantees. Unlike the value of your house or your stock portfolio, the collateral can never go down; it’s guaranteed only to go up. You have guaranteed access to loans and complete control over the payback terms. This ensures your money is always doing more than one job at the same time.

This provides you with unparalleled liquidity and frees you from the system where you have to essentially "beg" for financing, provide all your financial information, and hope they approve you.

Principle 3: A Long-Range Mindset

This is the biggest shift. You have to learn to think long-range. So many people get “FOMO” (fear of missing out). They’re stuck in a short-term mindset, looking for a “hack.” This is how they get talked into super high PUA policy designs, and then coached to immediately borrow out all the cash value to chase the investment of the day. I’ve seen it too many times—when one thing goes wrong, the whole thing blows up.

The first part of IBC is what I call "strategic capital accumulation," which is just a fancy term for saving money. It’s the boring part. But we focus on consistently building our pool of capital first, before chasing investments.

This requires discipline. First, the discipline to build your foundation by paying premiums. Second, the discipline to repay policy loans to recapitalize your system for the next opportunity.

This is how you become proactive instead of reactive. You know, every time there’s a market correction, I hear typical investors say things like, "I’m too scared to even look at my 401k right now." That’s a reactive mindset. Real investors don't hide when the market goes down; they go out and buy stuff.

People love to quote Warren Buffett about their investing, but they rarely actually do what he says... WB has a great line about buying when there's "blood in the streets." The problem is that most typical investors are never in a position to do that because they're the ones bleeding in the street!

By grounding your financial life in the principles of control, liquidity, and leverage, you put yourself in a position to take advantage of the changes we know are coming, rather than reacting to them. Infinite Banking allows you to build a system that can adapt to any tactic that is right for you at the right time.

I’m John Perrings, an Authorized Infinite Banking Practitioner and founder of StackedLife. Instead of taking high risk to get a high return, we help our clients implement the principles and strategies that create multiple safe returns with the same money repeatedly.

I’ve implemented IBC for hundreds of clients and educated thousands more via my podcast, articles, and courses at StackedLife.com.

Want to work with me? Schedule a free consultation here.

TL;DR

We're all told to trust the "average rate of return" for our long-term investments, but this common wisdom is built on a dangerous illusion. The financial industry's use of "rolling averages" is statistically flawed, resulting in decades-long periods where positive average returns masked zero or negative real returns. You'll discover why your actual, real-world return is lower than the simple average about 75% of the time and, most importantly, learn how to build a financial strategy based on certainty, not arbitrary numbers.

“This is fine…”

One of the main talking points of conventional financial wisdom is the idea of investing for the long term to get "average" rates of return. The premise is that if you just stay in the market, investing in things like the S&P 500, you’ll be fine. Even when the markets go down, if you “stay disciplined,” keep your money in, and keep investing, we’re told the average return will be significant—maybe 8%, 10%, or even 12% (depending on who you talk to)—and you’ll end up with a nice amount of money when you retire.

For decades, people have been taught to invest in low-cost index funds, and that as long as they stay with it, everything will turn out okay. But there are significant problems with this approach that most people are just unaware of.

Today, I want to demonstrate that the logic behind this idea of average rates of return is not only statistically flawed, but also, practically speaking, potentially dangerous to your financial future.

The Statistical Error with Averages

First, let's talk about the math. A lot of times, what people do when they analyze the market is look at a "rolling 30-year average." They’ll take a 30-year period, say 1930 to 1959, and get the average return. Then they’ll take the next period, from 1931 to 1960, and calculate the average return. The same for 1932 to 1961, and so on. If you do this from the start of the S&P 500 to the present, you currently get 66 30-year periods. These periods are then averaged, and we now have a sort of average of averages. This gives the illusion that we have a significant amount of data to pull from to create a reliable average market return.

The crazy thing is we all know we’re not supposed to use past performance to determine future market returns; it's literally printed on every investment statement you get. But, even so, that’s exactly what’s happening. All the different types of analyses, like Monte Carlo simulations and others, which sound very scientific, do exactly this. They just look at the past, jumble it all together in an average, and tell you that’s what you can expect.

But even putting that logic problem aside, there’s a bigger statistical error everyone is falling for. Let me explain with an analogy that I learned from Dr. David Babbel’s great work on this subject.

Imagine you have 30 people in a room, and you get their average weight. Then, you swap out just one person and recalculate the average. It's easy to see that swapping out one person isn't going to significantly change the average weight in the room, because you’ve shared 29 out of 30 data points from the previous average.

This is exactly what financial models do. The 30-year period from 1931 to 1960, for example, shares 29 of the same years with the 1930-1959 period. This is a statistical problem called autocorrelation, or overlapping samples. The data isn't independent; it's almost identical.

So, here’s a reality check: In the last 95 years of S&P 500 market history, we don't have 66 different 30-year experiences. We have three. Three non-overlapping 30-year periods. If we wanted to examine an entire “financial life,” from working years through retirement, that would span more like 60-70 years. In that case, the market history we have so far with the S&P would provide us with only a single data point!

To get the data we think we are getting from a “rolling” 30-year average, we’d need thirty 30-year periods, or 900 years of market history. We don't have nearly enough data to provide any statistical relevance.

The Real-World Consequences

This isn't a theoretical problem. These statistical errors have real-world consequences. I'm talking about significant periods of time where we've had no growth from a real return perspective.

When you look at averages, you’re just taking the arithmetic average of the percentage numbers. That has nothing to do with what happens to your money. The one exception is if you start with a pot of money and never add to it or take from it. In that case, the actual return will be the average return. But, in most cases, people are accumulating or spending. So money is going in and/or out of the investment. Every time you add or subtract money, it changes the outcome, and the average no longer applies.

Let’s look at an 11-year period from 1998 to 2008.

• If you take the simple average of the S&P 500 with dividends, it was +3%.

• But the actual return an investor got, after accounting for their annual contributions, was -2.7%.

I’m obviously cherry-picking a time frame here. The point is not really about highlighting the negative return; it’s about the fact that it’s possible to have a positive average return and still lose money. I don’t think many people realize this. The other point to consider is that most investors in this scenario will think they’re earning 12% because that’s what they were told the average is.

Think about that. For a decade—a third of your career—you might be expecting to have $350,000 saved after investing $20K for 10 years, but you end up with $175,000 (less than what you put in!).

If this happened in the first 10 years of your career, for the next 20 years, you’d need a real annual return of almost 15% to make up for lost time and get the money you thought you’d get over 30 years with a 12% average return.

(Side note: I moved to San Francisco and got my first job in tech in 1998 - so this is what I experienced)

This isn’t a one-time event:

• 1929-1939 (11 years): A nearly +5% average return, but the actual return was basically zero, a little less than -1%.

• 1955-1974 (20 years): The average return was +4.7%, but the actual return was 0.2%. Zero growth.

• 1962-1974 (13 years): The average return was +2.5%, but the actual return was -0.5%. Zero growth.

• 1998-2008 (11 years): The average return was +3.2%, but the actual return was -2.7%.

Averages can, and do, lie. And they can lie for a long time.

The S&P 500 with dividends has had seven 10-yr+ periods with a positive average return but a negative or zero actual return

The S&P 500 without dividends has had 24 of these periods, the longest being 20 years.

Quickly: I want to recognize that I’m cherry-picking data here. But it’s real data, and these periods have happened to people. So, while I wouldn’t say fear-mongering (nor exuberance) over cherry-picked data should be a best practice, ignoring these real possibilities is not wise.

Actual Returns Are Less Than the Average 75% of the Time

Going back to those rolling 30-year averages, there’s another pretty wild trend. When I analyzed the returns on those 30-year periods, I discovered that the actual return, the real growth on your money, is lower than the average return about 75% of the time.

My analysis here suffers from the same overlapping data problem I mentioned earlier. However, I’m bringing it up to demonstrate that, even when we use the conventional methodology, the data shows that the average return they promise is not what investors actually get the vast majority of the time. People are planning their lives according to these averages, but even when playing by the industry's own rules, they only come out ahead 25% of the time.

The Other Side of Dollar-Cost Averaging

We're often told about the positive effects of dollar-cost averaging—the idea that when markets go down, you keep buying shares at a lower cost, which improves your return when the market recovers. And that's true, it's a good thing.

But what's never discussed is the other side of that coin. If you're investing for the long term, you're also buying shares when they're at all-time highs. If you're dollar-cost averaging for three down years out of ten, you are doing the opposite for the other seven years. You're buying shares when prices are higher, and when the market goes down, that actually decreases your return on that side of the equation.

By the way, isn’t the #1 of investing to “buy low, sell high?” By that rule, shouldn’t we buy all of our stocks like we do when we dollar-cost-agerage instead of only 3 out of 10 years? 🤷🏻‍♂️

At the end of the day, many of these ideas are rationalizations to make people get comfortable with the significant risk they're taking when investing in the market.

So, What Should We Do?

I’m not saying it's bad to invest in the stock market. I’m only saying we should be more honest about the risk. Everything's great when the markets go up, but it really, really matters what's going on in your life when they go down. Are you in a job that could be affected? Will you have to liquidate investments just to live? What if you're retiring and need to withdraw money from your retirement fund during a down market?

The big problem is that most of us have our entire financial future tied to this system. We're just passively hoping that our 30 years won't be one of the bad ones.

Instead of trying to make the risky market be something that it's not, I suggest this: keep investing in the market, but have some part of your financial life that truly is safe. Build a financial foundation first, in a system that's entirely in your control, with assets that provide liquidity and certainty and are completely uncorrelated from the market. Then, once you have that foundation built, you can afford to take some risk without having to restart your entire financial life if something goes wrong.

At StackedLife.com, we teach strategies that combine whole life insurance—an asset class with liquidity and guarantees—with private wealth strategies to build a platform of liquidity, certainty, and growth. We can help you get massively improved outcomes with safety and control, so you can take advantage of the change that is always coming, rather than react to it.

I’m John Perrings, an Authorized Infinite Banking Practitioner and founder of StackedLife. Instead of taking high risk to get a high return, we help our clients implement strategies that create multiple safe returns with the same money repeatedly.

I’ve implemented IBC for hundreds of clients and educated thousands more via my podcast, articles, and courses at StackedLife.com.

Want to work with me? Schedule a free consultation here.

Crazy hypothesis:

Is term insurance to blame for the fact that every generation seems to essentially start from zero, financially?

In this article, I break down the real financial math behind term insurance versus whole life insurance, revealing how a seemingly 'cheap' $1,100 annual term premium can actually cost a family over $43 million across three generations. I'll show you why comparing these two types of insurance requires understanding net compound costs, not just premium prices.

If you've been taught to buy term and invest the difference, I think you'll be surprised by what I'm about to show you. We're going to dig into some numbers and look at the true cost of term insurance – and I mean the real costs, not just the monthly premium you see advertised.

Watch my podcast episode on this topic →

Life Insurance as an Asset Class

Let's start by talking about asset classes. You've got stocks, bonds, treasuries, real estate, cryptocurrency, your business – these are all different asset classes. Life insurance, specifically whole life insurance, is just another asset class.

Whole life insurance is considered a cash equivalent.

There are a lot of strong opinions out there about whole life insurance versus term, but if you really boil it down, whole life insurance is just another asset class that may or may not have its place in your financial life, just like any of those other asset classes.

Here's something interesting I see all the time: People are very adamant about paying a lower price for their life insurance. They talk about buying cheap term insurance to cover the life insurance side of it. Yet, if you ask those same people whether they'd rather pay a lower amount for where they live by renting or a higher amount by making a mortgage payment and buying a house, most would say they'd rather pay the higher amount to buy the house.

The reason is pretty simple – they know they're buying an asset. Every time they make a mortgage payment, it builds equity in their house, in the asset.

Renting vs. Buying Life Insurance

What's crazy is this conversation is actually pretty much the same conversation when it comes to buying term insurance versus buying whole life insurance.

When you buy term insurance, it's kind of like renting an apartment. Every time you make your rent payment, you pay it every month, and then when you move out of the apartment, you don't get any of the rent money back. It's the same thing with term insurance. You make your term premium payments, and when the term is over, the policy is done and you don't get any of that money back.

Whole life, on the other hand, is much more like buying a house. Every time you make a mortgage payment, you build equity in the house. With whole life insurance, every time you make a premium payment, you build equity in the policy. The asset in this case is the guaranteed future cash flow coming from the death benefit. The equity is the cash surrender value — the net present value of the future death benefit.

When you look at it like this, a lot of the objections that people have towards whole life stop making as much sense.

Term Insurance is Probably a Liability

Something that I don’t think is super-well-known is the fact that only like 1% of term insurance death benefits actually pay out. With term insurance, you have life insurance protection during a time when it’s statistically highly unlikely you’ll die. Then at the end of the term, you no longer have life insurance protection during a time when it’s guaranteed you will die.

It's a little bit backwards in terms of having only term insurance to protect your life. That's why the premium price is so much lower – because the insurance company understands this and that's how they're able to price it that way. The risk to them is much, much lower during the age when you qualify for term insurance.

You Can't Use Grade School Math for Financial Decisions

Knowing this, we can't just compare the premium price at face value. We can't use grade school math and just add up the premiums and compare these two life insurance products because it really just doesn't tell us the full story. Whole life insurance is an asset. Term insurance is most likely a liability.

When we compare these two things, we actually have to use financial math. And when we use financial math, we have to include the variable of time. We must also account for the cost of money.

Let me show you what I mean with real numbers. Let's look at a 30-year, $1,000,000 level term insurance policy. We can't just add up the premiums over 30 years and come to the cost.

Remember, as Nelson Nash explained: “You finance everything you buy. You either pay interest to someone else when you borrow, or you give up interest you could have earned when you pay.”

So we actually have to assign a cost of money to these out-of-pocket premiums. Let's say the cost of money is 4%. So we're giving up 4% every year on top of the premiums that we're paying over 30 years. That's actually the correct way to calculate the cost, not the price of the term insurance.

In this example, the price is $1,100 a year. That's the premium you pay. But the true cost depends on how many years you calculate it, taking into account time and the cost of money. That's called the net compound cost.

The Truth About "Cheap" Term Insurance

Here's where it gets eye-opening. This person buys the policy when they're 40 years old. In 30 years, they're going to be 70 and retire. The $1 million term insurance policy expires. The net compound cost of that term insurance was $62,000, assuming a 4% annual cost of money.

So they gave up $62,000 with those term insurance premiums over those 30 years. And now at 70 years old, they have nothing to show for that $62,000 because the term policy expired.

But here's something interesting: You actually have the contractual right to keep this particular policy so you could keep it if you wanted to. But …the premiums go way up from here. They paid $1,100 a year for the 30 years of the original term. If they wanted to keep this for another year, the premium would go from $1,100 to $61,000. That's 60 times what they were paying during the original 30 year term.

This person can keep this policy up to age 95, and in that year, the premium would be $883,000 for the year. It just keeps going up every year.

Quick context - Term vs. Whole Life

I fully acknowledge that it’s highly unlikely that a 95 year old would pay an $883K premium - and this is part of my point about term insurance. No one will keep it and I think that’s a problem.

But just to put the above in context, instead of paying $883,000 for one year’s coverage of $1M, if this person had purchased a whole life policy at age 40 for $1M instead, their premium at age 95 would be …wait for it… ZERO, because, by age 95, the whole life policy would likely be “paid up” or the premium offset.

And the death benefit will have grown from $1M to $3.5M with an associated $3M in cash value.

Isn’t that wild?

The Damage Done To Your Heirs

Let's take a look at the net compound costs over their life expectancy – we'll use age 85. At age 85, the net compound cost of this term insurance is $112,000. That's what they gave up for paying for this policy.

That $112,000 doesn't seem like a massive amount over an 85-year lifespan. But if we look at what that would have cost the next generation by not making it over to the estate, and let's say this person's child lives another 50 years, at the end of their lifespan, that's $800,000.

But that's just the cost of the premiums. What did we give up by not receiving the $1 million death benefit? This is where it starts to look very significant.

The net compound cost of that $1 million that this person's child did not receive – over the course of the second generation's lifespan, if they lived to age 85 as well – is $6 million. That's starting to become real money.

But what if we took this out just one more generation and looked at the grandchild? We go out two generations and that's $43 million that this family could have had if they had just respected what that million dollars could have done for their family.

Why Every Generation Starts from Zero

This is exactly why most families never accumulate generational wealth. Every generation starts from zero because, for regular folks like you and me, most of the previous generation's wealth dies with them instead of transferring forward. Term insurance breaks the wealth-building chain. It's designed to expire exactly when families need it most – at death, when wealth should transfer to the next generation.

Whole Life Insurance - The Generational Asset

This is the kind of thing that could stay in that family, in that estate, if they had a permanent death benefit. This never goes anywhere. If you have a permanent life insurance death benefit, you're never giving this up.

In fact, this would be much greater if they had a $1 million whole life insurance policy, because the way that we structure whole life insurance, this death benefit would probably grow to something more like $3 to $5 million for each generation.

When high net worth people get to their 60s, 70s, and 80s, it dawns on them that they need to start making esate plans. Their estate planning attorney will tell them they should try to buy some life insurance to pay the estate tax. The problem is that they may no longer qualify. And if they do, the premiums will be much higher.

If they had purchased whole life in their 30s or 40s, their estate plan would alsmost be taken care of by default. And they would have had the use of that cash value all along the way.

The Bottom Line

This is really what I wanted to point out – this is the true cost of term insurance. Statistically speaking, it's highly unlikely that term insurance will pay out, but also statistically speaking, it's guaranteed that you’ll die.

Why on earth would we not want to have a guaranteed outcome paired with the guaranteed event of us eventually dying?

When someone tells you permanent life insurance is "expensive," ask them: Expensive compared to losing $43 million across three generations?

The opportunity cost of losing a death benefit isn't just the face amount – it's what that money could have done for multiple generations of your family. When you factor in generational growth, permanent life insurance isn't expensive – it's the bargain of the century.

Your family's financial tree either grows or gets cut down. The choice is yours.

I’m John Perrings, an Authorized Infinite Banking Practitioner and founder of StackedLife. Instead of taking high risk to get a high return, we help our clients implement strategies that create multiple safe returns with the same money repeatedly. It’s geometric compounding that we call Stacked Interest Acceleration, and IBC is the first step.

I’ve implemented IBC for hundreds of clients and educated thousands more via my podcast, articles, and courses at StackedLife.com.

Want to work with me? Schedule a free consultation here.

TL;DR

Conventional financial wisdom emphasizes risk-taking as necessary for high returns, but this ignores the true definition of risk—potential loss. Genuine financial growth requires certainty through guarantees, liquidity, and control.

Typical strategies like maxing out 401(k)s lack real certainty and lock money away for decades, often forcing people into debt when they need access to it. Whether you're a W2 employee or business owner, creating a guaranteed financial foundation provides stability and strategic advantage, enabling true financial freedom and opportunity.

Certainty is the Backbone of Financial Growth

The typical financial planning advice that's handed out focuses almost exclusively on risk, promoting the idea that you must “take high risk to get high returns.” This mindset is pervasive, especially among younger generations, but in reality, there’s zero correlation between high risk and high return. In fact, “risk,” by definition, is the probability of loss—not gain.

This conventional advice often uses “newspeak”-type language, like needing "exposure to the stock market," in a way that frames “exposure” as a positive and subtly encourages people to overlook the true nature of risk. But, as I learned early in my sales career, "hope is not a strategy," and it shouldn't be your financial strategy either.

Why Certainty Matters

Having financial certainty means creating a stable foundation that lets you accelerate your growth confidently without betting your entire future. This certainty gives you room to fail without disastrous consequences and allows you to smooth out life's inevitable bumps.

Consider what typically happens when you prioritize putting your money into locked-up accounts like a 401(k) or IRA. Sure, you're saving, but because your funds aren’t accessible, when unexpected expenses (or opportunities!) arise, you're forced into debt—credit cards, car loans, home loans—and pay interest to financial institutions instead of earning it yourself.

When you have liquid assets under your control, you gain a "permission slip" to take calculated risks elsewhere without jeopardizing everything. Certainty, guarantees, liquidity, and control form the essential foundation for genuine financial growth and security.

The Problem with Typical Retirement Plans

For most people, the financial journey begins right after college, where the advice is clear: max out your qualified retirement plans like the 401(k). But these "plans" lack certainty on multiple fronts. You don't know how much you'll end up with, what it'll be worth when you need it, how long it will last, or what the tax rate will be when it's time to use it. Ironically, this approach defers taxes today—when they're historically low—to an unknown future, potentially at higher rates.

What exactly is it about “retirement planning” that is a plan at all?

Risk Isn't Just Market Volatility

Most financial advisors' risk assessments are one-dimensional and focus only on risk vs. expected return. Yet the real risks are the unknown variables: future tax rates, actual retirement costs, future income needs, and longevity. Ignoring these unknowns is a massive gamble.

Tech Employees: Double the Risk

I spent two decades in Silicon Valley and witnessed firsthand the risks tech employees unknowingly take. Young tech professionals are often told they can "afford" to take significant investment risks. Fueled by fear of missing out, they lock their money away in speculative investments or retirement accounts, often neglecting basic liquidity and savings.

Additionally, tech employees often gamble heavily on stock options or equity compensation, hoping for a big payday from a liquidity event like an IPO or acquisition. But the reality is that most startups don't achieve massive payouts. Even worse, during downturns, tech employees are usually the first to be laid off, compounding their financial vulnerability.

Business Owners: All Eggs in One Basket

Business owners also tend to underestimate their financial risks. While business investment can offer high returns, successful entrepreneurs frequently reinvest every dollar back into their enterprise. As a result, their business becomes their sole retirement plan, liquidity source, and financial safety net. Yet relying on the sale of an illiquid asset like a business is inherently risky, subject to timing, market conditions, health, and personal circumstances.

To manage this, business owners need liquidity outside their business to make strategic, not desperate, decisions. A strong personal balance sheet, independent of the business, allows owners to seize opportunities and handle setbacks effectively.

It’s About Growth, Too

Many people don’t want to take certainty seriously because the conversation about protection is, frankly, boring.

But it’s not just about protecting yourself. It’s every bit as much about growth, too.

Something not many regular folks like you and me are taught is that when you have control over high-quality assets (meaning assets with little-to-no risk), you can create multiple rates of return off of every dollar.

If you’ve ever had a mortgage, you've seen this in action. After closing on your house, you may have received a letter six months later letting you know that another financial institution now owns your mortgage. While you pay twice for your house (once for the home and a second time for the interest you pay for the loan), the bank earns twice. Once for the loan and again when they sell the loan. This is the power of high-quality “paper.”

The 401(k) investor can only hope his money gets a “high” rate of return. The certainty investor creates multiple rates of return with control and guarantees.

An Answer: Infinite Banking & Whole Life Insurance

Certainty means control over your money—assets you can access when needed without compromising future growth. Traditional methods fail this test, as evidenced by a recent Federal Reserve study: only 10% of retirees had over a million dollars saved. That million isn't even enough, considering inflation and longevity risks.

This shortfall happens because locked-away funds frequently get raided for emergencies or opportunities (or even opportunities), stunting growth and compounding financial insecurity.

The Infinite Banking Concept (IBC) addresses these problems head-on by using dividend-paying whole life insurance as a guaranteed asset class. Whole life policies provide guaranteed growth, liquidity via policy loans, and uninterrupted compound growth, even when the money is used via policy loans.

Infinite Banking allows you full control, enabling you to take advantage of change rather than react to it. When you have cash, opportunities find their way to you, providing a true foundation for sustainable financial growth.

Certainty isn't just security—it's the essential foundation for accelerated financial success.

StackedLife Podcast

Episode 12: The Math on Whole Life Insurance Returns

In this myth-busting episode, I'll translate the complex math behind whole life insurance returns into language everyone can understand.

Using real numbers and my favorite financial calculator, I'll show you why comparing whole life insurance to other investments without accounting for taxes, fees, and death benefits is like comparing apples to oranges—and why this misunderstood financial tool might deserve a second look in your wealth-building strategy.

Listen to Episode 12 →

Or read the article here →

I’m John Perrings, an Authorized Infinite Banking Practitioner and founder of StackedLife. Instead of taking high risk to get a high return, we help our clients implement strategies that create multiple safe returns with the same money repeatedly. It’s geometric compounding that we call Stacked Interest Acceleration, and IBC is the first step.

I’ve implemented IBC for hundreds of clients and educated thousands more via my podcast, articles, and courses at StackedLife.com.

Want to work with me? Schedule a free consultation here.

You're not imagining it. What you feel about your financial future isn't just personal anxiety—it's a nationwide sentiment. For the first time since tracking began in 2001, most Americans (53%) believe their financial situation is deteriorating. This pessimism exceeds levels seen during the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic.

But I want you to know something important: Your dreams of financial security and freedom aren't dead—they just need a different path forward.

Rethinking Traditional Financial Planning

The traditional financial playbook—maxing out 401(k)s, trusting in market returns, and hoping for the best—may no longer provide the security many Americans seek. The recent market correction, with the S&P 500 down 20% and the NASDAQ down 30%, is kind of a blip—but I think it reveals fundamental challenges in conventional financial strategies.

Many Americans have diligently followed mainstream financial advice, putting money into vehicles they can't access until retirement, with little guarantee of what those funds will be worth when needed. When traditional advisors promoted the "4% withdrawal rule" for retirement, they were working with assumptions that simply don't hold true anymore.

2-Dimensional Financial Wisdom

People are starting to recognize significant limitations that deserve more attention:

• Tax-deferred accounts restrict access to your money when you might need it most

• The promised tax benefits rely on assumptions about future tax rates that may not materialize

• Market-based portfolios expose us to challenging sequence-of-returns risk at retirement

• Financial products often benefit their providers regardless of the outcomes

• Because we give up control of our capital, we must seek permission from those who have it when we need it

Building Financial Resilience Through Control

One of the most overlooked aspects of financial planning is the value of liquidity and control over your capital. When economic uncertainty strikes (as it has now), those with accessible capital not only weather the storm but can capitalize on opportunities that others must pass by.

While financial advisors debate the causes of market volatility and come up with reasons for you to “invest for the long term,” big picture financial strategists implement proven methods, prioritizing control and access to capital.

The Strategy That Builds Wealth With Certainty

Instead of relying solely on increasingly unpredictable markets, consider an approach that has stood the test of time: utilizing dividend-paying whole life insurance as the foundation of your financial strategy through what's known as the Infinite Banking Concept (IBC).

Unlike volatile market investments, a properly structured IBC approach provides:

• Guaranteed growth regardless of market conditions

• Complete accessibility to your capital without penalties

• Protection from creditors in many states

• Tax advantages that work with current tax laws

• A death benefit that protects your family while you build wealth

This approach offers an alternative path that prioritizes your control, while the status quo financial advice focuses primarily on accumulation.

Learn more about how to create financial confidence

While record numbers of Americans feel financially uncertain, you can chart a different course. The current economic pessimism reflects real challenges, but it doesn't have to determine your financial future.

I invite you to listen to my full podcast episode about the topic of control, the most crucial aspect to a lifetime financial strategy:

StackedLife Podcast

Episode 11: Why the #1 Superpower of Infinite Banking is Control

Listen to Episode 11 here.

I’m John Perrings, Authorized Infinite Banking Practitioner and founder of StackedLife. Instead of taking high risk to get a high return, we help our clients implement strategies that create multiple safe returns with the same money repeatedly. It’s geometric compounding that we call Stacked Interest Acceleration, and IBC is the first step.

I’ve implemented IBC for hundreds of my clients and educated thousands more via my podcast, articles, and courses at StackedLife.com.

Want to work with me? Schedule a free consultation here.

The financial industry has sold us a beautiful dream: Work hard, invest 15% of your income in your 401(k), and ride the market to millionaire status by retirement. Easy-peasy!

Yet Federal Reserve data from 2023 tells a starkly different story: 90% of first-time retirees have less than $1,000,000 saved. For most Americans, the dream of a comfortable retirement remains just that—a dream.

Why is this happening? Because life happens all along the way, not at the end of a 30-year accumulation period.

The Dream They Sold You vs. The Reality You Live

We've all heard the mantra: "Invest for the long term." Financial advisors paint pictures of exponential growth charts and the magic of compound interest. And yes, in theory, investing consistently in the market should build substantial wealth over decades.

You deserve this, by the way. A retirement where money is abundant, where you can travel, help your grandchildren with college, and never worry about medical bills or assisted living costs.

But here's what they don't emphasize: short-term requirements can kill off long-term results.

When Life Interrupts Your Investment Plan

Let's be honest about why so many retirement accounts fall short:

• Your child needed unexpected medical treatment

• Your roof started leaking during an economic downturn

• You found yourself unemployed for 8 months when the economy contracted

• A once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity required immediate capital

• Your aging parents needed financial support

(PS - I have personally experienced a variation of every one of these.)

These aren't failures of discipline or planning—they're normal life events that happen to everyone. The true failure lies in a financial system that preaches long-term investing without acknowledging the inevitable short-term needs that derail these plans.

The Market Doesn't Care About Your Timeline

Remember 2022? The S&P 500 down 20%, NASDAQ down 30%. Or perhaps you recall 2008, when retirement accounts lost 30-50% of their value virtually overnight.

The DotCom bust and the Great Recession were the two that hit me the hardest. Two major economic downturns in the first 10 years of my working life.

The biggest problem with economic downturns is that they often coincide with job losses and other financial pressures, forcing many to withdraw retirement funds at the worst possible moment.

This is the cruel irony of the "average returns" myth. Yes, the market historically returns 8-12% annually on average, but you don’t get the average. You get what you get. And it’s meaningless, anyway, if you're forced to sell during the inevitable downturns.

What The Financial Industry Doesn't Want You To Know

Why do financial advisors focus almost exclusively on long-term investing? I don’t think there’s anything purposely nefarious going on. It’s just kinda their job.

The financial industry has 4 Rules. They want you to:

1. Contribute money to them

2. On an ongoing basis

3. To hold for as long as possible

4. And then distribute the money back to you in a limited manner

Just think about your 401(k); you know the above is true.

The industry has you give up control of your money and then benefits when you believe your financial shortfalls are personal failures rather than predictable outcomes of the status quo.

Taking Back Control of Your Financial Future

The good news? You can protect yourself from this flawed system. Here's how:

1. Prioritize YOUR financial system first. You must retain control over your capital.

2. Build your financial foundation before maximizing retirement contributions.

3. Maintain significant liquidity to not only pay the bills if times get tough but also take advantage of opportunities when there is proverbial “blood in the streets.”

4. Invest for cash flow. Buy stocks if you must, but focus as much as possible on buying assets that generate income.

5. Become your own banker. The business of banking is far superior to the business of investing.

The Path Forward

The financial establishment wants you to believe that long-term investing is all you need and that any shortfall in retirement is your failure.

Reject this narrative.

The 90% of retirees with less than $1 million saved aren't all undisciplined spenders—they're normal people who faced life's inevitable challenges and lacked a financial strategy robust enough to accommodate both long-term growth and short-term needs.

By acknowledging this reality and adjusting your approach, you can build financial resilience that serves you through life's predictable unpredictability, not just in some distant, idealized retirement future.

Your financial journey deserves a strategy that works in the real world—not just in theoretical models designed to make you feel inadequate when life inevitably happens.

StackedLife Podcast

Episode 10: How Much Do You Need to Get Started with Infinite Banking?

In this episode, I tackle one of the most common questions I receive: "How much money do you need to get started with Infinite Banking?"

In addition to some hard numbers, I explain the practical ranges, introduce my "Goldilocks Rule" for finding the perfect policy balance, and share strategies for kickstarting your IBC journey regardless of your current financial situation.

Whether you have a few hundred or a few hundred thousand dollars to commit, you'll learn how to think about the right starting point for IBC.

Listen to Episode 10.

Or read the article here.

I’m John Perrings, Authorized Infinite Banking Practitioner and founder of StackedLife. Instead of taking high risk to get a high return, we help our clients implement strategies that create multiple safe returns with the same money repeatedly. It’s geometric compounding that we call Stacked Interest Acceleration, and IBC is the first step.

I’ve implemented IBC for hundreds of my clients and educated thousands more via my podcast, articles, and courses at StackedLife.com.

Want to work with me? Schedule a free consultation here.

Living Your Dreams (While Keeping Them Secure)

You've built something extraordinary. Your business is your legacy, your passion, and potentially your ticket to financial freedom. The dream of growing your company into something valuable enough to fund your ideal future is powerful and worth pursuing.

But what if there was a way to pursue that dream while creating a safety net that ensures your personal financial success regardless of how your business journey unfolds? By building personal wealth alongside your business growth, you're not abandoning your entrepreneurial dreams—you're securing them.

Why the “All-In” Approach Needs to be Refined

It's easy to justify putting everything back into your business. After all, each reinvestment feels like it's bringing you one step closer to that big payday when you eventually sell. You tell yourself: "This is my retirement plan. This is my investment strategy. This is the smartest use of my capital right now."

By the way, these are all true! Your business is where you have the most knowledge, control, and potential for outsized returns.

But there is something beneath the surface of these noble thoughts. It puts all your eggs in one basket.

No matter how successful it appears today, your business is still a single, highly illiquid asset in an unpredictable market. Even Apple and Amazon face unexpected challenges; your business is no different.

Have No Fear

The thought of diverting money away from your business might trigger fear. What if taking capital out stunts your company's growth? What if you miss out on the big opportunity because you didn't reinvest that extra $50,000?

These fears are valid, but consider the flip side: What happens if your industry faces disruption? What if health issues force you to step back unexpectedly? What if the perfect buyer never materializes?

By building a personal financial foundation parallel to your business, you're not abandoning it—you're creating options. Having liquidity outside your business means you can weather storms, seize opportunities, and make decisions based on strategy rather than desperation.

Listen to Your Gut

You've probably heard the stories: the business owner who couldn't find a buyer, the one who sold for far less than expected, or the entrepreneur who had to finance the sale themselves only to watch the buyer run the company into the ground.

These aren't just cautionary tales—they're everyday realities. According to BizBuySell, only about 20% of businesses listed for sale actually sell. Valuation expectations often don't align with market realities. Finding the right buyer with both vision and capital is challenging. And timing truly is everything—economic downturns can decimate business values overnight.

Not to mention the possibility that business owners sometimes die or become incapacitated before they can sell, forcing a firesale so their families don’t lose everything.

Your instincts are right to question whether betting everything on a successful business exit is wise. A business sale is not a retirement plan; it's a potential bonus to a well-structured financial strategy.

Status Quo Financial Advice is a Threat to Your Business

The conventional wisdom surrounding entrepreneur finances isn't just flawed—it's potentially dangerous to your long-term wealth in multiple ways:

First, there's the "all-in" approach, where every dollar goes back into your business, creating a single point of failure for your financial future.

Then, when advisors and CPAs finally convince you to diversify, they push you toward problematic alternatives:

Qualified retirement plans that seemed attractive because of "tax advantages" actually create several hidden traps:

• You're forced to fund employee accounts to participate, draining capital from your own wealth-building

• Your money becomes locked away until age 59½, creating a liquidity crisis if you need capital for opportunities or emergencies

• You're deferring taxes from a historically low present to an unknown future (no one I’ve asked thinks taxes will go down)

• You surrender control of your money to market fluctuations and government regulations that can change at any time

Non-qualified market investments represent another misguided approach:

• After taking enormous risks to build your business, you take profits and immediately risk them all over again in volatile markets

• Wall Street benefits from your money while you assume all the risk

• Market cycles can devastate your wealth just when you need it most

• You surrender control of your financial future to economic forces beyond your influence

Both approaches violate the core principles that made you successful as a business owner: maintaining control, ensuring access to capital, and creating predictable outcomes. The financial industry has convinced entrepreneurs to abandon these principles the moment they start thinking about personal wealth.

The Path Forward: Control, Liquidity, and Guarantees

Smart entrepreneurs are now rejecting conventional financial wisdom and instead prioritizing strategies that offer:

Control: Maintaining decision-making authority over your capital at all times, just as you do in your business.

Liquidity: Ensuring access to your money when opportunities or challenges arise.

Guarantees: Building wealth on contractual promises rather than market speculations

Properly structured whole life insurance solves so many of these problems. With whole life, we can create:

1. Tax-advantaged growth without government restrictions on access

2. Guaranteed increases in cash value regardless of market performance

3. Liquidity through policy loans that don't interrupt the growth of your money

4. Protection from creditors in many states

5. The ability to self-finance opportunities without bank approval

6. Greater flexibility in passing on the business to heirs who want it without “disinheriting” heirs that don’t

Remember, you didn't build your business by surrendering control to others or gambling on uncertain outcomes. Why would you ever build your personal wealth that way?

Your business should be one chapter in your financial story, not the entire book. And the financial principles that guide that story should mirror the same values that made you successful as an entrepreneur: maintaining control, ensuring access to capital, and creating predictable, positive outcomes.

Watch this video

Check out this video where I whiteboard a few ideas on how business owners can get ahead on their personal balance sheet without sacrificing the growth of their business:

StackedLife Podcast

Episode 9: The Tax Advantages of IBC

Most people know life insurance has a tax-free death benefit, but that's just scratching the surface of tax advantages.

In this episode, I break down the three powerful tax advantages of whole life insurance and explain how the Infinite Banking Concept leverages these benefits to create tax-efficient financial strategies. I'll teach you about tax-deferred growth, tax-free access via policy loans, and strategies that can dramatically improve your financial picture - all within the framework of whole life insurance and IBC.

Listen to Episode 9.

Or read the article here.

I’m John Perrings, Authorized Infinite Banking Practitioner and founder of StackedLife. Instead of taking high risk to get a high return, we help our clients implement strategies that create multiple safe returns with the same money. It’s geometric compounding that we call Stacked Interest Acceleration and IBC is the first step.

I’ve implemented IBC for hundreds of my clients and educated thousands more via my podcast, articles and courses at StackedLife.com.

Get my free mini-course, Adding Certainty to Supercharge Growth

Yet somehow, in the world of financial planning, we're told to embrace "exposure" and "risk" as though they are the tickets to prosperity.

It rings like Orwellian “Newspeak” in my ears, and the reality is that it has trapped many, many hardworking Americans in a cycle of financial vulnerability.

Are these words used this way on purpose?

If you've ever felt confused or disappointed by your financial progress, know this: it's not because you lack financial acumen. The system is designed to keep you in the dark.

The traditional financial industry has conditioned us to accept a fundamentally flawed equation: that high risk automatically equals high return. There is zero correlation between high risk and high return. What they call "risk" is actually just the "probability of loss"—something any rational person would want to minimize, not embrace.

I think most people know this at a gut level, but they ignore it because there isn’t any other information saying anything different out there.

You've been told that "as long as you invest for the long term, you're going to be all right" and achieve a high "average rate of return." But here's what they don't tell you: Average rates of return don't really mean anything. You can have a positive average return and still lose money:

Why You Shouldn't Fear Missing Out

One of the most powerful weapons in the traditional financial advisor's arsenal is fear—specifically, the fear of missing out on market gains. It’s crazy if you think about it because if you cut through the fluff, it’s the only tool in their toolbelt: the hope of a good return. They've created an environment where investors feel there's never a good time to sell. You're afraid to miss potential gains, but you're also scared of losing what you have.

This fear is only a problem if you don't have a plan. And that's what you’re told you’ll get when working with a financial planner. In doing so, however, you will not get a clear, controlled plan that works regardless of market conditions. You’ll get what you get.

Let me reassure you: You can build wealth without subjecting yourself to the whims of unpredictable markets. The anxiety you feel about your financial future can be replaced with confidence when you reclaim control.

What Financial Advisors Don't Want You to Know

Your suspicions about traditional financial advice are well-founded. When advisors push you to maximize investments in 401(k)s and IRAs, they rarely emphasize or even acknowledge how much control over your money you’re giving up - for decades. This outsourcing of control subjects you to rules and potential tax implications determined by others.

Similarly, when you seek safety and liquidity and are directed toward typical banks with their measly interest rates, you are forced into higher risk (money market accounts) or less liquidity (CDs).

The financial industry constantly bombards you with messaging that conditions you to accept building wealth through volatile markets as the only viable path. This creates an amnesia effect where more logical and controlled financial strategies are forgotten or dismissed.

Opting Out of Wall Street's Rigged Game

The financial elite have created a system that works brilliantly—for them. While they benefit from your "exposure" to market volatility, they've constructed safety nets for themselves that ordinary investors don't have access to.

But you don't have to play this game. There is a growing community of financially savvy individuals who have rejected the status quo and embraced strategies that prioritize control, guarantees, and sustainable growth.

Having guarantees in at least a part of your financial life allows you to take some risk in a more responsible fashion. Strategies like The Infinite Banking Concept (IBC) prioritize control of your capital and offer unparalleled guarantees and access to credit that provide liquidity.

Your dreams of financial independence are too important to be left to chance - or worse, to a system designed to benefit others at your expense.

StackedLife Podcast

Episode 8: High Risk with High Early Cash Value

I've noticed something concerning lately - the flood of “high early cash value” (sometimes called "90/10") whole life policies being promoted across social media, promising maximum early cash value with seemingly no downside.

In Episode 8, I show, in detail, that there is a downside. Hidden trade-offs that most agents never disclose. I compare data from two 50-year scenarios that show why these designs can cost policyholders hundreds of thousands or more in long-term wealth potential.

I'll demonstrate why “thinking long-range" is essential and how a more balanced policy approach provides the flexibility and wealth-building capacity that can transform financial outcomes for generations.

Listen to Episode 8.

Or read the article here.

I’m John Perrings, Authorized Infinite Banking Practitioner and founder of StackedLife. Instead of taking high risk to get a high return, we help our clients implement strategies that create multiple safe returns with the same money. It’s geometric compounding that we call Stacked Interest Acceleration and IBC is the first step.

I’ve implemented IBC for hundreds of my clients and educated thousands more via my podcast, articles and courses at StackedLife.com.

Get my free mini-course, Adding Certainty to Supercharge Growth

You’ve probably heard advice saying investing is "not about timing the market, it's about time in the market." This advice is misguided, and I’m going to tell you why.

I’m challenging the notion that long-term investing magically eliminates risk. The truth is that "time in the market" is essentially just another timing strategy with its own vulnerabilities. Average returns mask real-world volatility, sequence of returns can devastate retirement plans, and financial planning often relies on statistical methods that ignore correlation and sample independence, using mostly the same data in each sample.

Rather than following this oversimplified mantra, discover a more balanced approach that incorporates certainty alongside growth potential. Because you only get one shot at this, and your financial future deserves more than a catchy phrase based on limited historical data.

If you've spent any time around financial advisors or browsed investment forums, you've undoubtedly heard the popular mantra: "It's not about timing the market, it's about time in the market." This phrase has become something of a sacred cow in financial circles - repeated so often that few stop to question its fundamental logic.

And the logic I want to demonstrate is that “time in” the market turns out to be just another form of market “timing,” only stretched over a more extended time period.

The industry’s selective statistics

When financial advisors show you those beautiful upward-trending graphs of market performance, they're often presenting average returns that mask a more complex reality. These averages smooth out the dramatic ups and downs, creating an illusion of steady growth that rarely materializes in real portfolios.

The industry loves to showcase how a hypothetical investment would have grown over the past few decades. But these presentations conveniently gloss over a crucial fact: money doesn't grow based on averages. Real investment journeys are filled with peaks and valleys that these smoothed-out representations fail to capture.

You've probably noticed this disconnect between the perfect charts and your actual investment experience. That nagging feeling that something doesn't quite add up? It's not your imagination - it's mathematical reality.

We don’t get average returns. We get what we get.

Average returns are 100% irrelevant

The industry's approach to averages is statistically questionable. But even without the incorrect statistical assumptions, let’s look at average returns on their face, as we are told how they work.

If we look at the last 30 years' average return of the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested, the “gold standard” average return vehicle, we see the average return was 12%. We need to understand that this 12% is just the mathematical sum of the returns divided by 30. It doesn’t have anything to do with what happened to our money.

Applying annual investments of $20,000/yr to this same vehicle, we see that the real rate of return was 10%.

I know that 2 percentage points doesn’t seem like the end of the world. After all, most people would consider 10% a “good” return according to the conventional index investing approach.

…until you see what it does to how much money you end up with:

A 2 percentage point drop in our rate of return caused us to have a 34% drop in our money!

Would it be a problem if you planned on having $5M in retirement but only ended up with $3M?

By the way, according to Fed data, 90% of retirees in 2023 had less than $1M and had similar historical returns. The real world shows us that something very different than getting average returns is happening. Check out last week’s issue for more on this.

Big statistical flaw: not nearly enough data

Most concerning of all is that we have nowhere near enough data to calculate these historical averages.

It’s common to use 30-year rolling averages of market history to try to predict the future. E.g., 1990 - 2019, 1991 - 2020, 1992 - 2021, and so forth. They’ll take each 30-period and then average those returns. You can get about seventy 30-year periods from ~100 years or market history.

This creates the illusion of having 70 data points—more data points than truly exist.

Using rolling 30-year averages is like calculating the average weight in a room of 30 people by replacing just one person at a time instead of getting a fresh sample of 30 new people. Replacing one person doesn’t significantly affect the average.

Coincidentally, a “financial life” is about 70 years long (40 years working, 30 years in retirement), which again is about the number of (fake) “data points” we get from a rolling 30-year average of the 95 years of S&P 500 history. Here is what is missing:

70 years = 1 financial life span. So from the perspective of gathering statistical data about what can happen during someone’s life, the last 70 years are ONE data point!

This is a problem with data sample independence where each new 30-year average shares 29 years with the previous average.

To get what we really want when using 30-year rolling averages of market history, we’d need thirty independent 70-year periods (that’s 2,100 years) of market history to have a valid set of 30 data points for a “financial life.”

Look up Dr. David Babbel (R.I.P.) to learn more about the correct statistical analysis of market history.

Understanding sequence of returns risk

The "time in the market" philosophy suggests that, given enough time, everything works out. But this overlooks a critical reality: the long term eventually becomes the short term.

The sequence of returns (mostly when you get negative returns) matters, especially as you approach and enter retirement. Most “time in the market” strategies only consider the accumulation phase of your financial life.

But guess what? You are still “in” the market during the distribution phase of retirement, and the earlier you experience negative returns, the more likely you are to run out of money in retirement.

Two investors with identical average returns can have dramatically different outcomes depending on when negative returns occur. Imagine two retirees with identical portfolios:

• Janet retires in 2008 just before the financial crisis, withdrawing 4% annually

• Robert retires in 2011 after the market has recovered, also withdrawing 4% annually

Even if their portfolios average the same return over a decade, Janet might have depleted her savings years earlier because she'd been forced to sell shares at depressed prices to fund her retirement. This isn't a failure of strategy on Janet's part - it's simply bad luck with timing, something the "time in the market" mantra suggests shouldn't matter.

The risk / return reality check

The financial industry has conditioned us to believe that high risk automatically leads to high returns. This oversimplification has led many investors astray.

Taking on high risk creates the potential for high returns - but also for significant losses. There's no guarantee that enduring volatility will be rewarded, especially if you need to access your money during a downturn.

Many financial advisors behave as though the favorable historical returns of the U.S. stock market are some kind of natural law, rather than what they actually are: a specific outcome from a specific time period in a specific country. While American markets have performed exceptionally well over the past century, numerous other markets worldwide have not shared the same fortune.

A better path forward

Rather than choosing between timing the market or blindly committing to time in the market, consider a more nuanced approach:

1. Incorporate some "certainty assets" that provide guaranteed returns or benefits

2. Plan for the worst-case scenario, not just average outcomes

3. Recognize that saving rates often matter more than return rates

4. Understand that your personal timeline matters more than historical averages

5. Having cash to roll with the punches can mean more to your returns than anything

The "time in the market" philosophy contains a kernel of truth—hasty reactions to market movements often lead to poor outcomes. However, treating long-term passive investing as inherently successful on auto-pilot is a dangerous path.

By questioning popular financial wisdom and adopting a more balanced approach, you can build a financial strategy that truly serves your unique circumstances, timeline, and goals - not just the industry's preferred narrative.

StackedLife Podcast

Episode 7: Term Life Insurance vs. Whole Life

When evaluating term life insurance vs. whole life, you've probably heard the advice to 'buy term and invest the difference.' This popular recommendation has one glaring problem: it uses simplistic grade school math to add up premiums and declares whole life insurance 'too expensive.'

But when we apply proper financial math—analyzing true lifetime costs, equity building, and the time value of money—the comparison looks dramatically different. In this episode, I show why whole life insurance is an asset that creates wealth rather than an expense, and why the 'cheaper' option might actually cost you hundreds of thousands more over your lifetime and millions generationally.

Listen to Episode 7.

Or read the article here.

I’m John Perrings, Authorized Infinite Banking Practitioner and founder of StackedLife. Instead of taking high risk to get a high return, we help our clients implement strategies that create multiple safe returns with the same money. It’s geometric compounding that we call Stacked Interest Acceleration and IBC is the first step.

I’ve implemented IBC for hundreds of my clients and educated thousands more via my podcast, articles and courses at StackedLife.com.

Get my free mini-course, Adding Certainty to Supercharge Growth

While most Americans struggle to build adequate emergency funds in traditional savings vehicles that lose value to inflation and offer limited benefits, whole life insurance provides a superior alternative that works harder at every stage of life. It combines guaranteed growth and immediate family protection while building your reserves, offers penalty-free access through flexible policy loans during emergencies without interrupting growth, and ultimately transforms into a tax-advantaged retirement asset and legacy for your loved ones—making your emergency fund dollars work efficiently across your entire financial lifecycle.

Get my free mini-course, Adding Certainty to Supercharge Growth

The Emergency Fund Dilemma

Financial experts typically recommend maintaining three to six months of living expenses in an easily accessible account. Some suggest starting with at least $2,500 as a foundation. However, the reality paints a concerning picture:

• As of May 2024, 27% of Americans have no emergency savings whatsoever

• A 2024 Bankrate survey revealed that 62% of Americans feel behind on their emergency savings goals

These statistics highlight a significant gap between financial advice and real-world implementation. So why are so many struggling to build and maintain adequate emergency funds?

Why Emergency Funds Remain Chronically Underfunded

Despite understanding their importance, Americans consistently struggle to build adequate emergency reserves for several critical reasons:

1. The Qualified Plan Trap Many Americans prioritize contributing to qualified retirement plans like 401(k)s and IRAs over building emergency funds. While these plans offer potential tax advantages, they effectively lock your money away for decades with substantial penalties for early access. When emergencies strike, these "retirement savings" remain frustratingly untouchable without significant financial punishment.

In fact, 90% of first-time retirees in 2023 had less than $1M saved. This indicates to me that many people end up “raiding” their qualified plans for emergencies!

2. Competing Financial Priorities Between student loans, mortgages, childcare costs, and daily expenses, emergency funds often fall to the bottom of the priority list. The immediate pressure of current obligations overshadows the abstract future possibility of emergencies.

3. Low Return on Traditional Emergency Funds Traditional emergency fund vehicles like savings accounts offer such minimal returns that many people become discouraged. Watching inflation erode the purchasing power of their hard-earned savings creates a disincentive to contribute.

4. Investment FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) Many people sacrifice adequate emergency funding due to anxiety about missing potential investment returns elsewhere. This tunnel vision on chasing high returns leads to allocating money that should serve as a safety net into riskier assets instead. When markets are booming, savings is boring. The FOMO on getting returns overshadows the crucial task of building proper emergency reserves.

5. Foundation Before Framework Focusing on investment returns without first establishing a solid emergency fund creates a fundamentally unstable financial structure. Without this foundation, any unexpected expense can force premature liquidation of investments—often at inopportune times—creating a cascading effect of financial setbacks. Even carefully selected investments become vulnerable when there's no buffer to protect them from life's inevitable surprises.

Traditional Emergency Fund Approaches

Most financial advisors recommend these common vehicles for emergency savings:

High-Yield Savings Accounts These offer better interest rates than standard savings accounts while maintaining liquidity for quick access during emergencies.

Money Market Accounts These accounts typically offer slightly higher interest rates than savings accounts with similar liquidity benefits, but introduce some risk.

Fixed Deposits (FDs) FDs provide stability and safety since they aren't tied to market performance. They're debt-based and low-risk, though they may have penalties for early withdrawal, affecting liquidity.

Treasuries Offer better guarantees than money market accounts. Growth depends on the term of the treasury, potentially affecting liquidity, similar to fixed deposits.

While these options focus on the essential qualities of emergency funds—liquidity, safety, and stability—they come with significant limitations:

• Interest rates rarely keep pace with inflation, meaning your money loses purchasing power over time

• Your capital remains largely static rather than working efficiently for you

• They provide no additional benefits beyond the saved amount itself

A Strategic Alternative: Whole Life Insurance

Whole life insurance offers a compelling alternative approach to emergency fund planning that addresses many of the shortcomings of traditional methods.

What is Whole Life Insurance?

At its core, whole life insurance is a permanent life insurance policy that builds cash value over time while providing a death benefit to your beneficiaries. What makes it unique as an emergency fund vehicle is its ability to serve multiple financial purposes simultaneously.

Why Whole Life Insurance Excels as an Emergency Fund

Stage 1: Benefits While Funding Your Emergency Reserve

1. Actuarially Enhanced Unlike any other cash-equivalent asset, life insurance is based on the actuarial law of large numbers (basically, insurance math used to calculate risk). Because the policies' outcomes are known on average, this gives whole life insurance an edge in offering incredible growth for the guarantees.

2. Built-in Discipline The premium payment commitment creates a consistent savings habit that many people struggle to maintain with traditional emergency funds. This structured approach helps overcome the psychological barriers to saving.

3. Immediate Family Protection From the moment you start funding your policy, your loved ones receive death benefit protection far exceeding your contributions—providing immediate peace of mind while your emergency fund builds.

Stage 2: Benefits When Accessing Emergency Funds

1. Unmatched Liquidity Without Penalties When emergencies happen, you can access your cash value, no questions asked. There are no credit checks, applications, or early withdrawal penalties that plague other emergency fund vehicles.

2. Continuous Compound Growth During Use Unlike traditional emergency funds that stop growing when money is withdrawn, your cash value continues compounding, uninterrupted, when using a policy because you are borrowing against your cash value, not taking it out. Your money keeps working even during emergencies.

3. Flexible Repayment Terms Policy loans have no payback terms, allowing you to recover financially at your own pace after an emergency. Compare this to credit cards and personal loans. Outstanding!

Stage 3: Long-Term and Legacy Benefits

1. Tax-Advantaged Growth and Distribution As your policy matures, cash value grows tax-deferred, and when structured properly, can provide tax-free income during retirement—transforming your emergency fund into a valuable retirement asset.

2. Volatility Buffer for Retirement Income Market losses when taking distributions from your retirement accounts can have catastrophic effects. Having guaranteed cash value to provide income when markets are down can make the difference between living a great retirement and completely running out of money during a time in your life when there are no do-overs.

3. Enhanced Legacy for Your Loved Ones Eventually, what began as an emergency fund becomes a significant tax-free inheritance for your beneficiaries, giving you a “permission slip” to spend more of your other assets in retirement and magnifying the impact of your financial planning across generations.

The Whole Life Advantage

While traditional emergency fund vehicles focus solely on preserving capital, whole life insurance provides additional economic benefits that banks simply cannot match for the same dollar amount:

• A growing death benefit that protects your family

• The ability to collateralize your cash value for loans

• Tax advantages on growth and distributions

• Protection from creditors in many states

• Guaranteed growth regardless of market conditions

In today's economic environment, where every dollar needs to work efficiently, whole life insurance represents a strategic approach to emergency fund planning that aligns with broader financial goals rather than compartmentalizing them.

By rethinking how we approach emergency savings, we can create more resilient financial foundations that serve multiple purposes simultaneously—providing peace of mind today while building wealth for tomorrow.

StackedLife Podcast

Episode 6: Who is the ideal candidate for Infinite Banking?

As much as I hate to admit it, The Infinite Banking Concept isn’t for everyone. But the list of who IBC is not for is a lot shorter than the list of who it is for.

See if you are an ideal candidate for IBC:

Listen to the podcast episode

Read about it here

I’m John Perrings, Authorized Infinite Banking Practitioner and founder of StackedLife. Instead of taking high risk to get a high return, we help our clients implement strategies that create multiple safe returns with the same money. It’s geometric compounding that we call Stacked Interest Acceleration and IBC is the first step.

I’ve implemented IBC for hundreds of my clients and educated thousands more via my podcast, articles and courses at StackedLife.com.

Get my free mini-course, Adding Certainty to Supercharge Growth

Ever had that nagging feeling that something wasn't quite right when your financial advisor handed you that risk tolerance questionnaire? Your instincts were spot on. After all, who actually wants to lose money? The truth is, the entire concept of "risk tolerance" has been carefully crafted by the financial industry to make us accept losses as normal and necessary – but they're not.

Read this week's newsletter to discover how tools like whole life insurance and The Infinite Banking Concept let you build wealth with guarantees and control so you can stop wondering how much money you're willing to lose and start focusing on how much wealth you want to build.

When was the last time you consciously chose to lose money?

If you're like most people, the answer is never. Yet somehow, when we sit down with financial planners, we're asked to fill out "risk tolerance" questionnaires that essentially ask us how comfortable we are with losing money. It's time we took a hard look at this strange phenomenon and what it means for your financial future.

The Risk Tolerance Myth

Every financial advisor's first move seems to be handing you a risk tolerance questionnaire. These forms, often filled with hypothetical scenarios about market performance, claim to measure your comfort level with investment risk. But the thing is, I think the entire concept of risk tolerance itself is fundamentally flawed.

The financial industry has masterfully reframed risk as something desirable, even necessary, for financial success. We've all heard the mantra: "Higher risk equals higher returns." But this oversimplified equation ignores a crucial truth – there is no direct correlation between risk and return. What exists is a relationship between volatility and potential return, but “potential” is the operative word here.

Redefining Risk in Financial Planning

Risk, in its purest form, is the probability of loss. Period. It's not a complex financial concept – it's that simple. But when's the last time your financial advisor put it that plainly?

The problem goes deeper than mere definitions. The financial industry has conditioned us to accept risk as inevitable, even desirable. We've been, as some might say, "brainwashed into the idea that you have to take risks to get higher returns." This mindset has become so pervasive that questioning it feels almost heretical in financial planning circles.

The Foundation of Financial Security: Whole Life Insurance and The Infinite Banking Concept®

What if there was a way to build wealth without surrendering to the traditional risk-return paradigm? This is where whole life insurance and The Infinite Banking Concept (IBC) enter the picture. Together, they provide something remarkable: a foundation of safety and liquidity combined with a process for maintaining control and creating safe leverage.

Whole life insurance serves as your financial bedrock, offering:

• Guaranteed cash value growth

• Death benefit protection for your family

• Tax-advantaged accumulation

• Protection from market volatility

• Contractual guarantees from a mutual insurance company

But it's when you implement The Infinite Banking Concept that these benefits truly multiply. IBC isn't just about having a whole life policy – it's about using that policy as your personal banking system. This approach gives you:

• Complete control over your banking function

• The ability to create safe leverage through policy loans

• A systematic process for building wealth without market risk

• The opportunity for uninterrupted compound growth

• A strategic framework for making financial decisions

Beyond Market Risk: A Broader Perspective

When we talk about financial risk, the conversation typically centers on market volatility. However, this narrow focus obscures other crucial types of risk that can impact your financial well-being:

• Health risks that could affect your earning capacity

• Political risks that could impact tax rates and policies

• Liquidity risks that could leave you unable to access your money when needed

• Sequence-of-returns risk that could devastate your retirement plans

With IBC and whole life insurance as your foundation, you're better positioned to handle these risks. Your policy's guaranteed cash value provides a volatility buffer, while policy loans offer flexibility and control that traditional banking relationships simply can't match.

The Foundation-First Approach

Instead of starting with risk tolerance, what if we began with a foundation-first mindset? This approach prioritizes:

1. Establishing guarantees in your financial life through whole life insurance

2. Maintaining control over your assets through the IBC process

3. Ensuring liquidity when you need it via policy loans

4. Creating a volatility buffer independent of market performance

5. Building a “banking system” you control, not one that controls you

This isn't about avoiding all risk – it's about being strategic about where and when you take risks. Having the certainty whole life insurance provides allows you to be more aggressive in other areas, should you choose to be, because you know your core financial needs are protected.

Strategic Growth Without Unnecessary Risk

The beauty of combining whole life insurance with IBC is that it allows you to pursue growth opportunities without exposing yourself to unnecessary market risk. Through policy loans, you can:

• Invest in business opportunities

• Purchase cash-flowing real estate

• Take advantage of market opportunities when others are fearful

• Create additional streams of income

All while knowing your primary store of capital remains protected and growing steadily in your policy.

The Retirement Planning Paradox

Perhaps nowhere is the risk tolerance paradox more evident than in retirement planning. Traditional approaches often rely on probabilities and best-case scenarios – a strategy that doesn't make much sense since you only get one shot at getting it right. As retirement expert Wade Pfau points out, unless you have a solid plan to manage volatility in your retirement income stage, you're left with limited options: save more, take more risk, work longer, or reduce your retirement expectations.

But with a properly structured whole life insurance policy and IBC strategy, you have another option: predictable, tax-advantaged income that's not dependent on market performance.

A New Framework for Financial Decision-Making

Instead of asking about risk tolerance, we should be asking different questions:

• How much of your financial future are you willing to leave to chance?

• What level of control do you want over your assets?

• How important is liquidity to your financial peace of mind?

• What guarantees do you need to sleep well at night?

• Is your need for financing during your life in your control?

Moving Forward

Remember this: You're not required to accept unnecessary risk just because it's industry standard. Consider instead:

• Building a strong financial foundation with whole life insurance

• Implementing The Infinite Banking Concept to maximize control and efficiency

• Creating a volatility buffer through guaranteed cash value growth

• Taking a long-term, disciplined approach to wealth building

• Focusing on opportunities and flexibility rather than just returns

Risk tolerance shouldn't be about how much money you're willing to lose – it should be about how much control you're willing to maintain over your financial future. With whole life insurance and IBC, you can build that control systematically while maintaining safety and liquidity.

Remember, the goal isn't to eliminate all risk – that's impossible. The goal is to be intentional about our risks and build a strong financial foundation to weather any storm. After all, true financial planning isn't about chasing returns; it's about creating security, maintaining control, and building lasting wealth through proven systems like The Infinite Banking Concept.

What is whole life insurance cash value?

The cash value is one of the most enticing aspects of whole life insurance and, yet, one of the most misunderstood!

Get the real deal on this incredible cash-equivalent asset here:

Listen to the podcast episode

Read about it here

I’m John Perrings, Authorized Infinite Banking Practitioner and founder of StackedLife. Instead of taking high risk to get a high return, we help our clients implement strategies that create multiple safe returns with the same money. It’s geometric compounding that we call Stacked Interest Acceleration and IBC is the first step.

I’ve implemented IBC for hundreds of my clients and educated thousands more via my podcast, articles, and courses at StackedLife.com.

Get my free mini-course, Adding Certainty to Supercharge Growth.

Today I want to talk about a different approach - The Infinite Banking Concept (IBC). But more specifically, I want to address the biggest obstacle I see stopping people our age from getting started: the pursuit of perfection.

Here's the truth: The biggest mistake people make with IBC isn't choosing the wrong insurance company or getting their policy designed incorrectly - it's waiting too long trying to make everything perfect.

Why This Matters to Gen X & Y

We're in our prime earning years, but we're also old enough to have lived through multiple market crashes. We know the traditional financial playbook isn't all it's cracked up to be. But here's what's wild - the alternative that's been hiding in plain sight is actually really hard to mess up.

Think About It This Way Remember when you got your first apartment? You didn't wait until you could afford your dream home with perfect furniture. You started where you could and upgraded over time.

IBC works the same way. There is a "capitalization period" where you're building your foundation. But unlike that first apartment's IKEA furniture, your IBC policy is guaranteed to get better every single year.

The Only Way to Actually Mess Up

Here's the ironic part - the only way to truly mess up a whole life policy is by doing what all the TikTokers tell everyone to do, which is overemphasizing and overengineering a policy for maximum cash value in year 1. Across the industry, the only design that could cause a catastrophic problem with whole life is super high early cash value.

All things being equal, we of course want as much cash value as possible, as early as possible. But when it comes to all types of insurance, everything is a tradeoff. And high early cash value comes with significant tradeoffs that are rarely disclosed to clients because high early cash value is, frankly, easier to sell.

Because to get really high early cash value, non-guaranteed policy elements (other than the dividend) may be used. These are pretty much the only thing that can cause a policy to completely blow up without you doing anything wrong. And you likely won’t even know about it until it’s too late.

What You Really Need to Know:

1. IBC is about creating your own banking system, not winning a rate-of-return contest

2. Your policy will have immediate cash value, but it will be less than what you paid in premium for a few years.

3. Every year it gets better - more cash value, more flexibility, more options

4. You're in control - not your agent and not your cousin who thinks whole life is a “terrible investment.”

Quick Reality Check

• Typical financial advice tells us to lock our money away for decades

• Then cross our fingers hoping the market doesn't crash when we need it

• Meanwhile, we're financing everything through banks and giving away our banking profit

Infinite Banking with whole life insurance is the opposite. The outcome is known. You maintain control, build guaranteed wealth, and create options for yourself rather than restrictions.

The Simple Truth

Getting started with IBC doesn't require perfect timing or a perfect strategy. It requires understanding that you're building your own source of financing that will serve you for life. The sooner you begin, the sooner you can start creating what Nelson Nash calls a "financial tailwind" - making everything in your financial life more efficient and effective.

Learn more at StackedLife.com.

Listen to this full podcast episode and subscribe at Stackedlifepodcast.com/4.

In the news - interest rates

Higher and lower interest rates and what it means for Infinite Banking.

Interest rates are everywhere in the news lately. When I talk with clients about starting their IBC journey, one of their first questions is often "Should I wait until rates come down?" Let me explain why this thinking misses the bigger picture.

Think about interest rates like a tide that lifts (or lowers) all boats. When rates for borrowing are higher, rates for saving are typically higher too. While it's true that policy loan rates might increase during periods like this, that's not necessarily a bad thing for your banking system. In fact, this environment creates some interesting opportunities - similar to when Nelson Nash first wrote "Becoming Your Own Banker."

Here's something most people don't realize: rising rates can actually benefit life insurance companies, and by extension, policy owners like you. These companies invest premiums in long-term debt instruments, earning higher yields when rates rise. This often leads to increased dividend payments over time. While dividends don't jump immediately with interest rates (they tend to lag prevailing rates), this slower movement actually helps create stability in your IBC “banking system.”

Whole life rates tend to trail prevailing rates, so there’s always a benefit.

Low interest rate environments

During low-interest rate environments, bank loan rates may be lower than policy loan rates, but policy growth rates will be significantly higher than a typical savings account, CD, or even a bond.

Rising interest rate environments

When interest rates are rising, savings accounts and CD’s become more competitive, but policy loan rates tend to be better than a typical bank loan.

But here's what really matters: IBC isn't about chasing the best interest rates - it's about controlling your banking function. Your whole life policy gives you guaranteed growth, tax advantages, and flexible access to your capital no matter what rates are doing. Instead of being forced to dance to the market's tune, you get to make strategic decisions based on opportunities you see.

Just look at what happens in the traditional financial world when rates change: people rush to refinance mortgages when rates drop or scramble to lock in CD rates when they rise. It's reactive, not strategic. With IBC, you're building your own banking system that works for you regardless of what's happening with interest rates.

The banking function will always be essential to your financial life - that's not changing anytime soon. By controlling this function through IBC, you're positioning yourself to benefit in any economic climate. Whether rates are high or low, you maintain access to capital through policy loans, which you can use to take advantage of opportunities or navigate economic challenges.

Think of IBC like owning your own bank - you wouldn't close your bank just because interest rates changed, would you? Instead, you adapt your strategy while maintaining the core function of your banking system.

I’m John Perrings, an authorized Infinite Banking practitioner and founder of StackedLife, where we implement full-stack financial strategies for our clients.

I’ve helped hundreds of my clients and educated thousands more via my top-rated podcast, reaching over 60,000 unique listeners, along with my articles and courses at StackedLife.com.

Want to work with me? — Schedule a free consultation here →

Already a client / member? — Schedule a time to catch up here →

P.S. — Here’s a $14 million dollar conversation that anyone can benefit from and has nothing to do with investment returns.

Subscribe now