98: Great Ideas from the 2024 IBC Think Tank

098 Great Ideas from the 2024 IBC Think Tank

[00:00:00] Hello, everyone. I'm John Montoya, and I'm John Perrings. We're authorized Infinite Banking Practitioners and hosts of the Strategic Whole Life Podcast.

Episode number 98. Great ideas from the 2024 infinite banking think tank. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the strategic whole life podcast. This week is a little bit of a special episode. We're actually hosted by wealth warehouse with Dave Befort and Paul Fugere.. And, we got together with a couple other colleagues from Cash Flow Legendz, that's Brandon Goswick and Nate Dean.

And we did a little round table discussion about some of the ideas and takeaways we got from this year's. Uh, think tank held by the Nelson Nash Institute and Las Vegas, Nevada. I'll post links to those guys, podcasts. You should definitely give them a listen as well as ours. And I hope you get something out of this episode. We'll be back next week with Montoya, regular scheduled programming. Enjoy.

Dave Befort: Hey, everybody. [00:01:00] we are, joined this week by a few other IBC practitioners. So we are on site in Las Vegas at the 2024 IBC Think Tank.

we just finished up two pretty incredible days with some pretty incredible people. and we wanted to, as Paul and I always do. bring you guys our big, golden nuggets and lessons learned from the last couple of days. So we decided we'd mix it up a little bit this year and bring in some other big time practitioners.

On my left, your right, we got, John Perrings, who has, been a practitioner for, we met here five years ago. and, John has also got a podcast called Strategic Whole Life. That's another great one with true content that you can trust. And to my right, your left, we got Nate Dean and Brandon Goswick, a couple of Texas boys who, we met [00:02:00] about five years ago as well.

And we've been pretty tight ever since. And, they've got a podcast also. Cashflow Legends with a Z. so give it a listen. you, any of these podcasts, you guys are going to get great content and true content in accordance with what Nelson wanted us to teach and, and continue spreading to all of you guys.

So what I wanted to do today is, like we do every year when we're here and do this recording is, what was the big thing that you guys got from the last couple of days? So who wants to start?

Nate Dean: I think there were two things for me. One is, those that knew Nelson knew that he was a giver, and he freely gave the gift of IBC to anyone who would listen.

And we see so much of that in our community. They're like, they're, everybody in the room is just willing to help. In some [00:03:00] way, help you get started. If you're brand new, if you're a veteran, but you're struggling like, Hey, let's, let me show you, share some things that are working for me that could help, your business and stuff like that.

So from a practitioner standpoint, there's a lot of givers in the room, in our community, from a practical standpoint, as far as just life insurance in general, one of the key moments for me was the idea, and I never thought about it this way. But the idea of our death benefit as it is a perpetuation of our income to the next generation.

And I've never, I've been doing this a while and I've never thought about it that way, but it was just a really cool reminder. Of the things that we are doing, for ourselves and for our clients and stuff like that.

John Perrings: yeah,

Paul Furgere: I always get re baseline when we come here, reinvigorated, there's always somebody as Nate was just saying that has a unique way of looking at IBC.[00:04:00]

Nate has a great video out there about, purchasing a car, right? and how you, how resonated with you back then. And we were just talking about this last night where he had forgot, forgotten about that content that was some of your original stuff that resonated with, with hundreds of people, if not thousands of people probably by now.

so it's nice to always Get reinvigorated, get re baselined and get motivated. and like you said, it's a giving community of just humble people and it's, and there's some just absolute rock stars. And I've always said this, the best life insurance agents in North America are here this week.

Dave Befort: Yeah,

John Perrings: I would, I guess two or three fold for me. the first one is we've spent the last maybe two or three years really talking about. [00:05:00] protecting the, infinite banking brand, where, there's a lot of, Nelson talked about noise in the financial world where, I guess 15 years into it, there was a lot of noise in the IBC world as well with like different, videos on YouTube and whatever, podcasts and things like that of people that are not even really IBC practitioners that are latching onto the name.

And that caused, I would say a lot of confusion in terms of like how policy should be designed, what's the correct way to do this. It maybe created a lowest common denominator commodity driven sale where it was all just, hey, look how much cash value this has.

And it completely ignores all the trade offs and, some of the other superpowers that whole life insurance has. And what I noticed in this one was, We talked about it the last, two or three times, but, [00:06:00] this was the first one that it, like when I was in the room, first of all, it was a much bigger room, so the movement has grown, but when I was in the room, it really And people were talking about like guys like Ryan Griggs and James Nethery and, and, David Stearns even, and it felt like everyone was synced up on the message.

a couple of years ago, it was people were like, Oh, is he talking about me? That kind of thing. But, this time everyone was really in agreement on that. and then from a tactical point of view, interview just from a, working with clients perspective, a lot of people that end up talking to me because of my background in tech, I end up talking to a lot of like W2 employees, engineers, people in the tech space that, are just looking for Ways to do things.

And one of the talks that was given, really [00:07:00] was a great way to, clarify the different types of assets in our life. And it was the one where he talked about, hey, in these circles, these are, this is all the stuff in your financial life that is out of your control. That you have no control over, you're taking all the risk on it.

And this is the portion that, that, that is, is in your control. Usually when, when someone's, especially if they're first starting out in IBC, they have very little in the green circles where you have control over that asset. Most, almost everything is in some type of asset where they're taking all the risk and giving up all the control, like 401ks, real estate, things like that.

I really like those two things. I can just leave it at that for now. Yeah, I like that.

Dave Befort: you say the parts of your financial life that are out of your control, but it's a choice. it's not out of their control. like the weather is out of our control. It's out of their control.

Like they made a choice and now they chose to [00:08:00] send their money somewhere they now have zero control over, take 100 percent of the risk and can't access without penalty.

John Perrings: And just like it was a choice to start that, they can, the good news is they can make the choice to not do that anymore pretty simply.

So that's a good call.

Brandon Goswick: Probably one of the biggest takeaways I had was this reality that we're all going to live until we don't, and we're all not going to make it out alive. as a practitioner, the thing I took away that was the most impactful was if we think about the people that we're blessed to get connected with, whoever that is in every walk of our life, we're our ideal person we want to spend time with is somebody that we wouldn't mind hanging out with this.

That's our ideal person. one, we're very fortunate that we get to do something where. Our clients become much more than that. They become people that we were flying to a certain place in the world and they're there, we're going to probably hang out with them, which there's not a lot of businesses like that, where you look people up.

So we're not going to get out of here alive. [00:09:00] So what if we, as practitioners, think about every opportunity when we meet someone, what do I want them to be able to say about me, our company, how we treat people, when it's time to deliver the guaranteed death benefit that's going to occur when they die and work backwards from there.

And what I think that really does is it puts you in a frame of, is our heart and our mind really in the right place? So if I were going to package that up for anybody new, because there's so many new people here. That's how you really need to be thinking, beyond that first commission, but it's well, it's much deeper of how are you going to help people for the rest of their life?

And the cool thing is when we do that well, we get to have lots of awesome conversations all the time. So that was my biggest takeaway as far as how we think. You

Nate Dean: know, when someone does leave this earth, there's typically a lot of burdens that come along that are left behind to other people.

And there's going to be tax implications with other assets. There's going to be all kinds of, [00:10:00] different things that people are going to have to navigate and go through. When you are,

Dave Befort: when you're dealing with grief,

Nate Dean: And there's a financial burden that comes with the grief. It compounds the grieving process, makes it much more difficult to go through those things.

And so when you think about it from that perspective, like we are the financial all star for our clients. Like we are the most important person in their life because on the day that they are struggling the most, we're gonna show up to their fam. Or the day they pass away, we're gonna show up to their family with.

A massive blessing with a peace of mind, like all those things are going to come walking in the door. And, the most important thing for us is like, how have we properly prepared for that day, for that client? because, we could get into this right now, the idea of capturing as [00:11:00] much of your insurability becomes extremely important when you think long term.

Dave Befort: Yeah. And while we're on that topic, just that what it did hit home because I don't think any of us have ever delivered a death benefit check to a client yet. Thank God. if you're in the business long enough, it's going to happen. And we had a couple producers. Up there telling their stories and how, when that happened, they were able to hand deliver that check and allow those families to mourn, and give them the time and the, ability to step away from work, step away from their normal day to day responsibilities and go through that

Nate Dean: mourning process.

Brandon Goswick: One of the things that tied to that is that, and we know this, but we don't, I don't always simplify it like this, but whole life. When we understand the power of it, we want as much as possible. And it is connected to two [00:12:00] things unlike anything else in the market that we're taught about. It is a when event.

It's going to occur when I die. There's no ifs. And it also is going to be directly related to my behavior and how impactful that when moment is. There's no other financial product that I know of that you control those two variables at that level. And so that really jumped out at me as one of the things that we all bring to the table is we have a unique way to connect with people differently because of our backgrounds.

But as I was telling a new agent, figure out where your voice is so you can connect with the people that really that will resonate with because that, that matters. and if you ever speak to anybody who's been in an experience where they don't have any death benefit, And all of the pain and grief that comes with that Knight's Rider does get compounded and nobody ever wishes that on their worst enemy.

Yeah. Yeah.

John Perrings: so we all have in common at Cashflow Legends, the third [00:13:00] guy that's not here is Brock and his, his dad has been a mentor to all of us in this business. And I was at a, another, two day workshop with Trent and his group. And there were a couple of, 40 year, life insurance agents in there who have delivered many death claims. And, one of the things that they said was not a single, beneficiary asked what the rate of return on the cash value was. it's just, that's the kind of wisdom that, I think, I see.

Keep in mind from people that have been doing this for a long time and have really seen, how much that helps a family in their in some of their worst hours. And, so and that's especially important when people are new to IBC. Of course, we're What kind of gets us hooked is that cash value and being able to leverage the cash value.

[00:14:00] And all of that will still happen, but understanding really what happens, for all those reasons you guys were just talking about with the death benefit. Another thing that just clicked in my mind was, I can't remember which one of you was talking about, just the giving nature of everything is you, Nate.

The giving nature of everybody and kind of separates this group, I think is, and just agents and practitioners in general from the rest of the spaces. Everyone's really looking at this as a group effort. Everyone has to come into this together to really, make a difference, especially, really for our clients.

Whereas if you look out there in a lot of other spaces, it's all. It's really an individual thing where, I've, been invited to some, conferences of, some different, they get into the multi level marketing side and it's all about like individual production numbers and where you rank up.

And [00:15:00] of course, all the insurance companies have their rewards programs and all that stuff. some of that's built in there, but like The, at the end of the day, what gives life insurance all of its superpowers is the fact that it's done in a mutual fashion with actuarial science using the law of large numbers.

So it's the, it's all of us working together, in the mutual company. That makes it all possible. And so people, start to, and I think that was talked about over the last couple of days where, people get really caught up in what's the interest rate of this? What's your, what's the interest rate of that?

And it's that's not what, that's not the story. Like what we're doing here is creating a guaranteed outcome. That to your point, we don't know when that will happen. If you don't speak Texas, I say, when he says, when we don't know when that will happen, but we can create a guaranteed outcome at the end.[00:16:00]

Whenever that does happen, we can create a guaranteed outcome when it does happen. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with paying a known price to create certainty out of a future outcome. And that's really, part of what we're doing here. Yeah.

Paul Furgere: it's one of those things, gentlemen, where we all know what we got with dividend paying whole life, right?

In the process of IBC. and it's a shame, we're trying to do this thing here in the Nelson Nash Institute of building the 10%. That was talked about a lot this week. and what, what that is, if we can get 10 percent of the population to practice IBC, we can turn the tide in the direction of this country's financial.

if you don't know, we're at 33 trillion in debt, give or take, and, it's unsustainable, right? So we know what we have. We just need to, convince the American public, just one, one client at a time, one family at a time that this product is phenomenal, [00:17:00] right? It's got guarantees.

We don't care about the rate of return. Nobody asks what the rate of return is when you deliver that check. All these themes and facts, but we're

Brandon Goswick: fighting,

Paul Furgere: we're fighting the big banks, we're fighting the financial entertainers. That's it. who's ads are all over the internet and whose ads

Nate Dean: have false

Paul Furgere: information.

We sent, I sent one to Dave the other day. I was like, look at this, it's, that's a lie. That's a lie. That's a lie. so folks, this is a concept, and a product worth your exploration. It's worth your time. Nelson's book is 92 pages. take several thorough readings, but it is worth your effort and your time to dig into this concept.

And become your own banker at the you and me

Dave Befort: level. Yeah, I'd say one of the things that really stuck out to me, I think it was Jason Lowe saying a quote by, David Stearns. But [00:18:00] IBC is not a plan. It's a lifestyle. And I think that was a big theme this week is everybody, every time I come to this, especially this time, maybe not every time, but especially this time I leave at the end of this, I'm thinking I need to be putting more money into premium.

I need to up my premium drastic. Because it's a lifestyle and that people up there presenting to us, we're giving examples of how their lifestyle is infinite banking. It's not just something that, that they promote or they teach or a product that they sell. Like it's a lifestyle that they live. And we all live that to a certain level.

Everybody lives it to a different level, but I know after this, I need to up my level. Of how committed I am to that lifestyle.

John Perrings: Peop people talk about plans, they're used to going and getting a financial plan and that creates the, so plans versus lifestyle, creates this mindset where it's oh, I met [00:19:00] with my financial planner and he gave me the plan.

And it's so I have it. I'm, I think I'm done now. I can just do this plan. It's getting a house plan and never building

Nate Dean: a house.

John Perrings: I got it though. I got the plan.

Nate Dean: Yeah. What's it gonna really do for me in my life? How am I gonna, yeah.

John Perrings: It's not a lifestyle, so it's just like I got the.

I did the meeting.

Dave Befort: Now I'm good. And it's somebody else's plan. It's not a choice you made to alter your lifestyle and go down a completely different road. You're just You know, letting somebody else determine what your plan is. John

Nate Dean: said something earlier about, matching that guarantee. something that Trent says is, we're matching a guaranteed event with a guaranteed contract.

And where people get hung up is they look at the cost of whole life insurance. they never look at the cost of everything else they're doing. They just, they look at that, but whole life insurance comes with a guaranteed return no matter what. Like it, it's self completing in what, in, as long as you're, [00:20:00] treating it properly and, all the, all these things, but, no one ever calculates the lost opportunity cost of money sitting in qualified plans and things like that.

and there's no guarantees in those things. The only guarantee in a qualified plan is you could lose everything. Yep. There

Brandon Goswick: was, there was some, we had a panel up there of some of the most stable mutual companies. Okay, and I won't go into what they said exactly, but there was something that I took away from it.

anybody that is really genuine with how their financial life has gone, that's our age or older, will tell you it's been a roller coaster. That's just the truth. And, but what they I'll admit that. Same here. when you recognize that, what you then come to the realization of is that a lot of the things that we're taught are really just to keep us on that rollercoaster.

That's the only goal. as I was listening to one of the guys up there speak, who's been in the industry for a long time, he says, interest rates are going to go up, they're going to [00:21:00] go down. Yeah. But when they walk through the reality of how sound their science is because of large numbers without nerding out too much, it makes you realize that you could not put your money anywhere else safer first TheFifthEdition.

com Period, point blank, no questions asked. And you got guys who've seen it for 40 years plus, and they're like, and they even brought up COVID and how it was almost a

Dave Befort: blip, not

Brandon Goswick: an issue. Compare that to other industries. It devastated it. They closed all these things. So when you realize that piece, you realize that this is far beyond just operating in a box that's in a year window.

Dave Befort: I had an epiphany. We were talking at lunch, me and Paul, and, he and I have, we've lost money before in investments. and when I was thinking about it, I was like, the money that I put towards that investment, it was money. I didn't take a loan from my policy. It was extra capital that was sitting in my bank account because I didn't have any [00:22:00] more room in my policies.

All the loans were paid back. All the premium was paid. That money was sitting there. If, so it was ripe for an opportunity that came along that, that I didn't vet well enough. Because it was sitting there and I was like, I can't put it anywhere else because I don't have any more policy room. So I'm just going to put it here.

If that money had been sitting in a policy, I don't think I ever would have taken a loan to go do that investment. It was David on the top of the roof, looking at Bathsheba, like he was not doing what he was supposed to do. He was bored, right? He was supposed to be at war. He was bored.

And By golly, the temptation seized him, just like it did with my money, because it was sitting there, it was bored, it wasn't doing anything. You

Paul Furgere: know, I've heard, James say this a few times over the years, and he's older than all of us, but the more, more capital he's accumulated over the years, other things

Dave Befort: have become less interesting to him.

Yeah.

Paul Furgere: [00:23:00] and I, took that to heart. That was in November, and I really took that to heart. And it's and I've been telling some of my clients this who are high income earners. I was like, Hey, you know what? Go do what you're going to go do. You're good at being an orthopedic surgeon or a physician's assistant or a pilot, whatever you're doing, go do that.

And then do this. And then that was, someone said black swan event today, wait for that.

John Perrings: And you'll be, and you'll be ready to go.

Paul Furgere: Instead of doing all these kind of, these little incremental, mildly investing, because it's there, maybe high risk, it's, everything's an opportunity. Wait for that big one.

it may be once every decade, right? But wait for

Nate Dean: it. So we had this epiphany in our past, in like earlier in our business, as we started accumulating more capital, we started looking at, Trying to find ways to [00:24:00] put money to work instead of letting opportunities actually show up to us.

We were forcing that and we equated it to, we learned a few chords on the guitar and then we challenged Carlos Santana to a guitar battle. like that's,

John Perrings: it wasn't pretty. Yeah. It wasn't pretty at

Nate Dean: all. and if we would have just kept learning slow and steady, accumulating that capital and doing it the right way, and then the right opportunities would have shown up.

And we would have made a lot better decisions with those things. cause just like you we lost money in investments as

Brandon Goswick: well. So Dave's mentioning when we have capital and it goes out and I'm coming off the heels of experiencing that. And I can literally reflect back now and go, if I had to put that 50, 7, 500 grand, if I had to prioritize capitalizing in my most valuable asset and protect it at first, I would have been in it, but we have to learn those lessons.

But here's the thing I can tell you, cause I've been on both sides. You cannot factor in the [00:25:00] rate of return on peace of mind until you don't have it and wish you did and you can't get it. Yeah. And there's a big piece about like you're telling your clients. Hey, nothing's wrong with just funding this financial heart of everything you're doing and get it as strong as possible.

Then decide how you want to go from there. Start there. So that's good. You

John Perrings: know, one of the concepts from some of the people talking about cashflow during these last couple of days is like adding a little speed bump to just not a bad way where it's slowing you down. Overall, but it's just adding a step that gives you an extra beat to think about things.

Yeah. Good. Yeah. Pause is a good way to say it where, some people will be like, I wish I could just do policy loans online. And I, sometimes you can, some, carriers, you have to call first or felt even fill out a form maybe. to get access to that capital and, I think that's a good thing because, if you take it to the other [00:26:00] extreme, what if they had policy loan credit cards, which by the way, I've thought about before, we should have that, and it's actually, that's not a good thing.

It's we want to have a little bit of a separation, so that the spending is not, conscious. We want to make. The savings part unconscious. And we want to make the spending part and investing part very

Dave Befort: conscious. It's like when you're going to delete an app, you hold it down, you hit delete, and then it says, are you sure you want to delete this?

And you have to hit delete again. And sometimes maybe a third time, but yeah, that's what it is. It is a, it slows you down. It makes you think a little harder because it's going to take you a couple of days to get that money. from your policy.

John Perrings: it's forcing us to go step by step. Like we have people, other people in our lives on the other side of things that talk about it's, the order of operations.

And so many people I talked to, that's why the high cash value things have come about because people don't have any patience and they feel like they're missing out. They get [00:27:00] FOMO. And so they, they start putting the cart before the horse and they just. Try to invest in anything that they can to your point of just like trying to force it.

And, Montoya on our podcast the other day had a great one liner. He's when you're building a house, you can't start with the roof. And so it's you've got to build the foundation. It's step by step. You dig the hole, you build the foundation, then you put up the framework. you can't, skip the steps because if you do and any one thing goes wrong, To your point, Brandon, the whole thing comes down

Nate Dean: from a physiological standpoint, as Brandon was talking about making your whole life strategy, the heart of everything, like the stronger our heart is, the more endurance our muscles have.

So the stronger that we can position ourselves with the

John Perrings: most important

Nate Dean: thing, the better off, the more strength we're going to have going out of that. [00:28:00] and the more endurance we're, we're going to be able to endure a lot more If we have focused on strengthening that part first,

John Perrings: and if you just, all you got to do is look at the numbers, really like everyone, when they analyze numbers, they look at one year or maybe two years.

It's so weird. But if you look at 30 years, It's there's no question if you capitalize with Whole Life first and then do your investing. It's the only way, black and white,

Dave Befort: obviously, the only way dividend paying Whole Life insurance doesn't work is if you don't do

John Perrings: it. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Befort: anybody got any closing thoughts? Paul, you got anything? It's closing. Besides how awesome it was to spend so much time sitting next to me and sharing a room with me. yeah,

Paul Furgere: that's fairly obvious. no, other than that, I, I've been to three of these now. and some may disagree.

this, I thought this was the best one I've personally been [00:29:00] to, for various reasons. again, I get recaged, I get back to the basics. I get re remotivated and, get thinking about paying more premium. Of course, every time, like, how can I do it?

Cause I'm a firm believer. You can't pay enough whole life premium. you just can't. So no, I really enjoyed it. It's always good to just, break bread with. With my friends in the business and like minded people and, we're on a growing island here. I think it's, it's a small island, but it's getting, we're building upon it.

And, great guys like this make it easy to do Blessed to be here and, and humbled.

Dave Befort: Yeah. it was an awesome time, time to go pay more premium. So that's what I'm going to do when I get back next week. I'm going to reevaluate things and probably either convert some of that big term I have for, apply for another policy, but, time to pay [00:30:00] more premium, man.

I'm motivated. Hey, thanks for joining guys. And, Hey, check out these podcasts. we'll put their links in the show notes and Hey, until next week, control your capital

Paul Furgere: or somebody else will.