Infinite Banking for Real Estate Investors

Mike Hambright (00:00.75)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with Chris Miles. We’re going to be talking about how to use infinite banking as a real estate investor. If you’re not already using it, you’ve probably heard the phrase a lot and we’re going to take a deep dive into what it is and how to use it as an investor. So Chris, welcome to the show. Yeah, this is one of those topics that comes up every once in a while. And I know I’ve got opinions on everything. I know a lot. I know a little bit about a lot of things.

Chris Miles (00:16.05)
Hey man, it’s good to be here.

Mike Hambright (00:28.294)
and I know enough about it to be dangerous. And so I’m excited to kind of jump into your mind today to tell us a little bit more about Infinite Banking. But hey, before we start that, tell us a little bit about your background, because I know you didn’t start as an infinite banking expert. Yeah.

Chris Miles (00:41.618)
No, no, I didn’t even start out in real estate either. Actually, I was going to college, I was planning to become a business consultant, but I figured if I’m gonna do that, I should have a real life business experience. So I decided to actually take a break from college before I got my degree and just like a little sabbatical, right? I thought, let’s find some business to start. And the first one that became kind of intriguing to me was being a financial advisor. I didn’t know they would just take anybody off the street, you know, as long as you had a heartbeat and could pass a test with 70 % and not be a, you know, someone who.

murdered someone at some point or robbed a bank, you can become a financial advisor. And so I started down that path. And again, my whole purpose was I wanted to learn about money because growing up in my house, like it was always, we can’t afford this. What do think I am made of money? Money doesn’t grow in trees, know, those kinds of things you hear growing up. And so my dad would even tell me, he worked in the automotive industry, you know, and he just said, Chris, this job is going to literally kill me. I’m going to die working. And he’d already had.

strokes and heart attacks by his 40s and 50s. So I figured, you know what? I want to do something different. So let’s learn about this. Maybe I can even help my dad. So I got into it, loved it. I drank the Kool-Aid. I was telling him to set and forget it and put in crappy mutual funds and all that kind of stuff, right? And then after four years, my dad reached out. He says, well, when are you going to advise me? So I sat down with him, saw his money for the first time in my life because he was always very guarded and protective of it. And as I looked at it, you know, he paid off his debt.

18 years including his house. So he’s mortgage and debt-free He had stuffed money in his 401k for several years and got the company matched like good boys and little girls should and And I looked at it. I said dad. Here’s a deal. You’re 61 years old if you want to retire today You’re gonna have to die in about five or six years because that’s when you’re gonna run out of money It’s like okay. That’s not the answer. I was hoping to get I want to quit I said well

Mike Hambright (02:24.067)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (02:28.293)
All right. Yeah.

Chris Miles (02:31.634)
Unless you want to quit life, you’re probably gonna have to keep working. He’s like, what else can I do? I said, I don’t know. You did everything right from what I teach as a financial advisor, which is basically like the Dave Ramsey crap, right? And so anyways, I walked away pretty upset. And of course, when the students ready, the teacher appears, little did I know the teacher would have been my previous student. Because there was actually a guy that was a financial advisor I trained, but then this guy left, quit the business to go do this thing called real estate investing.

And so him and I are chatting and he’s like, Chris, my dad and I have partnered on some real estate deals and we’ve now doubled his income as a professor at the local university. I say, come on, that’s too good to be true. There’s no way that’s possible. My financial advisor brain can’t handle this, right? Cause you know, 10, 12 % of the max you should get is in the stock market and that’s it. And so he finally just stopped me. He’s like, well, Chris, how many of your clients are really financially free where they don’t worry about money?

I well, even the retired ones worry about outliving their money, so none? Okay, Chris, I did expect you to be honest, but that works. Oh, how about this, Chris? How many of you guys as financial advisors are financially free, not off the commissions you’re earning, but actually doing these investments? And understand, this was in 2005, and the guys that were working in my office, some of them have there since the 1970s. And I said, well, none? He’s like, there’s your problem.

And so I started going down the rabbit hole. He told me, go get the book. Who took my money by Robert Kiyosaki. It’s a lesser known rich dad book. Basically says mutual funds suck. And, and there’s like, then listen to this AM talk radio show. Cause this is pre podcast era, right? of these two real estate investors talking about real estate. so I did, you know, listen to that AM talk radio show here in Utah every single morning for two hours a day. And, most of time they weren’t talking about real estate. They were talking about like founding fathers and principles of abundance and things like that, you know, and a mindset and that sort of thing. And so, but I,

I started getting into it. I eventually went to one of their real estate seminars a few months later. And in the middle of that seminar, I realized I got to quit. I can’t stay as a financial advisor because either I ignore everything I’ve been learning that actually does work or, you know, and I just keep working in the business or I quit the business, keep my integrity intact. And so I chose a ladder. I quit. I would never teach about money again. I’ll just be a mortgage broker because it’s 2006 by this point. I’ll be a mortgage broker and I’ll teach ballroom dancing on the side.

Chris Miles (04:54.9)
And that’s pretty much what I was doing at the time. But of course, I want to know what these guys knew. I started to learn about what they were doing with real estate. Most of these guys were flippers and things like that. And the next thing I know, like I realized I couldn’t even invest with these guys and get paid on hard money loans and things like that. And so I got to the point where eventually I was like, wait, I could actually retire. I’m 28, almost 29 years old. I can literally retire right now off the passive income. And so that’s when my whole world changed, right? That’s when I blew it up.

Mike Hambright (04:54.926)
you

Chris Miles (05:23.7)
Eventually, 2007, it came out of retirement to teach people how to do the same thing. 2008, the recession kicked my butt. Our business was failing because we were focused on real estate flippers. We were all broke. With lifestyle creep and everything else, I went from millionaire to upside down millionaire, where as over a million dollars in debt. Luckily, I able to dig out of that hole without bankruptcy, but it took a long, hard battle. By the end of 2016, I did it again. This time, it’s more of a passive investor, much more passive investor than I was before.

And been teaching people how to do that very same thing is how do you actually legitimately get out of the rat race?

Mike Hambright (05:57.878)
Yep, that’s awesome. I remember I grew up in a very blue collar family and nobody was ever teaching me anything in terms of financial, on the financial side or the success side of life, right? It was always just like, work really hard. If you work really hard, good things will happen. But the thought back then was you kind of build up this pile of savings and then hopefully you just…

you know, don’t outlive it, right, is the thing. And it was always the mindset too of, which is kind of the broke mindset of like, when I retire, I have to like cut back on all my expenses and live a simpler life. So that I don’t outlive that retirement. It’s like, wait a minute, why did you work your whole life to get to that point to like not enjoy the rest of it? You know, it’s kind of crazy, but.

Chris Miles (06:37.801)
Yeah.

Chris Miles (06:43.806)
That’s what happened with my dad. mean, he worked 40, 50 years, really about 50 years. He worked into his seventies until health kind of forced him there. And he had a few decent years where he was able to do his favorite karaoke to Johnny cash. You know, he would go to karaoke bars a couple of times a week to do that. Go fishing. Cause he loved fishing. And then the last five years since he broke both hips, he’s been pretty much bedridden, you know, and he’s alive, but he’s not living. And that’s the thing I really want people to, I really want to help prevent people from doing that is actually have that financial freedom.

Mike Hambright (06:50.156)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (07:06.466)
Yeah.

Chris Miles (07:13.36)
Now while you’re young, when you can enjoy it, when you can enjoy your family and your family still wants to spend time with you, you those kind of things.

Mike Hambright (07:14.626)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So tell me when you first learned about infinite banking and let’s talk a little bit about what that even is. So I know people have heard that phrase a lot and know little components about it. They know that it’s associated with insurance and things like that, but they don’t necessarily know what it is. And then let’s get into like how to use it as a real estate investor. But first, like what is it?

Chris Miles (07:40.168)
Yeah, so infinite banking is a strategy to use with life insurance, right? They call it infinite banking. was a guy, Nelson Nash, that created it. It was always about how do you keep flowing money in and out, right? How do you keep your dollars working for you and things like that? So instead of just throwing your money in and let it stagnate, how do you actually use that money now to create more wealth? And I first learned about it actually when I was starting to learn about all this real estate stuff. All these real estate investors were gung ho on this infinite banking concept.

And I’m like, what is this? They’re like, yeah, you use whole life insurance and you build up cash in the tax free savings account in there, not the death benefit, but the savings account. You build up the cash in there, then you can use to buy houses or cars and stuff. And I’m like, wait, whole life insurance? I was a financial advisor. We always told people it was a piece of crap. Like never use it. I don’t, I don’t know why other than it just, I was told that it gives you a low return, but I’ve never seen one before. Right. They’re like, no, it’s awesome. You got to do it.

Mike Hambright (08:33.901)
Yeah.

Chris Miles (08:36.884)
And so I started, you know, I read the book, you know, becoming your own banker. They always recommend. And then I went to the guy they all recommended, you know, and I said, although I have an insurance license, I don’t even know how to do what you guys are doing. I don’t have to design these whole life policies. And then I saw it and I was supposed to put in like a thousand bucks a month into this thing. So 12,000 a year. I said, man, this thing’s kind of expensive. I said, I know with other life insurance, I can pull different levers and make it cheaper. Can I do that? And the agent said, no, you can’t.

and said, right, well, you’re the authority, I’ll trust you. Well, as I mentioned, 2007, know, cash flow starts to become a stressor. was like in the whole 16,000 month by 2008, I’m like, hey, I can’t keep paying into this anymore. So I called the insurance company. I said, can I stop paying? They said, no, you got to keep paying into this because you have none of this cash in here. All of your money’s paying for the insurance costs. And so I lost the policy. Just a few months later, I’m talking with a friend who also bought the same kind of policy and he said, hey, did you know?

that you can actually make it perform better by reducing the costs. I said, can you? Because that guy told me I couldn’t. He’s like, yeah, you can. So I started to do my own little research. And this is back in 2008. I started to realize that the guy lied to me. And I confronted the agent. I said, listen, look, if you would have designed it this way, I wouldn’t have lost my policy. This would have had plenty of cash to keep it going and be essentially self-funding forever.

Mike Hambright (10:02.189)
Yep.

Chris Miles (10:03.316)
And by the end of it, he just said, Chris, I did it that way because I couldn’t afford to my commissions. I said, there’s the problem. And by the way, I’m never sending you in my friends or family again. And so that’s where over the last really 17 plus years now, I’ve been refining that and doing it better. And the thing is I used to refer it out to other people that would try to have that same philosophy. And like a lot of these infinite bankers will do that where you can make it little bit less costly, you know, cause that’s the thing. Whole life insurance is different than term insurance.

Mike Hambright (10:09.09)
Hmm.

Mike Hambright (10:13.677)
Yeah, yeah.

Chris Miles (10:31.892)
Term insurance is just death insurance, right? And costs go up over time. Whole life starts out kind of expensive, almost like when you buy a house and you have a mortgage payment, but that payment is fixed. And it can be fixed for your whole life. Where term insurance goes up over time, whole life has more expenses front-loaded and then it gets cheaper over time. So kind like when you pay on a house and then you pay more to interest than principal, but then more and more goes to principal. Similar kind of concept, right?

Mike Hambright (10:42.03)
Hmm.

Mike Hambright (10:49.805)
Okay.

Mike Hambright (10:54.838)
Right. Yep.

Chris Miles (10:57.044)
So anyways, eventually we brought it in house in 2017 because I couldn’t find anybody to do it the way I would do it as an investor. Because the way to make these things work, right? It’s not the death benefit. That’s not the thing that they talk about. It’s using this tax-free savings account called cash value. This tax-free savings account, by the way, this is a cool thing. And this is one thing I mentioned on the Ryan Panetta show recently, because he said like, tons of infinite bankers, he’s always poo-pooed all over it, which I don’t blame him. Because they always tell you things like,

yeah, you can pay yourself back interest and things like that, which is a lie by the way. You do not pay yourself back interest. And I’ll explain what I mean by that. But they teach all these little half-truths on social media and stuff that really aren’t true because they’re trying to pitch you more insurance. Well, the thing is this is that this tax-free savings account, the thing that makes it awesome is that it is liquid. You can get to it literally on a mortgage application. They ask you, do you have cash value life insurance? So if you’re trying to get a mortgage, this counts as an asset, but here’s what’s cool about it.

It doesn’t count as an asset in the sense that you’re not being taxed by the IRS. So there’s zero taxes like Roth IRA, but none of the dumb rules of waiting till you’re 59 and a half to access it and all that kind of stuff. None of that exists. There are none of those rules. Also, you could put in, you don’t have any income limits, so you can put in up to 25 % of your stated gross income into this plan every year. So for example, had one of my clients, one of my friends, he’s a syndicator. Obviously he writes off a lot.

You know, because he’s a real estate professional. In fact, he writes off so much. He not only wrote off the million dollars a year he makes, but he wrote off 50,000 of his wife’s teacher salary. So he was only showing 25,000 year on his taxes. But because we do a stated income type of application, we said, great, we’ll, just say, again, make, and he does legitimately make a million a year gross pay. Cool. Well, he can pay a quarter million a year into this. And again, gross tax free comes out tax free and

It’s not actually in most States, by the way, completely a hundred percent protected from lawsuits and creditors. So even if somebody sues you and wins, you can literally have millions of dollars stored here. They can’t get to it. Um, one of our mutual friends, he lives in out in Missouri, like he’s got like four or 5 million just sitting in cash. And I was like, Hey, you can use this to invest. He’s like, I don’t care to, I just want a good safe place to store my money. They’ll earn more than point, nothing percent at the bank tax free. Cause they’re paying like 6 % right now as tax free and

Chris Miles (13:21.704)
I can get that money whenever I needed to and but nobody else could get to my money. Right. And that’s that’s the thing that Ryan Pineda said. He’s like, I’ve had five different guests on the show talk about infinite banking. No one ever mentioned that it couldn’t be touched by lawsuits and creditors.

Mike Hambright (13:34.784)
Right. Yeah, that’s cool. So how do folks use it as how do you like borrow against that? I how do real estate investors kind of use that? How do they benefit from an infinite bank plan?

Chris Miles (13:45.948)
Yeah, this is where the whole double dip comes in or people talk about making money in two places at once, right? I mean, in addition to all the other things you can do with it, one of the things that is cool for investors is that again, this cash is in there. And if you’ve ever had money sitting in a bank account, maybe you’ve done this before, maybe not Mike, but if you’ve ever gone into the bank, say, hey, listen, I’ve already got a savings account here. Will you give me a line of credit with that as collateral? And banks a hundred percent will say yes.

Now I did this actually in 2007 when I was launching a business. I had 25,000 sitting in an account. I felt like it was burning a hole in my pocket because at that time making one and a half percent of my credit unit because we used to get paid better back then. And so I was like, we can make more money with this. So I actually went to the bank and said, can I get a secure line of credit against it for 25 grand? And they said, yep, approved. So I pulled out the 25 grand. I used that my business along with an SBA loan and everything else. And then I was paying back interest to the bank. Now, as I paid down the balance,

It freed up the 25,000 because they locked up that 25 grand. said while you know, while you have this $25,000 maxed out line of credit, we’re going to lock up your 25 grand. So if you don’t pay us, we can take that money. But as I paid the loan balance down, then they say, great, well now more and more of that cash is freeing up. You could do the same thing with a life insurance policy. But the cool thing is, like I said, they’re paying you like, you easily at least five or 6 % a year tax free on that money. And yes, they do charge you interest.

But unlike the bank, see the bank when I was doing it, see I was making one and a half percent interest there at the bank, but they were charging me 4 % interest, more than double the interest rate. But with an insurance company, they charge you about the same. So the cool thing is this, is that if you can now instead of just pulling your cash out, you withdraw your money, now you’ve lost the ability to earn interest on that money that’s tax free. Instead, I borrow from the insurance company, I borrow the money from them, and I use that money to invest. And just so you know, you could pay back that loan

However, whenever you want, there is no minimum monthly payment. It’s almost like a student loan that’s in deferral, you know, and they say, hey, we’re charging you interest, but you can pay it back whenever. Or think of it like a home equity line of credit that doesn’t have a minimum monthly payment, but that home equity line of credit also pays you interest, right? It’s kind of like that same thing. And so I’m able to use that money for whatever I want to generate cashflow. And then the key is to make it work to where you make money in two places is taking that cashflow, the returns from that investment whenever they come in.

Chris Miles (16:08.776)
and use that money to pay down the loan balance. And as you do that, you start paying down simple interest while they’re paying you compounding interest. So even you had the same interest rate, the cool thing is, is that you’re earning more in interest than what you’re paying them. That’s how you make it work. That’s how you can still make a net gain of interest with the insurance company while you’re still making all the money you’re making on your real estate. And the great thing is,

Mike Hambright (16:17.774)
Hmm.

Mike Hambright (16:23.426)
Yeah.

Chris Miles (16:34.494)
you don’t lose any the tax benefits. This is because a lot of times in real estate, we don’t want to use like IRAs and 401ks because you know, we’ll have you bit, you know, depending on what kind of deal you’re doing, we could have all kinds of issues with taxes. We don’t have that issue because it’s literally like using like a savings account, but we’re just borrowing from the insurance company instead. And yeah, if it’s used for business purposes, you do right off the interest as well, which is almost like a triple dip in that sense.

Mike Hambright (16:45.998)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (16:52.172)
Yep. Yep.

Mike Hambright (16:57.218)
Wow, that’s great. And people are using this, I mean, you could use it for fix and flips, you could use it to buy cash flowing assets, you could use it for essentially whatever, I mean, there’s no restrictions on how you can use it, I guess.

Chris Miles (17:01.799)
yeah.

Chris Miles (17:08.104)
Yeah, that’s the big thing with fix and flips especially, because you know how it is. Like if you try to borrow hard money or even if you’re just trying to use a line of credit with the bank, you have to keep making monthly payments whether you want whether you’re making money or not. Right. So you’re kind of coming out of pocket in meantime. Well, here they charge you interest, but there’s no minimum payment required. Like I said, the deadline, the balloon payment for paying back that loan is your death, which they just pull out your death benefit and pay the rest of your family tax free. Right. So you don’t have that pressure.

Mike Hambright (17:31.874)
Right. Yeah.

Chris Miles (17:34.354)
So for fix and flips, it’s awesome. I know some wholesalers have used it for that very purpose. Again, like I’ve used it more as, as keeping cash reserves and building a war chest for those deals that, especially if I can’t get money from the bank, cause I’ll, I’ll leverage money from a bank all day long. I’ll anything that’s cheap money. If it’s like 8 % or less or so I’m going to leverage the bank all I want. mean, I even just got a car loan. Like you remember they talked about using it to buy cars. Well, the thing is, this is the lie, right? They always say you pay yourself back interest.

No, you don’t. You’re paying back the insurance company interest. Now they are paying you interest on that money too, right? Say you have, you know, a couple hundred thousand sitting there, you borrow a hundred thousand from them, your 200,000 still earning interest. That’s correct. But that hundred thousand, you’re paying interest to the insurance company, right? That’s how they’re earning their money on it. And so, that lie, right? So you do make money in two places at once, but don’t think that you’re paying yourself back interest. You’re paying them interest. So when someone tells me, oh yeah, I can buy cars with this.

Mike Hambright (18:18.414)
Yeah.

Chris Miles (18:32.307)
Well, I just got offered on my car last year, a 3.99 % interest rate. Now, yeah, I can go get a 5.3 % loan with my insurance company, but why? Because I can get that free money from, my perspective, free money from the bank. It’s money that’s not coming out my pocket. Where if I borrow from the insurance company, it is leveraging my cash that’s sitting in there. I’m going to leverage the bank all day long. Same thing if I’m going to buy a property, I put 20 or 25 % down. I’m going to use, I can use my infinite banking for that.

But I’m not going to put all a hundred percent from my policy. I’m going to borrow that 75 or 80 % from the bank so that only the money that the bank won’t give me, or there’s just a ridiculous interest rate. Then I’ll use my own personal bank, my infinite bank. Then I’ll use that to step in. And so that way I get more leverage of my cash, right? I get more because I’m leveraging the bank’s money as well as my own.

Mike Hambright (19:16.056)
Yep.

Mike Hambright (19:21.846)
Yeah, I think one of the big misconceptions with infinite banking always comes in really is because it’s an insurance product and people always think insurance is for

like a death benefit or for tragedy or like a car wreck or whatever, like they don’t really see it as an investment vehicle, right? I think it’s just cause that’s how I look at most insurances. It’s an insurance against something bad happening instead of an investment vehicle. I think that’s where some of the confusion comes in.

Chris Miles (19:52.162)
totally. Yeah. Well, it’s that’s why I told somebody yesterday because they’re like, okay, I’m, I’m trying to follow this, but it’s kind of hard because there’s so many, seems like there’s so many things you can do. Cause some people use this for their college savings plans. You know, people might use this, you know, for like Walt Disney literally use this as collateral to start Disneyland. Cause he couldn’t get the, he couldn’t get the funds from the bank. He finally got ABC who was struggling network at the time. They were trying to, they were trying to compete with NBC and CBS. ABC put in the money, but they said only if Walt you put in your own cash.

So he sold off his investment property and then he used the life insurance from his whole life policy, the cash he used as collateral. And then ABC came at the rest. And now we’ve got the happiest place on earth. We stand in line for an hour and a half. Right. You know, so mean, things like that pampered chef, the seed money started for that business was that JC pennies paid money in the great depression. They paid their literally paid their payroll to their employees because they didn’t have cash on hand. even, even, uh, you’re Ray Kroc with McDonald’s. He paid the top executives when he bought it from McDonald’s brothers.

Mike Hambright (20:32.888)
Right.

Chris Miles (20:51.432)
He uses cash value life insurance to pay for those employees, those executives that keep them on board. So like, this is again, this is not something that’s new. It’s been used for many, many years. But that’s the thing is like everybody thinks, it’s just a death benefit. And that’s because insurance companies only want you to use it that way. Cause insurance companies love it. And so do the insurance agents. They love it if you just buy the most expensive thing possible. Now term insurance technically is the biggest.

Mike Hambright (21:01.678)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (21:09.944)
right.

Chris Miles (21:18.952)
You know, it’s the cheapest, but it’s also the biggest ripoff in a sense. If you ever talked to Tom Wheelwright, the author with Rich Dad Poor Dad, the tax-free wealth, Tom Wheelwright, you know, he’ll say all the time, says term insurance is an expense, but whole life insurance is an asset because he’s a big fan of using the strategy too. And the reason is because yeah, it is a death benefit, but that tax-free account is really, it’s really the death benefit. The fact that it’s life insurance is what gives you all those tax and liability protection. That’s why.

Mike Hambright (21:22.414)
you

I know, Tom.

Chris Miles (21:48.102)
If it weren’t for the insurance, you wouldn’t have that kind of tax benefit because, you know, AOC or whoever is going to come along and say, now, now you rich people can’t get away with this. Like, no, there are literally normal middle-class hardworking people that use this as well. That death benefit is literally the thing that’s going to keep the government from spending more money for families that are in welfare. Right. So, so they give it all these protections for that very reason. The thing, this is what’s hardest though. The hardest thing, this is what happened to me when I bought my policy.

Was because it was so freaking expensive if there’s ever an argument that’s really legit about whole life insurance Is that those upfront costs because they front load the definite, you know, all the insurance costs up front That is the number one deterrent, right? Because people are like well if I’m gonna use this to invest why not just invest and not have to have insurance costs pulled out And I’m like, well, yeah exactly and that fact that’s what I tell people to do. I actually tell them

Yeah, just use your cash to invest. So when I get past with investors, a lot of times it might say, Hey, I’ve got a quarter million dollars. Should I throw it all into this live insurance policy? And my answer is no, don’t. In fact, take your quarter million and invest it and say that they earn 10 % a year. They’re making 25 grand a year. I’m like, cool. Take that 25 grand a year and then start a policy. Use the returns to do that instead of making it compete. And that’s the problem. There are a lot of people in the real estate space, a lot of these infinite bankers out there that are one telling you

Mike Hambright (23:03.662)
Yeah, yeah.

Chris Miles (23:13.086)
dump in a ton of cash, like one of our, I won’t say one of our mutual friends, but one of our mutual friends was told put three quarter million dollars upfront. And then after that, maybe pay a quarter million a year into this. And I told him, said, well, I got to know his finance a little bit more. And I said, you know what? I wouldn’t do that at all. Do a quarter million upfront because you’ll reduce the cost of the insurance by three times. If you do it this way, it’ll be a third of the cost. like, and by the way, the only person that gets paid more in that first year is the agent.

Mike Hambright (23:40.995)
Yeah.

Chris Miles (23:41.076)
That’s why he’s telling you to dump it in front because that’s where the insurance agents make most of their money. It’s off of those costs that come out in those first years. So the best thing to do is to reduce those costs as low as you can possibly go. That’s why we trademarked Max ROI infinite banking because I got so pissed off. All these infant bankers were like, say, Hey, we’ll make it okay. It won’t be as bad as the one that Chris miles bought in the beginning. It won’t be that bad, but it won’t be the best either. It’ll be in the middle. It’s like a vanilla middle. And some of the biggest info marketers and stuff on infinite banking will say, yeah, you should pay

40 % upfront in the first year. That’s BS. Like it should be maybe 20 % comes out in the first year, give or take, but that’s it. And so really they’re charging double because they’re trying to pay their insurance agents more, right? Again, this is why I haven’t found anybody to partner with to do it, to partner with them and just do an affiliate relationship that way. It’s for that reason. That’s why we brought it in house because I couldn’t find anybody consistently say, here, I’m to make sure that you get the lowest possible cost coming out.

Mike Hambright (24:17.592)
Yeah, wow.

Chris Miles (24:38.728)
while keeping this policy tax free, right? So that’s the thing you gotta be careful of. mean, so don’t dump in a bunch of cash like they say, don’t buy in that you gotta pay 40 % of costs upfront. That’s not the case. It could be done much, much cheaper. And that is where it becomes more beneficial. Cause those upfront costs, that’s the drag, right? That’s the drag on your money. So I just tell people use your emergency fund, fund that for the first few years.

Mike Hambright (24:59.47)
Yeah, for sure. Yep.

Chris Miles (25:05.095)
And then you start to get to the point where within a few years you already have more money than what you paid in anyways, if you do it the right way.

Mike Hambright (25:09.262)
Yeah. Chris, I don’t want to go too far down a rabbit hole here, but how do families do this to kind of prepare their family? Because I’ve heard of infinite banking plans that are kind of multi-generational. I don’t know if the actual investment is. Yeah, stuff like that. We could probably spend a lot of time talking about that, but kind of high level. A lot of entrepreneurs are always thinking about their legacy, their estate, their family, how to protect their family. So we’ve talked a lot today about like…

Chris Miles (25:21.958)
the Rockefeller concept. Yeah.

Chris Miles (25:32.542)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (25:37.942)
how to use it now for your real estate investing business, whether it’s active or passive. But how do you set this up to where, maybe you could just talk it at a high level, for your family that could be multi-generational?

Chris Miles (25:49.864)
Yeah, one of my old partners wrote a book called What Would the Rockefellers Do? And that was kind of based on what his and my estate planning attorney had taught him, which was what did Rockefellers do differently than the Vanderbilts? Because the Vanderbilts, you know Anderson Cooper, right? He’s the grandchild of the Vanderbilts. He was only left 100 grand as his inheritance. But the Rockefellers, they’ve increased their wealth generation to generation. Now it’s split between family members, kind of like the Waltons, right? Like obviously they’re

Mike Hambright (26:06.146)
Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Miles (26:18.046)
They’re still wealthy, but they’re not like the richest, but they’ve been able to grow their wealth generation to generation. The way to do that is using the death benefit, right? Is that what if every family member had a policy and then that policy pays into your family trust, right? So if you have like the, you know, almost like the trust of Hambrite, right? You know, the, the T the toe, I guess you call it, right? You know, you got the trust of Hambrite, the Hambrite family trust or whatever, you know, you’d have that all the policies, the beneficiary would be the trust.

And then whenever anybody dies, that money pays in the trust. But instead of just gifting your kids or grandkids or great grandkids a bunch of money and turn them into trust fund spoilt brats, right? Instead say, no, no, you’re not just going to get a bunch of money here. Maybe we’ll designate some money to go to you to help out, but you’re actually going to have to go to us like we’re the bank. You have to borrow the money from our trust, right? You’re going to have to borrow the money there. And then that money, you have to pay back with interest. So then you’re not just pulling money out and consuming it and blowing it.

you know, like you’re the Paris Hilton, which by the way, she actually built up her own wealth now. But instead you’re taking that money and using that to keep growing the wealth. So the money has to keep going back in and cycling and growing the wealth generation after generation. And so the insurance part is the easy part of that. The hard part using the estate plan with the attorney, right? But the insurance policies just pay all into that trust. And you can actually own policies, not just on yourself, you can own on business partners, on your spouse, on your kids. By the way, you control.

Mike Hambright (27:27.938)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (27:34.52)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (27:38.082)
Yeah, yeah.

Chris Miles (27:45.478)
On your kids. Some people worry like, what if my kid turns 18? It’s like, no, this is not like a bank, you know, child savings account where they can access it the day they turn 18. This is literally under your control. Like I have one guy that he actually invests in real estate right now and he’s using his two kids policies to buy real estate. And that’s what he’s using to be their college funding, right? He’s buying these properties to cashflow and then using the cashflow to pay for the, the, college. And so he’s using that. But of course, everything, if they were to pass away, would pay into the trust, right? It pay into that family bank.

Mike Hambright (27:55.544)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (28:08.995)
Yep.

Mike Hambright (28:13.858)
Yeah. And I suspect just because they’re young, the life insurance is super cheap, right? Yeah.

Chris Miles (28:21.332)
yeah, yeah, it’s so cheap that the hard part that people run into is, want to pay more into this, but I can’t because the death benefit gets to be too big on the kids. And the insurance companies balk at it. They’re like, hey, your kids can’t have more insurance than you. They’re not richy rich, right?

Mike Hambright (28:34.498)
Yeah, Awesome. Well, Chris, I know you’ve got a lot of other great info to share with folks. If they want to learn more about you or Infinite Banking, where can they go?

Chris Miles (28:43.57)
Yeah, you know our YouTube channel, is Money Ripples with Chris Miles, you know, our YouTube channel has tons of stuff on there. We even have the Money Ripples podcast that’s on there as well. Or you can just go to moneyripples.com.

Mike Hambright (28:54.808)
Okay, perfect. We’ll have links down below for all that. So thanks for sharing your knowledge with us today. There’s so many ways, there’s so many interesting ways to make money or get your money to make money for you. So appreciate you sharing a little more with us about Infinite Banking today. Yeah.

Chris Miles (29:06.845)
sure.

Yeah, you bet. Thanks for having me on.

Mike Hambright (29:11.178)
Awesome, awesome. Everybody, hope you got some good insights from today. It’s complicated, it’s a little complex, right? That’s why you’ve gotta reach out to guys like Chris that really understand this and kinda help walk you through it. So, if you’re interested, we’ll add the links down below and you can learn more. Hope you got some good insights from today’s show. We’ll see you on the next one. Take care.