5 Proven Personal Finance Tips to Boost Your Savings Strategy

John Harcar (00:01.102)
All right. Hey guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar. I’m here today with Joshua Smith and we’re going to kind go over a little bit of his journey and talk about how he helps families, business owners really take control of their financial future, right? And some real, real good things to be able to do that. Remember guys, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, real estate entrepreneurs, service providers, two to five X their business.

And we do it by providing tools and resources, not only to help them grow the business that they want to have, but in turn, live the life that they’ve always wanted to live. So Josh, welcome to our show.

Joshua Smith (00:38.03)
Well, thank you, John. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

John Harcar (00:41.052)
Yeah, I’m excited to talk about this. You know, there’s a lot of no, I don’t want to say miseducation, but non-education out there that I think will definitely help folks, especially with some of the stuff we talked about offline. But before we get into all that, introduce yourself to our audience, tell them about your background, kind of what, you know, what got you into, you know, being a wealth strategist and what got you here.

Joshua Smith (01:04.974)
Yeah, it’s a bit of long story, so I’ll kind of give you the short version. But I’m the tale of two influencers. Back in 08, we had flipped our town home. We lived in it for two years, brand new home. We made like $35,000, thought we were financially geniuses at that point. Took that money and put it into, we lived in Utah at the time. So we put that money into a fix and flip. That was going to be a two year live in it, fix it up, flip it when we’re done.

Well, meanwhile, instead of paying off all my student loans, which were also 35 grand, we decided to go into a neighborhood that we had no business buying and we took one of those nice predatory loans, know, the 100 % financing interest only. Yeah. So we signed that dotted line, which I knew better, but we did it. And we bought a home that we wanted to flip within like 30 to 45 days. And we did, we got it out on the market. It was good, but that was when the wait meltdown hit. Right. And we had no clue. Like we didn’t.

John Harcar (01:43.676)
Hmm. yeah. Yep.

John Harcar (02:00.232)
yeah.

Joshua Smith (02:01.198)
We were young at the time. didn’t know the signs of the times. Our relitter didn’t have a vision on it. So we’re trying to catch that falling knife. And we lost our butts on both homes that we bought. We were upside down in both. So that wasn’t good. So my first influencer that I found was Dave Ramsey, right? Because I figured, hey, I don’t know what I’m doing. What should I do? I should probably learn something about money, right? Found Financial Peace.

John Harcar (02:16.188)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (02:27.014)
Did you do the envelopes?

Joshua Smith (02:29.274)
yeah, envelope system, whole nine yards. We actually taught FPU at multiple churches. we were, we were, I was on Dave’s Friday show, like the financial free show. So we, did the whole nine yards with Dave, right? So we were gung ho with that, which I’m indebted to his advice for budgeting. Cause honestly at that time I needed that, the investment advice, not so much. Like I, I wouldn’t, wouldn’t recommend that anymore. So we don’t see eye to eye on that anymore, but.

John Harcar (02:41.35)
Yeah.

John Harcar (02:53.884)
Ha ha ha!

Joshua Smith (02:57.334)
But anyways, so long story short, fast forward, I came across the other influencer, which was Robert Kiyosaki. And you and I were talking about Rich Dad Poor Dad. That was the book for me that was like, wait, our whole money system’s like a debt note? Like there’s good debt and bad debt and there’s assets and liabilities and there’s cashflow. And that opened my mind to go, you know, there’s more to money than just, you know, debt is dumb and like, you know, invest and…

John Harcar (02:58.021)
Right.

John Harcar (03:14.106)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Smith (03:23.65)
there’s a lot of strategies behind the scenes that I had no idea about. And that’s when I really started thinking, I would say outside the box. And then I came across what a lot of people call infinite banking. I’m almost not loving that term anymore because there’s a lot of infinite bankers out there that are teaching this like private family finance and it gets skewed, lost in the weeds, right? So we teach, I’m with Factum, we’re out of Mesa, Arizona and we teach a savings and liquidity strategy.

John Harcar (03:23.996)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (03:40.218)
Right.

Joshua Smith (03:51.33)
that has multiple benefits for families and business owners. So they can capitalize their own system, they control their own system, and then they can borrow from that system whenever they need it, right? To fund investments or, you know, launch into a business opportunity or God forbid an emergency happens, they have something to fall back on. Yeah, so that’s how I got into this. And in that realm, I was with GE Healthcare for about 20 years in management and various technical roles.

John Harcar (04:07.002)
Yeah, yeah. Awesome, okay.

John Harcar (04:17.212)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Smith (04:19.118)
But I knew once I left that I had to do something that I was going to be passionate about and that I could help people, like help people better their financial future. So that’s how I got into this. Yeah.

John Harcar (04:28.74)
I love it. I love it. If you’ve watched any of my other podcasts, there’s a question I always ask because I always want to know. You mentioned the Rich Dad Poor Dad book, right? And did you read that prior to your flipping escapade? And then secondly, before, okay, so if you didn’t, did you have any real estate influence, flipping influence, construction influence, anything in your family that said, hey, I can do this flipping stuff?

Joshua Smith (04:44.374)
No.

Joshua Smith (04:56.734)
Not at all. Like we were one, financially not educated. So I’d say we were financially illiterate at the time. I mean, we were in our young twenties. So we were just young dumb and you know, we had plan A and it was to make a bunch of money and there was no plan B of like, well, what happens if it doesn’t work out? Right. So there was no contingency. I actually formed an LLC with two of my buddies at the time. And one of my friends had had some experience with like long-term rentals and fixing up.

John Harcar (05:04.412)
Okay, sure.

John Harcar (05:11.708)
No way.

Joshua Smith (05:23.798)
Not really fixing flips, but at least fixing up enough, you know, cosmetically to make it work. So we thought, hey, with our experience combined, we can make this work. But to your question, no, we had no financial literacy, none.

John Harcar (05:38.05)
Okay, well yeah, especially on the real estate side, some people might have had like an uncle or someone who flipped a house and like, that sounds cool. what, as you transitioned and got into like some, to entrepreneurship, know, what type of struggles or things did you come across when you kind of first got started?

Joshua Smith (05:54.508)
Yeah, I think for me, the journey was like reading Rich Dad Poor Dad, opening my mindset up. I started looking at other books and other creative things like creative finance, subject to buying homes, like subject to that sort of thing. So I would say I was dabbling a lot and just getting a lot of head knowledge and learning, but I wasn’t really implementing or doing much.

John Harcar (06:07.087)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Smith (06:16.238)
You know, when oh, wait, happened, like the interest rates started creeping up, right? I remember getting like, had a high interest account at like 5 % in my savings. And I thought, Hey, that’s pretty cool. And then it went away for 20 years. Right. So coming back when we moved from, uh, Washington down to Arizona, we had a, like a two point, I think it was a 2.5 % interest rate. And I had all of our equity, you know, cause I still on the Dave Ramsey pay off my house train. Right. So 10 year fixed.

John Harcar (06:27.696)
Right.

John Harcar (06:43.6)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Smith (06:44.398)
put all my equity into the house that I live in. Well, when the fed started raising rates, I was like, man, this looks, feels and smells a lot like, wait, like I’m gonna refi and do a cash out refi on my house and take that equity because what good is equity if I see it vanish tomorrow morning and I’m sitting on a mountain equity that no longer exists. So we did a cash out refi. We thought we would buy a multifamily like a quadplex or a threeplex here in Phoenix, but the prices.

John Harcar (07:01.138)
Right. Yep.

Joshua Smith (07:12.396)
went nuts, right? So we were kind of like, okay, let’s hold back and see what happens. And that’s when I learned about this banking concept a few years ago. And I started delving into a lot of research, reading books on it, talking to people that had done it before I made any decision to do it myself. And that’s where we actually funded our first policy through the equity that we had taken out of our house. And then I was like, well, if we capitalize the policy, then I can go ahead and deploy that into a multifamily when we’re ready. So

That’s how I got into that.

John Harcar (07:44.838)
Tell folks, kind of explain a little bit about what this infinite banking is for people maybe that are on here that haven’t heard of it, don’t know what it’s about.

Joshua Smith (07:52.59)
Yeah, for sure. So Infinite Banking’s been around a long time. So we deal with mutually owned insurance companies only, and it’s dividend paying whole life policies that we deal with. And these are very, very old school, slow growth, boring asset, right? This is an asset class that’s been around since the founding of our country, really. We underwrite a lot with One America. They were founded in 1877. So 150-year-old company.

John Harcar (08:19.435)
Hmm.

Joshua Smith (08:20.728)
They have paid dividends every year, you know, through the Great Depression, through COVID, through the 08 financial meltdown. They pay dividends every year to their shareholders. Now they’re not guaranteed, but their track record is pretty sweet. So what people don’t know about whole life, because we do have financial gurus out there saying how, you know, it’s a bad investment. It’s not a good place to, you know, put your money. It’s expensive. Like you hear this all the time. And I would agree with them that it’s not a good investment, but it is.

a phenomenal savings strategy. Like it’s the best savings platform on the planet, right? So you have the death benefit. Everybody knows about the death benefit. The way infinite banking would work is we would actually structure a policy that’s customized to our client, right? Based on their savings budget that they’re currently comfortable with. So there is no change in their lifestyle. They’re just redirecting, you know, money from one place to another, right? So instead of their traditional savings account, they’re going to put it in a dividend paying whole life.

and they’re going to let that build and build over time. And it’s, it’s got a pretty phenomenal growth rate. Like these things on average are like four and a half, about four to four and a half percent. And that’s net. So you’re not paying taxes on this, you know, and it’s uninterrupting compounding. So the longer you have these things, the more efficient and better they perform. So pretty cool. And then the company, since it’s mutually owned, that’s your money, you have access to it, but you can use the insurance as money.

John Harcar (09:29.98)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (09:38.95)
Right.

Joshua Smith (09:46.772)
as a line of credit, right? So they’ll give you a guaranteed line of credit on your cash value. So if you have an investment that you want to go fund, you can go grow your money in two places now at the same time.

John Harcar (09:57.956)
And what benefits does that have? What things does it help? What are the pros of doing that?

Joshua Smith (10:02.828)
Well, so I deal with a lot of real estate investors, right? And hard money lenders, private money lenders. So one, they have a guaranteed line of credit. So a lot of these guys are using like say a HELOC. Well, a lot of people don’t know that HELOCs can be yanked, especially if we get into, you know, tight credit, those banks will pull your HELOC, right? That happens all the time. So these are guaranteed lines of credit because if you think about it, the cash value inside your policy is actually over collateralized by the death benefit, right? So

Say, for example, I have a million dollar death benefit and I have a hundred thousand dollar loan. Like my beneficiaries, if I died are going to get $900,000. So there’s a, they, they give you a loan provision that’s interest only and unstructured, meaning there’s no payback term. So if you walked into Wells Fargo or chase and said, Hey, I want an interest only loan that I’m going to pay back someday. I don’t know when what’s your, and I want like a five to 6 % interest rate fixed. Like.

John Harcar (10:37.531)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (10:55.598)
Mm, yeah, whenever.

Joshua Smith (11:00.844)
What can you give me? They’d be like, take a hike, right? That doesn’t exist. So that’s the big thing with like real estate investors, hard money lenders, is that loan provision is they have guaranteed line of credit that never dries up, never goes anywhere. Plus it’s completely private. So nobody knows about it, right? So if I take a loan out and you’re say with the SBA and I’m trying to buy like a small business and they ask you like, Hey, do you have whole life? Yes, I do. Okay, cool. How much?

How much of an asset do you have in cash value? You can tell them, but then it’s like, well, how much of a loan do you have? Nobody knows, right? Unless you disclose it, like if you say, I got 50,000, but completely closed loop private system. And that’s really intriguing to a lot of people, because it’s a private contract between you and the mutually owned company, which you’re partial owner in. So there’s nobody else involved, right? And I’ve…

John Harcar (11:39.142)
Yeah.

John Harcar (11:50.672)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Joshua Smith (11:54.71)
I’ve personally taken loans out on my policies and the first time I did it, was shocked because it was a one page form that basically said, what’s your name? What’s policy number? How much money do you want? Sign here. and where do we send it? Right? Like, where do you want it? And there was no question of what’s your credit worthiness? What are you using it for? You know, are we sure this is a good loan? None of that. It’s your money, right?

John Harcar (12:04.764)
Mmmph.

John Harcar (12:10.641)
Right.

John Harcar (12:19.894)
Are these policies hard for people to get?

Joshua Smith (12:23.784)
it, depends. you know, a lot of people feel like, it’s too late for me to start. We hear that a lot, especially with people in their say their fifties, sixties. we have, we have policy owners that start policies in their eighties. Now to your question, it does depend on health, right? Your health age, all that stuff is going to be taken into consideration, but we have all the time where somebody is like, Hey, I’m not insurable. What do I do? Well,

All you have to do is be a policy owner. You can put a policy on anybody as long as you have an insurable interest. So if you have a business partner, we do this all the time with businesses that have two or three partners and they want to cross insure each other in case something happens, then they can buy out their shares. We do that all the time. Corporate America has been doing this for years, right? So you don’t have to have a policy necessarily on yourself. In fact, we teach people to scale the system.

John Harcar (13:10.396)
Okay.

Joshua Smith (13:18.746)
the founder of our company, his family has like 50 over 50 policies just in their family alone. So yeah, pretty cool.

John Harcar (13:27.292)
I mean, just put them on friends? How do you find the people you put them on? You put them on the dog?

Joshua Smith (13:32.148)
Yeah. Well, there’s two. So like, I’ll give you an instance. Like my father wants to do a policy and he’s not insurable because of past health issues, right? So his question to me was, well, who would I put one on? And I’m like, well, I’m your kid, your grandkids, anybody in your life that A, you have permission, they’ll sign off and say, yeah, you can put a policy on me. And two, you have to have an insurable interest, basically if you’re like the way we teach our clients to do this in a family,

John Harcar (13:42.3)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Smith (14:00.162)
would be like, we’re teaching you how to build legacy wealth, and this is cross-generational. So when you tell the insurance company like, hey, we’re teaching our family how to build wealth, and we’re using these whole life policies to do that, that’s sufficient, right? They’re like, OK, cool. And so that’s the insurable interest. So that’s the second piece besides permission. Yeah, so pretty easy to get policies on anybody.

John Harcar (14:18.577)
Got it.

Is there a age limit? Is there an age limit or can I put one on my eight year old daughter?

Joshua Smith (14:25.95)
You can, so actually our founder just had a daughter last week and he’s got a policy on her like today. So the earlier you start the, yeah, because the time is on your side with the compounding, right? And the younger you start with your kids or grandkids or whoever, the younger you start, the cost of the death benefit is cheaper, right? So they’re statistically like a child is statistically not likely to die anytime soon.

John Harcar (14:34.14)
wow, incredible. That’s so cool.

John Harcar (14:41.66)
Yeah.

Joshua Smith (14:55.67)
So their premium dollars will actually buy a bigger death benefit. And the policies that we deal with every year, that death benefit goes up as well. So your cash value is building, but the death benefit is also building. But your premiums stay the same. So it’s also a hedge against inflation because your premiums are guaranteed to never go up. So like for me, I have term, you know, I’ve had term for almost 20 years. It’s going to expire in four years on me and my wife. And I don’t even want to see what that premium is going to be once I turn, you know, because I’ll be like 40.

John Harcar (15:11.589)
Yep.

Right.

Joshua Smith (15:25.56)
I think it’ll be 48 when those terms expire. And it’s like, what’s the renewal on that? Cause it’s not going to be as cheap as it was when I was in my twenties, right? So yeah, so.

John Harcar (15:28.763)
Okay.

John Harcar (15:33.358)
Right, yeah, yeah, especially. So is generally this type of cold life more expensive than term?

Joshua Smith (15:42.552)
So it depends because term is very cheap when you’re young because statistically only 2 % of those policies will ever pay out, right? Because when I’m in my 20s or 30s and I get a 20 or 30 year term, I’m not likely to use that because I’m not likely to die statistically, right? So the insurance companies can give that to us very cheap. But like I said, when you go to renew that, say you’re in your 40s, 50s, 60s, it becomes very, very, very expensive. It’s actually…

Term becomes the most expensive insurance on the planet as you age, right? Because the risk goes up. Like when I’m in my 60s, I’m gonna need insurance on my life and life insurance through term is not gonna be affordable. That’s not gonna be something that is gonna be attainable. So the problem that people find themselves in is they wait and then they find out, shoot, I’m not insurable. Now I can’t even get health insurance because I’ve had some prior massive issue like cancer or heart disease or something.

something that the insurance company might not insure against, now you’re at major risk, right? So we try to coach people through, you know, try to get the coverage. Another thing that we find is people have coverage through their work, like if they’re in a W-2, and they don’t realize that if they get laid off or they quit that job, their insurance is now gone, right? Now they can convert it, but they’re probably not going to get a very competitive, you know, premium or coverage, and they might not be insurable, right? Like if they don’t convert it and they decide, I’m going to go shop the marketplace.

John Harcar (16:38.886)
Right.

Joshua Smith (17:07.714)
They might find, shoot, I lost my insurability. Now what do I do? Right? So there’s a lot of risk with not having the right coverage in place for individuals and families.

John Harcar (17:19.91)
Got it. Okay. And when we started off the show, our topic was, you know, how you help folks, business owners, families take control of their financial futures or their finance. Why do you think there is such a lack of education or maybe knowledge, you know, nowadays where people don’t have control of their financial future?

Joshua Smith (17:41.046)
Man, that’s a good question. Honestly, I can’t prove this in any form or fashion, but what we teach comes all the way back to the Rockefellers, right? You got the story of the Rockefellers and Vanguard and Vanderbilt, all of them, right? The Rockefeller waterfall method is basically what we teach, and John D. Rockefeller basically got his CPAs and his accountants together and lawyers and said, how do I keep my family’s wealth intact?

John Harcar (17:46.556)
You

Joshua Smith (18:09.288)
not just now, but for generations. And they came up with tuck all your money into whole life and wrap it into a series of trusts, right? So irrevocable and revocable trust set these up as a framework so that when somebody dies in the family, that money now gets paid out and buys more death benefit in another policy for other other members of the family. So they still have access to the cash value, but they don’t get like a big check to go blow it in Vegas, right? They don’t go party it up and like

John Harcar (18:29.382)
Right.

John Harcar (18:36.934)
Yeah, right.

Joshua Smith (18:38.444)
you know, cool, dad left me millions of dollars, now what? So we do a two-pronged strategy is one, we teach this in four stages, right? So the first stage is what we’ve been talking about, a better place to save. When you get up to the fourth stage, which is infinite banking, that’s like full-blown, like how do I do this generationally? And how do I train, like my goal is how do I train my kids to handle all this money that they’re going to inherit someday? Because…

inevitably me and mom are going to die. We’re going to pass you guys on an inheritance. Are you capable to handle it and continue the system? So that’s, that’s another thing that we specialize in is not just teaching our clients what to do, but okay, who’s your beneficiaries and are they ready to like, you know, handle this wealth that they’re going to, they’re going to benefit from.

John Harcar (19:25.532)
Okay, are you offering like, do you have like education processes for even for like the younger, let’s say the kids in the family or anything like that. Do you guys do that?

Joshua Smith (19:33.782)
We do actually. have, we actually had one yesterday, but we have a monthly webinar that’s free that we send out to all of our prospects and clients and say, share it out. So we do that once a month. have live events. you’re in the Phoenix, Arizona area, if you’re looking for a live event, chances are we have agents all across the nation. can probably get somebody there. If you can get, 25, 30 people together, we could come out to you and teach. So what we teach is it’s called tough money and it’s.

John Harcar (19:35.58)
That’s cool.

Joshua Smith (20:03.266)
Basically a roadmap to get people, if you think of a foundation, right, we want financial education, like you said, where do we get it? Why is it not readily available? Why is this stuff not taught? So we want to financially educate our clients and prospects first, and then we want them to be financially aware, right? So if they get the financial education and they get in tune with their personal finances, we have a whole curriculum that we walk them through step by step. And we can even do this email, I walk these, you

clients through this in like a seven week email campaign. It’s like 15, 20 minutes a week, but they fill out a book called Tough Money. And then the third thing would be, okay, now where do you save that money? Like that’s our foundation is education, awareness, and then where’s a better place to save. So that’s where we start everybody out. And that there’s no cost to that. Like we give all of our education material away for free just to help people.

John Harcar (20:57.402)
Okay, awesome. Yeah, I was going to ask like what advice or what tools or resources you you would, you know, put out there for folks that need to start learning or want to start educating themselves about this.

Joshua Smith (21:08.374)
Yeah, that’s it right there. We have a series of books that we like to take people through, like Nelson Nash’s Becoming Your Own Banker. That’s kind the gateway drug to this whole system that changed a lot of our paradigm shift in our mindset to think like a banker. Because when you look at, say, Robert Kiyosaki, we talked about him earlier, he’s got the four quadrants. He’s got the employee, the business owner, the investor, and then the self-employed.

John Harcar (21:25.37)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Smith (21:36.81)
All four of those quadrants have one thing in common and that’s that they all require banking, right? So if we can teach people to become your own banker, and it is a journey, right? It’s not you became your own banker. It’s like a lifelong journey. But if we can teach people the mindset of, how do I capture just the family financing back in my own life or like a business owner? How do I recapture this financing that I’m paying to Chase, Wells Fargo, all these major banks? What if I could make my own system where I recapture all that? Because

John Harcar (21:42.022)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Smith (22:05.07)
You and me, we’ll buy like 13 cars over our lifetime. And I have six kids, right? So there’s me, my wife, and six kids. So there’s eight of us. Eight times 13, that’s a lot of math. But that’s a lot of vehicles flowing through our family. over the lifetime, yeah, there you go. You’re good at math. So you have roughly $400,000 to $500,000 per individual in just vehicle financing alone over the life of their, right? So if you can take that and I can…

John Harcar (22:09.465)
Right.

John Harcar (22:18.076)
104.

John Harcar (22:29.838)
Hmm.

Joshua Smith (22:32.992)
I can show you a way to say, those $400,000 in vehicle expenses can now turn into like a million and a half profit. How powerful is that? So you can flip the whole paradigm on its head and say, hey, you can control the banking function in your own family and change generations. And there’s a pretty easy system to plug in that’s been there for a long time.

John Harcar (22:41.83)
They’re huge.

John Harcar (22:50.908)
that’s

John Harcar (22:55.952)
Well, great information. Thank you for sharing all of that. It’s incredible. And I think there needs to be a lot more education. If folks are on here listening and they want to call you and they want to talk, they want to find out how you can help them. What’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Joshua Smith (23:10.54)
Yeah, best way is probably just go to my website. It’s gogiversolutions.com. And that’s solutions with an S, so gogiversolutions.com. You’ll land on our landing page, and it’ll ask you for your name, phone number, email, and then how you heard about us. And then it’ll give you our foundations videos for free. So you can go through and kind of see, is this a right fit for me? What is this all about? It gets a little more in-depth than what we’ve gotten into.

And it just helps people kind of get the framework of like what we teach and who we are.

John Harcar (23:37.841)
Sure.

John Harcar (23:43.164)
Okay, and then we’ll, you like I said, we’ll put all that stuff down in the show notes. know, Josh, thank you again for coming on here. mean, great information, guys. I hope you took some really good notes. If you have any interest in learning more about this, please reach out to Josh. And I hope you guys enjoyed the show. I really did. And Josh, thank you again. And we’ll see you guys on the next one. Cheers.

Joshua Smith (24:03.928)
Thank you, John.