Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign welcome to wealth on Main street, where conversations about growing your wealth are fun and entertaining. Wealth isn't just about money. It's the skills and the knowledge that we develop to pass on to future generations. Tune in each week to, to grow your mindset and your net worth at the same time.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: In this video, Rich and I are going to walk through a strategy where we're going to tie what's happening with this spending plan back into the infinite banking concept and all the advantages that it represents. And business owners, individuals, families, etc, who are just opting out of the madness and this process that we've been on this journey for many years now. For me, I'm approaching my 17th year. For Rich, he's, he's literally just a year behind. It's one of those things yet again. Like, if you just feel like there's fundamentally something wrong and the headline tells you clearly in plain English what's wrong, but you still can't quite put your finger on the uncertainty of it, you're definitely in the right place. So, Rich, let's dive in, let's get into it. You know how the government demands that we pay our taxes on time down to the penny, but they can drop a $486 billion spending plan with no budget, no accountability, no explanation. You feel that tightness in your chest when you read that headline this morning? I know I did.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: And there's, they took a $486 billion dump on a piece of paper and called it a budget or whatever.
[00:01:45] Speaker B: Well, it's, it's a little voice that comes up every time I read something like that. You know, this, this just can't be sustainable. And people who are commenting on it, they're feeling the same. And it's, it's not just frustration. It's, for Rich and I, it's our financial instincts that kick in. It's, it's our, our gut that continues to remind us that the system's broken. And it's, it's top, it's top of mind, I think, to share with people that you can stop playing by the rules that just don't protect you.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I mean the, the announcement is absolutely bonkers. And the fact that anyone thinks that it would be sustainable just doesn't make sense. And again, like bringing it down, the simplicity, it's, it's kind of going back to saying, hey, you know, I, I, I can barely afford to put food on my table and pay my bills, so why don't I go and get a $486,000 credit card. And I'll just, I'll just rack that up over the next year while I'm trying to make everything else work. I mean, that's kind of what's taking place to some degree.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: I shared earlier this morning when I was first made aware of it, the, the government spending plan isn't a plan, it's a warning. It's a warning. The issue is clear, like 486 billion in spending, no budget, no roadmap, just hope in your tax dollars. Like when we think regarding what we do with the infinite banking concept, like if you just read that headline, you can't plan your future on their lack of a future.
Infinite banking provides us with that peaceful, stress free way of life and a very predictable financial foundation because we are the plan. We're not having to lay awake at night worrying about more tax grabs that are definitely coming.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Well, I mean, yeah, it's not that I'm not worried about it. I'm still worried about it. I'm just not worried about it from a perspective of being impacted by, at the same degree as I think a lot of other people were. I mean, you know, you always worry about your, your fellow man, your fellow people, like the people that you love and care about. And additionally, it's, it's alarming and very unsettling to consider what are the unintended consequences, what is the impact of this over a long period of time? And you know, the idea is that they're going to try to, quote, unquote, spur certain elements of the economic machine of the country by randomly throwing money at it. Like Will, that is just a Keynesian model of thinking about the world and that the result of that behavior is we're just going to load right back up into the boom, bust cycle of scenarios and some people are going to be at different phases of that bust depending on how it comes about. And it just is nonsensical to consider that we're walking into this particular government with massive challenges, massive amounts of government debt, massive amounts of interest accruing on that debt with no real methodology of being able to properly deal with it. And we're just going to throw money randomly at some stuff and that's going to fix it. I don't see, I don't, I just don't see the rationale on how that's going to be an effective model. And so here, here's the thing. The government doesn't have any money. It doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't have anything. The Only thing it has is it has your social insurance number or your Social Security number in the United States. It has a method of being able to basically take your money and use it to pay for all their crap.
So they're trying to justify that the crap that they're doing is actually for you and your benefit. Sure, some of it is and some of it does actually benefit you. But does all of it benefit you? I would submit that it does not. And if you, you, you take the, the chains off and you just let them run willy nilly, doing whatever they want, the likelihood that there's going to be some damage is very much. It's like, you know, it's like taking a buffalo herd and just saying, you know, we could, you know, you know, herd you and corral you down one particular zone so that we can, we can end up, you know, directing you somewhere or we can just be all willy nilly and random and craze chaos. And so if they, if you don't manage that and the herd is going and there's a stampede and then all of a sudden your barn or your house is in the way, well, they're just going to go right through it. Like they're not going to stop. Some will go around, but eventually the whole herd's going to come. It's just going to blow right through the house. So in that model of thinking, there's no control mechanisms over the way that all this capital is going to be spent.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: I agree.
Another issue that came up as a result of this announcement is, you know, they floated a capital gains overhaul. And so if they're willing to test that.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: Nobody saw that coming, Jay.
[00:06:46] Speaker B: If they're willing to test that, nothing's off limits. And so again, I'm trying to tie in the infinite banking concept as it relates to the issues that I personally identified from this announcement. And when you think of, when you think of the tool that's used to implement the infinite banking concept, you're dealing with a dividend paying life insurance contract, ideally from a reputable mutual company.
You've got cash value that is growing daily, that is uninterrupted.
You're in a tax advantaged contract, you control it. You're no longer a sitting duck in the government's game of what can we tax next. And so it just, I tried to think through this logically around, okay, what are the specific issues?
Why is the infinite banking concept, why does it remain an advantage? Here's another one. And it applies to Whether it's the IRS or Revenue Canada, they demand perfection while they write IOUs.
You miss a payment, penalties, they blow billions, they shrug it off. How does that sit with you?
[00:07:54] Speaker A: And not even remotely hypocritical.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: Yeah, it's unreal. Yet with, you know, the infinite banking concept, you get to build a warehouse of wealth that, that makes you less dependent on traditional, taxable, unpredictable government rules. And you can't, so you can't fight the government with complaints, but you can definitely build a system that makes you far less dependent. And that matters. That I think that matters more than ever in the environment that we're in.
[00:08:26] Speaker A: The, there's, there's a lot of reasons to be concerned.
Again, I, concern and fear are two different things. Like I think you can have concern and not be fearful. And fear doesn't, you know, future events appearing real. That's my acronym for fear. There's several other ones. And because you can't fear something in the past, it's already happened, right? You can fear a future thing because it, it, it is about to happen or it could happen. But usually the fear is driven from your mental recollection of something in the past that had a similar outcome or, you know, an experience.
So you know that, yeah, there might be reasons to have fear, but I think more so concern. And, and because if we address concern, we can minimize fear. And so there's also, but there's also going to be opportunity. And so where, where are the strategies to turn this, call it a nuclear financial bomb that the Canadian government has decided they wanted to drop on everyone and where are we going to be able to create opportunities within it? So it's, Jason, you and I aren't going to fly down to Ottawa and knock on some doors and just magically change this decision that's happened today. Like, it's not, it's not going to work. So instead we say, okay, we can't, we can't correct or modify or change it. We might consider how we might maybe look at our vote the next time it happens. So that's, that's, that's the only real actionable item that we can do in relative to, you know, changing future elements. But what we can say is what, based on what's happening, what are some potential areas or theoretical zones where we might see economic uptick, we might see some great potential that exists. And so let's go through some of the fine line items of what, what they outlay they're going to do. Okay, so what industries might be impacted, what geographic locations might be impacted, do we want to Rebalance our investment portfolio? Do we want to think about dividend paying stocks that we have? You know, so like, what are all these different elements that we can say, let's take a rational view at this. And how can we position ourselves to be in the best financial climate despite whatever shenanigans they've got going on over there in Ottawa?
[00:10:41] Speaker B: Yeah, it's so true. And again, I just think logically, you know, the, the government will chase you down for missing $142, but then they say, hey, look, let's commit to spending a half a trillion dollars and we'll figure the rest out later.
What comes up for me is liquidity, right? And most North Americans have very little liquidity or any at all. Like if you think of tax qualified plans, Whether it's a 401k RSP up in Canada, real estate, mutual funds, liquidity is locked up and it's taxed on the way out and it's tied to economic or market volatility or political turmoil. But yet the infinite banking concept tie in is that in our system and our clients, they get ready access to capital at any time on their terms without interrupting the daily growth of their cash value. It's a system that they own, that they control.
And what came to mind for me is, and this could be, this could be an article or even a small book that we end up writing, liquidity without compromise. That's the phrase that comes up for me, liquidity without compromise. And the folks in North America that we're blessed to serve each and every day, they really truly value that. And announcements like the one that came out today regarding the Canadian government is just, it's completely asinine.
[00:12:14] Speaker A: And when there's lots of, so there's the, the big aspect of it, the overarching aspect, and then there's like, not that it's granular, but you know, dissecting some of the components. I mean, there's one that stands out to me as completely baffling. Like I just don't fathom and understand.
And that's, that's a promise to continue to boost funding. Increase funding, yeah, to the CBC up to $150 million a year. I mean, I, nothing against the CBC, don't get me wrong, there's some programming that I used to watch when I was young and, and I'm sure they probably still have some great stuff now, although I, I don't believe I watch any of it. What, to what degree do we need to subsidize the, you know, the, the marketplace of things like the news and Canadian programming. Like if Canadian programming can't survive because it's so amazingly unique, but we need to do, we need it to maintain our identity somehow? Like, well, shouldn't it be able to do that on its own merit? Like the free market is telling you that this content isn't good enough to be able to support itself. Right? Like there's a, there's thousands of different networks and television stations and whatever down in the United States and in Canada. Yeah, we've got less. And we, we watch. Why do we know so much about our American counterparts? It's because we watch all of their programming. Right? And that's why we're effectively very similar in nature between the two nations. But Canada's own, you know, broadcasting Corporation, it's, in my opinion, it's spinning on an awful lot of drivel and wasted energy and effort. So like, why are we supporting that initiative? The free market has spoken and said it does no longer need to exist. If it did, it would be able to support itself.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: Such good points. And I, I would add to that, like if you.
Again, everything begins with the way that we think. And look at this from, from through another lens, inflation, which is really just like it's a stealth tax, right? Like your, your dollars are losing value while the government distracts you with buzzwords like affordability framework. Like, this is not a framework, it's a freaking bonfire.
And when you tie in the infinite banking concept, everything begins with the way that we think. You have cash value growing uninterrupted inside of a contract that's designed to kick the pants off of inflation. And so you've got capital that's accumulating quietly, compounding in peace. And you're not worrying because you're expected to obey while they improvise. So there's, there's one set of rules for them and there's another one for you. You follow deadlines, you submit forms, you have to account for every dollar and they burn billions on ideas that wouldn't pass a high school economic class. Whereas with the infinite banking concept, you, you stop playing their game because you accumulate and own capital.
You own the gold, you make the rules, you borrow on your terms in. I guess I would just say you just stop asking for permission. And so I'm, I like, I'm not saying in this video, and I don't think rich that, that you would say it either. I'm not saying that the infinite banking concept solves all the problems of the IRS or Revenue Canada.
An exorcism might help do that.
But what I'm saying is that when. When governments go off the rails, smart people get off the train and they build systems that make them independent. They grow capital in a very boring, predictable way. They become their own banker, and they stop waking up wondering what headline is going to hit their net worth next.
And so for people watching and listening, you can keep playing by the rules that they're rewriting almost daily, or you can literally build your own damn system.
And we can, we can show you how to do that.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: If we had, you know, the proverbial crystal ball.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: And we knew three years in advance to the day, that the COVID pandemic was going to impact our ability to meet in person and everyone be forced into their houses, working from home, all this kind of crap. And we would need supplies like, oh, my God, toilet paper. Because apparently everyone under the sun needed bazillion rolls of toilet paper in order to survive. We needed all these things and masks and face masks and blah, blah, blah. If we knew that in advance, three years, do you think we would have put a little bit of prevention and stockpiled a couple of things, slowly but surely built up a bit of a storage facility, a war chest to be able to navigate the thing that we knew was coming.
The Canadian government just gave you a three to five year warning on all the crap that's going to happen economically in the country. And you need to build a fricking storage facility, a war chest to prevent or prepare for the crap that's going to happen. Like the announcement's telling you this is the equivalent of knowing that Covid was coming three years in advance today.
[00:17:26] Speaker B: Oh, I love that. I love, I love that perspective. It's.
You've been given a glimpse into a future that you can begin to prepare for now. And I, boy, you know, I can rant a little bit on this, and that's what I'm going to do. Like, I've said it many times, you know, I think that you would agree, like, I don't mind paying taxes. Like, I really don't. You know, when the roads are nice and the hospitals are, you know, taking great care of people and policing and, you know, fire services and infrastructure.
Someone's gotta pay for all that. That's just the truth. But what really just gets under my skin is when you've got governments that spend. Like, they've got Elon Musk's bank account, but none of his business sense.
$486 billion. No budget, no plan, no Spreadsheet. Not even what you and I would call napkin math. Just trust us. We'll figure it out. You know who else has said that you want to know? Every other guy who's pitched a crypto idea from his mom's basement.
That's the truth. And we address some of the issues, like capital gains reform. That irked me a lot because the government basically flirted with taxing investments like their criminal activity. Like, if you bought a rental property in 1998 for $60,000 and it's worth 2 million now, you're the bad guy. Like, apparently, yeah.
[00:19:10] Speaker A: Total jerk. I can't believe you did that to help put something together for your own retirement because a company wasn't going to take care of you anymore.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: 100%. And it's like.
[00:19:18] Speaker A: And we've been manipulating interest rates and printing money, so we've created a massive inflation problem for your future. So heaven forbid you should have done something 25 years ago to protect yourself against that rich.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: Apparently making money without government involvement is offensive. And you'd think that the message was, you know, how dare you succeed independently. We're not finished bleeding you yet. And don't do, like, don't even get me started on the notion of a principal residence exemption. I mean, if they touch that, oh, my God.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Here's, you know, a lot of people, my clients and folks that know me, they know that I'm not, I'm not the biggest fan of the quote, unquote, the government. Right. It's not an. A specific area of the government. And it's not that I, in broad scopes, don't like the government or I don't like the people in it. We have a lot of amazing clients that are government employees. They work for the government. They are public servants. They've done great things and they try really hard. And I get that everyone needs work and they need a job, and it's all fine. However, here's where I do have a problem, because I've had exposure to blatant waste that, that, that I can, I've seen with my own eyes. And I can. I know that it happens if I can see it in little increments.
Where is it happening in the large scale that we can't see? Well, Elon's proved that with Doge down in the United States and how much money they found on wasted things. And I'll just give you a couple of examples. So I'll give you a recent one and then I'll take you back a little bit before you And I met jason to give you some examples. So, first off, there's a lady I've been introduced to here that through a mutual friend locally in the chilliwack area, connected to some, you know, external friends. Not somebody I know a great deal, but I've met them, has a government job. Great for her. That's fantastic. And I found out, you know, essentially during COVID her job was working. Working from home. And she maintained working from home, which is fine, but she spent the bulk of that time in her bed watching television and netflix. And all she did was review emails and clear out email inboxes. Not even responding to the emails. Not doing it for someone's business. She was just clearing out old emails. That was a hundred percent of her job. And she was ma. She makes over a hundred thousand dollars a year doing that.
That doesn't seem to compute very well. And her biggest concern was that they were going to make her go back into an office. That was the biggest concern of her life. Hey, whatever works for you. I'm gl great that you were making 100,000.
Not sure if that was warranted or not, but that's effectively the result. Now let's rewind the tape a little bit and we'll go back to call it early 2000s. As a. As an electrician working in the city of edmonton, I had the privilege of working on a lot of really, really interesting large scale projects in edmonton. Commercial projects on a lot of government buildings. I worked on a lot of schools. I worked on a lot of. In a variety of hospitals. In the city of edmonton, I had the unfortunate or fortunate pleasure to help rebuild and the construction of the edmonton women's maximum security prison in the west end of the city. And in all of those environments, and there were others, I saw blatant waste across the board. And I'll give you a perfect example. Working at the edmonton women's security prison at the time when they were restructuring it, they didn't have enough budget from the new construction budget that was provided, so they had to work from the renovation budget and the new construction. So they. They tore everything down from the old building, but they left a huge chunk of the slab floor where we would have needed to run a lot of conduit so that it could have been protected should anyone be able to escape.
So because they left it, we couldn't do that. And everything had to be run overhead. And they made us break canadian electrical code because they wouldn't allow us to do certain things that are required in order to Put pulled points and junction boxes, which would have meant access hatches in the ceiling. So they, they circumvented national rules because of how they manipulated the whole project. And then you'd have people fly out from Ottawa to Edmonton every two weeks. So we're paying for all that. They would sit in meetings all day to discuss things. Then they would have to go back and discuss in Ottawa. Meanwhile, the job is moving forward.
So then they would send change orders a week, two weeks later. But we've already two weeks farther ahead. We have to tear things out and go backwards instead of forwards because they can't make decisions.
All of that goes on the taxpayer's dime. I'll give you two perfect examples. This is when the technology was still coming along. There's a 1 foot wide by 4 foot long fluorescent light fixture. It's hung from two little stems from the ceiling and it's in the control room at this particular venue. Well, originally it was going to be one of the very first, you know, electronically controlled fluorescent fixtures. We go many years ago where LEDs became popular, et cetera. And so you needed to run control wires to it. Well, they deleted the pipe and the wires because it got too expensive. But we still installed the fixture. Well, the fixture was $5,000. It took me and another, another electrician, a journeyman at the time, the better part of several hours to install it because we couldn't touch their touchscreens and the, and you know, the whole scenario. So it was a very precarious situation.
So there was all that cost. And then the end result is it's just a light switch. It's a $5,000 regular light. And guess what? They'll never turn it on. You want to know why? Because the glare from the light, the way the touchscreen, the screens to manage and looking at, all the prisoners are at an angle. The glare makes it so that they can't see what the prisoners are doing, so it'll never be used. And, and then right outside of that, above it, there's a $50,000 light fixture that is the size of, I don't know, it's probably 30ft in diameter and it's all put together in modular components and it's hung at a weird odd angle from aircraft cable. It took three days to install with four people. And you know what? They couldn't even buy that light fixture from a Canadian company to stimulate our own economy.
So I have seen exactly how they view the spending of our dollars. And it's been proven to me that they can't be that I say they at the aggregate level can't be trusted. You might have great individual people that can be trusted, but they're fighting against the machine that just doesn't care to look after our, and manage and steward the money of the population of a nation in an appropriate manner.
[00:25:48] Speaker B: Very well said and very, very concerning. And so in this video, you know, just to, to recap, I guess. So we covered the, the Canadian government's new fiscal masterpiece, 486 billion in spending, zero budget. We've talked about how this isn't a plan, it's a warning. You heard me share that earlier.
Because something important to take away. Whenever the government can't explain where the money's coming from, we've got a spoiler alert. It's you, it's your income, it's your gains, it's your property, it's your tax qualified plans. And we walk through some of that, you know, in terms of the bait and switch, shrinking carbon rebates, the ticking time bomb that is this plan, this stupid spending plan. And it's just the kind where you kind of close your eyes and you swing a bat and you hope you don't hit the middle class. And yet that's what always happens. And Rich, you and I know, we know full well, like some people hear all this and they're going to say, well, hey, that's just the way things are, okay? Blockbuster used to be the way movies were until somebody created Netflix. And given that this is going online, I think the financial Netflix is what we would call the infinite banking concept. And when you implement this process, you're not just opting out of volatility, you're replacing chaos with contracts. That is so important because you get to be the one that's making new financial decisions. That's making the few financial decisions in your life, your family's life and within your business that don't depend on stock markets, tax bills, or whether the finance minister got a good night's sleep. And so we can't fix the government, but the truth is we can stop funding their damn dysfunction with our blind trust. Implement the infinite banking concept, or at minimum, at least investigate it. Understand the advantages of what it means to become your own banker. Because hoping for change isn't a strategy. Control is rich.
[00:28:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I 100% agree. And of course, now that you've been able to hear our little tirade and hear us, the next thing to do is to watch another one. You'll see that a magical recommendation for a new video just popped up, and I think you should go ahead and click on that.
[00:28:16] Speaker B: Continue your journey of learning. And in our case, whenever headlines like this come up, our journey of ranting.
Rich, this was fun.
