Nelson Nash on Why He Wrote Becoming Your Own Banker

In the late 1960s Nash met Larry Wilson of Wilson Learning Corporation, who had built a sales training program for Bank of America called Counselor Selling. It ran four hours at a time over ten weeks, on the theory that each lesson needs time to be digested before the next one lands.

Nash and a colleague taught it every fall for years. They capped it at two people from any one occupation, because, in his words, people have tunnel vision and assume their business is different. They deliberately scheduled it against Monday Night Football. Anyone unwilling to give that up was not someone they wanted in the room.

When his own banking seminar failed, he went back to that structure. That is what produced the book.

Nash was direct about this: "If it weren't for Austrian economics, that book would not exist." He had been selling life insurance the conventional way, on the need for a death benefit, and his Austrian background is what made him see that something was missing from the standard pitch.

This is the part most summaries of Infinite Banking leave out. The concept is not a product feature. It is an economic argument about who should control the banking function, applied to a contract that happened to fit.

The analogy came from a practitioner named Jim Kenry. A trust has a grantor, a trustee, and a beneficiary. The grantor creates it out of nothing and puts property into it. That property becomes the trustee's, and the trustee has to put it to work.

Nobody ever says look how much that trustee is making. They say look how well that trustee is doing for the other two parties. If that were not true, nobody would create a trust.

Nash's point: you buy a policy, you are the grantor, the insurance company is the trustee, and you have a beneficiary. The company has to put the money to work, and you outrank everyone else in access to it.

Nash said money had not left his family in over 30 years. No car financing, no mortgages. He described the concept buying him five airplanes over the years.

Every time a grandchild was born, he started 2,000 dollars of premium on them and the parent matched it, so each of his ten grandchildren had 4,000 dollars a year going in. He stopped paying at age 22, at which point dividends covered the premium and the remainder bought paid-up additions.

His summary of the intent: "If they do what I say, they'll never see a bank in their life."

"I have the perfect estate plan. I don't own a thing." A car and a house jointly with his wife, and beyond that nothing in his name. Nothing to probate. His wife held 1.8 million dollars of insurance on him and all of his children owned policies on him too.

The mistake he kept seeing in his clients, and in his own younger brother who died at 80, was different and simpler. They never taught their wives how to be a widow.