According to the Enneagram (a personality typing system), different personalities have a particular orientation to time. I tend to live with an eye to the future. This can be a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because it attracted me to the Infinite Banking Concept with its emphasis on long range thinking and legacy planning. On the other hand, I have always struggled to spend significant money in ways that would allow me to enjoy the present. My future concerns would always outweigh my present desires—even those that are healthy and good.
Typically, I won’t make updates to the house now because I can live with my outdated bathrooms or a cracked kitchen countertop for many more years. Or, I tell myself that one day I’ll travel after I have X amount of dollars saved, but not yet. Or worse yet, I’ll pay for that vacation with my family another year (or two or ten) and we’ll create great memories then! Always, one day, someday out in the future. The problem is none of us are guaranteed someday.
This lesson came home like a thunderbolt with my brother. He did everything right according to traditional financial advice. He worked hard and socked his money away in a qualified retirement plan with a company match. He drove truck long distance Monday through Friday every week for 40 years, looking forward to that day when he and his wife would move to Florida and finally start living a better life – except he didn’t. He retired in January at 63 years young, spent that first summer preparing his home for sale when he suddenly found himself out of breath just walking across the living room. It was cancer. Diagnosed in August, he was gone by October. His “one day, someday” never came. When my kids and I were at his home after his funeral, we noticed the silver coasters he had engraved with “Florida Bound 2014.” We were dumbstruck by the sadness of his unrealized hopes and dreams. I vowed then, not to live only for the future. I confess, I still have work to do.
You see, we are taught to save our way to retirement. The problem is that when we do, we inadvertently fall into another trap. We become afraid to touch our money for fear of taking away from the capital we are accumulating that must be there for retirement. Indeed, the problem is compounded if our savings is in a qualified plan as we are penalized if we touch it before 59 1/2 years old. Thus, our very program for wise planning also ends up programming us to live with a “one day, someday,” scarcity mindset.
But, it doesn’t have to be this way! The good news is when you become your own banker and store your capital in a mutually owned dividend paying whole life insurance policy, it changes everything. We can save our money for the future and spend it on the things that matter today. This is a total game changer! We can take that family vacation and create those most important memories knowing that our capital is still growing. We don’t have to wait to update the house until we are getting it ready for sale. We can enjoy it now and know that our capital will continue to compound. With IBC, we can be an honest banker and live our life today without fear of the future. Simply put, we can SAVE and SPEND at the same time! This my friends is so much freedom and peace of mind. It is unlike any other financial vehicle you can find.
So, now that I have given this a little bit of thought, I think when I put my pen down, I’m going to book that next vacation with my family and go purchase that new countertop for my kitchen because I can! Life is simply too short not to.
