2 www.innitebanking.org david@innitebanking.org
Nelson Nash Institute Monthly Newsletter November 2021
To be clear, Nelson Nash is not advising everyone
to “invest in life insurance.” Again, he recommends
using these policies as warehouses for one’s wealth—a
headquarters, if you will. If a person sees an attractive
real estate deal, he is certainly free to take out a policy
loan and use the funds to invest in the land. Indeed,
that’s part of the rationale for implementing IBC: You
always have ready access to your wealth, allowing
you to pounce on investment opportunities as they
arise.
Advice from the nancial “Experts”
Naturally, Nash’s advice is far too straightforward for
the gurus to endorse. The conventional wisdom from
nancial planners is that while it may be important
to have life insurance in the form of a cheaper term
policy (not a more expensive whole life policy) for
its death benet protection—especially for a young
breadwinner with kids to support—nonetheless life
insurance makes a terrible saving or investment
vehicle. Rather, the conventional nancial advice in
America today says that an individual should turn to
tax-qualied mutual funds to build up a nest egg for
retirement. Putting the two ideas together yields the
familiar slogan: “Buy term and invest the dierence.”
According to the gurus, “buy term and invest the
dierence” is a much more sensible strategy. For a
given death benet, the premium on a term policy is
lower than for a whole life policy, so that the pure life
insurance coverage is cheaper. Then with the savings
(because the premium is lower), the household can
invest in, say, a 401(k) mutual fund with pre-tax
dollars. These holdings then grow at historically higher
rates than the cash value in a whole life policy. Thus
it seems that “buy term, invest the dierence” is a no-
brainer: you get the desired death benet coverage for
your family at the lowest possible price, while your
retirement investments earn a better rate of return.
What kind of an idiot would follow the Nelson Nash
strategy in light of this seemingly superior approach?
In other issues of the LMR I have tackled this
mindset;
1
I won’t repeat my arguments here in this
article. Instead, I want to describe the trap into which
many American households fall, because they follow
this typical advice that I have just described. In the
next section, I’m doing nothing more than restating
what Nelson Nash describes as the typical American’s
problem early on in BYOB, but I’ll talk about it from a
slightly dierent angle.
Pung Your Money in Prison
Now in fairness, I should be clear that Dave Ramsey
tells his followers to stay out of debt altogether. So in
that respect, someone who literally obeys the Ramsey
approach is going to be ahead of the average Joe. But
more generally, that’s not what American households
do when they listen to the conventional nancial
wisdom.
For millions of American households, this is what
happens in practice: After they siphon some of their
paycheck into stocks and bonds which they can’t
touch until retirement, they then discover that they
can’t aord their desired lifestyle. So what do they
do, when they want to buy a car or a house, send their
kid to college, or pay for a wedding? Because the
government won’t let them access their “savings”—
which makes it an odd form of “savings”—these
households have to go hat-in-hand to outside creditors.
Depending on how much outside debt a household
takes on, the situation can border on the absurd.
Currently the average credit card debt per U.S. adult
is just shy of $5,000, while the average balance on a
card that usually carries a balance was above $8,000.
Looking at households (not individuals), the national
average of credit card debt is $7,000, while focusing
on just households with credit card debt the average
gure jumps to a whopping $15,000. Nearly 30
percent of Americans report having higher credit card
balances than they could pay o with their “emergency
savings.” Finally, the average APR on a credit card
with a balance on it was 13.14% as of February 2014.
2
These statistics are staggering.
3
The conventional
wisdom of putting money into a 401(k) is clearly not
working for any household carrying credit card debt.
The Federal Reserve may have a “zero interest rate
policy” but the credit card companies certainly don’t.
If a debt-strapped household can somehow manage to
pay o its $15,000 of credit card debt rolling over at