Table of Contents
Podcast Transcription
Georges El Masri [00:00:00] Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in, this is Georges El Masri and you are tuning in to the Well Off podcast where today I spoke to Jason Lowe, who is the founder, CEO and CEO of Ascendent Financial. He is the chairman of the Lowe Family Group of Companies, and we broke down the concept of becoming your own banker. And at first, I was having a bit of a hard time understanding this. But basically, we broke down the whole process of having whole life as a tool and using it to get ahead financially. So we talked about the strategy, we talked about how the banks use your money, and it was a pretty interesting concept. What they do with the money that sits around in your checking and savings accounts. And then we also kind of broke down the tax benefits of using whole life. So if you’re interested in finding out a little bit more about life insurance whole life, this is a great episode for you. And if you enjoy it, I ask you to share it with a friend. Make sure to leave us a review on the Apple Podcasts platform that is truly appreciated, and I just want to let you guys know that your support is appreciated. I really enjoy all the messages and the people reaching out and thank you so much for tuning in on a regular basis. So if you want to connect with me, I’ve got lots of opportunities in the Niagara Region. I am a real estate investor and I love working with investors. So if you’re looking for a three four unit properties and Niagara well in St. Catharines or Hamilton, reach out got a while after seeing, book, call, let’s chat. Enjoy the episode! Welcome to the podcast where the goal is to motivate, inspire and share success principles. I’m here with Jason Lowe. Jason, welcome. Thank you very much for your patience. We had some, some technical difficulties earlier. I appreciate you doing this.
Jayson Lowe [00:01:47] That’s OK. It’s great to be with you. Thank you for having me.
Georges El Masri [00:01:50] Awesome. So I like to start off by asking about your childhood. Do you want to tell me a little bit about where you grew up? Couple of things you remember.
Jayson Lowe [00:01:57] Oh, sure. Well, I was born and raised in Timmins, Ontario. And for your viewers and listeners, they may be familiar with Shania Twain, the country music singing sensation. Her real name is Eileen is Ojibwe. It means on my way to school. We were both born and raised in the same community and one of the one of the memories that I have from childhood. I grew up in a period where in the early 1980s I was still a toddler and inflation skyrocketed, so interest rates peaked at twenty one and a half percent. If you were a prime customer of the bank and my parents, sadly, my parents argued a lot about money because nobody taught them how to multiply it, how to keep it. And so I didn’t have anybody who could mentor me in that way. But I do remember. I’ll share this with you because it’s one of my favorite memories of my dad. I’ll never forget we lived in this semi-detached duplex, very small home, and all my friends were driving around on these new BMX bicycles. And I kept saying to my dad, I really want one of these BMX bikes. And he said, Can you do me a favor? Just go to the front picture window and just take a look outside and tell me what you see. And I said, OK, I went to the front picture window and I can close my eyes. I can see it. And he pointed out that all my friends were just dropping their bikes on the on the gravel, letting them fall on the road, dumping them on the front lawn and running into their house. And he said, Look. There’s a lot of grass to cut. A lot of neighbors go and get the lawn mower going, knock on doors, start cutting grass. And I promise you, when you earn the money to buy the bike while your friends are dropping them, not taking good care of them, kicking them around. He said, You’ll be out there, spit shining your bike every single day. Yeah. And he said, you’ve got to learn to appreciate the value of a dollar. And the surefire way to gain that appreciation is to get out there and work for it. And I’ll never, ever forget that advice. It’s stuck. It’s like permanently etched in my mind. Mm-Hmm. And I actually have in our The World headquarters of Ascend and Financial here. So way out there in the reception area. I’ve got a framed pic of a dollar and my dad’s quote cool when I first started business. And became an entrepreneur. I actually had that framed dollar sitting right above my computer up on the wall. So it was the first thing that I saw and it was the last thing I saw in the office every day and it reminded me of what? He advised me to do, and it still rings true to this day.
Georges El Masri [00:05:00] Oh yeah, 100 percent. I love that. That’s great. It’s a great story. I love hearing these little stories that you know, things that happen when you’re a kid and they just stick with you forever and they become kind of like a principle that you live by.
Jayson Lowe [00:05:13] Absolutely, and. You know, I’ll just share with you that growing up in that community is small mining and forestry community, but it really, truly was a great place to grow up. And you know, I still have a lot of dear friends. I have family that still resides there and it was a great place to grow up. But the world is a big place. You got to go out and see it. You’ve got to go out and explore it. And that’s what led me to Western Canada, where I live and work today. I mean, our business serves clients coast to coast. You know, we were we’re right across the country, but you never forget, you know, those really important pieces of wisdom that you pick up. Even when times aren’t good, you’ve always got to have your antenna up for lessons and for advice and things that you just don’t know at that time are going to be with you for the rest of your life.
Georges El Masri [00:06:11] Oh yeah, 100 percent. And I know this is different, but it’s kind of on the same level. But I find it’s kind of the same thing, like if I’m booking a podcast with a guest, if I just set a time with them, a lot of times they don’t show up. But if they go through the trouble of filling out their information in the system that I’ve created and they have to upload their portrait and do all that work or have their assistant, do it, they’re much more likely to show up. It’s just a little bit of a barrier, but it makes things a lot easier for me. Absolutely. Yeah. OK, so tell me about you’ve got the book behind you becoming your own banker. Tell me about that. What does that mean? What for the people that don’t know anything about what you do? If you can just tell us a little bit about that?
Jayson Lowe [00:06:56] Oh, for sure. So the process of becoming your own banker, the infinite banking concept, the whole essence of the process is to recapture the interest, the money that you presently pay to banks, credit card companies, finance companies. For all those things that you need throughout your lifetime, whether it’s property businesses, business investment, real estate investment appliances, weddings, education, recreational vehicles to name a few, like all of these things that you need to purchase throughout your lifetime. The whole essence of becoming your own banker is to have that money flowing back versus flowing the way. And we’ve been practicing and specializing in this process and teaching Canadians for the past 14 years.
Georges El Masri [00:07:45] So how do you do that?
Jayson Lowe [00:07:47] Head on over to the YouTubes, go to Bankers Volt. But secondly, get your hands on a copy of our Nelson Nash’s book. It’s a 92 page read. It’ll take you the better part of an afternoon to get through it and at a Senate financial dossier. That’s ascendent financial dossier if you just click on shop. By the book We Courier, we don’t send it Canada Post, we courier it to wherever you want it to go, and we sell it for less than Amazon. So I coauthored the book titled The End Asset for Canadians. We’re going to gift a copy of this book to your viewers and listeners. OK, sounds good. The other day was going to end asset, not to its end asset, not to claim their free copy there. And that is just for you, your viewers, your listeners, just as a token of gratitude for having us on the show. This is not about the product. It’s about the process. It’s about making this part of your lifestyle.
Georges El Masri [00:08:48] Are you able to share? I know you want people to head over to the website and to dig in and find out more information there, and that’s perfectly reasonable. But is there anything you can kind of break down for the listeners that are that are just interested in finding out more about how to use life insurance as a tool?
Jayson Lowe [00:09:07] Yes. Yes. What can you share with? Yeah. Well, I can share with you my own one of many personal examples. So back in, you may be familiar with this, but back in 2008, you could still get 40 year amortization. Forty years. Mm-Hmm. And so in April of 08, my wife, Rebecca and I, we purchased our first home together and we got a 40 year amortization. We thought, Oh my God, this is absolutely amazing. The interest rates were ridiculously low at that time as well. Mm hmm. And so in July of that year. So just a few short months later, that’s when I was first introduced to this process of becoming your own banker, the infinite banking concept. We began by opening up our dividend paying, participating whole life insurance contracts. Those contracts began to accumulate what’s called cash value immediately from day one. And I want you to picture if your viewers and listeners just close their eyes and they picture an aquarium in the aquarium is filling up with cash every day. Not water. Mm hmm. And what we did is we started accessing policy loans once a year and we would take the insurance companies money and send that to the bank. To buy down the principal balance of our mortgage, but because we were still in the first term of the mortgage, our mortgage payment didn’t change. It stayed the same, but every future payment we made became instantly more valuable to us because more of that payment was going toward principal and less of that payment was going toward interest. Mm-Hmm. It took us seven years to get rid of the commercial bank. So getting rid of the commercial bank 33 years ahead of schedule was pretty remarkable. Would you agree? Of course, the first person I called was my mentor. So I called Nelson and I said, Nelson, you’re not going to leave this. We’re done. We got rid of the bank. And he said, Whoa, whoa, whoa. Pump the brakes on. You’re not finished yet. Remember, this is all about becoming your own banker, you committed to a 40 year amortization, schedule payments. You’re going to finish that schedule. You’re just going to change the process of who’s getting the money. Mm-Hmm. So now that payment that I would have still otherwise been contractually obligated to send away from my family is now coming back to our system. What I mean is when we got rid of the bank, we had a policy loan balance outstanding. So the mortgage when we first got it was about four hundred and thirty grand a year. Seven. The bank is gone. We’ve got a policy loan balance of both 226 south, all of our cash in the aquarium. Is still filling up every day, it’s still growing uninterrupted. There’s no money that ever left our aquarium. We borrowed against that accumulating value on our terms. So think about this if you went into the bank and you needed access to money in the bank said, Listen, we’re going to lend you money on demand on your terms. Would you ever want to talk to me? No, not a chance, you’d be like, Man, I got, Hey, I got the great deal with my bank.
Georges El Masri [00:12:28] Okay. Sorry. Just sorry to interrupt. Just to clarify one thing this aquarium that you’re referring to is that the life insurance policy.
Jayson Lowe [00:12:36] That’s correct. You got it. OK, so you’ve got this contract, OK? Mm hmm. It’s called a dividend paying, participating whole life insurance contract. Yeah, it has a death benefit because it is a life insurance contract, but it also has financing characteristics. You’ve got this accumulating pool of financial value called cash. Haven’t met anybody yet who doesn’t like cash, right? Especially cash that grows daily uninterrupted.
Georges El Masri [00:13:05] Is that is that is it growing because of the dividends? Is that what you’re saying?
Jayson Lowe [00:13:10] No, no, no. So the reason it’s growing is the insurance company contractually guarantees that the total cash value that piles up in your aquarium must match the total death benefit of the policy. OK. And the way the policy is engineered, the death benefit keeps going up every year, but the premiums stays the same. So if you’re aging closer to one hundred. And the death rate, if it’s rising in the cash value, must match the death benefit by age 100. Mm. What is going to happen to the acceleration of that cash value growth as you age?
Georges El Masri [00:13:45] It should increase. It has to.
Jayson Lowe [00:13:48] Yeah. There’s no pandemic, no government intervention, no stock market volatility, no economic recession or expansion, no real estate cycle that’s going to take away any of that contractually guaranteed accumulation right in that good, of course. But if you just said to somebody, take a look at this life insurance contract and you can borrow money, you can borrow against it, it’s going to grow every day. You can participate in the divisible profit generated each year in the way of dividends. And if you chunk those dividends back into the policy, it grows the death benefit even greater, which means the cash for you getting bigger. A person is going to look at that and go, OK, well, how does that compare to bitcoin? Mm-Hmm. How does that compare to real estate investment? Yeah. How does that compare to the stock market? That’s a question coming from a person who doesn’t understand the problem. Mm-Hmm. If we lead with an understanding of the problem, which is banking and who’s controlling that in your life, then this becomes an either or it becomes an as well as. Hey, I’m going to become my own banker or I’m going to put my money in bitcoin, or I’m going to put my money in real estate, or I’m going to put my money into the stock market or mutual funds. Whereas the person who really understands the problem says, I’m going to become my own banker, as well as putting my money into bitcoin, real estate, the stock market, et cetera, because you can’t get a better rate of return doing anything if you’re not controlling the banking function as it relates to that thing that you want to do. Mm-Hmm.
Georges El Masri [00:15:21] Not good. Of course. Yeah.
Jayson Lowe [00:15:24] OK, is there anything stupid about doing that?
Georges El Masri [00:15:26] No, no. It’s just I think it’s it might be a little bit difficult for certain people to wrap their heads around how this works. Here’s the reason why
Jayson Lowe [00:15:35] it’s so difficult. One of the banks talked to you about all the time mutual funds. Give us your money. Yeah. Give us your money. Give us your money. Leave your money here. Give us your money. Hand control of the motion of your money over to us so that we can do something better with it than you can.
Georges El Masri [00:15:54] And by saying hand over your money, you mean like just keep your money in a checking account or a savings account or whatever.
Jayson Lowe [00:16:00] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Put the money in checking, put it in savings, put it in tax free savings and put it in mutual funds. But ask the bank. Go to your corner bank. At your first opportunity and approached the very first employee that you see in the bank and you can just say, Listen, I was listening to this guy, Jason Lowe on this podcast. This guy was so amped up. But I want to know, can you give me a list of all the mutual funds that you, the bank invest in? So hands you a blank sheet of paper. Mm hmm. Can you give me a list of? All the stocks that you buy as a bank. They’ll give you a blank sheet of paper. Mm-Hmm. But if you ask, can you give me? The figure as to how much money the bank has put into bank owned life insurance. It’ll be in the billions. So either the bank is really dumb. But they know something that you and I don’t. Which one do you think it is?
Georges El Masri [00:17:07] Probably. Number two.
Jayson Lowe [00:17:10] So if people are listening and viewing this podcast, they can hop on to the Googles. They can check with Uncle Google and type in the world bank owned life insurance. Mm-Hmm. You’ll be shocked at what you find.
Georges El Masri [00:17:24] So the bank is investing. How does the bank invest in life insurance?
Jayson Lowe [00:17:29] Great question. In order to be a chartered bank, you have to maintain what’s called Tier one capital. You have to have tier one assets; you need to have bullion. You’ve got to have bank owned life insurance cash. As Tier one assets. Wouldn’t it be an advantage if we just simply did with the banks, too? Yes. And so if banks are buying these contracts by the truckload? That should send a signal to you and I. Mm-Hmm. But yet they’re telling us, leave your money with us.
Georges El Masri [00:18:14] I’m still trying to wrap my head around how the bank buys life insurance, like
Jayson Lowe [00:18:19] what they pay for it. They use cash.
Georges El Masri [00:18:22] But for who? Because life insurance usually is associated to a person.
Jayson Lowe [00:18:27] That’s right. So they purchase these contracts on the lives of all of their key executives. OK. Imagine. Let’s see. We’ll use you as an example. Mm-Hmm. You get hired in a key a sea level role with a commercial bank. Mm-Hmm. The bank says Listen, part of your employment contract is we need to ensure your life because if something happened to you. If the unthinkable were to occur, we have to go out and hire another U. Mhm. That’s going to put us in a pretty awkward situation temporarily while we go out and find someone else. But what we’re also going to do is that if you fulfill your employment contract with the bank, we’re going to pay you a defined income all throughout your retirement. It’s on the house because the bank knows that when you’re gone, they’re going to get reimbursed for everything they paid you. Plus more. Isn’t that good? Yes. So why wouldn’t you do that for your family? If your family is going to spend money, would you not want to replenish the family? Well, when the family member who spent all the money is gone. Mm-Hmm. Let’s bring the money back to the family.
Georges El Masri [00:19:44] Yes, and there would be, from my understanding, tax benefits, and that’s good.
Jayson Lowe [00:19:49] Yeah, it happens on a tax free basis. Yeah. So there’s no taxable event triggered. Death benefits are paid income tax free and access to capital throughout the lifetime of the life that is insured is also available on a tax free basis. But you’ve got to work with somebody who’s thoroughly familiar with this, and this is what we do and we’re great at what we do. Mm-Hmm. And I’ll tell you, when you get into a situation in your life when you don’t have to rely upon a commercial bank for anything other than the convenience of debit. That’s peaceful, man. Mm hmm. Stress free. But it doesn’t happen overnight. We live in an instant gratification, every single instant coffee, instant food, instant downloads, instant everything. This is a process that is meant to be achieved incrementally over a period of time. But the longer you wait, the more you penalize yourself and you don’t even know you’re doing it. Mm-Hmm. But you’ve got to understand the problem first. Otherwise, the solution just won’t matter to you. Yeah. And the best way to gain an understanding of the problem is to open your eyes to this whole new financial world. Read the book Immerse yourself in the YouTubes. Learn. Get your brain thinking differently. In they’re good. Yes.
Georges El Masri [00:21:18] So just because this is new to me, like I have a life insurance policy, but I don’t have whole life or any of that, that sort of thing. So just to kind of recap and to make sure that I understand it’s basically when you get a whole life insurance policy, one that you would suggest it will grow over time because from my understanding, it earns a return of some sort
Jayson Lowe [00:21:47] while the insurance company earns the return. Yes, your growth is contractually guaranteed, OK?
Georges El Masri [00:21:55] And it’s based on the death benefit, which increases over time.
Jayson Lowe [00:22:00] It increases every year or every month dependent upon how frequently you pay the premium
Georges El Masri [00:22:05] rate and then it allows. This policy allows you to borrow against it so you could technically use the money you borrow against the policy to pay down other debts or to pay down to buy things that you want to buy. Yeah.
Jayson Lowe [00:22:22] Or to take advantage of opportunities that will absolutely track you down. Right. And when you have ready access capital. On demand on your terms. Mm-Hmm. Opportunity will hunt you down. I promise.
Georges El Masri [00:22:37] So is there some sort of tax benefit or something like that to using the funds that you’re borrowing against your policy
Jayson Lowe [00:22:46] dependent upon that individual’s total structure and how they’re put together financially, there could definitely be. Absolutely.
Georges El Masri [00:22:54] So what would be the benefit then? Like, why would somebody borrow against the policy as opposed to just invest in something else? And, you know, get her make a return on something else that could potentially be greater than this whole life policy, for example?
Jayson Lowe [00:23:09] Oh, goodness. Well, what I would say in that scenario is that if I have just cash, so if I just had saved up money for an opportunity and I had, you know, $50000 sitting in my savings account at the commercial bank and an opportunity came my way, I could withdraw that 50000 and go and invest in whatever that opportunity is. And that opportunity is going to pay me a 10 percent rate of return. Just an arbitrary number. Yeah, but you have a policy that you’ve piled up 50000 in your aquarium. And you approach the insurance company and say, you know, I’d like to take a policy loan against that aquarium that’s full of cash. Yeah, the insurance company says absolutely. Now you’re using the insurance company’s money to participate in the same opportunity that I did using my own cash, right? Yeah. I’ve got zero balance in my savings account now, but I’ve got 50000 in the investment account. Makes sense. Yes, you’ve got 50000 in your aquarium and 50000 in the investment account and your aquariums going to keep growing in value every day. Hmm. So I couldn’t get a better rate of return than you if I tried. Mm-Hmm. We’re both going to get the same return, but you just went about financing the investment differently than I did.
Georges El Masri [00:24:34] So at what point do you have to repay the amount that you’ve borrowed against your policy
Jayson Lowe [00:24:39] when you decide to? You’re the policy owner, you’re the one that controls the repayment schedule of your loan. OK. And so if you happen to pass away and there was a loan balance outstanding, that loan balance would be deducted from the total death benefit of the insurance policy. So using that same scenario, if I passed away and went about purchasing the investment the way that I did, which is to use my savings, my own cash when I go, the only value is the investment value. When you go, you’ve got the investment value and the death benefit, right? One, you’re going to pay tax on the other one you want. Mm hmm. And so that’s such a shallow, you know, overview, there’s so much more depth to it. The process of becoming your own banker is never has been, never will be about addressing the yield of an investment. The process of becoming your own banker is all about how you go about financing the things that you need in life, which can certainly include investments. It’s all about the how. The process? Yeah. The tool. That enables you to implement the process is dividend paying, participating whole life insurance. That’s the tool. Mm-Hmm. But if I give you the best tool to get the job done and I didn’t show you how to use the tool, not only are you not going to turn out any good work with the tool, you’re likely going to break the tool. Mm-Hmm. And so that’s why you need to coach. You need somebody who can lead you to mentor you through how to make this process become part of your lifestyle. It’s not a financial plan. Those things end up in a binder collecting dust on the shelf somewhere. This is all about lifestyle. Now something good.
Georges El Masri [00:26:34] Yes. OK, cool. I’m understanding the basics, I know that this is not as simple as, you know, a 15 minute conversation or whatever. There’s a lot more to it, but I appreciate you sharing the basics. Do you feel like there’s anything else we should discuss before we move on to the next part?
Jayson Lowe [00:26:53] No. Let’s go. Let’s keep rocking and rolling. OK. Well, if what we just talked about didn’t inspire somebody to at least hit the YouTubes and read Nelson’s book, yeah, I would invite that person. Please send me a message and I’ll raise my own right hand and slap myself in the face like this. Look, this is all about the fundamental truths. Your money must reside somewhere. Would you agree? Yes. And someone or some organization must control the banking function as it relates to your needs. There are no exceptions. Anybody who’s watching or listening has all of their income flowing through the books of someone else’s bank presently. I say that again someone else’s bank. Yeah, taking control of that is going to radically improve anything that you’re already doing financially. Mm-Hmm. Who doesn’t want radical improvement to anything they’re already doing financially, right?
Georges El Masri [00:27:53] Cool. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Jayson Lowe [00:27:56] Or you weren’t ready, you weren’t ready for me to be on the Aussie amped up as I am. I get to talk about this every day.
Georges El Masri [00:28:03] Yeah, yeah. Well, you’re obviously very passionate about this, and I’m sure it’s impacted your life so that the next part here is just to share. How do people reach you? What services do pride, which is super obvious, but if you just want to recap those two things?
Jayson Lowe [00:28:20] Oh, sure. Yeah, well, think sincerely. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to share that because. The process of becoming your own banker is what we specialize in, but we take care of our clients in terms of not only the dividend paying, participating whole life insurance contracts, but we also provide critical illness disability. We take care of our client full circle. And we’ve got on our team trust and estate planning expertize. Certified Financial Planning expertize Chartered Life Underwriting expertize. So we provide that full service to our client and our clients really value that. In addition, with the ongoing coaching and mentoring, as I mentioned previously with our password protected client portal that just has a treasure trove of resources. We meet with our clients and invite them to quarterly group client coaching sessions. If you can’t attend, it’s recorded and archived in the portal so you can go back and view it at your convenience. So we’re all about servicing our clients and taking great care of them and making sure that their journey is amazing. They always want to continually impress our clients and bring value and people can get in touch. It’s very simple. I’d love to hear from folks. You can head on over to ascendent financial dots here. That’s a send in financial dossier. And when you get there, if you click on Meet Our Team, you’re going to see all of the people who contribute to your satisfaction when you’re working with us. And if you need to reach me by my profiles on there, you can simply click through that and get in touch. I’d love to hear from you.
Georges El Masri [00:30:06] Awesome. Jason, thank you so much for sharing this concept. Hopefully, it will positively impact a few people. And I appreciate your time.
Jayson Lowe [00:30:14] Always a pleasure being with you. Thanks so much for having me.
Georges El Masri [00:30:17] Thanks for listening to this episode of The Well Off podcast. If you enjoy the show, then I’d really appreciate if you left us a review on iTunes and let us know your thoughts in order for us to get a larger audience, it’s really important to have reviews so your sport is extremely appreciated. And also, don’t forget to share the podcast with your friends and family. Until next time, I’m Georges El Masri. Have a great day.