This course would not be complete is I didn’t cover this topic. In fact, I wrote these words on the fifth day of writing the course. This is the most crucial part of the course. Well, that’s an interesting perspective – the fact is you have to understand the financial mechanisms, you have to believe in the financial mechanisms, but what I trying to say is you also have to believe in yourself. You have got to have a vision of yourself being a MyForeverBanker.
“Without a vision the people perish.” the good book says and my 87 years tell me that is absolutely true. I have had visions and lost them and failed to achieve the goal, and I have had visions and followed them to their glorious end. It is just a simple fact of our mortality that we are subject to such things. The secret sauce is knowing how to get a vision when you want it, and how to keep it shining brightly before you so you stick with it through thick and thin, through the good and the bad days.
There will be discouragements so you must learn to dance in the rain. Learn to accept failure as a key to success. Remember, we got the light bulb because Edison managed to see each of his thousand failures as progress, another method to be eliminated on his path to being illuminated.
If you are a typical US citizen, whatever that is, you are endoctrinated in the financial system constructed by bankers and politicians to be profitable for them. It’s as simple as that. You need to breakout of that picture, get a whole new paradigm of yourself using your MyForeverBank. That vision is the most important goal you have. On the way there, you will likely find that there certain things about yourself, even about your personal character that need adjustment. That will be your biggest challenge. Nobody wants somebody else telling them what is wrong with their character. So you will dislike some topics I will be taking you through.
The degree to which you dislike a topic tells you the importance of it.
If that happens, if you run up against something here that raises your aversion, then know this: It’s OK, it’s normal. Your best path forward is to own it, let the feeling overtake you, and think about all the reasons you should skip that section. Let the rationalizations flow until they run “out of gas”. Then dive into the subject, and if you will allow me, I may be able to drag you, complaining, kicking, and screaming into your MyForeverBank.
So, let’s review the whole program – here’s what you have to do to be a MyForeverBanker, to build and keep a MyForeverBank. These are not in order of importance, there is no such order. These are just the ingredients that must be in the bowl if you want to make Bank-Free Banking cookies – leave one out and you won’t get cookies.
- Understand that whole life insurance can be the foundation of your banking system. (Take this course.)
- Understand the basics of finance. (Ace this course.)
- Understand how to discipline yourself to buy the needed policies.
- Understand your own weaknesses and how to overcome them.
- Have a vision of the conditions that will prevail as your MyForeverBank blesses your financial affairs.
How to Be What You Must Be
Life is full of dilemmas. The more you focus on making yourself happy, the more miserable you will become because that is a very selfish use of your time. The more you reach out to make others happy, relieve their pain, calm their nerves, feed their needs, the happier you will be.
We have serious trouble, in a culture that constantly appeals to our creature needs and provides instant gratification, in finding joy. Playing video games is real, immersive fun, but it is only that. It is not happiness and certainly not joy. You have to keep playing the game to have that transitory kind of happiness. Authentic happiness can be remembered over and over with no regrets and no need to repeat the activity.
The whole truth of the matter is that authentic happiness and joy cannot be directly purchased with any amount of money or effort. We simply must learn to do our duty to love God, our families, our neighbors, and our country and then to do the things that love suggests. When we do the right thing, happiness just happens. When it comes that way, it is the sweetest kind of joy.
Why have I gone into “preacher” mode? Because happiness will be the most important part of the support you will need to keep the positive attitude required to succeed in the long run with anything and with Bank-Free Banking in particular. We will discuss positive attitude and how to keep it next.
But before leaving this topic, I want to make one last summary statement: if you focus on being what you must be, on the kind of person you must be to reach your vision, everything else will eventually fall into place almost automatically. That’s a fact of life, that’s karma in action.
Wisdom and Emotion
These are two different things of course, and to be a wise banker you must keep a cool head. That should be obvious. I want to spend some time on this subject because it is more important in the long run than all the other so-called financial principles.
I have learned, during my 80 some years, that first impressions are often not only wrong, but the opposite of the truth.
When we were in the middle of our child-producing years, I needed to refinance a small farm we had purchased a few years earlier. I was working full-time as a Systems Analyst, producing financial software for Salt Lake County and farming the rest of the time. There were several lending agencies along a particular street in Salt Lake City, one of which we had used to purchase our 10-acre “farm.” I decided to visit these and compare their terms.
As I walked along, I came to our mortgage holder and immediately began to hear myself describe all the reasons why I should not talk to them, so I walked on. Then, coming to myself, I realized how strange it was that I would have so many negative thoughts when there were no good reasons to support them. I just had a bad attitude, perhaps because I was having trouble keeping up with the payments.
I repented of my negative attitude, I realized that the application and qualification processes would be simplest because they had years of experience with my on-time payments and all my personal information. I ended up getting the loan there at as good a rate as I could find anywhere.
That was a good lesson for me. But I want to tell you one more story about attitude because your attitude is more important than all the financial training you can get anywhere. It determines whether you see things as they really are or as they really aren’t.
During my late teen years, our family lived in Tieton, Washington state; my father was producing apples and pears. He had purchased a small apple orchard several miles up the Naches River, and we were clearing land and making preparations to plant more orchard. Because it was several miles from home and Dad had other orchards to attend to, he often left me alone on the new property with an assignment. If you have experience farming, you already know what happened. I had good days and I had bad days. The common problem was some kind of equipment failure.
As the summer went by I found myself taking two distinct paths when trouble struck. Sometimes I would feel challenged by the failure (probably when I could see an easy solution), and other times; I would spend hours waiting to be picked up, having conversations in my head during which I refined my excuses for failure.
Somewhere that wonderful summer I came to myself and realized what I was doing. I decided to repent. Looking back, I could see that it was a lot more fun to see a problem as a challenge and throw myself into it with everything I had, than to sit and polish excuses. I found that I could fix things with baling wire, sticks, stones, and whatever I could find poking around that old property. So I had the opportunity to feel like a hero or to feel like a loser. It was up to me.
Always, always keep your mind on what you want and off the things you don’t want. (A Napoleon Hill guideline.) You will be a lot more astute as a Bank-Free Banker, and more importantly, you will be a lot happier.
The Best Opportunities Look Like Problems
When we found our off-grid cabin real estate and drove from Kansas to the Rocky Mountains to see it, we discovered in a conversation with the listing agent, that the price had been based solely on the dirt and the forest that grew out of it, i.e. the price was typical for a lot the same size and characteristics without consideration for the cabin. We learned that the owner had not been there for at least two years, the chimney had been scraped off by a heavy snow pack the previous year leaving a hole a foot in diameter, and a window had been broken out for some time. A careful inspection of the window and the surrounding outside wall proved that the chimney and its flashing had swung under the eve and broken the window. The weather coming through the hole in the roof had done surprisingly little damage. The hole in the window, however, had not only let in the weather but many forest critters.
There were also several problems with the supporting members of the cabin. The beams were smaller than the specifications we found in the loft and the floor joists had been exposed to the weather for some time and needed to be replace. So the cabin had serious problems.
However, the pricing of the place entirely discounted the cabin. This was the basis of the good investment we made because the cost to build what was there, poor as it was, was not even close to zero. All those problems could be fixed, and I could do the work myself. I could turn a cabin valued at zero into a structure worth tens of thousands of dollars; the materials I would need and the time to do the work would all be leveraged into a huge increase in value.
Those problems provided an investment opportunity.
It is a self-evident axiom of life that every problem is an opportunity. The secret to success is often your point of view. This leads us to the principle that the best investments will have opportunities that exhibit themselves as problems.
The key to success is a positive mental attitude. Be aware of your thoughts and feelings. When your feelings are strongly negative, ask yourself if there are facts to support that degree of aversion. If not, turn the problem over to see the opportunity and evaluate it. You may be looking at the best chance you’ll ever have. Or, you may not.
That is the only way to obtain an unbiased, cold, calculated view of the matter. That’s what you need when you think of any investment, like a mountain cabin or a broken-down tractor.
He writes from a background as a family man (raised ten children) with degrees in Physics, Mathematics, and Business. HIs vocation has been mostly Engineering and Financial Business, Accounting and Banking software. He is a Christian, a Philosopher, and an Author writing mainly about rights and government. He lives off-grid most of the year in the tops of the Rocky Mountains.
- Fundamentals of Finance - February 19, 2025
- How to Be a MyForeverBanker - February 19, 2025
- Cost of Capital - February 17, 2025
