You are here because you want to learn more about becoming your own banker. If you pursue this course, you will not only become your own banker; you will own the bank! When you need money to help a child with schooling, or snatch a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, or buy an off-grid cabin, or whatever; how would it be if you just wrote a check for it? No application, no one checking your credit score or demanding your financial history and your bank statements. Owning your own bank is the ultimate for control, freedom, and security. Here’s how.
Be advised that this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. But think about this: at one drip per second, how long does it take to get a gallon of water? One. Drip. Per. Second. Guess how long!
Small, consistent acts, repeated over a long period, have power this generation can hardly imagine. This is a get-rich method. Did you guess 3 or 4 days? It only takes 21 hours, less than one day!
I welcome you to Bank-Free Banking and to the training that will free you from the bankers’ grip and let you begin to make money just like the bankers do while also attending to your financial needs like the bankers do. Bank-Free Banking is banking without an ordinary bank: like a fat-free food is food without fat. We will use the name “MyBank” for your new personal bank that will replace the one you are now using. For example, when you want a loan you just talk to yourself about it.
My name is Jackson Pemberton, and I am the originator of the “bank-free banking” moniker. My job here is to introduce and describe a system that you probably have never heard of. One of this course’s major objectives is de-programming your brain from understanding banking the way bankers designed it (for their profit) and re-programming your thinking to recognize that you can design, build, own, and control a custom banking system for yourself. Let that sink in – that’s where we are going with this course! You can design, build, and control your own bank. I call it the MyForeverBank because this brings the banking function into your home. This idea alone is a paradigm shift: a bank that is not down the street but in your house and under your control! A bank that becomes an intimate and natural part of your home.
The ideas behind bank-free banking are actually centuries old and more than well-proven. What is new here is the way you will learn about this financial method. This course will do some necessary academic treatment of the vocabulary (optional for you) and principles but the instructions in methodology will be delivered by examples so you see how it works in vivo. You will get a feel for it that an academic treatment could not deliver.
The following may surprise you because it may seem counter-intuitive, but the motor that runs this bank is life insurance! Life insurance was invented to insure that death did not end the income stream the breadwinner produced, so it got the name of life insurance, but seen from another perspective, a particular type of life insurance is a marvelous tool that can leverage your money in a surprising way. Here’s why.
Because the policyholder makes payments over a long period, and because of the terms included in a whole life insurance policy, a large pool of cash becomes a flexible, accessible, controllable, and secure financial resource that is far superior to investments such as savings accounts, stocks, bonds mutual funds, 401ks, or certificates of deposit (CDs). When viewed from this perspective, life insurance is a superior investment, and the death benefit is just the “frosting on the cake.” Life insurance should have been called something like “Personal Capitalization.”
As if that were not sufficient, there is still more that this course will give you.
This is a naturopathic course that will reach deeply into your habits and way of thinking about life and build your character, giving you a notch up on your self-esteem, self-confidence, and ability to act instead of being acted upon. We will not focus on those things, but they will be the natural consequence of building your own MyForeverBank. We are going to train you in such a way that self-confidence and self-esteem will flow into you without compulsory means. Let’s review some of these human challenges.
Programmed Spending
The marketing sector of our national economy has spend billions of dollars studying the propensities of the human animal – and they have nailed us. A good TV ad or a block buster movie changes the scene every second or two, even if it is only a different angle on the same subject. That’s because the brain needs a moment of close attention to orient itself to new scenes. The short clips keep us riveted to the screen and a slave to the message offered.
They have learned how to make us feel that we need to buy something. No matter where we are on the wealthy scale, we need to buy something more to keep up. So you spend a lot of money for things that don’t satisfy your needs and wants. You live in a manufactured, artificial world that sets values and goals for you that are not in your best interest. And you think that is just the way life is and you go along with the game laid out carefully for you because you don’t know any better. But in your quiet moments, you sometimes wonder if this “rat race” is really what it’s all about. You wonder if there is a way to live that doesn’t demand that you constantly reach for things that are just beyond you: that need you to spend just a little more money than you have: that keep you constantly not quite satisfied with your present conditions.
New Lifestyles
People are leaving the big cities, and some are going so far as to go to a wild, off-grid lifestyle that is more rewarding because it is simpler. I am one of those. My 81-year-old wife and I live above 7,000 feet elevation in the Rocky Mountains in a 700-square-foot cabin. We get our water from a spring, our power from the sun, and heat our home with wood from the trees that die and fall over on our 10 acres of forest. This is a rewarding life because it is challenging.
We had a paradigm shift and saw our lives as they really were instead of a reflection in the corporate marketers’ mirror. Besides that, we saw a way to stop feeding a mortgage and bought a backwoods parcel with an unfinished cabin we could pay for with one year’s income. We will soon stop paying interest. That’s an inversion for us, who have paid interest of several thousand dollars every year for at least forty years. It is my first step in building MyBank.
Banks Are for Bankers
When you walk into a bank, you walk onto their turf. Probably without realizing it, you agree to play your financial game on that turf and so according to their rules. You have entered a world constructed by bankers, for bankers, and designed for their gain, not yours. You give yourself willingly into their hands with the hope that they can help you reach whatever goal you have in mind. The resulting arrangements will be profitable for the bankers because they built it that way.
Nelson Nash quoted my writings on the Constitution because I was advocating freedom. The politicians love to write laws (which necessarily curtail freedom) for the bankers. It’s a banker-politician complex that designed investment instruments to their liking. For instance, the rules governing 401Ks. Freedom means you design your own investment instruments with messy rules like “required minimum distributions.” Those stink of control and regulations.
You may have noticed that banks have the biggest buildings in town that stand on prime real estate. For example: the little town of Ephraim, Utah is centered on the intersection of Main and Center Streets. Two of the four corners are occupied by Zion’s Bank and Cache Valley Bank.
The first thing we’ve got to do here, is de-program you from thinking like this: “I can go to the bank and maybe they will have mercy on me, and help me _______________ (buy a car, a house, or finance my daughter’s education, or …). That’s the way we are programmed, we grow up in that point of view and it is exactly what the banker wants you to think – they are doing you a favor. But they wrote their rules to favor themselves. Of course.
You can be certain that the banking system was not designed for you because it is strongly biased against your needs. When you are desperate to borrow money, you can’t get it, or if you do get it, it is extremely expensive. Never mind that you have always paid off your loans, and otherwise shown your reliability and attention to what you owed. Now your credit score is low and you are classified as high risk in spite of your stellar history.
When you are doing really well and in a position to loan money to others, the banks will do everything they can to get you into their debt. Their agenda is all about them, not you. Not that there is anything illegal or shady, just the banks were designed by bankers for bankers. Not you.
What you really want is some of their banking functions structured by you, for your gain, and controlled by your rules.
That’s what Bank-Free Banking is all about. You. Your goals. Your rules. Your life!
Anyway, I hope you have learned two things in this little discussion: that fundamental principles will help you comprehend the details in a way that keeps the details in order in your mind, and that learning what banking is fundamentally about will free your mind to see how to do Bank-Free Banking.
We will be talking a lot about fundamentals because once you get those right, everything else falls into place. So we will try to unscrew your head, dump out the banker’s bias and fill it with fundamentals that will free you forever from the traps of banking as usual.
The Bank-Free Banking Course
This course is about “becoming your own banker” and is derived, for the most part, from R. Nelson Nash’s book by that title. I will refer to his work from time to time, but this course will also draw heavily on my own life experiences, all 87 years of them. I have the distinct advantage of first becoming aware of Bank-Free Banking only a year ago after paying at least a quarter of a million dollars in mortgage interest alone. So, I came to the shocking realization that I had lived the wrong financial life for 60 years! This is an advantage to you because I am a convert. I saw banking the same way life in today’s financial world has trained you to see it. I have struggled to make the paradigm shift that you must make. I think I can help you. So listen up! Together we can build your MyBank. I will provide the scaffolding, but you must do the building.
The Basic Financial Method
I want to give you just a teaser, a brief introduction to Bank-Free Banking. I want to give you a vision of what this can do for you and your family.
Life insurance has been given a bad rap by the people who offer the many inferior ways to invest. Labels can be misleading. A whole life insurance policy should have been named something like “regenerative savings” because it is a reliable financial instrument that can multiply itself. You invest money in it, and it soon begins to compound itself. Here’s how it works.
Because the life insurance policy owner makes payments over a long period, and because of the terms included in a life insurance policy, a pool of cash becomes a flexible, accessible, controllable, and secure financial resource that is far superior to investments such as savings accounts, stocks, bonds mutual funds, and certificates of deposit (CDs). When viewed from this perspective, life insurance is a superior investment, and the death benefit is just the “frosting on the cake.” Life insurance was named for the reason it was invented but not for the excellent investment instrument it is. It should have been called Personal Capitalization.
This is nothing like a regular savings account because it begins to refund part of your contributions without lowering the balance in the account. These are refunds, not interest, so they cannot be taxed. If you are smart and able, you will use these to add to the balance or to start another regenerative savings account. No ordinary savings account does this. It is usual, that in a few years these refunds are greater than your monthly contributions. I’ll explain how that happens later.
That is the basic mechanism, but at least two more aspects of a whole life insurance policy make Bank-Free Banking even more attractive.
The first one is easy: the death benefit. It is just frosting on the MyBank cake. This is a cheap way to assure yourself that if your income stream ends, it doesn’t end for your beneficiaries.
The cake is a bit more complex. Look at it this way: when you buy a whole life insurance policy, you are building a bank. You have to capitalize (put money into) that to get it started. An ordinary business takes a few years to break even, and to actually pay back the initial investment and produce a profit takes an average of about seven years. A policy has a similar characteristic because it becomes a business that you own. (The policy is owned by you, not the insurance company.) This will be a successful business because you will see it grow without intervention. (You don’t have to open the store every morning, carry inventory, pay employees, write off stolen products, etc.)
What MyBank Offers
Here’s the features that make bank-free banking so attractive. We’ll cover all these during the course.
- Absolute control of your money: no approvals or credit scores needed
- Guaranteed dividends
- Guaranteed growth
- Tax-free growth
- You can leverage your own money: save it and use it simultaneously
- Privacy: keep your financial affairs to yourself
- Stability: your investments are not open market instruments
- Availability: instant access when an opportunity or need arises
- Cost-effective protection: insurance at a decreasing cost
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.
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