“Infinite Banking” or “Be Your Own Bank” via Whole Life Insurance…where to start?
Can't tell you where to go for a good policy, but I can tell you that most brokers make a hefty commission out of your payments for at least a year before you even start funding the tax sheltered investment account that you're trying to buy under the umbrella of life insurance. You'll have to do a lot of homework to hunt down a reputable discount broker or a direct policy purchase from the insurance company. Life insurance requires insurable need. The description is vague enough, that you can probably still get the account despite being a single male with no apparent heirs to benefit, but it raises the question of why you are buying the insurance. Whole life policies require you to maintain a certain ratio of investment to premium payment and you will likely never be able access all of the money in the account for your own personal usage. Compare several policies from several brokers and companies. Read all the critical sources you can about the pitfalls and dangers of commissions, fees and taxes eating the benefits of your account. Verify that the insurance company you buy the policy from is financially stable after the market crash. You are paying a commission to pool your money into their investment fund, and if your insurer goes under, you'll have to get a portion of your money (possibly only the principle) back from the state insurance commissioner. Some companies sold pretty generous policies during the bubble and have cut their offerings way down without fixing their marketing literature and rosy promises.  Finally, let us know what you find. It never hurts to see hard numbers and to run multiple eyes over the legalese in these contracts. "Keep in mind that the only advantage that using a tax favored account gives you is tax-free growth of the cash value of the policy. This ""Infinite Banking"" spin isn't some sort of new revolution in money management, its just a repackaging of techniques that people have been using for years to manage tax liability with some breathless marketing spiel. Before you jump in, compute the following: Now comes the hard part: Life insurance is sold, never bought. The guy pushing this does seminars at hotels sponsored by life insurance agents. The purpose of the program is to generate sales of insurance. Be wary. If you actually have the significant amounts of money required to capitalize this, there are much better ways to get an income stream from that money -- you need a good financial advisor. And if you have a huge tax liability and a scheme like this somehow makes sense, find someone who does it for a living in your state who isn't a crook." "Why would you give them the money and borrow it back?  If you didn't give it to them in the first place you wouldn't need to borrow!  It makes no sense at all. It USED to have a different use--as a tax dodge.  You would buy ""life insurance"" for a low amount of coverage and way overfund it.  Let the money grow and in your later years you would ""borrow"" against the extra value you had built up in the policy.  Since this was a loan rather than a payout it wasn't income.  When you died the tax liability went poof. Thus so long as what you had to pay in life insurance + the inefficiency of the insurance company was less than the tax rate it was a good deal. Congress closed this loophole a long time ago by prohibiting too great overfunding." "There are a lot of false claims around the internet about this concept - the fact of the matter is you are giving yourself the ability to have money in a tax favored environment with consistent, steady growth as well as the ability to access it whenever you want.  Compare this to a 401k plan for example....money is completely at risk, you can't touch it, and you're penalized if you don't follow the government's rules. As far as commissions to the agent - an agent will cut his commission in half by selling you an ""infinite banking"" style policy as opposed to a traditional whole life policy. @duffbeer703 clearly doesn't understand life insurance in the slightest when he says that the first three years of your premium payements will go to the agents pocket.  And as usual offers no alternative except ""pick some high yielding dividen stocks and MLPs"" - Someone needs to wake up from the Dave Ramsey coma and realize that there is no such thing as a 12% mutual fund....do your research on the stock market (crestmont research).  don't just listen to dave ramseys disciples who still thinking getting 12-15% year in and year out is possible. It's frustrating to listen to people who are so uneducated on the subject - remember the internet has turned everyone into ""experts"" if you want real advice talk to a legitimate expert that understands life insurance and how it actually works."
The short answer is: the money is yours from the insurance company, they actually can't tell you how to spend it, they can only decide from their tables and your plan, how much you get. The longer answer: Usually the insurance company pays one blanket amount, then itemizes the rest, where you have to submit receipts.  You're also lucky, because damage over time is rarely covered, damage is usually only covered as sudden damage, so they don't pay out for maintenance issues. You can repair your house the way you want, I even do some of my own labor, because some repair jobs just don't get covered what they really cost to do right.   HOWEVER, your mortgage company can withhold part of your claim to verify satisfactory work, this is to maintain the value of the collateral, and the insurance company can choose not to cover pre existing damage.  Generally they don't stray from the assessment.   I do not know of any law that permits an internal inspection of your home without your consent.  They can come look at the outside, but they can't force you to let them inspect inside... Unless they're holding some of your insurance payment hostage, for most banks, receipts are sufficient. A good contractor usually will meet all the needs with an itemized budget and has a bit of wiggle room to fix things the right way, while keeping the bank and mortgage company happy. Whole life in most instances is a very bad plan. It's marketed as a life insurance policy wrapped in an investment but it does neither very well. The hidden caveat of whole life is that the investment goes away if you die.  Say for example I have a $100,000 whole life insurance policy and over the years I have paid in enough to have a $15,000 cash value on the policy. If I die, my family gets $100,000 and the cash value is lost. With term life you can get a substantially higher amount of coverage for a smaller payment. If you invest the difference you end up not only with better coverage, but a better cash value from the difference if you don't die (which is what we all hope for anyways). As JackiYo said, your insurance should be designed around replacing lost income/value.  You should get 10x your annual income in term life insurance. "Is your mother still paying the premiums, or are you? If you're paying the premiums, then just contact the company and say you are no longer willing to pay and want to cancel the policy. If she's paying the premiums, why do you care? If the issue is the non-smoking declaration, and you are a smoker or want to take up smoking ... I don't know what country you live in, but I'd be surprised if there's a law anywhere that gives your mother the legal authority to forbid you from smoking when you are over 18. If you are paying the premiums, then contact the insurance company and tell them that you are no longer a non-smoker. The premiums may go up. If she is paying the premiums, tell her that you are now a smoker and that she should contact the insurance company about changing this clause in the policy if she wants to be sure it remains valid. If she declines to do this, that's between her and the insurance company. As you're not a party to the contract, it really has nothing to do with you. If, as you say, your mother is not fully capable of managing her affairs, you could contact the insurance company for her. I don't see how you could get the policy ""invalidated"". Unless there is some evidence that the life insurance company made false claims, or somehow tricked your mother into buying the policy, or that the policy violates local law, there is nothing ""invalid"" about it. Just because you've decided you don't want the policy doesn't make it invalid. Likewise I don't see how you could get the premiums refunded. The whole point of life insurance is that you pay a monthly premium, and if and when you die, they pay the beneficiary the face value of the policy. Life insurance is often described as a kind of gambling game: The insurance company is betting that you will live long enough to pay more in premiums than they pay out in benefits. You are betting that you will get more in benefits than you pay in premiums. If you die young, you win! If you could wait and see if you die within some time period, and if not demand your premiums back, well, that would be like saying that you want to bet on a spin of the roulette wheel, and if you win you take your winnings, and if you lose you want to get your original bet back. What casino would agree to that? You should be able to cancel the policy at any time. I suppose there might be some specific commitment in the contract, like you pledge not to cancel within X years. If you never signed it, I don't see how you could be obligated to pay for it, regardless of what commitments your mother made. I don't know where you live or your country's laws, but I doubt your mother can sign a contract legally committing you to pay for something for the rest of your life. You say it's a ""whole life"" policy, which means it should have some cash value if you cancel it, i.e. you get SOME money back. Not everything you and/or your mother paid in, but something." Think about your priorities in life.  Everybody is a little different.  In my case I have a wife and child, so these are priorities for me, and you might have your own depending on your story. So if I lost my job, and I have no more money coming in (unemployment insurance runs out, savings depleted) then the bank can have the house.  I personally would probably drop the house long before it came to that point. The first thing you do is talk to your creditors and work out a deal.  At the same time I would stop paying for ALL unnecessary things (cable TV, extra cell phones, automobiles, leaving light bulbs on and turning the heat up over putting on a sweater).  If I can't get a good deal from the creditors, I would stop paying the mortgage, find a place to live (family, friends, cheap apartment) while the credit is still good. My advice is to get yourself setup while your credit is good and you have SOME money in the bank.  Waiting until the bank decides to foreclose is probably going to make your harder. Something that introduces the vocabulary and treats the reader like an intelligent individual? It's a bit overkill for 'retirement', but Yale has a free online course in Financial Markets. It's very light on math, but does a good job establishing jargon and its history. It covers most of the things you'd buy or sell in financial markets, and is presented by Nobel Prize winner Robert Schiller. This particular series was filmed in 2007, so it also offers a good historical perspective of the start of the subprime collapse. There's a number of high profile guest speakers as well. I would encourage you to think critically about their speeches though. If you research what's happened to them after that lecture, it's quite entertaining: one IPO'd a 'private equity' firm that underperformed the market as a whole, another hedge fund manager bought an airline with a partner firm that was arrested for running a ponzi scheme six months later.  The reading list in the syllabus make a pretty good introduction to the field, but keep in mind they're for institutional investors not your 401(k). The problem with the cash value is that it's really slow to accumulate. For the first many years you'll just be paying premiums which are front loaded until the insurance company gets their money back. Whole life is NOT an investment, regardless of what your 'advisor' says. It's insurance, and expensive insurance at that. Right.  A banker provides a product/service, whether it be liquidity or something else, for a premium.  The Rothschilds, for example (I'm only familiar with them because I like their wine), are typical examples of some of the first bankers of the modern era-- they provided the ability to exchange currencies at a market value, and it made them one of the wealthiest families of the modern world.  If someone doesn't like banks, then let them walk onto the NYSE and make their own investment decisions.  Which is a terrible idea because it's statistically almost impossible to beat the market.  If you wanted to be able to prove that you are a successful investor you would have to have higher earnings than a market portfolio every day for around 180 years, in order to have a T-statistic of about 2.0. You bet if it was so simple. This is when financial acumen comes into its true form. The bank would never ever want to go insolvent. What it does is, take insurance against the borrower defaulting.  Remember the financial crisis of 2008 which was the outcome of borrowers defaulting. The banks had created derivatives based on the loans distributed. CDO, CDS are some of the simple derivatives banks sell to cover their backs in case of defaults. There are derivatives using these derivatives as underlyings which they then sold it across to other buyers including other banks. Google for Fabrice Tourre and you would realise how much deep the banks go to save themselves from defaulters. If everything fails then go to the government for help. That was what happened when the US government doled out $600 billion to save the financial sector.