Zero To A Hundred – Episode 40: Building Wealth Through Infinite Banking With Nick Kosko

Accelerators! 🚀

Want to break free from the traditional banking system and take control of your financial future? This week, we’re joined by Nick Kosko, a key member of the Create Tailwind team and co-host of the Breakaway Wealth podcast. Nick dives deep into the Infinite Banking Concept, a strategy that helps entrepreneurs build wealth, eliminate debt, and control their own capital—all while keeping their money working for them. If you’ve ever wondered how to make your money work for you instead of the banks, this is the episode you can’t afford to miss! 🎯

What’s on the Menu:

💰 The good, the bad, and the ugly of Infinite Banking.

🏦 Using life insurance as a financial tool, not just a death benefit.

🔑 How to create a system where you become your own bank.

Why Tune In?

Nick reveals the hidden truths about money, banking, and financial control—and why most people are trapped in a system designed to benefit banks, not them. If you’re an entrepreneur looking to build generational wealth and keep your capital in motion, this episode is packed with game-changing insights.

💬 Gem from Nick:

“You finance everything you buy—either you pay interest to someone else or you lose the ability to earn it. Take control.”

Get in Touch with Nick:

📧 Visit CreateTailwind.com to explore Infinite Banking strategies and financial freedom.

Don’t miss out—hit that subscribe button and let’s take your business from zero to a hundred! 💥

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Building Wealth Through Infinite Banking With Nick Kosko

I am very excited to introduce our guest, Nick Kosko, who is a key member of the CreateTailwind team, a financial coaching platform that is dedicated to educating individuals on achieving financial independence through Infinite Banking. The platform offers courses, resources, and a supportive network for those who are seeking to take control of their financial lives. He’s also the co-host with Jim Oliver of the podcast Breakaway Wealth, where they talk about ways in which you can break away from the norm, control your wealth and control your life.

Some of the topics that we are going to cover, and I want everyone to tune into this because this is a little bit outside the box of what we typically cover. It’s super unique and something that you should know and understand as an option in your tool belt. First and foremost, Infinite Banking, the good, the bad and the ugly. Using life insurance as personal finance versus for death benefit, and the way in which you as individuals can take control of your money and smart ways to put your money to work.

For those of you who do not know, I’m the Founder of BoxFi. We are the nation’s leading payment consultant, providing business growth solutions through payment processing. I’m very excited to share the network I have built over the years of my career to help you grow your business and become more profitable. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s accelerate together.

Nick Kosko, thank you so much for joining us on the show.

Thank you for having me on.

We are going to talk about something that we have not spoken about on the show before, and there are infinite possibilities on the concept that we are going to discuss, and the pun is intended. Before we get into the technical aspects of Infinite Banking, let’s talk about your background and what led you into this business because it would be important for our audience to know.

I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. I have a wife, four kids, a dog, and a 35-acre little farm outside Louisville, Kentucky. All I ever wanted to do was fly big airplanes. When I was in high school, I delivered newspapers. I had a walking route. It took me about an hour to deliver about 110 pages of newspapers. The Louisville major airport, which is the headquarters of UPS Airlines, this neighborhood was about by the crow flies like two miles from the airport. I’d be out there at about 5:00 or 4:30 in the morning, and I hear all these big brown and white airplanes. I’d say to my guidance counselor, “I want to do that.”

As luck would have it, that’s what I was able to do. It took me a few years because it’s not a quick road. When I was 30, I got hired for that job. I got married that same year. I had my dream job. To be honest with you, it was like I was levitating around town. Here I was in the right seat of a 747 flying around the world and not a care in the world. I was making great money, and then we had this big economic downturn. ‘08 and ‘09 happened.

About the time my wife told me she was pregnant with our first, my illustrious employer said, “We need to downsize.” Everybody’s going to get hit. They laid off 109 pilots and I was number 87 on the list. It was when that happened that I learned that I was a well-paid slave. I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but once you realize something’s going on, you are like, “I’m not sitting in that anymore.”

That began a journey. I’m a self-professed very slow learner. It took me a long time to learn how to fly, to land an airplane. Here’s the fun part. Usually, once I get it, I’m good at it, but it can take an inordinate amount of time for me to get it, and most people would quit or the instructors would give up. That’s how I am, no matter the subject matter.

It took me a few years. I got my job back flying. I think it was 21 months later when they recalled me, and I was like, “We are back.” We were on the precipice of having our third kid at this time, and I started interviewing financial advisors. Here in Louisville, Kentucky, there are 6 to 10 financial advisors waiting on the doorstep of the crew room, metaphorically, because they know we make good money. We get a lot of money put into a deferred compensation plan. We are easy pickings.

I started interviewing all these guys and I left every one of the meetings. I didn’t hire the person. Something in my gut told me, “This is for your benefit, not mine, even though your shtick is good.” It was that notion of the truth that was starting to become an important concept to me as a young man. I started getting clarity that “There’s not your truth and my truth. There’s just the truth.” That’s been a theme for me since.

I couldn’t put my finger on it. I’d done Dave Ramsey’s financial peace stuff in the past. I was not particularly impressed with that. I knew the math was off on that, but I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out on my own. Things are not clear and I don’t feel like I’m getting all the information. One night, we take off out of Louisville and we are going to Denver. It’s 4:00 AM. I say something obtuse about money to the guy I’m flying with, and he goes, “Have you ever heard of Infinite Banking?” I said, “I have no idea what you just said.”

We spent the next four nights trying to go to the end of the internet with this poor son of a gun named Mike at 35,000 feet as we toled across the United States. I asked him every question under the sun, most of which he couldn’t answer. He was a brand new client of somebody who I’m very close with now. It’s a small community. He goes, “You just got to read the book,” and so I get this book. I sit and I read it. I’m on a layover in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

I’m sitting in the Denny’s in the hotel and I have got this 92-page book written by R. Nelson Nash, and I get 25 pages. There you go. I got 25 pages into it and I said, “Where’s this been? I want in.” What hit me so powerfully was that the book was speaking the truth about money. It wasn’t Nelson’s convenient lie. It wasn’t somebody else’s convenient lie. It was just, this is the truth and I appreciated the matter of fact get to it approach.

Can we stay on that for a second? If you want to wrap the story before answering this, you can, but it’s going to be important for our audience of entrepreneur, and business owners who have existing successful businesses. They are growing, but we all have and have either experienced or may be experiencing, potentially could experience in the future, those moments of financial uncertainty. When you read the first 25 pages of the book, what were some of the key aspects that you took away as like, “This is the truth about the banking system that I didn’t know and now that I know, I’m empowered to change things?”

The Problem With Traditional Banking

Nelson starts off by talking about the problem in the book, and it’s so important. It goes with every subject. If we don’t understand the problem, the solution’s a moot point. You’ll find that most of the knuckleheads out there even talking about Infinite Banking, all they are talking about is the solution. What I loved was that Nelson was speaking about the problems of money like Parkinson’s Law. What the heck is Parkinson’s Law? Most of the time, people’s expenditures rise to meet their income.

You can’t overcome Parkinson’s Law. You can’t collect a lot of wealth. I love how he tells the story of Willie Sutton, a famous bank robber back in the day. They asked Willie, “Why do you rob the banks?” He goes, “That’s where they keep the gold.” It was telling this story of what the heck is going on in the world.

I was intrigued by that. I was intrigued about somebody addressing the problems, not just coming to me with the solution. When I sit down with the financial advisor, “How much money do you have? Where is it? Let me show you how I can do so much better with it,” and then make these charts. They tell me how much money I’m going to have when I’m 65 and how much money he thinks I’m going to be able to collect in “retirement.” Nelson doesn’t do that in his book. I was super intrigued. I’m super intrigued when people talk about and living the road less traveled. I have never been interested. If everybody’s going right, I don’t care about the subject. I’m always intrigued about what’s over to the left.

What are the problems that you saw that you also realized were happening in your life?

Control, and it comes down to control. We can touch on that, but let’s talk about the problem Nelson puts upfront in the book. What problem is Infinite Banking solving? I love that. What’s the point of doing anything if we are not solving a problem? I would say most people are going about their life, and it’s so mundane that they don’t realize that there’s so much opportunity to solve stuff. It’s pretty stimulating to go solve a problem.

He said, “You finance everything you buy. You either pay interest to someone else or when you pay cash, you give up the ability to earn interest forever.” When he said that, I was so struck because I knew when Dave talked about spending cash on your cars. I’m telling you, that didn’t resonate with me. I didn’t know the solution. I didn’t know there was an alternative.

When he said this, I was like, “We did the debt snowball. Did I pay off the student loans? Did I pay off the cars?” That’s cool and all but I created another problem in the process. You only told me part of the story, not the whole story. Nelson started walking through examples to prove it, and I was like, “Dang it.” I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like this like I felt then. You know there’s a problem going on, but you can’t put your finger on exactly what the problem is, and you can’t come up with a solution. Nelson was like, “They want control of your money, and you are not being told about all the problems.”

They is the bank.

The banks, Wall Street and the government.

You talk about we finance everything that we buy, and if we are to pay cash, we give up our ability to earn interest. How does Infinite Banking completely flip that on its head and give you the control back? One of the things that you talk about is helping individuals free themselves from financial slavery. Walk me through what Infinite Banking does to allow them to do that.

Can I answer a little different question to give maybe your readers a little more context? The answer to your question may be more meaningful if I can answer something else first. We have to understand a little bit more of how the financial institutions work so that I can tell you the solution. Let’s talk about how a bank works, and we can fill in the blank, like your brokerage account. The life insurance companies. Most people don’t realize life insurance companies are the biggest financiers in the world.

How Banks Leverage Your Money

Shakespeare said, “If we understand the players in the play, we’ll understand what’s going on.” In the banking world, there are only three players in the play. Let’s have a little narrative here. You are the depositor. You go down to the bank and you deposit money at the bank. To the bank, is that an asset or a liability?

If it’s my money, it’s supposed to be an asset if it’s earning me interest, but if it’s not earning me interest, it’s a liability.

To the bank owner, is your deposit an asset or a liability?

For them, it’s an asset.

Don’t feel bad. Everybody answers it wrong. The deposit itself is a liability because they have to pay you back whenever you want. By the letter of the law, you are a creditor of that bank. You touched on something important and I love it and applaud you. It’s the loan, the borrower that is the asset. If you and I want to go buy a bank, we are going to evaluate the loan portfolio.

We have got the depositor, the bank owner and the borrower. Now, let’s apply some numbers to this. Let’s say you went down and you deposited $10,000. Now the bank is so nice they are going to pay you 0.2% of your $10,000. That’s $20. Now, the bank’s going to turn around and sell that money for anywhere between 4% and 28%, 28% being your high-yield or high-interest-rate credit card, but we are going to use 5.2% as an average. That’s $520 they collect on the loan. They paid you $20, they collected $520. How much better did the bank do than you did?

Infinite because it’s not their money.

I love that. Frigging high five. Let’s apply some accounting numbers to that because I’m going to get to what you said. Is $20 goes into $520, 26 times? That’s 2,600% better. To your brilliance, they did it with your money. This is about leverage. The financial world is leveraging your money. You and I leverage other people’s time and talents all the time. It’s a copacetic thing. What people need to understand is that’s happening in the financial industry and they are paying you a pittance on your dollars. To the control thing, and you and I have talked about this before, how much of your money does the bank want?

They’d like to have all of it.

How long do they want it?

Forever.

How much of it do they want to pay back to you?

None of it.

As little as you’ll tolerate. That 0.2% is as little as you’ll tolerate. You’ll do that. It’s about understanding the process of banking. It’s about the power of leverage. What does this solve? Are you the owner of the bank where you bank? No. Do they love you so much that at the end of the year, they bring you a check and pay you a nice little portion of the dividends?

Yes, sure. Very little.

You are essentially the renter at the bank. Most of your readers will probably resonate with this and it resonates with you and I. The concept of ownership has privileges, but we are not the owner of that bank. Do you know that if you go to take a loan from the bank, they are charging you to borrow your money? Why do we do that?

I always think of it like this. The financial industry’s playing a game so well, we don’t even realize there’s a game being played. If that’s the problem, if the bank’s making 2,600% with your money, if everyone has control of your money for 40, 60, 80 years of your life, you let this happen. Your money’s babysitter is so nice, they only charge you 1%. Nelson gets into this. He says, “What’s more important, the interest rate they charge or the volume of interest?”

What do you mean by the volume of interest?

What’s most important is the volume of interest in every payment. Let’s talk about this. Let’s take a mortgage example. We are going to take a $300,000 mortgage and we are going to go 5% for 360 months. It’s $1,610 and change per month is the payment. If we multiply $1610 by 360, it’s $578,000. You borrowed $300,000, you got to pay back $578,000. That works out to $0.48 of every dollar over the life of the loan goes to someone else in interest. You earn $1 and you have to pay me $0.48 of it. Do you care about the rate or that you had to pay me half of the money you earned?

From what you’ve presented, I care more about the fact I’m having to pay you half of the dollar that I have earned. I don’t understand how the rate comes into play if I don’t know what the specific rate is. Are you saying the rate is 5%?

The rate is 5%, but the rate is a distractor. The bank knows something you don’t. In the first seven years, over $0.80 of every $1 goes to someone else in interest. The bank is so nice. Let’s say that you had that mortgage for five years. The bank comes and they say, “You’ve been such a great customer of the bank. We know you’ve got a 5% rate on this mortgage. We’ll do it for free. We are going to lower the rate to 4.5%. We’ll cut your payments from $1,610, $1,560, or $1,540, pick a number, it doesn’t matter. We are going to do it for free and we’ll refinance it for you to get you a lower rate. Does that sound great? What does the average American do

They are going to refi, but you said that for the first five years, 80% of your $1 is going to the bank. That’s going to happen again if you do a refi.

That’s right. The bank knows something we don’t.

Conceptually, this all makes sense. How does Infinite Banking come into play now that you’ve walked us through that? It allows us to take control or eliminate that. This is because I have heard of Infinite Banking before. I have done no research. I have the book. I told you it was my third book to read. I finished my second. I’m going to start reading the book. How do we take control of that? It sounds like a system that we don’t have the ability to take control of unless we have a ton of money.

Infinite Banking As A Solution

It’s a fair question. The only reason that Nelson put out there, he wasn’t saying, “There’s not a solution to this. There’s a solution.” We have to understand the various tools that are out there. Nelson, his brother, in the 1950s, sold him a whole life insurance policy. Nelson didn’t know better. He said, “My brother charged me $350 a year for this whole life policy and I started plugging money into it.”

I went to Dave Ramsey’s financial peace course and he told me whole life insurance is bad. What I didn’t understand at the time was that it’s not the best tool to buy death benefits with, but it is a tool that I can use to take over the banking function in my life. All I had to do was understand what’s going on in it. There are a lot of rules to how life insurance works and it’s understanding what is out there. There’s a way to design a life insurance contract very specifically so that you have equity in it right away. Think of it like your home, the home equity in this thing, but there’s something out there called a mutual insurance company. Do you know the difference between a stock company and a mutual company?

No, I do not.

A stock company thinks AIG. Something I will touch on real quick is ratings. A lot of times, people get so wrapped up in ratings. Just know that AIG had the best ratings possible 30 days before they took down the entire world’s economy. Ratings are bought and paid for. They are a distractor. There are other things to look at when you are evaluating a financial institution. The AIG policyholder get profits after the shareholders get profits because they are profitable and they distribute the profits to the shareholders.

Mutual companies are only owned by the policyholders. Let’s think about this concept of ownership. You already told me you don’t own the financial institution that you do your banking with, which is fair, but if you could have ownership in it, do you think that would be beneficial to you? The more money I deposit at this financial institution, the more ownership I get.

That’s cool, and it comes with privileges. We design these life insurance contracts as a tool to go solve the problem of our need for finance. Most people are selling life insurance for death benefits. If we agree that we finance everything that we buy, tell me what’s greater, your need for death benefit or your need for finance?

Finance.

All day long, because you are going to spend money to the day you die, but I promise you, you’ve never sat down with a financial advisor and they said, “Let’s solve that problem,” because that doesn’t behoove them. They don’t get control.

I want to be very clear for the audience: what you are saying is that the problem is we are going to spend money, no matter what, until the day that we die. A lot of it is going to be financed.

All of it’s going to be financed. We take this life insurance contract. We construct it so that you have cash to use in it right away. The normal way of selling whole-life policies is that you have no cash value sometimes for the first few years, but we build this so that you have cash to use right away. We have clients that put money into this and then immediately take loans against it to go buy cashflowing assets.

We’ve got to have a depositor like the bank. We have to deposit money into the policy and then motion is the law of God. If water doesn’t flow, it becomes stagnant and poisonous. If air doesn’t flow through your lungs, you die. If money doesn’t flow, it’s dead. The financial institutions know this. This is why Robert Kiyosaki says, “Savers are losers.”

We can’t keep up with inflation by storing your money in a high-yield savings account. That doesn’t even keep up with inflation. I got to move it. You are in the financial space; money moves, and it moves literally fractions of a second. Your average American are like, “Let me save up, and then maybe I will go buy something.” It doesn’t work that way.

We put money into the life insurance contract and then what we advocate for is, sometimes, you may have someone that’s got a lot of debt. The average American, you’ll see this in Nelson’s book, pays $0.34 of every net dollar to someone else in interest. Think about your mortgage, your car payments, school loans, all of that. If you start looking at the volume of interest in every payment, a lot of times it spooks people.

Correct me if I’m wrong on this, is it a mutual life insurance policy? Is that what it’s called?

We are going to use a very specifically designed dividend-paying whole-life policy with a mutual company.

First of all, how little money can you start with to create one of these dividend-paying whole life policies?

I would challenge you that you’ll put the maximum that you can put in, but we have clients that probably do $10,000 a year and we have people that do millions of dollars a year.

It’s more so it’s like this is something that’s only for the elite and you have to write a $500,000 or $2 million check or can you start with $2,000?

We have got college kids that have come to us.

Understood. This is accessible to any and everyone out there who has some money to put into it. Let’s use a real-time example and say I have $1 million. I put $1 million into that policy. How is that structured where I can take it out right away and there is benefit for me? Let me leave it at that because you are the expert. I want you to explain it.

What people don’t understand is that a whole-life policy is a tax shelter. Let me ask you. Do you think your taxes are going up or down in the future?

They are going to completely eliminate taxes and I’m never going to have to pay them again after this year. I believe that taxes will continue to go up.

It’s a math problem. When we print more money, what people need to understand is that money is borrowed from the Federal Reserve and we have to pay the interest on that debt, and the way that interest is collected is through the IRS. We have printed somewhere in the neighborhood of $9 trillion in the last few years, and guess what? That’s got a bill for it. Taxes have to go up. It’s a math problem. Taxes are on sale right now, by and large, still. Once we put money into a life insurance contract, those dollars are never taxed again.

Are we putting in net dollars?

Yes.

We pay the taxes on the dollar on whatever it is. Say we make $100,000. We have $50,000 left over. We take that entire $50,000 and we put that in the whole life policy. As long as it stays in the whole life, the policy is never taxed again.

Leveraging Life Insurance For Financial Control

Here’s what’s important to understand. Remember the bank, you have this powerful word called leverage. When I want to take a loan from my policy, my money does not leave the account. I am an owner and I have privileges, I have contractual privileges. When you go take a loan in the bank, it’s a total pain in the rear. If I want to take a loan against my life insurance contract, I would call and tell them I want a loan. I don’t ask and beg for the loan. I tell them I want a loan, and they say, “What account do you want that money wired to?” I say, “X, Y, Z,” and tomorrow, the money is in my account.

Can you only borrow against the amount of equity that you have in that policy?

Yes, sir. What they do is they lend you their money from the general reserves of the insurance company. Your money stays in your account, earning interest tax-free.

What type of rates do they charge you when you take money or borrow money against your policy?

It’s 4% to 5%.

That’s industry standard?

You’ll find a couple of companies that are quite a bit higher. You can use that as a tell that they don’t want you taking loans from it. We use companies that encourage you to do this. It’s a good deal for the insurance company, and we are owners of the business, of the policy of the insurance company, too. That interest rate winds up coming back to us, as Nelson illustrates in his book. That interest winds up coming back to us anyway.

What are the payback terms typically on a loan?

The Power Of Unstructured Loans

It’s an interest-only unstructured loan. Let’s talk about that interest only. The interest compounds annually and calculates daily. I will get a bill at the end of my year for the interest that’s calculated daily. I have no monthly payments I have to make, and then it’s an unstructured loan. I know all your readers can walk into their commercial bank and get an unstructured loan these days, right? No.

You sound crazy right now. I’m dealing with a loan for real estate investment right now.

I get an unstructured loan, and the insurance company says, “Do you want to set up any payback terms?” “No. I will get back to you when I’m ready.” Great. They don’t care. The loan, they place a lien on my money in the policy, and then it’s ultimately secured by this death benefit. Let’s say I had $5 million in death benefits. I take out a $100,000 loan and I get run over by a truck and die. My wife gets a check for $4.9 million and she gets whatever I bought with $100,000. If I went and bought a piece of real estate, which I did, she gets that, too.

Is there a max of what you can put in an annual basis to a whole-life policy like this?

No, it comes down to the death benefit. The maximum death benefit they will give you is $99 million.

Could you have multiple policies?

Yes. There’s an oil and gas rich dude in Oklahoma. He puts $800,000 a month into his banking system, his life insurance contracts.

When he goes to get a loan to buy a car, house, or property to build a well, he borrows from his own policy.

I don’t know what he’s doing with the money. He is not my client. I will give you a real estate example. We have a client of ours. He is an extremely successful real estate investor. He’s got about $500 million of real estate. His escrow is about $400,000 a month. He said, “Why would I store $400,000 a month into my commercial bank? Why don’t I do this in my banking system?”

Is that his own money or is that investor’s money?

It’s his own money. He’s the sole owner of all his properties.

Talk to me about the compact pounding effect of you putting $100,000 in. How much of a policy does $100,000 buy you?

Do you mean like the death benefit?

The death benefit.

Probably for your what? Forty?

It’s 40 or 41.

Probably in the neighborhood of $3 million.

I put $100,000 cash in, it gets me $3 million and the first year, I only have a value of, in terms of equity, $100,000, but I can go back and borrow against that $100,000. I should never pay for a car in cash. I should take the $100,000 to buy whatever car I’m going to buy, put it in a life insurance policy and then borrow against that.

Yes.

It’s complicated stuff right now because you are making it so simple and me feel crazy. How does that $100,000 grow an equitable value over the period of time it’s in that whole life policy?

When we started this, I was careful to include life insurance companies in the financial industries that take in people’s dollars and they put it to work. What do they do with your premium dollars? They go put it to work. These financial institutions have about the most conservative investment portfolios of anyone you’ll ever find. About 80% to 85% goes into a 30 and 40-year laddered bond strategy.

You got another number of percent that goes into some of the highest rated real estate deals. I tried to buy a big apartment complex and it had an assumable loan on it and it was from a major life insurance company. It struck me. I was like, “I have known this to be the case.” It was the first one I have seen, and then there are few percent of equities in their portfolios. The insurance companies are built by actuaries. Those are the engineers of a life insurance company.

What do engineers do? They always over-engineer things. It’s like a big airplane. Just because it says max speed is 0.9 mach doesn’t mean that the airplane comes apart at 0.91. Been there, done that. It’s not what happens. It’s like the life insurance companies. They know how many 41-year-olds are going to die every year. They don’t know who, they just know how many.

They know how much premium they have to bring in and they know within fractions of a percent how much their expenses are going to be. They take these dollars, and they go put it to work. They are going to have a certain amount of expenses. At the end of the day, let’s say for every $1 they bring in, they have $0.10 of profit. They pay us some of that in dividends and they put some of it into their statutory reserves. We are earning interest in this thing.

Who are the big shops that you go to and get one of these dividend-paying whole-life policies?

You would find that there are a number of mutual companies, I would say 6 or 7, probably worth a darn. There’s a couple that would get my money, and there’s a lot into this. I’m an independent agent. I can go with anyone I want. I’m not married to anybody and nobody pays me more than another, but we want companies that have been around for at least 100 years.

They have paid a dividend for at least 100 straight years. They have flexible policy provisions so that I don’t have to put in the exact same amount every year. We want them to have significant statutory reserves, meaning how much of a blow they can handle in the market. We want them to support this, and I would tell you that there are a couple of companies in the Northeast that appear to support this, but they don’t behind the scenes.

I don’t want to mention these names. I’m not interested in badmouthing the companies, but we tend to gravitate more towards the Midwestern companies, and that’s because they generally have a lower overhead. If I’m the owner of the business, I’m interested in that. I have sat down with the CEOs of some of these companies and they are committed to serving.

That’s the one thing. I need to be able to take a loan and get that thing wired to me tomorrow like, “Instead of $100,000 this year, I can only pay $90,000. Is that okay?” “Yes.” I need that flexibility because we are business owners. There’s the rhythm of our cashflow. Things happen. There’s a company out of Lincoln, Nebraska called Emeritus. There’s one out of Indianapolis called OneAmerica, Lafayette out of Cincinnati.

Those are three great companies that check all these boxes. I’m not married to any of them. I’m saying these are ones that you can go look at, and they are huge bulletproof financial institutions. They are boring. Life insurance. This has been around for over 200 years in America and about 600 years in Europe.

I have a real estate question, and also for the sake of keeping on track with time. When we had our pre-call, I knew this was going to happen. My brain is on fire. I’m like, “There are three things that I need to personally talk to you about right now.” Is there any way of tying in the tax benefits of investing in real estate like 1031s into this structure or is everything mutually exclusive, they are all separate?

I would tell you they are going to be separate. We have a video that we call the Ledger, like a financial ledger, people put the assets on the left and the liabilities on the right. We drew it backwards because Infinite Banking requires you to think a little differently. We mess with people. On the left side is the policy, and on the right side are our assets. Most people look at it as either/or, and that’s how you were taught about money. Money’s either in your pocket or it’s in the real estate, it’s in the checking accounts, in the real estate, whatever. It’s either/or.

Here, we get both, but you don’t want to put pre-tax dollars into the policy that’s going to violate the benefits of, “Taxes are on sale right now.” What’s important for you and I as real estate investors, we get all kinds of great benefits. Depreciation, I’ve got a trash compaction company. We accelerated the depreciation on our big trucks and got all kinds of great acceleration. We get to do cost segregation. I know somebody who pays zero tax every year because they perfectly go buy another Airbnb or two costs and seg it out, and they get their tax liability to zero every year. Very methodically.

We are going to have to have you come back because this isn’t the end of the conversation yet, but this is fascinating and it’s going to create far more questions than I have answers for right now. We are going to offline this. Talk to me about what you have told the audience because you started with a story that led into the problem.

The problem is we are all going to be leveraging money for the entirety of our lives because we are going to be making and spending money into what this solution looks like with the Infinite Banking of putting money in dividend paying whole life policy can borrow against that. We are paying the interest and it makes so much sense because that policy is growing in value and that $100,000 potentially buys me a $3 million policy.

I now can still get the car, still have that $100,000 in that policy and the policy’s growing in value. Frankly, if I’m putting in $100,000. I have got to buy a house, I have got to buy an investment property, I have got to buy a couple of cars, whatever it may be. I’ve got cash to do that. I should be throwing it in, borrowing against that and my life insurance policy’s growing. This is making sense.

How To Get Started With Infinite Banking

For someone who goes, “This guy Nick, he said something super interesting.” What is the next best step for someone? Remember, most of our audience are established owner operators, entrepreneurs who have got some investments. How do you dip your toe into this to learn and understand it and then go from there?

I challenge your readers to continue to be curious, and you can become curious at our website, CreateTailwind.com. We have a free online community. You can join it right there. You can download our app. If you go to your app store and type in CreateTailwind, it’s free to join. All of our training, all this information, the story I was telling you can watch the What is IBC course for free.

You can watch the Becoming Your Own Banker course for free. You can watch that course along with the book that you have in your hand. It’s us explaining that book. You got Make Bank Without The Bank, which is Jim’s book. You can download it on Audible if you found that my voice was like a five-star voice, which is probably only an appropriate amount of stars. I’m kidding.

We talk about that in Jim’s book. He talks about what it looks like to be an owner, how to get cash to flow to you, what do we do with that cash? If you go to our website, if you click Contact Us, I promise you, I have a 100% no-hassle guarantee. If you’ve got some questions or you want some personal guidance, just schedule a call with me. If you do that, I will send you a copy of Becoming Your Own Banker for free, and I promise you, again, it’s no hassle. Those are my offers for you, guys.

Rapid Fire Q&A

We are going to do our little rapid-fire section here, and then we are going to tell everybody where they can connect with you again. This was interesting. This was a great conversation and something for those of us who are looking to figure out the right investments, and expand our portfolios. This is something that just from our conversation sounds like we all need to be exploring this. Are you ready for the rapid-fire?

Bring it on.

Coffee or tea?

Coffee.

Number one book in business that you would recommend to our audience of owner operators, entrepreneurs to read.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

Are you using AI in your business?

Yes.

What are three money saving strategies that you would suggest our audience do in 2025?

Start becoming your own banker from savings. I am not much of a saver. I’m a put-it-in-motion person. Money saving, move your money to hard assets like real estate, crypto, and precious metals if you don’t like any of those two things.

What is one thing that could kill your business in 2025 that we should be aware of?

Not keeping score.

Give me two people in your life who are key that helped you build the success that you have now.

I would say Jim Oliver, my partner in this. I met him several years ago and he has changed my life. The other person is my pastor, Adam Miller.

What was the biggest obstacle that you had to overcome to build the level of success that you have?

I had to put aside my ego and be willing to be 100% wrong.

Please tell the audience where they can connect with you if they would like to do so.

CreateTailwind or you can email me directly at NickKosko@CreateTailwind.com.

Nick Kosko, thank you for joining us on the show.

Thank you.

Important Links

• CreateTailwind
• Breakaway Wealth
• Make Bank Without The Bank
• Becoming Your Own Banker
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad
• Nick Kosko’s Email Address

About Nick Kosko

Nick Kosko is a Wealth Strategist of CreateTailwind, a financial coaching firm dedicated to educating individuals on achieving financial independence through the Infinite Banking Concept (IBC). Alongside founder Jim Oliver, Nick co-hosts the Breakaway Wealth Podcast, where they discuss strategies for financial freedom and wealth building.

In addition to his role as co-host, Nick actively contributes to the development of the CreateTailwind Community, a free learning hub designed to help individuals understand and implement IBC principles. This platform offers courses, resources, and a supportive network for those seeking to take control of their financial futures.

Nick’s commitment to financial education and empowerment is evident in his efforts to provide accessible tools and knowledge, enabling people to break free from traditional financial constraints and build lasting wealth.