How a $160K Policy Loan Funded a Fourplex w/ Mark Willis

Most people think that if you touch your life insurance money, it stops growing. Financial planner Mark Willis just told me about a client who borrowed $160,000 from his policy to buy a fourplex, and the account kept compounding like the loan never happened. In this episode, Mark breaks down how the bank on yourself strategy actually works, Why he agrees with Dave Ramsey that most whole life insurance is a bad deal and how real estate investors are using policy loans as a source of capital without stalling their growth. stick around and if you want the full breakdown, there's a link to Mark's site in the

description. Let's get started. Mark Willis is back and you can learn more at kickstartwithmark.com clickable link in the show notes. But Mark, you just finished to co authoring a book too. You want to give everybody heads up on that where they can find that Sure, yeah, thanks so much again, Jack, for having me back on the show. Yeah, the book is called The Business Fortress, How to Grow, Protect, and Exit Your

Business with Confidence. Whether your business is brick and mortar, coffee shop type business, or a services business, or it's a real estate investment empire you're starting to build, a fix and flip, or rental properties or otherwise, you need to know how to grow, protect, and exit. that business with confidence. Too many entrepreneurs are winging it and that's why so many of them ended up in bankruptcy courts or watching the banks bleed them dry. So it's the business fortress and anyone who goes to kickstartwithmark.com mention the

business fortress in the agenda notes when you fill out the form and I'd be happy to send you a few chapters of this book completely free. Well, I appreciate you providing that. What made you decide to co author a book? That's one of the most daunting things I think I could I could think of is to is to write a book of any kind. Well, it's the co-authoring that made it possible for me. You know, I had somebody else, you know, nipping at my heels, so to speak, to get those

deadlines done and get those chapters written. If it was just up to me, it would be a lot harder, I think, to get the thing done. What's the, there's the Parkinson's law says that, you know, the time expands to the allotted permitted amount, right? So when you're... English teacher gave you two weeks to write the paper, you'd take two weeks. When the English teacher gave you two months to write the paper, you'd take two months, right?

So having the deadlines and accountability with David Barnett, who's an incredible business consultant, has worked with thousands of business owners, it just made everything a breeze. He's a tremendous man and a great guy to get to write the book with. David Barnett, why do I know that name? You know, he's doing a great job out on YouTube. He's got hundreds of thousands of followers. He's helped thousands of business owners across the country and David and I are keenly

aligned with similar financial strategies like Bank On Yourself. He's up in Canada, but he works with folks across the United States as well. So you, your book has that subline of grow, protect, exit your business with confidence. Would you mind kind of giving a summary of each of those words? Like why is it so important to emphasize those? Well, so many people, I'll even start beginning, the main title is the business fortress. And I want you to imagine a castle. A castle that is worth its salt has a moat around it.

What's the moat full of? Liquidity, right? Liquid money that most businesses don't have. So your castle must be protected by a moat, surrounded by a moat. There also needs to be a keep in your castle. What else are you protecting? So the castle has to have a keep and many businesses do not have anything in their on their shelves, to speak, financially speaking.

They might have inventory, but they may or may not have anything of value when they go to sell that business someday. It's an empty castle. It's been raided by the business owner or more likely the banker who bled them dry all those years. So there needs to be drawbridges. Only let certain employees in and out. You know, do not just hire anybody.

You the people who are not your clients are just as important as the people who are your clients. So there's so much to the metaphor of the fortress to withstand the attacks of your competitors, of the interest rates and our overall economy. The market swings one way or the other. The competitive edge that you might have today might be bought out by Walmart tomorrow. So you must be ready to withstand those Viking hordes. that might be coming to assail your fortress.

And there's one more thing. The idea of anti-fragility comes to mind here. Every single time a castle is attacked, it doesn't just crumble, it usually gets repaired and then improved upon. Usually when a new style of attack, the trebuchet for example, began to use leverage to launch material over the... giant walls of protection, right? Then the trebuchet begins to throw giant fiery balls into your castle.

Well, what do you do? Well, next you have to be prepared to once again protect yourself against such leverage. So the idea of being anti-fragile is this. You don't just withstand attacks, you use them to become stronger. You use the Akido function. All right, of taking the attack of the enemy and making it part of the solution, part of what makes you stronger. Not to mix metaphors too much here, but when you work out, you're actually tearing your

muscles apart. That's literally what's going on biologically speaking. But you know, we know that when you work out, you're not just tearing yourself down, you're actually causing your body to build itself up stronger. You're anti-fragile as a body. And I think our businesses, I think our finances, shouldn't just be sturdy, they certainly shouldn't be fragile. Most American finances are fragile.

One wrong tweet or one wrong move by some world power and your 401k is losing 20%. What kind of financial plan is that? So most Americans have a fragile financial plan. Most people think, I'll just move everything into my safe in my house or into gold or something like that. That's maybe you might say a sturdy financial plan, possibly, although there's risks there too. But what we're really pushing for in the book is how to become anti-fragile, how to grow,

protect, and then ultimately exit. Grow meaning let the money be put in places in your financial life where it automatically grows. Go figure. This is a brain dead obvious, we call it BFOs, brilliant flash of the obvious. So my client said to me this, said, When I realized that I could put my money in something that was guaranteed to grow, I figured it out.

I'll never lose money ever again. And it was just like for him a light bulb moment. And I realized, wow, he's right. When you put money in certain places that are guaranteed to grow, you'll never lose money again. That's just such an easy thing to say, very hard to do because we're lured into all these different complex financial tools. So grow your money, protect your money.

That's the fortress concept. And then finally, exit your business. Everything has an exit plan in our lives. We're going to exit everything, so we might as well do it well and pass it off to the next knight in shining armor who will take over that castle and move it on to the next generation. I'd be curious if you do talk about those things where we know, you know, these are obvious things too, is, is that when we do pass it on to the next generation, we see some

of that wealth mostly disappear within that next generation. Are there ways to protect it beyond that? Well, on a very broad level, there's very particular estate planning strategies you and I could discuss, which I'm happy to get into. But one of the more basic things to remember is you cannot just prepare the money for the people. You also have to prepare the people for the money. And this is too often forgotten.

Let's talk about the family. Many times, parents, if they have any assets to pass on, They often just do it in a knee-jerk, ad hoc way. They'll leave it in the will. wow, I guess mom and dad had some money for me after all, they might say. But I think much more important is how do we train the next generation to be ready to accept and absorb such a financial responsibility? I think some of the best examples can be seen in some of the wealthiest families in this

country. Compare the Vanderbilts to the Rockefellers. Vanderbilt's very wealthy family, but because of a number of different mismanagements, they have essentially lost their family's fortune. They were among the wealthiest in all of human history, and for one reason or another, they just couldn't keep it together. you know, even now today, we really don't see that family thriving in a financially, you know, overt way.

Meanwhile, a company, a family like Rockefeller's designed a system of trusts and strategies to keep the wealth in the family. Rather than letting it leak out to other entities like financial planners or bankers, the Rockefellers decided that they were gonna let the family be their greatest investment. So teaching that family member what we now have is just as important as giving them that pile of money. I don't want anybody to be able to I guess get so much money in my family that they do nothing with it.

I want them to be able to do anything they want with the money we give our family someday, our kids, our grandkids, but I don't want them to have so much money that they can just sit back and do nothing. And beyond those more principled approaches, it's gonna be more detailed things like what kind of trust do we set up, what's the language of the trust, but it comes down to having those family meetings and making conversations happen, giving them tester runs, like give your kids a loan and see if they can repay you over a reasonable period of time, things like that to get them started.

That's interesting you bring this up because I frequently we you know, I guess I never thought of it this way is that as entrepreneurs as real estate investors, we spend a lot of money, time and resources on ourselves to whether it's through education through skills, what have you. But we don't pass that information. And that's probably the biggest pool of wealth. is to pass the information and the education down to your kids. 100%.

That's exactly, well think about it 150 years ago. 150 years ago, we didn't have 401ks. Heck, 50 years ago, we didn't have 401ks. So 150 years ago, how did we pass on wealth? It was through our business and the land and the farm, the family farm. And how did the family keep that farm from going to the banker and instead passing it on? Well, you had grandma, grandpa, the owners. teaching the adult children how to manage the farm as they worked it.

And meanwhile, the younger kids were watching mom and dad and helping out around and milking the cows and doing all the things that the farm needed done. Everyone's involved. It's an all hands on deck experience. And so by the time grandma, grandpa, you know, shuffle off the coil, so to speak, the adult children are more than capable of absorbing everything and moving forward with it. They aren't surprised. by are shocked that this business or this farm is being passed on.

It's been handed down over the last three or four decades really. There's a business in Japan. It's a hotel, Hotel Ryokan. And it's been around for a thousand years within the same family. 46 generations. mean, can you imagine that Jack? To be born into that family and you're the 46th. generation.

What do you think you're going to do? Become an accountant? No way! You know what you're going to be. You're going to be a hotel manager. And honestly, think more and more we don't have businesses that are going to be training the next generation like Hotel Ryokan has, or like the average family in America with a farm had.

But there are strategies. are tools. There are approaches. We don't need to be an agrarian society again to have multi-generational wealth. You can do this with financial tools. One of my favorites is life insurance, where instantly when the family member passes away, they're leaving a legacy, instant rate of return, double or even triple digit tax-free returns to the next generation.

And as long as you've trained them well, again, you can mess up anything, but if you've trained that person, and maybe there's a trust set up or a family office set up, then all of a sudden now you've got a seed fund to then create a harvest for the next generation and the next and the next. We have families that will open up a life insurance policy like the Rockefellers did on every family member as soon as they're born. And that is assumed to be a part of the family's portfolio.

And it's one of the best things in the world to watch a family say, hey, you know what, we've got We've got 25 family members, we've got 25 life insurance policies, all of them have cash value today and a death benefit for tomorrow. Hey guys, we're all gathered here for our family reunion. What do we wanna do with those millions of dollars in our cash values? How about we invest in that real estate property down the street? How about we give money to little Johnny, know, grandkid who wants to start a business?

These things bring a family together if you do it right. and it trains the next and the next and the next generations to keep the wealth in the family and to help it multiply. Well, we're going to get into the meat of that here just a moment. But to remind everybody you can learn more by going to kickstart with mark.com. That's going to be a clickable link in the show notes if you found some value in what we're chatting about so far, do us a favor, share this with one of your friends. And if you're watching us on YouTube, give us a like and subscribe.

So Mark, you've opened the can of worms here. Now let's do the second half of show and talk about the bank. on yourself concept and how that might be different from what most people might know as infinite banking. Absolutely. Yeah, well, there's a long story history here and I'll just say that there's there's plenty of good people out there. In fact, I learned the other day there are 400,000 licensed life insurance agents in the

United States. That's about one agent for every 800 Americans. Now all it takes to sell someone a infinite banking type policy is to have a life insurance license. You might know Jack, it's not that hard to get a life insurance license. Maybe two or three weekends of light study can get you that life insurance license. The idea of infinite banking goes back to the 80s when Nelson Nash, who founded the concept and wrote the book, Becoming Your Own Banker, started getting this idea that if

you flip the idea of cash value life insurance on its head, in other words, If you put as much into the policy as possible, rather than putting pennies in, you're putting dollars in, you're going to build up an insane amount of cash value. Cash value is the stuff you can use while you're still alive. And he used it for himself actually, to get out of a ton of variable interest rate mortgages. What was going on in the early 80s? Well, were variable rates were going up to whatever 18 % on his mortgages.

That was going to kill him financially speaking. So he... overfunded his life insurance, paid off all of his snakes, he calls them those banks, and he started doing workshops to share what he had learned and how you can use life insurance as a current asset, not just as a future death benefit. Okay, so other insurance agents would attend these workshops and they got the idea that they could start promoting a similar concept, but they thought they knew better, so they started promoting universal life insurance or variable life insurance.

Some people used HELOX to follow the infinite banking strategy. There was really no protection around what in the world infinite banking even meant. And by the time Nelson figured this out, I guess, he was, let me just say he was a wonderful evangelist for the concept, but he didn't have the protections around the concept. No IP protection, for example, that sort of thing. So fast forward, he meets up with someone named Pamela Yellen, who he and him, he and her create what's called the

Bank on Yourself Professionals Program. And it's since then been sort of the standard bearer for a credentialed, overseen organization that looks over the shoulder of the financial professional, the insurance agent or like me, a certified financial planner, to design these policies properly, to give the buying public what they think they're getting when they say they want a Bank on Yourself designed policy or what they read about in Nelson's book. So what's all this mean for people listening today? It just means you want to get into the airplane and just fly to your destination, right?

You don't necessarily need to know how much fuel went into the wings or what the airspeed velocity is of an unladen swallow or whatever. You want to make sure that your plane is engineered properly and you want to make sure that the pilot knows what he or she is doing when he gets in that dashboard and has to lift off. All you want to do is get into your airplane, sit down and fly and get to your destination safely. Most of the time, I've seen insurance agents that claim to be proficient in infinite this

or cash flow banking that or family wealth creation or money multiplying, dot, dot, dot. There's a number of knockoff nicknames for this. The only phrase that has any credential or authorization program behind it is something called bank on yourself. And it's why I'm a part of that group because I wanted to make sure that my work was scrutinized by third parties to make sure if I'm designing the thing for my clients that they know that I know what I'm doing. So that's the broad, maybe two story to the history there.

Jack, hopefully that helps kind of give some context to what these are and what they can be for folks. So would you recommend people then, like that's the number one question they should ask is if you're certified the bank on yourself? Yeah, obviously there's dozens of different nuanced designs for how to build these policies. But yes, the number one thing, if you don't remember anything else from this episode, just find out, is the person who's building or has built one of these policies for me and my

family, are they a Bank On Yourself professional? Are they authorized and certified and in good standing with the Bank On Yourself training organization? you mind spending a little time now breaking it down like real estate investors? Anytime you got you got to face fact, right, Mark, that most people when they hear whole life insurance, they probably cringe a little bit. Like, so let's let's tackle some of those misconceptions straight on. Like, how does a real estate investor use this?

yeah, that could have been the start of my conversation, so thank you. The biggest thing I can say is that I agree with Dave Ramsey 98 % of the time, that whole life insurance stinks. And he says it for good reason. Most whole life insurance is designed around the commissions that the insurance agent makes and the big death benefit you get if you should pass away. You might pay a giant premium and get very little cash value for most old-fashioned whole life insurance, but the 2 % is what I'm talking about today.

If you can design the policy for as little death benefit as we can legally get away with, as little commission as we can legally get away with, then the cash value portion of your policy, that's the money you can spend now. Think of it like a supercharged savings portion to your policy. That savings... that cash value will be so much bigger, somewhere between eight and 40 times more cash value than an old fashioned whole life would have had. And so what can you do with money?

Well, it's infinite. That's where the phrase comes from, right? What can you do with money? If it's liquid, accessible dollars that you can use for any reason, there's no prohibited transactions, there's no red tape, there's no custodian looking over your shoulder, it's your cash value. So you could use it for a down payment on your next rental. I just got off the phone with someone who borrowed several hundred thousand dollars from

his policy, 160,000 dollars from his policy to invest in a fourplex on the other side of the country and he's a passive investor. So someone else manages the deal. He just invested in it. He used his cash value as a source fund for his investment. And here's where things get really interesting. I'll be very brief on this, Jack, and I'd love your feedback. If the policy is designed appropriately,

correctly, the bank on your self way. When you borrow against the life insurance to get access to the money, which is one of the ways you can get money out, when you borrow against one of these policies, the policy will continue to compound and grow even on the capital you borrowed as if there was no loan. Now the neat thing about that is for my client... yeah, please, Jack. Go ahead. No, I've heard that that piece of it before is is is that and I think that's where people

get caught up a little bit is the is the concept like how does that even work? Like, that doesn't make sense that I put money into this. I'm withdrawing it to but you're that's not exactly the situation, right? I'm not actually withdrawing the funds. I'm kind of getting more of a loan. I'm in a way Yeah, you're exactly right, Jack. So there's several ways this is a lot like real estate.

One is the loan feature. If I have a house, let's say my house is $500,000 and I borrow against it, a HELOC for example, does my house stop growing in the neighborhood? Is it worth less now? No, it's still worth $500,000. Zillow does not care if I have a HELOC on my house or not. But in this scenario, I have a $500,000 house and I borrow $100,000 against that house. Now I have a hundred grand in my pocket and my house is still worth $500,000.

So that's where we introduce the idea of collateral. You know, we're just using the house as collateral for the loan. And just like that, if it's a non-direct recognition policy, if it's a bank on your self-designed policy, then you can borrow against the cash value and it will continue to grow. as if there was not a loan taken. Again, not to belabor the point, but there are plenty of people out there who think they have a bank on yourself or infinite banking style policies, but they do not have this

feature, which makes the entire conversation kind of null and void in my opinion. I mean, what good does borrowing from a life insurance policy give you? What good does it give you if if it stops growing the minute you borrow against it. Not only does, I could do that with my savings account, right? I can withdraw money out of my savings account and it stops growing there too. And at least with the life insurance policy, now I got policy loan interest. So it must be a bank on your self-designed policy for it to work this way.

But when it does, you're getting uninterrupted compounding in your policy. And of course you've got your money out in the real world invested in real estate or buying your car or whatever you might need. The way you paint this, almost sounds a little too good to be true on some regards. Like give us a breakdown of who this would be a good fit for and who it may not be. Yes, I'm glad you brought that up. So it is an incredibly compelling tool. And I would be totally dishonest if I told you that you shouldn't do it just because it

sounded good, right? I want to tell people good strategies, not boring ones or so average ones. That's why our podcast is called Not Your Average Financial Podcast. That said, there's no free lunch. There's no perfect financial tool. There's always benefits and trade-offs for everything. Do not do this insurance strategy if you want instant rate of returns or quick fixes. It's a slow strategy.

It's a deliberate get rich quick. No, get rich for sure. Yes. It's a slow, steady, methodical, guaranteed every year to grow methodical tool. So it's never gonna give you those wild up years and there's no down years either when it comes to the market taking money away from you and that sort of thing. So it's slow, steady, boring, some people say. I call that sane.

I call it sane. I want more sanity in my portfolio. I would also say it's not something you have to watch a lot. And so some people really want to meticulously watch this thing. It's not an investment. That's the best thing I can say is that it should be treated as another insurance slash savings strategy. It's not an investment.

So don't compare it to one or the other. That's the other thing I would say. And there are insurance costs even on Bankhunter Self or any kind of like high cash value insurance policy. There's going to be some insurance costs. So again, long-term thinking is the appropriate approach here. You're not going to get all of your dollars in the first year because you are buying a

life insurance policy, but we're designing the policy to cut those costs down as much as we legally can so that the policy grows as fast as possible. with the disruption we're seeing, you know, you knew I had to get here eventually. with the disruption we're seeing it with AI and the technology tools out there in the landscape right now, what are you seeing in your profession? It's a good question. I've enjoyed using, I've always said people's jobs won't be taken by AI. They'll be taken by someone who's using AI.

And so I think that where we are in this time, as we're recording this in May of 2026, I don't see the replacement for AI in the space of financial planning per se. You can get investment insights from AI. It can tell you what's going on in the markets. It can even, in a sycophantic kind of way, tell you you're doing a good job in your finances. I have not yet seen much AI give me aha moments or provide me courage to make business or investment decisions.

That's something that's so far anyway. The chutzpah. has to come from advisors that are willing to stick their neck out and talk to another human being. That desire to go from thinking about it to actually doing it is something that so far I see happening on those real human to human level conversations. I use AI all the time in my business and we use it to analyze deals, real estate or otherwise.

helping our clients with their financial plans. Again, we are a full financial firm. So the use of AI is something that we use carefully and also important and prudently, but it helps us leverage our time and our expertise as best as possible. But the key things I still haven't seen AI really do is give me as a consumer the courage to make a change and not just to, again, sycophantically, reinforce my pre-existing priors. And I think the reason is, and I'll be done after this, I promise Jack, is that we really

suck at asking AI good questions. You know, hey, what's the best way to prepare for retirement? That's a terrible AI prompt. You're gonna get AI slop poured all over you, you know? But if you asked a three paragraph long detailed analysis, compare with me what the... the tax and volatility and beta implications of a market-based mutual fund slash bond portfolio over a 35 year period with fees, compare that to a bank on yourself design policy that has maximum cash value, high paid up additions, low commissions, non recourse

loans that are non direct recognition and do that over 35 years. Which one comes out ahead? Which one would give me a better income in retirement? If you ask a question like that of AI, I would I highly suggest try that out. Write out that prompt or make a slight adjustment to it if you want and just see what they say. If it's going to give you a real answer, it's going to come from a prompt that's two or

three paragraphs long like that. Yeah, it's all about the context. You know, it if it doesn't know the context you're you're after, or what type of results you're after. That's where the hallucinations that that continue to be reported come from. It's that it's it's trying to fill in the gaps where you you were lacking. So It was a really insightful mark.

I appreciate you that giving me that. You know, when you were you've been doing this for quite some time right now. And you were as you're scaling your own practice in business. I always like to learn from other people's experience, especially from different industries. When you were scaling, what was the first thing that broke? First thing that broke was, I'll say, my ego. Given that I was just getting into the financial services world with six figures of

student loan debt. and having to take on extra four five jobs to pay that bill every month. And the first job or two was a property management type job where I'm getting under elevators and sucking out whatever I could find with a wet dry vac, you know. So that's a ego busting experience. On my business side, I'd say the first thing that broke was, again, my automating tools. know, the... The metaphor I'll use is I've got two kids right now.

One's 10 years old, one's a newborn. And when I trained my older daughter to tie her shoes, it took a long time to show her where the lace goes and take this loop and twist it around here and there you go, you got your tied shoe. I could have just, you know, pulled her foot over and just kind of done the thing and gotten in the car and gotten on our way faster if I just... continue to tie her shoes, it would have been faster in the moment. But it was such a good use of time to focus, slow down, show her how to do it, teach her

10 different ways to do it. And now I never have to tie her shoes ever again. In fact, there may come a day where I'm so old that she's tying my shoes. So what breaks? I think it's the... I guess the inclination to do it all yourself. The business owner should not be the solopreneur forever. And if you can find somebody in your life, in your work that can do as a C plus job of

what you can do, give it to them to do it. It's so much better if you can teach them and we use a system called model assist watch leave or M-A-W-L. So we maul people. in our business. Hopefully, HR isn't listening to that. But the idea would be pass it on, replicate it, delegate it, and increase trust tenfold. Well, Mark, this is always such a great conversation.

Before we start diving into the rapid fire and closing out this episode, is there anything else we should have tried to hit on? You know, again, just make sure you have a pilot that has more information about your financial plan, your goals, your desires, than something that you may have collected on a 10 minute YouTube video right before you called them. That's such a big deal. I can't emphasize that enough. I would not want my pilot doing a how-to, fly an airplane YouTube video right before we

take off. That just would freak me out. So, that's all. Thanks, Jack. Well, if you're ready, Mark, we'll dive into the rapid fire and close out the episode. Sounds great. What lie do real estate investors often tell themselves? I don't want to be mean.

They are getting, all right, they think they're getting a much better return than they're actually getting. Usually it's just a little bit above inflation for most people. So, you know, there's probably ways around that, but I see that 90 % of the time. If you could go back in time and give your younger self a piece of advice, what would it be? And don't take yourself so seriously. Have some fun.

Figure out a way you can break that ego every chance you get. Outside of your book, do you have a book recommendation or what are you reading right now? Yep, boy, there's several books that I would recommend. One is called The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham. Really funny title and a fun book to read. He's one of the smartest guys I know. Just don't, The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham. Go read it.

And finally, what single tool or process have you implemented that has had the biggest time-saving impact? Well, we use all kinds of tools in our tech stack at work. think, you know, the conversations that we have once a week through our level 10 meetings at our work, it's an EOS skill. If you've ever read anything from them and their group, check out level 10 meetings. It's been very helpful. Well, Mark, it was great to chat with you again.

One more time, kickstartwithmark.com. That's going to be a clickable link in the show notes. Remember to mention that book in the comments section of that so you get the first few chapters for free. Take advantage of that. And really appreciate your time, Mark. This was great. And I hope you'll consider coming back again real soon.

Well, thank you, Mark.