Interview with Chris Bay

Chris Bay Interview. Transcript

Michael Crawford:

All right, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Michael Crawford, and yes, you may have noticed I am not the voice of Chris Bay. That is because today’s podcast, if you’ve been following our podcast series, is on our team, and Chris Bay is the next victim.

Chris Bay:

Nice. Nice.

Michael Crawford:

He is in the hot seat, as it were, and we’re going to go through a little bit about how he got started in Infinite Banking and tell a little bit of his story and give some insight into how it’s working for him and where he sees it going. How are you doing, Chris?

Chris Bay:

I’m doing great, yeah.

Michael Crawford:

Awesome.

Chris Bay:

Doing great. Love talking about this topic.

Michael Crawford:

Yes, you do. You’re not used to the position though, right?

Chris Bay:

No.

Michael Crawford:

You’re the one asking the questions.

Chris Bay:

I’d much rather be asking the questions, but I think our story will connect with some people out there.

Michael Crawford:

Absolutely. I agree 100 percent. So let’s dive in. I want to start from the beginning. Your story is unique in how you got started, and I think it’s pertinent for a lot of people. Because we all have different stories on how our money came to be where it is, and learning a little bit about where yours came from and how you took advantage of your next steps with the Infinite Banking Concept, I think the people would like to hear about.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. Well, at the time when I was in introduced to the Infinite Banking Concept, I was working as an elementary school principal, and my wife and I had worked pretty hard and made a lot of choices and sacrifices to be single-income family so that we could invest in our two daughters. And so at the time, we actually had been practicing the teachings of Dave Ramsey for actually about seven years. And I will tell you, that was a source of frustration and a source of conflict in our relationship, and the word you use in your podcast was hope.

The hope for us was so far down the road using this approach, Dave Ramsey’s approach, that our hope was very little. We were not going on vacations. We were not going out to eat very often, and it was really frustrating. And I was working my tail off, doing the best I knew how to do to provide for my family, but we were not doing it very well. I remember, Sean reminds me that we were negotiating with medical care providers who were providing services for our daughters and for our family because we didn’t have the money to pay it, so it was tough.

Michael Crawford:

Right. And so when you talk about the stress, was it the stress that you were experiencing in your financial picture that led you to investigate alternatives?

Chris Bay:

Yeah. In fact, I remember there was a teacher that I was working with, and this would have been back in 2007, the fall of 2007, and she had taught for over 30 years, and she came in and said, “I’m going to retire in the spring.” We were celebrating her career. And she came back in in the… Sorry, that was the fall of 2007. In the spring of 2008, so think about the world and financially what was going on, she came back in and said, “I’m not going to be able to retire.”

Michael Crawford:

Hm.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. I filed that away in my brain, because I thought… Are we good?

Michael Crawford:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Bay:

Oh, okay. I filed that away in my brain, because I thought where we all have been told to put our money, it’s not safe.

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

And so I’m working my tail off to do all this and I’m putting it at risk. Who’s to say, depending on the timing of the market going up or down, that it’s going to be there for me when we need it?

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

I didn’t have a solution at that time, but I knew what the world was doing, all the things I’ve been told and taught was not working. The buy term and invest the difference that we hear from Dave Ramsey all the time and others, I didn’t want to go that route because I had seen it doesn’t work.

Michael Crawford:

So that was 10 years ago, because it’s currently late, well, middle fall here in 2017.

Chris Bay:

Right, right.

Michael Crawford:

And so that was 10 years ago today. Kind of give us a timeline from that point until you officially got introduced to infinite banking and how that took place.

Chris Bay:

Okay. It probably was a little over seven years, probably between seven and eight years ago that I was introduced to it. It was actually from two different conversations with dads, two separate dads that were volunteering in our elementary school where I was a principal. And I had developed trust with them, relationships with them. One was a business owner in town, and I asked Dave, I said, “Dave, do you mind me asking as a business guy how do you think about and manage your money?” And he said, “Have you ever heard of the Infinite Banking Concept?”, which I had not. And so he said, “I’d really recommend you check it out.” Research, I heard that and I don’t even know if I dug into it much at that point. It was probably about two months later that I went to another dad, and I asked Doug, and I said the same question, and he came back with the exact same answer.

Michael Crawford:

So two different sources.

Chris Bay:

Two sources, same answer.

Michael Crawford:

Got you.

Chris Bay:

The Infinite Banking Concept. So I said, “Okay, how do I learn? This is crazy that two of you have told me this and I’ve never heard of this. What do I do?” And he said, “Well, you need to read this black book, Nelson’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker, and you need to get ahold of this guy who lives down in Baldwin.” And I said, “Who’s that?” He said, “Well, it’s Mike Everett.” Well, crazy thing is, I actually had known Mike Everett back when I was in college. His niece and I knew each other in college, and so I had met Mike through Heather. So anyway, started, got ahold of the book. In fact, I think Mike gave me the book, and we always charge people for the book so they have a little skin in the game to read it. I don’t think I actually paid him the 20 bucks until like a year later when I was actually a client of his. But that all comes out in the wash anyway, right?

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

So anyway, for us, unlike you and Mike Everett, I’m the slow guy, and we all joke about it here within our team. But I’m the slow guy, and Shawn and I, my wife Shawn, we researched this thing inside and out. I read the blogs, the websites, the pros, the cons, Kiplinger’s, Forbes. I read everything about this thing.

Michael Crawford:

Got you.

Chris Bay:

And Mike was coming to our house and teaching us the concept about once every month or so. This took place over a nine-month period, and it was actually Shawn at one point, my wife, grabbed my arm. She said, “This just makes sense.”

Michael Crawford:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

And so at that point is when we made the decision to go ahead and start our first policies.

Michael Crawford:

Okay. So to recap there, you kind of had something stuck in your brain in 2007 when the financial crash occurred.

Chris Bay:

Yep.

Michael Crawford:

A couple of years later, two individuals who you trusted both of them on separate conversations told you about Infinite Banking Concept. So it only took you, what, four years to make a decision on something?

Chris Bay:

I didn’t have the solution at the beginning.

Michael Crawford:

Got you, yeah.

Chris Bay:

That’s right. That’s right. No, but I’ll own that. I’ll own that.

Michael Crawford:

No, fair enough. But 2000-what, ’11?

Chris Bay:

Yeah, probably.

Michael Crawford:

’10, ’11-

Chris Bay:

Yeah, somewhere in that.

Michael Crawford:

– is when you got your first policy. Can you tell the listeners your story on how you capitalized it? Because the way you guys capitalized it is actually very beneficial to many of our existing and potential clients.

Chris Bay:

Yeah. Well, in our boot camps, we always tell people, “You’ve got a pool of money somewhere. You may not know it, but you do.” I didn’t think I had a pool of money.

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

We had been doing Dave Ramsey, so we didn’t have a whole bunch of consumer debt, smaller things, those kinds of things, but we had our mortgage.

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

Well, as we started looking at things, we actually had equity in our home. And so what Mike helped us do is put together a plan where we could leverage. And I don’t even remember if Mike suggested it or we came up with it. I don’t recall, but we leveraged a home equity line of credit to get our first policy. We started four policies; one of myself, one on my wife, and one on each of my daughters.

Michael Crawford:

Okay.

Chris Bay:

And that was really important for a couple of reasons. One, my wife had previously had thyroid cancer and she was now cancer-free for 10 years, and so we were for sure starting a policy on her.

Michael Crawford:

Absolutely.

Chris Bay:

And we saw the power of you start a policy on somebody when they’re healthy, because you never know. I mean, she was young.

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

So you start a policy as soon as you have the opportunity to, and we have other team members that’ll talk about that.

Michael Crawford:

Absolutely.

Chris Bay:

So we started four policies. We leveraged the equity in our home and took out a line of credit, and that’s how we got our policy started. Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

Okay, so you used the HELOC or home equity line of credit to capitalize your system. Tell the listeners going from a nine-month investigation to what kind of policies did you guys do?

Chris Bay:

Well, people who work with us will soon find that we have no secrets. We will show our policies, our policy loans, cash value. We have no problem with doing that because we’re just full disclosure. Mike was not suggesting this, by the way.

Michael Crawford:

Right. Absolutely.

Chris Bay:

He was suggesting, I think, maybe like a $20,000 annual premium policy for us. Well, as I learned through my investigation that premiums are deposits into a system that I own and control, and so do I want my deposits to be large or small?

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

Secondly, I know because of the power of compounding interest, the sooner I start and the bigger I start, the better.

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

So Shawn and I actually leveraged the equity in our home, and we started cumulative premiums for our four policies of $50,000 a year in life insurance premiums.

Michael Crawford:

Wow.

Chris Bay:

Which people hear that and they just freak out.

Michael Crawford:

Absolutely. Well, I mean, I think anybody would have a reason for pause when they don’t understand the end game or if they’re thinking short-term, which is one of Nelson’s principles. And so you only really had your mortgage to eliminate at that point.

Chris Bay:

Yeah, because part of that was I was still working for the school district.

Michael Crawford:

Oh, right.

Chris Bay:

So I had Kansas Public Retirement. We call it KPERS. I had 403b’s through the school district, but I couldn’t access any of that because I worked for them.

Michael Crawford:

Exactly. And so it was locked up tight.

Chris Bay:

It was locked up tight. Man, that fired me up, which spurred me then further in my investigation of IBC.

Michael Crawford:

Exactly.

Chris Bay:

Because I was thinking, “This is supposed to be my money and I can’t access it?”

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

That was really frustrating.

Michael Crawford:

No access to your own money, so you use the HELOC. You start huge $50,000 annual premium policies cumulatively. Give us a synopsis of where you’re at along that timeline after you started your policies.

Chris Bay:

Yeah, it was about probably two and a half, three years later, and I’m now, instead of reading educational literature in bed at night, I’m now reading things on infinite banking and Austrian economics. Here’s the thing. It’s a beautiful thing when your wife has such confidence in you, and she turns to me in bed and says, “You know, you’d be really good at teaching people that.” That opened up all kinds of possibilities, and so we made the decision to… Actually, I resigned from the school district three years after we started our policies. I remember having the conversation with Mike Everett in his office, and he thought I was going to warm up. You know, “What are you going to do? Do this on the side?” We didn’t. We burned the ships. We went 100 percent. Remember, I was single income after 22 years in the school system. Completely resigned and left to go 100 percent commission. When I tell people that, you’ve got to know that I believe in this concept 100 percent.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah, and I think it shows that you were dedicated to helping other people change their lives the way yours had been changed, right?

Chris Bay:

Yeah. It’s incredibly powerful.

Michael Crawford:

Absolutely.

Chris Bay:

My daughters, I’ve got a freshman in college now, which we’re using our policies to strategically do her tuition and all that. I’ve got another daughter who is a sophomore in high school, and much like you, they’re never going to have to borrow money from an institution.

Michael Crawford:

It’s very refreshing.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah.

Chris Bay:

So we’re changing the trajectory for our families.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah. Well, okay. I’m going to wrap this up, but I want to ask you a question that people often ask us, and that is, how long did it take you when you first started to get out of debt? Because we’re all fighting the wind current, as we say. And if you’ve listened to our other podcasts, you’ll know what that term really means, but it means basically the debt in our lives and the things that are working against us in our life financially. How long did you and Shawn have your policies in place before you had paid off all of your outside debt?

Chris Bay:

Well, we’re a little different, because we couldn’t get access to our pool through my 403b’s and KPERS and things like that. Had we been able to get to that, we probably could have turned our wind current the very first month.

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

But we couldn’t get access to that.

Michael Crawford:

Right.

Chris Bay:

So we were leveraging the home equity line of credit. So for us then, when I resigned from the school district, I did get access to those dollars. Then we were able to turn our wind current on our mortgage, the home equity line of credit, all of that, 26 months. We could have been debt-free of outside debt month one, which sounds crazy to people.

Michael Crawford:

Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Bay:

But I want to say this. When we did access our 403b and our KPERS, we got all of it. We went after all of it, so there was huge taxes, huge penalties. But I want to tell you that we recouped, by turning our wind current and using IBC, we recouped all of those taxes and all of those penalties in eight months.

Michael Crawford:

Wow. Eight months.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

Not even a year for you to recoup all of the debt that was incurred, associated with not the debt, but the taxes and penalties that were associated with your qualified plans.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

That’s amazing.

Chris Bay:

Yeah.

Michael Crawford:

Well, Chris, thank you very much for giving us a piece of your story. You’ll hear more of all of our stories in future podcasts as we continue to work through the Life Success Legacy team, and introduce you to their stories and how we all got started. For those of you who are continual listeners, you’ll know that we always suggest if you haven’t read Nelson’s book that we have a copy of it on our website, lifesuccesslegacy.com. Keep your ears and eyes peeled for future podcasts. We look forward to our next adventure. Thanks, Chris.

Chris Bay:

Absolutely. Thanks.