Chris Bay:
Hey, welcome to the Life Success and Legacy podcast. My name is Chris Bay. Today I’m joined by my good friend and the founder of Life Success and Legacy, Mike Everett. How you doing, Mike?
Mike Everett:
I’m doing super good. Thanks, Chris.
Chris Bay:
Cool. The purpose of our podcast is anything and everything having to do with the Infinite Banking Concept. The Infinite Banking Concept has changed my life and I know, Mike, it’s changed your life. What I’d like to talk about today is how were you introduced to the Infinite Banking Concept?
Mike Everett:
Well, Chris, Linda and I were at Applebee’s one Sunday after church and we were just sitting there having lunch and all of a sudden, an old friend of mine walked in and he made a beeline for our table. It was obvious that he was pretty excited about something, but he looked at me and he said, “Mike, if I could show you and Linda a way to recover the entire cost of all the cars you buy the rest of your life, is that something you’d be interested in?” I looked at him and I said, “Well, sure, everybody would like to know that.” He said, “Well, I have a book I’d like you to read.” He said the name of the book was Becoming Your Own Banker and it was written by Nelson Nash, Christian gentlemen out of Birmingham, Alabama. He said he would send it to me in the mail.
Mike Everett:
So lo and behold, this was Sunday after church. We go through Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, all of a sudden we got this Manila envelope in the mail. Out slid this wonderful black book called Becoming Your Own Banker by Nelson Nash, and on top of it was two papers. On the top it had a letter telling us exactly how to read the book. It was just an instructional, “This is the way you ought to read it.” I flipped over the letter and underneath it, there was a bill for the book that he wanted me to read. Now, I’ll be honest with you, I was taken back a little bit and I yelled into Linda, I go, “Honey,” I said, “do you remember the book Ray wanted us to read?” I said, “There’s a bill in here.”
Mike Everett:
And so I literally, I took this bill, I tore it into as many pieces I possibly could and I threw it in the trash. Because I thought, “He has got his nerve. He wants me to pay for a book that he wanted me to read.”
Chris Bay:
Sounds like something you would do.
Mike Everett:
Well, let me tell you, I felt a little aggressive about it. So I literally took the book, I threw it over by my chair where I do my reading in my study. This was Wednesday. I let that book just sit there Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night after the news, all of a sudden this book literally surfaced. I thought, “What the heck, I told Ray that I’d read it.” I just decided to open it up and read it, at Sunday night, around 10:30 PM that night.
Chris Bay:
Now, Mike, I’ll tell you, obviously because I’ve read the book multiple times and it’s been impactful in my life, we don’t actually recommend people read it at night. How did that play out for you?
Mike Everett:
Well, let me just tell you, I started reading this thing and I got about probably 50 pages into this thing and I thought, “Oh my gosh, what happens if this works?” And so I literally, I just began reading it and reading it and reading it. I finished my second reading about 1:30 AM. To be honest with you, I was so excited, I went and I woke Linda up at about a quarter to two in the morning, just completely freaked out of my mind because I thought, “I know what I’m going to do for my new living, my new career.”
Chris Bay:
Yeah.
Mike Everett:
By the way, we tell people, “Don’t read this thing after 9:00 at night.” Because I’m going to tell you what, if some of the concepts in this book actually work, which now after 10 years, I’m telling you they work, people are a little bit too excited when they get done reading this book, if they read it exactly the way we tell them how to read it.
Chris Bay:
Yeah, it gets the brain going and you’re trying to figure it out. I know for me, a lot of what I read in Nelson’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker, was counter to a lot of things that I’d been taught about money, things that I’d learned, things that I’d studied about money. And so part of it, if you’re sitting there thinking it through, it’s hard to turn that off, especially if you read it… I think you tell people don’t read it after 9:00 at night-
Mike Everett:
I do.
Chris Bay:
… because it’s going to mess with your sleeping pattern, for sure.
Mike Everett:
I always tell people, I say, “If you read this thing after 9:00 at night, please do not text me and email me or call me in the middle of the night because you can’t sleep.”
Chris Bay:
So then when you read it, what then took place? What happened after that?
Mike Everett:
Well, I literally, I started thinking about how in the world can I adopt this? How can I implement this into my life as quickly as I could? But the information, just like you said, was so counter to everything that we had learned. I thought, “I want to teach people this.”
Chris Bay:
So it was a personal thing for you, implementing it in your life personally, but you were also thinking, “I want to teach people how to do this.”
Mike Everett:
I was at a crossroads in my life, career wise. I had come to an end of an era at my past career. I had made a decision at the end of the second reading of this book, that this is something that I could see myself doing. I got up at 8:00 the next morning and I started calling this guy’s office, only to find out that they didn’t open until 9:00. Well, I left him four voicemails between-
Chris Bay:
But you’re a pretty patient guy.
Mike Everett:
I am not patient at all. I literally finally got to him at 9:01. The receptionist answered the phone and I said, “Hey,” I said, “I need to set up an appointment to talk to Ray about this as soon as possible.” This was Monday… Yeah, this was Monday morning. She said, “How about Thursday?” I said, “I can’t wait until Thursday.” She goes, “Oh, I meant Thursday next week.” I said, “Oh my gosh.” I was just so excited about this, so literally what I ended up doing was I read the book three more times myself and I used it as a bedtime story for Linda over the next 10 days.
Chris Bay:
You’re a romantic guy.
Mike Everett:
Yeah. Well, we had quite a bit of fun with it. But it was really… Since I had kind of made the decision to change careers, for me to get fully immersed in the information in this book, the timing couldn’t have happened any better for me.
Chris Bay:
You said that there was a letter that you were given to tell how to read the book. To me, that sounds crazy, you’re telling somebody how to read the book. But what do you tell people?
Mike Everett:
Well, because the information in Nelson’s book is so opposite of everything that we learned about money, you’ve got to give people a platform or a way or a process in which they can actually take this information and think through it correctly. Literally, what we tell people to do is blow through the book the first time and don’t think. Because a lot of people, when we’re talking about money, they overthink everything because money is just one of those things that we never really got taught properly. So we tell people to read through this thing as fast as you can, like you would a novel, just don’t think. The second time, we want people to get their pen and their highlighter out. We want them to write right on the pages when they get certain ideas or certain question, we want them to highlight the things that are important to them. And then they can really start to dissect and sift through, what does this really mean? Because after they go through it, the first time they’re going, “Okay, hey, I kind of get it.” But when they really take some time to go through and analyze some of the concepts and the ideas in the book, the second time through what will happen is the light will begin to flicker.
Chris Bay:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, the book’s 92 pages long.
Mike Everett:
It is 92 pages.
Chris Bay:
Estimate for me, how many times would you say you’ve read this book?
Mike Everett:
I have read it more than 250 times now, so I kind of have an idea of what’s in the book.
Chris Bay:
Yeah. For those people who are listening and they go ahead and they want to get ahold of a copy of this book, what would be your advice to them? What are they going to get out of the book? What can they expect by reading Nelson’s book, Becoming Your Own Banker?
Mike Everett:
Well, first off, it’s going to go against everything that they believe about money. But what happens is, as they are going through this thing, it’s going to challenge some of the things that they’re thinking about, “Why does this work? If it works this way, what should they do about it?” But I would encourage everybody that is listening to this podcast to get a copy of the book. You can actually get a copy of the book on our website, lifesuccesslegacy.com. You can get it right on the home page there or you can go to the resource tab. We offer it in print form and we also offer it in a CD form, so you can listen to the book. The CD form is not quite as informative as the written form, so I really encourage everybody to get the book itself. This 92-page book will challenge everything that you believe about money, about the financial system that we have now, and about financial products that we have been taught to store our money.
Chris Bay:
Tell me again, the website people can go to.
Mike Everett:
Lifesuccesslegacy.com.
Chris Bay:
And the name of the book is?
Mike Everett:
Becoming Your Own Banker by R. Nelson Nash.
Chris Bay:
We are going to dig into those topics that are in the book in future podcast. I hope you guys will join us. Mike Everett, thanks for being a part of this, we look forward to future conversations.
Mike Everett:
Thanks, Chris.