And but I'm going to begin by giving you an overview of what we saw in our financial freedom seminar. And basically, we begin this question by what is the American dream? Why is it that many people from around the world come to the United States, one of the main reasons why a lot of people come here is because they come looking for opportunity. 

They believe that by coming here, they can go from something from nothing to something, that they can start their own business, that they could be an entrepreneur, that they can achieve financial freedom and something of a better life for their family. In essence, people think if they come here, they could basically buy the home of their dreams, by the car of their dreams achieve a stable security, achieve a stable, retirement and their last years. And essentially, a lot of those things used to be true.

But lately, a lot of that has become not true, why? The sad reality is that for a lot of people, they end up struggling, simply because they are in debt. A lot of people have financial problems, largely because they haven't figured out how to manage their money and how to make their money work for them. Instead, they end up working most of their life for money. 

The reason I created these courses, is to help people and especially Christians, figure out how to get money under control, and then how to serve God with money. So today, I am going to focus in a little bit on the strategy that we call How to Become your own bank. But before we do that, let me just quickly review what we teach in our financial freedom seminars. 

Basically, a lot of people live today in debt, and therefore they have a lot of uncertainty about the future, they worry that if they were to lose their job, they might lose their whole lifestyle, they might lose their car, they might lose their home, their kids might no longer be able to go to the same school that they go to, etc. 

A lot of people work really hard, but they don't really have enough time to focus in and have quality time with their family. A lot of people still owe their car and they still owe their home. And therefore, you know, they spend their whole life in financial problems. And by the time they get to be old, 65, 70 years old, sometimes they're still in debt, and they don't have enough money to achieve the lifestyle that they would have wanted. 

As we talked about yesterday, this is a typical progression of how people fall into debt, they first get into debt through going to an expensive university that they can't afford. Later after that, they start buying their first car and they get further into debt. After that they get married, they have too big of a wedding that they can't afford. And maybe they put it on a credit card. After that they purchase their first home and get their first mortgage and they get further into debt. And before they know it, people are just in a deep, deep hole of debt, they don't know how to get out of it. 

And then they spend the rest of their life basically trying to get out from under this debt. My goal and my purpose is to help people get out of this pit of desperation by learning how to pay yourself first, at least 10%. And then after that, we basically help people understand that in order to get out of this debt, you have to start focusing in on paying off this debt as quickly as possible.  This phase is what we call living in abundance. In it requires that you make a focus of investing first in yourself to acquire the skill sets and the knowledge to get out of debt. 

Once you become debt free. The next phase is called prosperity and prosperity is where you learn how to become your own bank. You learn how to start your own business, you learn how to invest, and you basically take calculated risks that will allow you to start to prosper and grow to a point where you reach what we call financial freedom. 

Financial freedom is the point where you're making sufficient income not by working but from your investments and from other financial activities that will basically sustain your current lifestyle. Beyond this point, you can enjoy the Liberty you can enjoy a lifetime of giving back. You can enjoy basically the gift of giving and sharing with people which we're going to Talk about little bit later today. 

And lastly, when you pass away from this world, you can leave a legacy in a foundation that others can build upon and be thankful for. So at the end of the day, the question is, what is the future that you would rather have? Would you rather be part of the people who enjoy financial freedom and success? Or would you rather be a part of the majority that always struggles financially, the choice is really up to you if you take the time to understand the principles that make financial success possible. 

And today, I'm going to give you one of those keys, which is learning how to become your own bank, so that you can achieve financial security. What this consists of is taking control of your money, and taking it away from banks who simply want to live off the interest that you pay them. This will help you pay for your children's education, it will help you protect your loved ones, it will help you learn how to finance the major purchases in your life such as cars and your home. And at the end of the year years, they will help you achieve a more stable retirement with predictable income. 

Now let's talk about less than one, there's two inevitable risks that most people will not be able to avoid. There's a lot of risks that people face in life, for example, they could face the risk of a car accident, they could face the risk that they might get some terminal disease like cancer, they could face the risks that may be you know, their hospital burned down, they could face many types of risks. But a lot of those can be handled through other types of insurance, there's only two types of risks that nobody's going to really be able to get away from. One of them is growing old. As life goes by day by day, we're all getting older. 

And someday we're going to if we are fortunate enough to live many, many years, we're going to have to make provision for when we are old, when we're not able to work anymore, how are we going to sustain ourselves. 

The second risk that we have to be prepared for is when we reach the final days in our of our life in this world, we will all die someday. And of course, we have to make peace with God first. But we also have to remember that we have responsibilities here in this planet, with our family and with other loved ones and other people. 

And we have to make provision for that for the day that we die. So who is responsible for your retirement, a lot of people unconsciously have shifted the responsibility of their financial future to somebody else, that somebody else could be their wife could be their husband, it could be their children, it could be their extended family. It could be a government, it could be their financial adviser. 

But what I would tell you is that ultimately, the only person who is responsible for you is yourself, you're going to have to do a better job of understanding that nobody's going to come save you, when you get into trouble. Nobody's gonna care about your life more than you do yourself. So it's not enough to have hope. That is not a strategy to sustain you in your future. It's not enough to shift responsibility and hope that somebody else is gonna be there for you. It's not enough to believe that the government is supposed to protect you and send you Social Security or some other kind of income in order to take care of you medically. 

The reality is that the government is getting worse day by day. And that a lot of the things that we thought were supposed to be there may not end up being there when we most need them. So what is your retirement strategy? Is it simply hope prayer, hoping that the government is going to be there for you to give you a handout? Is it relying on a company pension or a government pension? Lot of these things are not a good strategy to bank on. And don't make sure that this isn't your retirement strategy to simply allow, you know, for you to be basically hoping that somebody else will have pity on you.

A lot of people, as we discussed, have spent most of their life getting in themselves into debt and they haven't figured out how to get out of debt. Sometimes some people think bankruptcy is the answer. But it's not the answer. It doesn't really solve any problems. It just makes them worse. Other people when they have children, they think well, I got to save up for my child's education. But you know, some of the plans out there constrict you to or they put limitations on you which are not desirable. When it comes to retirement, a lot of people are thinking, well, I should use a strategy like a 401 K or an IRA, in order to save money for what you're essentially doing is you're transferring risk to something like the stock market or a mutual fund, which is simply going to cause your investments to go up and down. 

There's not a single adviser in the United States, or probably in the world, who's going to guarantee exactly how much money you're going to have following that strategy by the time that you retire. So what should you do lately, a lot of people have been investing in cryptocurrencies, things like Bitcoin Atrium, believing that maybe that's a solution. Other people rely on real estate, they say, Well, you know, real estate is something where, basically, I can invest in something tangible, something where I can put my money, something that I can physically touch.

But we saw what happened in the last decade with real estate, once property value start going down. The real estate completely loses everything that you put into it. And it takes many, many years for it to come back. So before you get into flipping houses and renting them, make sure that you understand the risks associated with that. A lot of people have the idea, well, maybe I should start a business. Well, that's a good idea for many people. But you also have to realize that 90% of businesses fail within the first year. 

So again, we go back to the question, how do we prepare ourselves to have a predictable income when it comes time for retirement? And how do we take care of our family? Well, let's look at one of the traditional strategies that people typically use. 

They focus in on traditional investments, such as IRAs, and 401, Ks. And they do it because they've been told by some TV personalities or some gurus out there, who say that mutual funds are going to make you 10 to 12% per year, we've gone back and studied the stock market over the last few years. And what we find is that over the last 25 years, we haven't seen gains of 10 to 12% per year, if we look at there's been periods where the stock market goes up significantly, and then it drops almost in half, then it goes up again. And then it drops in half. Again. Now it's back up. And since the beginning of this year, it's been starting to go back down. 

So what we find is something that people go through an emotional roller coaster, where they don't really know, you know, they feel good during the good years, but they can't handle the downside. A lot of people don't even want to open their statements, because they don't know what's gonna, what's gonna show up. 

So I asked the question, so is it really true that you can make 10% to 12%, at some of the TV personalities like to say, I found out that the average rate of return that you could make over a 10% year period, on average, has ranged roughly from plus 7% to minus 3% per year over a 10 year time frame. If we take the whole period, it's really an average at best, the 5%.

Now that's before tax, once you include the after tax, and management fees, you're really talking probably about a 3% per year return on average at best.  As I said, a lot of people think well maybe if I focused in instead of the stock market, I'll focus in on real estate. After all, I can touch it, I can fix it, I can rent it, I can flip it, I can do something with it. All I can tell you is I have focused in on the housing industry for the last 17 years of my career. And during the downturn, which began in late 2005. Even through the next 10 years, people lost close to 10 million homes here in the United States, a lot of people lost everything that they had, through this downturn. 

Once prices begin to fall, real estate becomes very liquid, which means it's difficult to get rid of it unless you basically give it away. And so a lot of people think, typically only on the plus side on the upside, they never think of what happens when things go the other way. As I like to say here, leverage is great as long as home prices are going up. But leverage can kill you once home prices start to go down. 

What about commercial banks? How safe are they? Well, if you know anything, basically, there's been many, many banks. In fact, my slide here is a little bit outdated because now there has been over 500 banks that have failed since 2008. And how do they fail? They fail simply because they make unwise loans and they're leveraged. I'd like to show you a little cartoon that basically shows you here. What happens to people's money when they have it in banks and things go wrong.

I really have to do this dad, Stan. Now more than ever, you need to understand the importance of saving money. The grandma said I could use this money to buy whatever I want. Okay, next, please. Go on Stanley. I got $100 check from my grandma. And my dad said I need to put in the bank so it can grow over the years. Who else? That's fantastic. A really smart decision, young man, we can put that chick in a money market mutual fund, then we'll reinvest the earnings into foreign currency accounts with compounding interest and it's Good.

What? It's gone, it's all gone. What's gone the money in your account? It didn't do too. Well. It's God. What do you mean? I have $100? Not anymore. You don't poof? Well, what can I do to get back? Sorry, sir. But this slide is for bank members only. I just opened an account. Do you have any money invested with his bank? No, he just lost it all. Then please stand aside for people who actually have money with us. 

Next, please. Hey, Hello, Mrs. barnacle? How are you today making a deposit? Are we great, we can just put that into your retirement account and make it go to work for you. And it's got what? Sorry? Yeah, that's gone, please step aside for people who actually have money with the bank. Next, please. Yeah, hey, I'm trying to teach my son the importance of savings, you already lost his money. Oh, Mr. Marsh, don't worry, we can just transfer money from your account into a portfolio with your city. And its gone, this slide is for people who have money with the bank only please step aside.

Alright, so you might find out a little bit funny. But what you might not find so funny is that if we do a search here on Google, and I'm gonna say, stuff fail banks in United States we find here, site from the FDIC. What we find here that says there's 555, you see if I can zoom in a little bit, so you can see this a little bit better. But it says here, there's 555 entries. So if we go here, and we tell her to show us everything.

When we go to the beginning of this list, what we find is that in 2005, we find the first in the year 2000, there was only a couple of banks that failed in the year 2000. In the year 2001, there was three banks four banks that failed in the year 2002, maybe there was a dozen banks that failed. However, as we keep going through this list, we find that more banks as time went by started to fail, especially beginning in 2007, and 2008, suddenly, the list becomes huge. 

As we scroll through all these names, we can find here banks across the United States across all kinds of states, all kinds of cities, all kinds of banks. Sometimes, even on one single day, several banks were closing down. 

Now, you might say, well, this happened, you know, during the crisis, the housing crisis, it's not happening anymore. Is it? Well, let's see. We still see here banks in 2009, 2010. And I'm just going through this list pretty quickly, but you can look for it for yourself. Still 2010, 2011 several 100 banks 2012 2013, 2014. And here we are till today. The last banks that failed was December 15 2017, just a few months ago. 

So what did we learn from? What do we learn from this? Basically, what we learned is that banks are not necessarily a very safe place to put your money. Now, in the old days, the government used to bail out people essentially by rescuing one bank and transferring that bank account to a separate bank. 

In 2011, the governments of the world started to realize they can't exactly bail out everybody. So what they started to do is they started to transfer the losses, over to the people who put the money in the banks. They tested this out in Cyprus, were two of the major banks there failed. And essentially, the people who had opened up a savings or a checking account, took the losses, they lost 50 to 60% of their money. Any of these people were from Russia. And from that point on, the government said, You know what, maybe this is a better strategy, instead of putting the burden on the taxpayers to lose the money, it's probably better to shift it over to the depositors. 

So what this is basically telling you is that your money may not be as safe as you think of it in the bank. Now, how much does the bank so much of the banks really pay you to have to hold your money in the seventh year in a checking account? Last I looked, it's pretty close to zero. How much they charge you to borrow money from a bank? Well, typically, it's probably if you're lucky, it's somewhere close to four or 5%. But I've seen several people who get charged 10% 12% 15% 18% 25%, even 40%. It's crazy. 

So the banks basically pay you nothing. And they charge you a lot of money. So what should you do? Should you worry and focus more on your debts paying off your debts? Or should you worry about investing for the future? I would say, why not do both at the same time with the same dollar? You can ask? How's that possible? Well, I'm going to show you how it's possible. 

But first, let me ask you a question. If something were to happen to you today, if you were to have an accident, or you were to acquire, you know, a terminal disease, like cancer or something like that, how is your family going to survive without you? How are you going to replace your income? What are you going to do to take care of the people that you love most? Are you prepared for that? Do you even have something to cover your funeral expenses? Are you going to do like a lot of people do these days where they just go to Facebook, and they create a Go Fund Me account and they ask their friends to pitch in for their loved ones funeral expenses. 

I personally think that taking care of your funeral should be something that you should take care of, it's not something that you need to go spread around to your friends. But that's just my personal opinion. But more than that, more than just taking care of your funeral expenses, you ought to really think about taking care of your family. And the best way to do it, is to not leave it for later. But to simply focus on it today. 

The way you do that, is through something that's called Life Insurance. Life insurance is essentially a contract, which I'll explain in the more in a minute with the life insurance company, where you are basically exchanging a small premium, which is a small amount of money on a regular basis, for example, every month, in exchange that if something happens to you, they're going to give your family a large sum of money so that they can basically do better without you once you're gone, as opposed to having nothing and having a devastating loss. 

So basically, the one solution that we're going to be discussing with you focuses in on a couple of things. 

First, providing protection for your family while you're getting out of debt, and protection that lasts through your last day here on planet Earth, which could be maybe 50 years from now. 

Second, it helps create a stable and predictable savings plan so that you can basically put aside money now as we were talking in our financial freedom seminar, paying yourself first, every week, and every paycheck that you get every month, you'd have to put away at least 10% into something that's not going to be lost and it's not going to be exposed to risks. 

Then what you're going to do is you're going to take part of this money that you're putting away into savings, and you're going to lend it to yourself so that you can pay off all your debts to the banks. The idea being that we want to cut off the bank from our life as quickly as possible. 

Then, once you are done paying the banks, you're going to pay yourself back that money that you borrowed from your life insurance policy that we're going to show you with the interest that you would have paid to the bank instead you're going to pay it back to yourself By doing so, you're going to create a legacy for your family. And you're going to create a pool of money from which you'll be able to borrow in the future when you need more money, for example, to purchase your next car. I really believe that this is the way that we create prosperity for ourselves, instead of basically working really hard to make the bank's a lot of money. 

We start doing this by again, investing in yourself, and then learning how to become your own bank. So this has to be the new plan that you focus on. And that's what we teach the people that we work with. We basically teach them when you take our financial freedom seminar, how to adopt a new mentality around money, and the role that it plays in your life. In the seminar that we're talking about now, how to become your own bank, we're going to show you how to become independent from the banks, and essentially how to replace the banks in your life, and be your own source of financing. 

We also teach another class called University success, where we meet with people once a month, once a week, I'm sorry. And we teach them how to become a millionaire with a purpose. The goal being basically to change the world and to have people who are motivated to make money to help others. As I said, we teach another class called how to invest in the stock market. For those who are interested in Lastly, we help people acquire the Destiny the third millennium, which is Peter Daniels program, which helps you set yourself up for life goals, and create a clearer destiny. 

So the question is, why would you want to become your own bank? What's wrong with using the current existing commercial banks? Essentially, when you think about it, as we went through the class on financial freedom, we showed that sometimes when you acquire a debt, you end up paying two or three times as much money for that debt. Because you're essentially paying the banks back with interest. Why not become your own bank? And why not? Pay yourself all that interest that you would have given away to a bank? Wouldn't it be interesting to learn how to do that? So that going forward the rest of your life, you never have to use a bank and instead you use your own source of financing in order to basically achieve greater prosperity and cut off the reliance on third parties.