Throughout our lives, we depend on traditional banks as our main funding source. Banks provide us with loans to pay for our cars, our homes, our college tuition bills, and, when necessary, our credit card bills. They loan us money for life’s major expenses, and they are a financial lifeblood for business loans and home equity lines of credit. The problem with traditional banks is that they are not on our side; they are all out to make a lot of money on us, even as they call all of the shots regarding repayment of our loans. Let’s explore why using traditional banks as our funding source is the worst kind of controlling relationship imaginable:
Traditional banks determine your credit worthiness:
If you’ve ever been denied a loan or been told you qualify for less credit than you need, you know the total control that banks have over your financial future. Most of us believe that banks are the only way to get loans, and thus we become beholden to banks for all of our funding needs.
Traditional banks determine all of the repayment terms:
When you receive a loan from a traditional bank, you don’t get to set any of the repayment terms. Your bank drafts up all of the terms and forces you to affix your signature to those terms before you get a single dollar.
Traditional banks determine your interest rate:
When traditional banks loan you money, they see only dollar signs. No matter how good your credit is, you will always pay for the cost of your loan via interest payments. Anyone who has ever held a mortgage understands that these interest payments add up to enormous sums over the life of the loan.
Traditional banks determine your privacy (or lack thereof!):
When you take out a loan from a bank, you can be assured that your every move will be recorded in a detailed file and reported to credit monitoring agencies and Uncle Sam. In other words, you have no financial privacy when you rely on traditional banks to loan you money.
The good news is that you don’t have to be beholden to traditional banks for your money. When you invest in a whole life insurance policy, you become your own bank, accessing the cash value of your policy at any time as a loan to yourself. With a whole life insurance policy, there is no third-party bank determining your credit worthiness, your repayment terms, your interest rate, and your (lack of) financial privacy.
For more information on how you can use a whole life insurance policy to become your own bank, our site and start your journey today!