329: Josh Bought IULs for Infinite Banking, Here’s What Happened

The short answer is no. The longer answer requires understanding why, because the question is being asked more than ever, and the misinformation circulating on social media around this topic is causing real financial harm to real people. Right now, social media is full of content promoting Indexed Universal Life insurance as “infinite banking 2.0,” an upgraded, modern version of the concept that Nelson Nash created. It is not. And the man who created IBC said so directly, in writing, on page 39 of Becoming Your Own Banker. “I never sold one when I was in the business, and I surely wouldn’t buy one. I would not recommend it nor use it for the infinite banking concept.” – Nelson Nash Nelson Nash spent 35 years in the life insurance industry. He won lifetime achievement awards. He was a member of the Million Dollar Roundtable. He sat on every major committee in the industry. And in all of that time, he never sold a single Indexed Universal Life, variable life or traditional universal life policy. That statement should do a lot of your thinking for you. Why Is This Question Being Asked So Often in 2026? There are three reasons this question keeps coming up. First, social media marketing. IUL products are heavily marketed online. They illustrate well, meaning the projected numbers look impressive on paper. And they are being marketed aggressively by people who are either uninformed about IBC or who are deliberately misusing the trademark. Second, the trademark is being violated. The Infinite Banking Concept is a registered trademark of the Nelson Nash Institute. Authorized practitioners — like the advisors at Ascendant Financial have signed an agreement to use the concept and its trademarks correctly. Many people promoting IUL as an IBC vehicle are not authorized and are not following the trademark policy. Third, people genuinely do not know the difference. And that is not their fault. The distinction between a product and a process is not obvious. If the first content you encounter about IBC is promoting an IUL, it is entirely reasonable to assume that it is the right vehicle. It is not. The History of Universal Life: Where It Came From and Why It Matters To understand why IUL does not work for IBC, you need to understand what universal life actually is and where it came from. Nelson Nash was direct about this on page 39: “It was invented in the early 1980s by E.F. Hutton, a stock brokerage firm, in my opinion, that knew nothing about life insurance.” That matters. How we think about something is shaped by what created it. The insurance industry did not invent universal life to serve policyholders. It was invented by a stock brokerage firm to compete with whole life insurance during a period of high interest rates by unbundling the savings and insurance components of a whole life policy and putting them in a single package under a different structure. The original format was simple: one-year term insurance with a side fund of an interest-bearing account. In the 1980s, when interest rates were running at 10 to 12 percent, that side fund looked attract...