financial needs analysis

NEVER be at the Mercy of Banks Again | Shuttered Line of Credit – What Happens?

 

…there’s an old saying, “A banker is somebody who will give you an umbrella when it’s sunny and take it away when it’s raining.”

Wells Fargo recently closed credit lines on their customers. Stick around to the end of this video, because we’re going to go over exactly what that could mean for their customers, for the economy, and show you a solution that will make sure that you’re never at the mercy of banks, the government or Wall Street again.

On July 8th, 2021, Wells Fargo announced to its customers that if they had a personal line of credit, they were shutting it down. Basically, if you had this line of credit, you’ve got to notice that in 60 days, Wells Fargo was going to shutter your account. Let’s go over exactly what that means.

Well, when your account is shuttered, it means two things. Number one, any unused portion of your credit line is no longer accessible to you. So you don’t have access to the unused portion. And secondly, they’re going to be getting a payment schedule for the outstanding balance that’s remaining. So how is that going to affect their customers? Well, it’s going to affect their customers in four ways. First and foremost, their access to credit has been limited. Secondly, their future cashflow is limited because now they have a payment schedule. Thirdly, because they had credit and it was shut down, that’s going to have a negative impact on their credit score. And all three of those issues are going to negatively impact their customer’s ability to obtain credit in the future.

So you could see how this simple shift from a line of credit to a term loan could have such a waterfall effect on these customers and not only their present cashflow position, but also their future ability to access capital. In the last week or so, we had the opportunity to speak with some of our clients and a lot of them asked “Is this even legal what Wells Fargo is doing? Are they even allowed to do this?” And the answer is yes, it’s written in the terms of their loan agreement.

You know, there’s an old saying, a banker is somebody who will give you an umbrella when it’s sunny and take it away when it’s raining. And this action by Wells Fargo only underscores the meaning of that saying. You see Wells Fargo is protecting themselves. They have it written into the loan agreements that they’re allowed to shutter or shut down those lines whenever for whatever reason. And by the way, it’s not only personal lines of credit, it’s home equity lines of credit that they can do this on. They can do it with business lines of credit. And not only Wells Fargo, other banks can do the same banks write documents on those loans. That’s why there’s all these legal documents when you take out a loan. Why? To protect the bank! But this should come as no surprise for Wells Fargo customers. In 2008 and 2009, when they took over Wacovia they did the very same thing.

They shut down credit lines for people, business credit lines. And I had clients call me and say, Hey, I’m in trouble. I’ve got to get a new credit relationship. I just got a letter from Wells Fargo that says I have 60 days to obtain new credit. Well, the ideal situation back then would have been to have control of their own pool of money so that they wouldn’t be affected when the bank decides that the bank wants to protect itself and they shut down your access to capital. So this is all part of what Nelson Nash referred to in his bestselling book, Becoming Your Own Banker. And in there, he has a chapter called the golden rule. And basically the golden rule, according to Nelson Nash was the one who has the gold makes the rules. Well, if you’re in control of your own pool of money and you’re making loans to yourself or to your business, you are truly in control of the process. So the question really becomes, do you want to continue to be controlled by the process and be at the mercy of the banks? Or do you want to be in control of the process? Again, the one who has the gold makes the rules!

Banks are really good at getting us to do what’s in their best interest and they do it under the premise that it’s in our best interest. And they’re so good at doing it, most of the time, we don’t even know what’s happening. And the perfect example of this is a 15 year mortgage with a low interest rate versus a 30 year mortgage with a higher interest rate. Let’s take a look at a solid example of a $250,000 mortgage.

So if our choices are a 30 year mortgage for third, for $250,000, at 4% interest, our payment is about $1,200 per month, a 15 year mortgage for 3.75%. And that’s how they entice us to do what’s in their best interests. They offer us a lower interest rate on a shorter term loan. Our payment will be about $1,800 per month. Now that’s a 50% increase in cashflow that we don’t control. And that’s cashflow that the bank now controls, but again, they have us focused on the interest. So with the 30 year mortgage, we would pay the bank $179,000 in interest with a 15 year mortgage, we’re only going to pay the bank $77,000 in interest. So here’s the issue, if the amount of interest paid is really in the bank’s best interest, why would they cheat themselves out of $102,000 of interest? Well, the answer that is, it’s not the amount of interest that’s paid. It’s how fast the bank gets it back. What the bank literally did by getting us to pay the loan back quicker, they increased their rate of return on the loan, the 30 year loan, they had about a 9.5% rate of return. And on the 15 year loan, they end up with a 13% rate of return. They almost increased their rate of return by 50%.

The thing is that with businesses, when they sell products, inventory turnover gets them more profits. And with the bank, they have a product to it’s loans. So the quicker they’re able to get the loan money back and then turn it over with a new loan, the more interest, the more profits that they’re able to make. Imagine how stressful it would feel if you had a credit line out for tens of thousands of dollars, and only had 60 days to secure new financing, to secure a new banking relationship.

Conversely, imagine having access to your own pool of money, so that when you got this notice, you can borrow against your pool of money, use it to pay off Wells Fargo or anybody else who calls your credit line and buy yourself time to obtain another relationship. In the process, while you’re using that money, you’re still earning uninterrupted compounding interest on the money you used to pay off that loan. Wouldn’t that be a great situation to be in?

If you’re ready to learn more about our process and exactly how it works, check out our free web course at tier1capital.com. It’s one hour and you could register right on our website.

And remember, it’s not how much money you make, it’s how much money you keep, that really matters.

Why My Clients Choose to Work With Me

If you have had any previous experience with a financial advisor, chances are the conversation revolved around how much money you have, where it’s located, we can do a better job. It would seem that most investment firms share the same singular focus of trying to find better products that earn a higher rate of return which often take more risk. For all of the fancy analytics and mathematical acrobatics available today, nobody has yet figured out how to predict the future. Earning higher returns is certainly not a bad thing, and something we can help you with as well, however we believe we should help our clients avoid money they could be losing unnecessarily before considering options that require more risk. Return is not the only thing to consider when evaluating the efficiency of your own personal economic model. There are three types of money:

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The money used to secure your financial future must somehow come from these three areas. Accumulated money represents the dollars you currently have invested and are currently saving. You could focus your attention on these dollars in order to find better investments that potentially pay higher rates of return.

Lifestyle money represents the dollars you are spending to maintain your current standard of living: where you live, what you eat, where you vacation etc. For many people, this is where the conversation ends. While everyone wants to solve their financial problems reducing their current standard of living is not a popular option.

What if there were a way to address the issue without having to incur more risk or impact your present lifestyle? I’m glad you asked!

Transferred money represents the dollars you may be transferring away unknowingly, and unnecessarily. Such as:

  •  How you pay for your house,
  •  What you pay in taxes
  •  How you fund your retirement accounts
  •  Non-deductible interest
  •  How you pay for major capital purchases like cars, education, weddings, and other large expenses.

There are really only two ways a financial advisor can be of help to you:

  1. By finding better products that pay higher rates of return requiring more risk
  2. By helping you be more efficient by avoiding unnecessarily losses

I believe that there is more opportunity to serve my clients by helping them first avoid the losses, before trying to pick the winners. My focus with clients begins with eliminating the involuntary and unnecessary wealth transfers. Consider this. There are two ways to fill up a bucket that has holes in it. One way is to pour more in, and the other is to first plug the holes, then the bucket will fill up even if the flow is just a trickle. Which strategy more closely resembles the way you are currently approaching financial management?

 

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Opportunity Cost vs. Rate of Return

 

“That car that we pay $20,000 for, is really costing us about $150,000.”

 

For the past 35 years, I’ve learned that there are only five ways that you could accumulate wealth in America. Number one, you can be born into it. Number two, you could marry into it. Number three, you can purchase a business and have your employees create wealth for you. Number four, you can purchase real estate and have your tenants create wealth for you. Or number five, you can focus on saving more of your money.

Notice, nowhere in there did we say you need to earn a higher rate of return on your money to become wealthy. You see, traditional financial planning focuses on rate of return. Oftentimes people go from one advisor to the next advisor, all with the promise of a rate of return that’s better than the last. We believe that there’s more opportunity in making your money more efficient than there is in picking the winners.

For every dollar that goes through our hands, we could only make two choices with it. We can either save it or spend it. Saved dollars will grow over time, spent dollars are gone forever. Now the potential future value of spent dollars is called opportunity cost. We will never see the money that we don’t earn after we spend our money, but let’s take a look at an example to see just what an impact opportunity costs can have on our money.

Today we’re going to look at buying your first car. You graduate college and you get your first job. Now you want to buy a car. Let’s say it’s a $20,000 car. That $20,000 could have earned 5%. We’re going to look at this over the next 40 years. Well, focusing on opportunity costs, we think the car cost is $20,000. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is that car costs us $20,000 plus what we could have earned on our money for 40 years, that’s an additional $127,168. That car that we pay $20,000 for is really costing us about $150,000. That is opportunity cost.

Keep in mind. This is only looking at the cost of one car. The average person is going to purchase 12 cars over their lifetime. The point is, it’s not what you buy, it’s how you pay for it. Making your money as efficient as possible and losing as little opportunity cost as possible is what will make you financially free. There’s no certainty in trying to risk your way to financial independence.

 

 

How do I pay off my debt?

 

“Our mission as a company is to show people how to regain control of their money.”

 

The problem with getting in the debt cycle is that once you take on that first debt, it becomes difficult to save your income. In the case of an emergency, you’re forced to take on more debt and tie up even more of your income and make it even harder to save. In his bestselling book “Rich dad, poor dad,” Robert Kiyosaki’s foundational principle is to pay yourself first. But if you’re working that hard to pay off your debt, how in the world are you going to be able to pay yourself first? 

So here are some of the problems with consumer debt. First, it places an obligation on your future earnings. You lose the capital to purchases and the financing costs forever. As in, you’re giving up opportunity costs. When you make these purchases, you become a debtor to the creditor. Most importantly, you’re losing control. 

Our mission as a company is to show people how to regain control of their money. With this simple concept, showing them how to regain control of the financing function in their lives. We could make significant progress in showing you how to regain control of not only your money, but your financial future. 

If there’s only one thing you take out of this video, please let it be that “ It’s not what you buy, It’s how you pay for it that really matters.”  Because let’s face it,  every purchase we make is financed. You could either be a debtor, a saver, or wealth creator. Let’s go over the differences. 

This is what a debtor looks like. They have no money. So when they have to buy something, they have to finance it. They have no choice. They dig a hole and then they fill it up and then they dig another hole and they fill that up too. But notice, they never get above the financial line of zero. So what a lot of people do, is they save money in order to spend. They save, save, save, and then when it’s time to buy something, wipe out their savings in order to make the purchase. They keep doing this again and again. Over time they don’t stay above the financial line of zero. 

Then there’s the wealth creator. This is what we help our clients to become. They save as a matter of course. Then, when it’s time to make a purchase, they borrow against their money. They use other people’s money to make their money more efficient, but notice they never interrupt the compounding of interest on their money. Their money is always working for them and they are no longer working for money. That’s the power of becoming a wealth creator and that’s the power of controlling the finance function in your life. 

 

Why Are We So Passionate About Helping Our Clients?

What makes us so passionate about helping our clients become financially independent?

 

With over 35 years of experience in the financial services industry, we have seen how following conventional wisdom can lead you astray. What makes us so passionate about helping our clients become financially independent? Growing up in a family that lived paycheck to paycheck really changed Tim’s perspective on life. After following some great advice from Don Blanton and Nelson Nash, Tim realized, maintaining the efficiency of your money and maintaining the liquidity use and control of your money, will let you have financial freedom. It is our goal now to help as many people as we can, become financially independent.

 

“It’s become our mission to help our clients become financially independent by using these concepts so that they could release the financial stress and pressure and maintain or attain financial engines”

 

 

At tier one capital, our mission is to help our clients become financially free. We believe that you should be in control of your money, not the banks, not the financial institutions, and certainly not the government. Today we’re going to tell you a little bit about why we’re so passionate about helping our clients to become financially independent and why liquidity use, and control of your money is the key to becoming financially independent.

 

A lot of times when we meet with clients, they say, this is so simple and so different, how did you guys come up with this process? Let me tell you a little bit about my journey over the past 35 years in the financial services industry and in order to do so, I want to take you back to my childhood. Growing up in Wyoming, Pennsylvania in a blue-collar family, my dad worked in the coal mines and Thursday night was pay day. On Thursday nights my mom would get my dad’s pay, go to the grocery store and cash the check to pay bills for the next day. Sometimes, however, my dad would come home on a Thursday night and he didn’t have his pay.

 

So now let’s fast forward to the Christmas of 1993, sitting around my parents kitchen table with my family, reminiscing about the good old days. It certainly came up about the few times where my dad would come home without his pay. It was those times when my mom would load my brother, sister, and I into the car and sit in front of my dad’s boss’s house waiting for him to come home, to get my dad’s pay. Now, as a kid, I had no idea why we were there. I asked my mom, what were we doing there? She said, waiting for dad’s pay. I asked, why didn’t you just wait until the next day? She replied, we lived pay to pay, we needed that money to pay bills. It was at that point that I realized that I was living pay to pay, despite the fact that I was making 10 times what my dad had ever made, despite the fact that I had no dependence. I had a 15-year mortgage, and I was maxing out my 401k. 

 

Yes, embarrassingly, I had credit cards and there were even times when I had to go to my dad and borrow money to pay my mortgage. Why? Because I didn’t have any access to money. It was at that point that I realized that I was living pay to pay, despite the fact that I was making good money and I was following conventional wisdom by the book. I knew at that point that things had to change. It became, from that point forward, my mission to find ways to help people to become financially independent. I was able to figure some things out on own and then in 1995, I was introduced to a guy by the name of Don Blanton, who developed a whole financial planning system around making your money more efficient. 

 

With this system, we’re able to identify where our clients are giving up control of their money, unknowingly and unnecessarily. We look at the five areas of wealth transfer; taxes, mortgages, how you fund your retirement plan, how you fund college tuition for your children and how you make major capital purchases. It was Don’s system that proved that the process of how you use your money is way more important than where your money is. Then in July of 1997, I met a gentleman by the name of Nelson Nash. Nelson taught me that the importance of having access to capital when opportunities come about. Being in a position to take advantage of opportunities only comes to those people who have access to their money. Nelson taught me the importance of being in control of the financing function in your life. 

 

Think about conventional wisdom. It tells us to max out our 401k’s and put extra on our mortgage. But by doing those things, it only makes you look financially free on paper. You don’t actually have access to that capital. When opportunities or emergencies arise, our clients come to us, they look good on paper, they’re making great income, but they’re financially stuck because they don’t have access to capital when they need it most. 

 

It’s in the combination of maximizing the efficiency of your money and maintaining the liquidity use, and control of your money so you have control of your cashflow. You have access when you really need it. Then financial freedom can emerge. It’s become our mission to help our clients become financially independent by using these concepts so that they could release the financial stress and pressure and maintain or attain financial engines.