- The Problem Nobody Talks About in Entrepreneurship
- What Is the Infinite Banking Concept? (And Why Entrepreneurs Are Asking About It)
- "I Didn't Know What to Call It, But I Knew Something Else Existed"
- The Real Reasons People Hesitate and What's Actually Going On
- What Tara Actually Used IBC For (The Honest Answer)
- The Mindset Shift That Actually Makes IBC Click
- What Les Corbett Observes Across Hundreds of Conversations
- Raising Kids Who Already Think This Way
- The Quote That Stayed with Us
- Listen, Watch, and Connect
The Problem Nobody Talks About in Entrepreneurship
You built the business. You’re generating revenue. From the outside, things look successful.
But inside? You’re quietly dealing with limited financing options, unpredictable cash flow, credit lines that cost you, and a banking system that wasn’t designed with entrepreneurs in mind.
That’s not a personal failure. That’s the system working exactly as intended, just not for you.
In this episode of Wealth on Main Street, hosts Jayson Lowe and Richard Canfield sit down with IBC practitioner and Ascendant Financial teammate Leslie Corbett and his client Tara, a mindset coach, entrepreneur, and former realtor, for a candid conversation about what it actually looks and feels like to implement the Infinite Banking Concept (IBC) in real life.
What Is the Infinite Banking Concept? (And Why Entrepreneurs Are Asking About It)
The Infinite Banking Concept (IBC) is a financial strategy that uses a specially structured dividend-paying whole life insurance policy as a personal banking system. Rather than routing your money through traditional banks and paying them interest, you build your own pool of capital called cash value that you can borrow against, repay on your own terms, and grow simultaneously.
For entrepreneurs, this matters because:
- Banks are structurally biased toward salaried employees. Entrepreneurs face scrutiny, stricter lending criteria, and limited options.
- Every dollar sent to a credit card, line of credit, or bank loan is a dollar that stops working for you.
- IBC creates a private, flexible source of capital you control, for business, for personal needs, for debt cleanup, and for generational wealth.
Nelson Nash, who popularized the concept in his book Becoming Your Own Banker, framed it simply: you are already allocating 100% of your financial resources to something. The question is whether you’re doing it consciously, and whether those dollars are serving you or someone else.
“I Didn’t Know What to Call It, But I Knew Something Else Existed”
Tara’s story will resonate with a lot of entrepreneurially-minded people.
She had been a realtor for nearly a decade, a world where, as she describes it, “here’s your license, go figure it out.” Not a lot of financial education. A lot of pressure. Ups, downs, and debt accumulated along the way.
When she started looking for insurance options to protect her family (she and her husband have two young boys), she kept hearing snippets on social media that suggested insurance could do more than she’d been taught. That there was some extra dimension to it.
“I’m like, my money can do six different things. I’m not going to pay money here that can serve these other purposes.”
She wouldn’t commit to working with any advisor she met until she connected with Les Corbett, someone she already trusted. Once he explained IBC, the response was immediate: That’s what I was looking for. I just didn’t know what to call it.
The Real Reasons People Hesitate and What’s Actually Going On
One of the most valuable parts of this conversation is the honest breakdown of why so many people resist or dismiss IBC before they understand it.
1. The word “insurance” triggers a defensive response.
Richard Canfield describes it well: the word insurance carries emotional baggage. A bad claim experience, a sense of being sold something, a friend’s story about a denied policy and suddenly an entire industry gets filtered through that single lens. IBC lives in that industry, so it inherits the baggage even though it operates nothing like what most people picture.
2. People don’t see the problem with the current system.
Tara articulates this clearly: most people think the conventional banking system is fine, because it’s the only option they’ve ever known. They’re not looking for a solution to a problem they don’t know they have.
“They don’t think the bank system is a problem. But it’s not built to help us. It’s built to help them.”
3. The environment hasn’t changed yet.
As Nelson Nash wrote in Becoming Your Own Banker and as the hosts reference directly in this episode, “no one elevates himself or herself much above the environment in which they operate.” If the five people you talk to most don’t know what IBC is, and they respond to your curiosity with skepticism, you’re fighting your own ecosystem.
This is exactly why community matters: Ascendant Financial’s Wealth Builders Club meets every Saturday morning in an open forum for practitioners, clients, and the curious, all in the same room, sharing experiences.
What Tara Actually Used IBC For (The Honest Answer)
This is where the episode gets real.
Tara didn’t start using IBC to make investments or optimize capital deployment. She started using it to clean up.
“It was a lot of debt. A lot of bills. A lot of wrong decisions and not a lot of guidance… IBC helped us really clean up the debt and organize it so that we were paying ourselves back instead of the credit card.”
That’s the part people don’t often talk about: IBC isn’t just a wealth-building strategy for people who already have everything figured out. It’s a reorganization tool. It shifts who receives the interest payments, from the bank to you.
The surprise she didn’t expect? The freedom of it.
“I didn’t expect that much freedom and opportunity with it. But I also wanted to make sure I was learning enough so that I wasn’t shooting myself in the foot.”
Because here’s the thing: policy loans are unstructured. There’s no external repayment schedule forcing discipline. That makes the policy owner’s behaviour the most critical variable, which Jayson and Richard had literally just finished recording an episode about the day before this conversation.
IBC rewards the intentional. It requires consciousness.
The Mindset Shift That Actually Makes IBC Click
Tara is a mindset coach. She works with people who are stuck in beliefs they inherited, about money, about what’s possible, about what “people like them” are allowed to do.
Her observation about IBC? It’s not complicated. It’s just unfamiliar.
“If it feels unfamiliar, go learn to the point that you understand it enough, because if you’re not at the understanding level, you’re not making an educated decision. Dig in and learn enough so that you can consciously choose what you want to do. Not a default no because it’s uncomfortable.”
She also describes what it feels like to learn about generational wealth when nobody in your family has ever talked about it:
“‘Who the hell do I think I am thinking about generational wealth?’ Says who? Who’s making these rules?”
And that question, Says who? is maybe the most important one in this entire episode.
What Les Corbett Observes Across Hundreds of Conversations
As an IBC practitioner, Les sees a consistent pattern: people come in focused on the tool rather than the problem.
They’re talking about rates of return, GICs, investment trusts, noise. What they often haven’t examined is the silent leak in their financial system: the fact that every dollar they send to a bank, a lender, or a credit card is working harder for that institution than it is for them.
“It’s almost like walking past dollars to pick up dimes.”
Les’s most effective clients, like Tara, weren’t the ones who came in already knowing about IBC. They were the ones who came in knowing that something was off, even if they couldn’t name it.
Raising Kids Who Already Think This Way
One of the most unexpected and meaningful moments in this conversation is when Tara talks about the book Beaver Bankers written by Becca Wilhite, which Les gave her as a resource.
She read it with her seven-year-old son Leo. He loved it. He read it again on his own. Then he decided to write his own book.
“I don’t even have to push this on you or rewire your thoughts about this. You’ve already got an open mind for this.”
Richard shares a similar experience with his eight-year-old daughter, who brings up lessons from the book when they’re out hiking and spot actual beavers in Fish Creek Park.
The point isn’t just heartwarming. It’s strategic: the families who implement IBC now are raising children for whom this is simply the normal way of thinking about money. That changes the generational math entirely.
The Quote That Stayed with Us
There are a lot of quotable moments in this episode. But the one that keeps coming back:
“Nobody’s coming to save you. But nobody’s coming to stop you either. So what do you want to do with that?”
That’s the invitation. Not a sales pitch. Not a product brochure. Just a question about what you actually want and whether the financial structure around your life is built to get you there.
Listen, Watch, and Connect
Watch the full episode on the Wealth on Main Street YouTube channel.
Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts; search Wealth on Main Street.
Download the free 7 Steps guide at 7steps.ca to evaluate whether IBC is right for your family.
Get the free digital copy of Don’t Spread the Wealth, a proven framework for keeping wealth inside your family.
Want to work with Leslie Corbett or another IBC practitioner on the Ascendant Financial team? Contact us.