Paperback: 256 pages Publisher: Vanguard Press; Reprint (March 23, 2010) Language: English ISBN-10: 1593155662 ISBN-13: 978-1593155667	Order from here:

The last two years have been devastating to people. People investing their money in 401K’s, Stocks, etc. lost much of their investment. This book presents an idea to combat situations like that. It’s called the Bank on Yourself plan. The general idea is if you want to buy a car for 30K, you borrow the money from yourself, then pay yourself back each month with interested just as you would with a financed vehicle. This can be applied to almost any purchase. You use your own money, pay yourself back with interest, increase your own account. The benefit is, for example, when your car is paid off, you have the car, and you have all the money you paid for it plus interest. The alternative, you’d have the car, but the money would be in a bank somewhere.

How is this achieved? Through Life Insurance. But not just any life insurance, but Whole Life Insurance specifically set up for the purposes described in this book. There are apparently only 200 advisers in the country that can help you set it up. Theoretically, it sounds to me like it could work. But I see some issues with the plan itself. Something I’d need to investigate further.

But, I’m not here to review the plan, I’m here to review the book. The book is divided into different sections. First you get a background in what the plan is. Then you get a narrative showing a couple going through their life after investing in the plan, and how it worked for them. Then you have testimonials, and information on how it can be applied to different areas.

How was the book. It packed a lot of information regarding the plan into it’s pages. There wasn’t information though that didn’t seem to be repeated on their website, though probably more detailed here. The narrative involving Paul and Katie I felt was very much like an infomercial. That was probably my greatest issue with the book itself, a lot of it came across as a written seminar/infomercial in investing in this type of product. The author did very good at describing the product and how it all worked, but I found myself still having questions.

There were a lot of referrals back to their website, as well as forms to send in for a free analysis. If you want an alternative to high risk investments, this seems like this may be one of those alternatives. I can recommend the book, if you want to learn about this process and examine it for yourself. It did make me more curious to investigate their process further and possibly see if it works, and that’s probably the point of the book. If you want to pick it up though for a lot of concrete answers, I’m not sure you’d find them here. You almost have to get involved in the process to get those answers.

You can discuss it here or join my facebook page and discuss it there.. I’d like to know, have you tried this? How did it work for you? Drawbacks? Benefits? Discuss it below.

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