We believe in being transparent & educational from the start.
We only recommend the best of breed products and designs!
We help you understand your options and let you sell yourself!
We own the same products we recommend to you & we’ll prove it
We believe in complementing your other wealth building efforts… not replacing them.
John “Hutch” Hutchinson – ChFC®, CLU®, AEP®, EA (Inactive)
John, or “Hutch” as he’s often known as, is the founder of BankingTruths.com. He is not only a proponent of the strategy discussed throughout this site, but also a customer himself. Hutch specializes in taking a visual educational approach with clients, boiling down complex financial strategies to simple sketches and stories that they can easily understand. He is also a perpetual student in the continually evolving subject of wealth creation/preservation.
Although he has earned some of the most respected classifications in the financial industry, Hutch learned some of the hardest lessons first as a consumer. You see, Hutch watched his father’s life’s work as a successful entrepreneur come unraveled due to a premature death coupled with a lack of proper planning. Hutch used this as motivation to learn more about the mechanics of money as a consumer, and eventually joined the financial services industry before the second crash hit. Hutch was convinced he could build a more client-friendly model, and was determined to learn the business from the ground up.
After working for two prominent parent companies, he and co-founder Ben Vondrak left a major financial company’s advanced business-planning team in 2012 to create their own independent boutique practice, not to be “in bed” with any particular financial institution. In 2014, Hutch started studying digital marketing and began releasing content in 2015 with the advent of BankingTruths.com
Because of his own entrepreneurial nature and what happened with his dad, Hutch especially enjoys working with business owners and self-employed real estate investors. He fully understands that an entrepreneur’s best rate of return will almost always come from within their own businesses where they have more access, knowledge, and control than they do with volatile financial markets.
Hutch lives in Laguna Niguel, California with his wife of over 21 years, whom he met in elementary school. They have three daughters and enjoy going on travel adventures together as well as playing pickleball and being of service through local causes.
Ben was initially drawn to the financial industry from his college years when he first began to invest his own money. He first subscribed to the Wall Street Journal at age 18. Ben’s interest grew while taking coursework focusing on economics and the financial planning process. He took his first job in the financial services industry in 2006 right after graduating from Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego.
Ben and Hutch met in 2009 while they both worked at Guardian Life. In 2012, they realized there was an inherent conflict of interest, even when working for a solid financial company who had their own proprietary products. Ben eventually chose leave the safety of his employment to venture into the independent realm with partner John “Hutch” Hutchinson. Together, they started their own independent life insurance brokerage and boutique wealth management firm to pursue the strategies and/or products that best fit their clients’ financial needs.
Ben helps his clients create that same sense of confidence and freedom so they can focus on their business, family, and values knowing that their financial world is well cared for. Now in his early 40’s, Ben seeks to create lasting relationships by forging strategies that will safely grow and protect his clients’ wealth over the decades to come.
Today, Ben lives in coastal San Diego with his wife Megan and their 3 kids. They enjoy traveling together and an outdoor lifestyle where they like to bike, hike and golf as well as being involved with their local church.
Initially drawn to traditional investments, Bryan started his financial services career with Edward Jones. During that time, he realized, that although clients want to see their money grow, his more conservative clients actually preferred safer and more controlled growth than what financial markets could offer. This was especially true with his most successful clients, who were either entrepreneurs and real estate investors.
After years of stress testing a slew of financial products, Bryan became convinced that properly-structured life insurance products were the ideal mechanism to achieve this controlled growth. This led Bryan to eventually transition over to ING Financial, which would later become Voya Financial, since they offered both investment and insurance products to their clients.
During his time at Voya Financial, Bryan became more interested in showing his clients how to use life insurance as their own private bank. He eventually became an “Authorized Infinite Banking Concept® Practitioner” as he became more and more interested in using Whole Life insurance as a true, non-correlated asset class to financial markets.
Bryan met Hutch and Ben in 2019 and was intrigued about running a virtual practice, which proved to be an invaluable strategy right before the COVID pandemic. Hutch eventually sold his boutique wealth management firm, BalancedPlanFinancial.com, to Bryan so that Hutch could drop his series 7 & 65 and focus strictly on online financial education. As an independent, Bryan now enjoys researching financial/insurance products of all types and crafting custom privatized banking strategies for clients without interference from a parent company mandating him to steer clients toward their “approved product” list.
Like Hutch, Matt Sanford got his financial education as a consumer before becoming a professional. You see, Matt became obsessed with aggressively paying down his mortgage before learning there was a better way. Through that educational journey, Matt learned about the principals of Velocity Banking and then later Infinite Banking by obsessing over his own numbers.
After more than a decade as a specialized general contractor in the highly regulated city of San Francisco and working with engineers and architects on extremely complex projects. Almost every one of Matt’s clients was a repeat client or a word-of-mouth referral, which has taught him to be a trusted advisor to those he served. “Take care of your clients first and the rest will follow” is still Matt’s motto today.
When Matt’s daughter was about 1 year old, Matt got obsessed with personal finance. At that time, his business was booming, so he focused on reducing debt and taxes. Once he realized how much knowledge was out there and how many financial blind spots he had, he dove head-first into the world of personal finance. In 2018, Matt decided to change careers and here we are today…. Matt holds many investment and insurance licenses, as well as a Chartered Federal Employee Benefits Consultant (ChFEBC℠) for anyone who will have a pension in retirement.
Matt prides himself on taking a very detailed and holistic approach to finances, integrating investments, life insurance, real estate, and each client’s own unique logical and emotional factors into a cohesive plan. Working at a deeper level opens up more possibilities for each client’s unique situation. Matt’s goal is to be your financial advisor for the rest of your life, one financial decision at a time.
Matt Sanford is a true northern Californian. Raised in rural Petaluma 50 miles north of San Francisco, educated in mechanical engineering at UC Santa Barbara, and currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He enjoys spending time with his wife and two daughters. In his spare time, he enjoys learning Portuguese, 4-H volunteering, outdoors, woodworking, and participating in family activities.
Straight-Talk: A regular complement we hear from clients is how our straightforward approach and simple explanations help them quickly get to that aha-moment. We cut through the financial gibberish and give it to you straight. We excel at boiling down complex concepts and into simple stories and sketches, so you can quickly comprehend the strategy and arrive on a customized plan for your family bank.
Quality: The solvency of your own private bank is only as good as the quality of the underlying insurance product and company that backs that long-term financial promise. We pride ourselves on always leading with the best-of-breed products from the top-tier companies. These happen to be some of the biggest, the oldest, and most solvent mutual companies around. They also happen to be the stingiest companies when it comes to agent commissions, but that’s how they consistently deliver the strongest long-term policyholder value. We make it up the difference in volume from repeat business and referrals from happy clients.
Education: Hype and evangelistic salesmanship seems to be the norm amongst the both the “infinite banking” and “velocity banking” communities. We prefer to educate you about your options and their implications. We then let you sell yourself on what’s best for your family. Collectively our team has numerous prestigious designations in the various disciplines of planning. By educating you about banking in the context of the rest of your financial life, you can feel confident about moving forward, rather than just blindly hope you did the right thing based on a hyped-up sales pitch.
Coordination: Given our team’s balanced financial background, we understand that creating your own private family bank with life insurance is just one piece of your financial puzzle. Whereas other providers blatantly speak against traditional retirement planning, we believe that it doesn’t have to be an “either/or conversation.” In fact, we know that a properly-structured life insurance policy can often complement and enhance traditional retirement planning. We believe that optimizing the sum of the parts often produces the most powerful results for clients.
Independence: Having worked for different captive financial companies in the past, we believe that true independence is the only way to objectively serve our clients. That way, we can stay nimble as the industry evolves, we can always gravitate to the best-of-breed, and never have to be attached to any company in particular.
Our competition is often married to one or two product providers that butter their bread (not yours). By maintaining only broker contracts with the various insurance companies, we have no minimums to meet nor do we have allegiance to anyone other than our clients. We pride ourselves at staying cutting-edge with the best available products by shopping your unique fact-pattern to multiple providers to find the best possible fit for you.
Validation: We believe that every recommendation should come from testing and measuring multiple alternatives. We don’t expect you to simply just take our word for it. We are always happy to walk you through the internal due-diligence, shopping, and stress-testing that we have done on your behalf. That way you can fully understand and feel confident with our recommendations.
Service: Acquiring life insurance is traditionally a very complicated and time-consuming process. We pride ourselves on simplifying the steps for you and creating a turnkey experience, where we do as much of the heavy lifting for you as we can. We prep you for what’s to come, we alert you with updates throughout the process, and we will help you pivot and reroute when necessary to help you acquire the optimal policy for your bank.
Although you can always deal directly with the insurance company once your policy is in-force, we urge you to have us be your one-stop-shop when reviewing your policy values, adjusting your premium payments, or requesting loans. That way we can share our context and advice on the best course of action.
Our clients are intelligent people who take a proactive approach to their own financial success. They are financially conservative people who loathe violent swings to their wealth caused by outside factors they don’t fully understand.
Oftentimes, our clients are entrepreneurs or real estate investors who have found a way to consistently outperform financial markets through their own wealth-building endeavors. They therefore need to keep a large portion of their asset base in cash. Our clients believe that retaining control of their assets will reap greater rewards in activities they understand, rather than in markets they have no control over.
We help these types of clients create their own private family bank, where they can maintain liquidity, safety, and control while getting tax sheltering and controlled-growth without volatile price swings. Our clients often have complex situations that require the coordination of their newly formed banking policies to work in tandem with their other wealth-building efforts as well as other planning such as business succession and estate planning.
If exploring this strategy is not a major priority right now…
No problem, we’re not going anywhere. However, there’s a benefit to always starting a program sooner than later. Think about it. The earlier you start putting non-performing assets to work, the better your compound interest will look. Plus, insurance products are age-based, and no one is getting any younger.
However, if there’s a good chance you’ll be no-showing or rescheduling on us after booking a meeting, we’d prefer that you just wait until you have the time to seriously explore what’s possible with your own private bank. Once you’re ready, we’re big on service. We do all the shopping and modeling for you and make the whole process as turnkey as possible.
If you’re looking to endlessly shop amongst multiple providers…
We get how it’s totally normal to get multiple bids. However, we find that this activity usually causes more confusion than clarity and wastes a lot of everyone’s time (including your own).
We’re always happy to have a conversation to earn your business, but it’s not the best use of your time for you to do the interpreting of multiple apples to oranges illustrations from several agents. That’s what a trusted advisor does for you.
In case you missed it, the crux of our value proposition listed above is:
We are committed to using the leanest designs using the highest quality products from the oldest and most financially solvent insurance companies. We spend the time to educate you about how we arrived at the recommendations. We also discuss the implications of each choice and how that ties into your overall financial picture so you can make a balanced decision.
So save yourself the time and energy. Decide who you feel most comfortable with, and let us do the shopping, modeling, and compiling for you, so you can learn about the top companies for your situation.
If you’re looking for short-cuts or magic-bullets to make up for irresponsible financial behavior…
That’s just not what the banking strategy is about. It’s true that you leverage the miracle of compounding by paying simple interest on a decreasing balance while earning compound interest on an increasing balance. However, you can’t “spend your way” to financial independence. The strategy is not a short-cut or magic-bullet to replace solid long-term financial responsibility.
If you’re drowning in consumer debt (not including mortgage or business loans)…
You’re simply not ready for infinite banking strategy yet, and probably should be focusing on Velocity Banking. Although other “bottom-feeder” banking groups advocate setting up a banking policy concurrently with long-term debt elimination, we just couldn’t sleep at night making these kinds of recommendations.
If you can fully “refinance” all your bad-debt through your first year’s policy premium, there may be a case for starting a banking policy now. Otherwise, you really should throw everything you have at your consumer debt. The only insurance recommendation that would be appropriate would be possibly taking out a convertible term policy that you can easily expand into a banking policy someday once you can see the light at the end of your debt-tunnel.
If you’re looking to completely get off the financial grid…
The banking strategy is probably not for you. It’s true that you will have more privacy, confidentiality, growth, and other benefits by keeping the bulk of your reserves on deposit with an insurance company rather than a traditional bank. However, due to anti-money-laundering concerns, you can’t pay your premium with a bundle of cash or bitcoin.
You still need the conduit of a traditional bank to pay your premiums. You also will need a traditional bank account to accept a wire or cash a check from the insurance company when you choose to borrow against your life insurance policy.
We believe in utilizing traditional bank accounts for what they’re good for: utility, convenience, and at times loan optimization. Otherwise, we help you to replicate what big banks themselves are doing by parking their cash reserves inside investment-grade life insurance policies to maximize growth and other benefits.
Teach you how this infinite banking concept works with your unique situation while answering any lingering questions you have.
Together we customize & optimize your own private banking system with the most robust products, companies, and design techniques.
Reroute ongoing cash flows through your own bank for maximum access, control, and growth while sheltering them from future higher taxes.
Let’s face it, the financial industry is known for making things overly complicated for consumers. And you always have to wonder if the recommendations from any financial strategist are really in your best interest or theirs. This includes any money manager who doesn’t want any assets under management leaving their control.
It’s amazing to us how short-sighted insurance agents can be, often trying to squeeze extra commission from clients by either:
– Choosing lackluster insurance products from 2nd-rate companies
– Or not optimizing their designs even with quality insurance companies
– Or just selling oversized policies clients can’t handle w/o excessive leverage
It probably comes from a scarcity mindset, since they don’t know where their next client will be coming from.
Thankfully, we’ve been blessed with abundance for freely providing the best information on the internet, so we always recommend the best of breed products designed optimally. Also, all our agents are versed in more than just insurance when it comes to integration!
Check out some of our most timely & popular content:
Hutch reveals Penn’s brand new Whole Life product that got designed to be ideal for Infinite Banking. Each of the new product’s growth components and riders are analyzed such as dividends, base policy, paid-up additions, and term rider enhancements.
Infinite Banking is a cash flow management system using the cash value in a life insurance policy rather than traditional bank accounts. By borrowing against their policies cash value, users of the Infinite Banking keep their liquidity compounding inside a tax sheltered environment and end up at a higher place in line when they pay down the loans.
4-D Banking is the ultimate privatized banking and cash flow management system that combines the best aspects of both Velocity Banking and Infinite Banking. The 4-D Banking System is a multidimensional approach to wealth building. It aims to take full advantage of time, the 4th dimension, and its steepening effect on your compound interest curve.
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