Helping Canadians to Be Wealthy

Most financial advice in Canada starts from the same assumption, and it is rarely stated out loud. The assumption is that if a household wants a better result, the household needs a better rate.

Find the fund with the stronger record. Move the account to a lower fee. Ask whether the balanced portfolio should be growth instead. Every one of those conversations is about the same thing, which is the money you have set aside.

Here is the difficulty with that. For most Canadian households, the money set aside is the smaller part of the picture. The larger part is the money moving through, and almost nobody is examining what happens to it.

The mission, stated plainly

Canadian Wealth Creation Centre Inc. exists to help Canadians be wealthy.

That is the whole of it, and every part of the sentence is chosen. Not to help Canadians retire, which is one event in a long life. Not to help Canadians save, which is a habit rather than an outcome. Not to help Canadians invest, which is somebody else's licence and somebody else's work.

To be wealthy. And to get there by a route almost nobody is describing.

What we mean by the word

Wealthy, as this practice uses the word, means having capital you control and being able to reach it when a decision has to be made.

Notice what that definition leaves out. It names no number. The figure that makes one household comfortable leaves another awake at three in the morning, and a definition that depends on a number is really a definition of somebody else's life. It says nothing about income either, because income is what arrives, not what stays. Two households with identical incomes finish twenty years apart, and the gap between them is not explained by what they earned.

What the definition does contain is control and access. Those two words carry the argument. A household with capital it can reach is in a different position from a household with the same income and none, and the difference shows itself on exactly two kinds of day: the day something goes wrong, and the day something worth having becomes available. Both days come. Neither sends notice.

The question nobody asked you

Somewhere in the last thirty years you were asked what rate you were getting. Possibly many times.

You were almost certainly never asked this one: over your working life, how much interest will you pay to other people, and where does it go?

Sit with that for a moment, because it is a larger number than it looks. The mortgage is the obvious part, and the obvious part is not the whole of it. There is the vehicle, replaced five or six times across a career, financed nearly every time. There is the line of credit that gets used and repaid and used again. There are the balances that carry from one month to the next in the years when a family is expensive. There is the equipment or the fit-out or the buy-in, if you own the business.

Each of those was a separate decision, made in a separate year, and nobody adds them up. Add them up and you have a number that, for most households, exceeds every investment gain they will ever make.

And here is the part worth sitting with longer. That money does not go down. It goes somewhere. Somebody performed the financing function in your household, every single time, and was paid for it. It has simply never once been you.

Why this mission rather than another

Canadian households now carry roughly one dollar and seventy cents of credit market debt for every dollar of disposable income, a ratio that Statistics Canada has published for years and that has stayed near that level through both low rates and high ones.

Read that ratio carefully, because it is not a statement about overspending. It is a statement about structure. A country whose households are permanently financed by outside parties has a financing pattern, not a spending problem, and a pattern is a thing that can be changed deliberately.

Nobody is going to be talked out of a mortgage. That is not the proposal. The proposal is narrower and, in the long run, larger: that the financing function itself is worth examining, that most households have never examined it, and that a household which does examine it can begin, gradually, to perform more of it for itself.

What the approach actually is

The Infinite Banking Concept® is the name R. Nelson Nash gave to this way of thinking. It uses a specially designed participating whole life insurance contract as a place where a household holds capital, so that when money is needed for a purchase, the household has somewhere of its own to turn.

Two honest sentences belong immediately beside that one.

The insurer charges interest when the policyowner requests a policy loan against the contract. This is a contract with an insurer, administered by the insurer, and nobody becomes anything by owning one.

And the early years look poor. A participating contract puts its cost at the front, which means the first several years show less than a savings account would, and any household that needs the money back inside that window is looking at the wrong instrument. That is not a caveat added at the end. It is the single most common reason this does not suit somebody, and it is said early here for the same reason it is said early in a first conversation.

What the contract offers is not a rate. It is a place to hold capital that a household controls, over a period long enough for control to matter.

The discipline behind the word sovereignty

Infinite Financial Sovereignty® is this practice's name for applying that approach with discipline across a lifetime. It is a registered trademark of Jose Salloum, and the word in it was chosen carefully.

A sovereign is not somebody with no obligations. A sovereign is the party who decides.

A household with capital it controls decides when to buy and when to wait. It decides whether to repair the vehicle for another two years or replace it now. It decides whether a lender's terms are acceptable, and it can decline them without the decision costing anything. None of that requires permission from anyone, and that is the entire meaning of the word.

Sovereignty is a position rather than a product. It is reached by years of consistent funding, and it is lost by interruption. Nobody signs a form and arrives there.

What we will not do to get there

A mission is defined as much by its refusals, so here are ours.

We will not promise a return. Dividends on a participating contract are declared annually at the discretion of the insurer's board and are never promised. Guarantees in the contract are obligations of the issuing insurer and are not backed by any government. Anyone who tells you otherwise is describing a product that does not exist in Canada.

We will not tell you to fill your registered accounts first. This is the place where this practice parts company with most Canadian financial content, and the disagreement is deliberate rather than accidental. Where a household is funding an RRSP or a TFSA, the approach taught here is to fund it by borrowing against capital already held rather than by paying cash out of the household, so the same capital is doing two things at once instead of one. How that applies to your own return is a question for your accountant, who has your actual numbers and carries the licence for that answer.

We will not describe this as anything it is not. This practice is not a bank and carries on no banking business. A policy is a contract with an insurer. Deposit insurance does not apply to insurance products. Those three sentences appear on this site more often than any marketing sentence does, and that is on purpose.

We will not publish only our own side. Every serious criticism of this approach is set out on this site, at length, in the reader's language rather than in ours, and several of those criticisms are marked as correct. A reader who has met only the case in favour has not been educated.

We will not advise where we are not licensed. The advisor here is certified by the Autorité des marchés financiers in Quebec and licensed in Ontario and British Columbia. A household resident elsewhere cannot be advised from here, whatever either party would prefer, and that is said in the first five minutes rather than the fifth meeting.

Who this mission does not serve

It would be an odd mission statement that claimed to serve everybody, and this one does not.

It does not serve a household without durable surplus. This approach rewards years of steady funding and punishes interruption, and a household that cannot see its way to consistency is being offered a commitment rather than a benefit.

It does not serve a household that may need the money back within a few years. Said once already, and said again because it is the failure that costs people the most.

It does not serve the reader who is shopping on rate of return alone. That is a comparison this will usually lose, and it deserves to lose it, because the case here has never been that the contract outperforms a market. The case is about who controls the capital and what happens to the interest.

And it does not serve someone looking for a product to buy rather than a habit to keep. The habit is the substance. The contract is where the habit is kept.

Why a family practice

Canadian Wealth Creation Centre Inc. was incorporated in 2016 and works from Laval, Quebec. Jose Salloum has been licensed since 2001. Michael Salloum works in the practice alongside him.

There is a reason to say so on a page about a mission. A participating contract runs for decades. The funding gets reviewed, the dividend option gets revisited, a loan position gets managed, a beneficiary gets changed after a birth or a death. The advisor who designed it should still be the person answering the telephone in year fifteen, and in a family practice that is a reasonable expectation rather than a hope.

That is also why nothing here is arranged quickly. A relationship measured in decades does not begin with urgency.

How this practice is paid, and why that is on this page

Insurers pay a commission when a client purchases a policy. That is how this practice earns, and it makes it an interested party rather than a neutral one.

Putting that sentence on the mission page rather than in a footnote is deliberate. A reader who knows how a writer is paid can weigh what the writer says, and a reader who does not know cannot. The protection this site offers against its own interest is structural: the arguments against are published at the same length as the arguments for, every claim is checkable against a regulator or a statute or an insurer's own contract, and the licences named here appear in free public registers that anybody can search without asking us.

Read the material with that interest in view. That is the correct way to read anything published by a firm that stands to gain.

What being wealthy looks like in practice

It looks quieter than people expect.

It looks like a vehicle replaced without a conversation with a lender. It looks like a business owner buying equipment in a bad quarter because the capital was already there. It looks like a family paying for a wedding, or a roof, or a year of care for a parent, out of something they built rather than something they applied for.

It looks like the same income producing a different life, because the pattern underneath it changed.

That is the mission. Helping Canadians to be wealthy, one household at a time, by changing what happens to money that was passing through their hands anyway.

The first step, and what it costs

A conversation. Thirty minutes, at no cost, with nothing arranged at the end of it and no illustration prepared beforehand, because an illustration prepared before anybody has heard your circumstances is a sales document rather than an analysis.

We will ask what money is currently doing in your household. We will tell you plainly whether anything here is relevant to you. Often it is not, and you will be told so in that first half hour rather than in year four, which is when the expensive version of that answer arrives.

That is not much of an offer, measured against what most firms promise. It is the honest one, and a mission worth having ought to be able to survive being described honestly.