Helping Canadians to Be Wealthy and Financially Sovereign

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.

This page sets out what this practice is for. It is longer than a mission statement usually is, because a mission compressed into one line is a slogan, and a household deciding whether to spend the next twenty years on something is owed the reasoning rather than the slogan.

The mission, stated plainly

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

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 then, because wealth on its own turns out not to be enough, to be sovereign with it.

For most of the life of this practice the mission was stated with the first of those two words alone, and the second was left implied. Leaving it implied was a mistake, because the second word is where the work actually happens. Plenty of households reach a respectable net worth and still spend their lives asking permission. The number on the statement went up and the position never changed.

So the mission now names both, and the rest of this page is an account of what the second word means, how the two are reached, in what order, and what this practice refuses to do along the way.

Wealthy, and what the word carries here

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.

There is a reason the definition was written that way rather than around a target figure. A target is somebody else's number, usually produced by a calculator that assumed a rate, and the household that reaches it often finds the thing it wanted was never the total. What it wanted was to stop having to ask. That want has no dollar figure attached to it, and a definition that cannot name it is measuring the wrong thing.

Which is the honest reason the second word had to be added. Control and access are already halfway to sovereignty. Naming only the wealth left the more important half of the sentence unsaid.

Sovereign, and why the word was added

Financial sovereignty means that the decisions about your own capital are made by you, in your own time, on terms you find acceptable, without needing the agreement of a party whose interests are not yours.

That is a plain description of a position, and it is worth separating from what it is often assumed to mean. It does not mean having no obligations. A sovereign nation has treaties, debts, neighbours and constraints. What makes it sovereign is not the absence of those things, it is that when a decision is on the table, the sovereign is the party who decides it.

Households are the same. A household is not sovereign because it owes nothing. It is sovereign because when the vehicle fails, or the roof goes, or a parent needs care, or a competitor's equipment comes up for sale at the bottom of a bad quarter, the household can act out of something it built rather than something it must apply for. The application is where sovereignty is lost, and it is lost quietly, one reasonable approval at a time.

Most Canadian households have never held that position and have no picture of it, which is why the word sounds abstract the first time it is used. It is not abstract at all. It shows up as a series of small, concrete, unremarkable moments: a decision made in an afternoon rather than in two weeks, a rate declined without consequence, a repair chosen over a replacement because the choice was genuinely open.

And it is compatible with wealth in the ordinary sense without being the same thing. A household with substantial registered savings and no accessible capital is wealthy on paper and dependent in practice, because reaching the money means selling something at whatever price the market offers that week, or triggering tax it did not choose to trigger, or applying to a lender who will price the application according to how the year has gone. Wealth without sovereignty is a balance sheet that looks good and behaves badly.

Infinite Financial Sovereignty® is this practice's name for the discipline that builds the second word on the first. It is a registered trademark of Jose Salloum, held personally, CIPO registration TMA1420283, and it names an approach rather than a result. Nothing about it is a promise, and the rest of this page is careful to keep the difference visible.

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 many households, is larger than expected, and it can rival what their savings earn over the same years. Only your own figures can say which.

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.

The second question follows from the first and is rarely asked either. Who decided the terms on which that money left? Not the household. The rate, the amortisation, the penalty for early repayment, the security taken, the conditions under which the arrangement could be reviewed: every one of those was written by the other party. A household that has never asked either question is not badly behaved. It has simply never been shown that there is a question there.

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.

That is the whole reason this practice exists rather than another kind. There is no shortage of people in Canada willing to discuss a household's investments. There are very few willing to spend a first conversation on its financing, and fewer still willing to say out loud that the financing is the larger number.

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.

Neither Jose Salloum nor Canadian Wealth Creation Centre Inc. is affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Infinite Banking Concepts, LLC or the Nelson Nash Institute. The concept is named here because it is the honest name for the thinking, and the thinking is older than any practice that teaches it.

The strategy, in the order it is actually done

A concept explains why. A strategy is the order in which things are done, and the order matters more than most of the material on this subject admits. Here is the order this practice teaches, with the uncomfortable parts left in.

First, the financing function gets examined before anything is purchased. That means listing every place money currently leaves the household at interest, and what each one costs across the years it actually runs rather than per month. Most households have never seen that list on one page. Several decide, having seen it, that their first work is to deal with an expensive balance rather than to fund anything new, and that is a correct decision that costs this practice a sale.

Second, capital gets built in a place the household controls, and it gets built out of durable surplus. Durable is the load-bearing word. Surplus that exists because a good year happened is not durable, and a commitment funded out of it is a commitment that will be interrupted. This is where the honest no gets said most often.

Third, the funding is kept consistent, for years, through the part where nothing appears to be happening. The approach rewards consistency and punishes interruption, and the punishment is real: a contract funded for four years and abandoned is usually worse than never having started. Anybody who describes this as flexible has not said that part.

Fourth, when a purchase arrives that the household was going to finance anyway, the household considers requesting a policy loan from the insurer against the contract instead of applying elsewhere. The insurer charges interest on that loan. The loan reduces what would be paid at death while it is outstanding. Both of those facts belong in the same sentence as the idea, every time, and a presentation that leaves them for the appendix is a presentation to walk away from.

Fifth, repayment happens on a schedule the household sets. This is the point at which the position changes, and it is smaller and less dramatic than it sounds. Nothing is forgiven and nothing is free. What changes is who wrote the schedule, and over a working life that difference accumulates.

Sixth, the arrangement gets reviewed every year: the funding level, the dividend option, the loan position, the beneficiary designation, and whether anything in the household's circumstances has made the original design wrong. A contract that runs for forty years without a review is not a strategy, it is a filing cabinet.

None of those six steps is a product, and none of them can be completed in a meeting. That is the honest shape of it. A household that wants the position described on this page is agreeing to a decade of unremarkable consistency, and the reward arrives late, quietly, and mostly as the absence of having to ask.

What financial sovereignty is not

A word this useful attracts claims it cannot support, so here is the boundary, stated before anybody else states it for us.

It is not independence from risk. The contract carries the insurer's obligations, the insurer carries its own, and dividends are not promised. A household that holds capital still lives in the same economy as everybody else.

It is not a tax strategy, and nothing on this page is tax advice. The tax treatment of a policy, a loan, a withdrawal or a death benefit depends on the contract, on the owner, and on facts only an accountant with your numbers can see. This practice is not registered to give that advice and does not give it.

It is not freedom from obligations, and it is not a way of avoiding lenders on principle. A mortgage remains the cheapest large credit most households will ever be offered. Sovereignty is about who decides, not about refusing everything on offer.

And it is not a result this practice can promise you. It is a position that some households reach, through years of their own discipline, and that others do not reach because circumstances changed or the surplus was never durable. Anybody who describes it as an outcome that follows from signing something has described something other than what is taught here.

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 rank a registered account against a contract for you. This practice is licensed to place insurance of persons and is not registered to advise on a TFSA or an RRSP, so it will not tell you to fill them before a contract and it will not tell you to fund a contract before them. Comparing a registered account with an insurance contract is an investment question, and investment advice requires a registration this practice does not hold. Your accountant 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.

We will not sell the word sovereignty as a feeling. It describes a position a household either holds or does not hold, and whether it holds it can be checked: can this household act on a decision this month without asking a party outside it. That question has a yes or no answer, and a page that used the word without being willing to be tested against it would be using it as decoration.

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.

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.

And it does not serve a household whose first problem is that too little is coming in. That is a real problem and a serious one, and it is not this one. Somebody whose income does not yet cover the life they are living needs help this practice is not the right place to get, and saying so early is worth more than a polite meeting.

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.

It is also why the word sovereignty can be used honestly here. A household cannot hold a position it has to renegotiate with a new firm every few years, and continuity is a precondition of the thing this page describes rather than a pleasant extra.

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 a party with a commercial interest in the outcome.

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.

There is a sharper version of the same point. A practice that talks about sovereignty while hiding its own compensation has asked the reader to become independent of everybody except the person writing the page. The disclosure is not modesty. It is the minimum condition under which the rest of this page can be read at all.

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 and sovereign 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 a rate being offered and declined, with no consequence either way, because the household had somewhere else to turn and knew what it cost.

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 and financially sovereign, 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.

If it does turn out to be relevant, what you are agreeing to is years of ordinary consistency, reviewed annually, in exchange for a position that arrives slowly and is difficult to lose once held. That is the whole proposal. Nothing about it is dramatic, and that is the most reliable thing about it.