Meet Jake Tayler Jacobs, or Mr. Be The Bank. Jacobs is a financial strategist, coach, speaker, and author of two published books – 1) We Are Sick: Surviving Financial Cancer, and 2) Private Banking Blueprint: The Playbook to Becoming the Banker.
Jacobs’ involvements don’t end there; he’s also the president of ABS Brokers, an insurance marketing firm he started in 2015 to help families become debt-free while learning how to safeguard investments and build generational wealth. Furthermore, he’s co-founder of The ABS Institute, an online financial learning academy that has exploded so far this year with roughly 1,400 enrollments through July.
Jacobs loves teaching others how to make more of their financial situation. In what has become a full-fledged effort to bringing financial literacy to the public, Jacobs helps his students understand their spending habits at the psychological level and teaches how to mimic wealth-building strategies used by the best money generators in the world – banks.
You may be asking yourself, why would I want to build my own bank? According to Jacobs, the average amount of money an American makes in their lifetime is $1.5 million, of which some 90% is given back to the bank by way of debt and finance charges. That didn’t sit right with Jacobs. In looking for answers, he realized that he didn’t just want to stop his wasteful spending. He also wanted to make his money work better for him.
This led him to study just how banks create and retain so much wealth, which led to learning about insurance reserve investments and infinite banking. Jacobs eventually implemented some of these concepts to his finances with massive success, erasing debts brought on by foolish spending as a young college graduate. Now, some eight years after he first started work as a financial literacy teacher in college in 2012 and some six years after starting as a PE teacher at Lancaster Middle School in 2014, Jacobs’ lessons on private banking make up the bulk of his curriculum and he’s changing lives at the level he always aspired to.
As part of The ABS Academy and his Private Banking Blueprint, Jacobs teaches of the steps needed to free yourself from the current system and build your own bank. Furthermore, he was kind enough to summarize the four most important steps for doing so, which can be found below:
Step One – The Family Blueprint.
“Typically, what I always like to say is before anyone gets started with anything,” said Jacobs, “is you need to identify where exactly you all are trying to go, which is what I call Step 1, The Family Blueprint. You have to decide what you guys are going to do.”
Jacobs further discussed what you need to identify when, as he puts it, incorporating your family. The family needs vision and a plan, not just business-wise, but when it comes to family values, responsibilities, and goals as well.
“What are some of the first things you think about when building a business?” asks Jacobs. “What are going to be our colors? What’s going to be our name? What’s it going to be when people look at our company? What are we going to represent?”
“However, when it comes to our family blueprint, we don’t do the same thing. First… we ask, what are the pillars? What do you stand for?” said Jacobs. “What is the overall objective of the family? Because typically, when it comes to family, the reason why family units cannot move together is because everyone has a different objective. Everyone has a different goal and is so fragmented, and then you end up having to go borrow money.”
For Jacobs, defining goals together and agreeing upon a family blueprint is the most important step to getting started. By defining objectives and managing expectations when it comes to family goals, doing so as a cohesive unit is much easier.
Step Two – The Family Management System
“The second thing we have to understand,” said Jacobs, “is that we have to figure out our Family Management System. We’ve got to understand the importance of legacy management.”
What Jacobs is referring to by legacy management is not making bad purchasing decisions that impact you and your family’s future negatively. It’s essential to not spend beyond your means, and Jacobs suggests only buying things you can afford four times over. Furthermore, Jacobs advocated for making your money work better for you by mimicking those that do it best – the banks.
“Getting into debt when it comes to financing cars, or the mortgaging homes before you can actually afford it. It’s just because you don’t have a legacy management system, because we’re so short-sighted,” said Jacobs. “We don’t think about the next generation and what we could possibly put in for them. With that, it’s a known fact that the only industry that wins, whether we win or lose, is the banking system… So what we wanted to do was mimic the very industry that wins no matter what.”
As he does in his courses, Jacobs spoke of just how banks make so much money – by being involved in transactions on all sides of the consumer-producer relationship.
“The bank lends money to the consumer, and the consumer buys money from the producer, who borrows money from the banker,” said Jacobs. “There’s only one team that wins both sides – the bankers… And the bank is the only entity that wins when it comes to Wall Street. Why? Because the bank makes money per transaction, and the bank makes money per loan.”
“My family understood that we wanted to get off the banking system, and we wanted to adopt our own banking system where we did everything in-house. That meant that we had to pool our money together, resource our money together, and resource our talent together to identify who was going to be the leader of the family… You’ve got to decide who’s going to be doing what.”
Step Three – Find Out Where the Money Is Going
Jacobs’ third step for getting your money right and starting your own bank is figuring out where the money is going. Summarized, that means identifying current expenditures and being strict in your spending. In the day-to-day of modern life, costs are easy to rack up.
“We’ve gotta find the holes in the boat. What I mean by that is, if we had a boat on an ocean and the boat was getting water inside the boat, what happens?” asked Jacobs. “It’s going down… You’ve got to plug the holes so that you can stay afloat.”
With this metaphor, Jacobs was elaborated on how important it was not to waste your income. 76% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and in Jacobs’ opinion, that’s due mainly to the “little bitty expenses that we think are nothing” we accumulate monthly.
“Netflix, you’ve got the Amazons, you’ve got car note payments. You’ve got finance charges, you’ve got mortgage payments, credit card payments,” said Jacobs. “You’ve got all these little payments that are coming out of your boat – your income boat. That’s the reason why you cannot stay afloat long enough to be able to build your family legacy.”
“I went five years without ever watching TV. I went for years without Netflix. I went for years without making small purchases. I went for years without buying subscriptions. I went years without purchasing name-brand things. I went for years without buying a new car. I went for years without incurring any more debt, increasing my income because I understood that the legacy management system of my family required me to think about the future and not about today.”
Step Four – Learn How to Become the Banker
“I began to study where the banks put their money. I began to study the habits of the bank, and I began to realize that the banks get all of the enjoyment of the money, and they take none of the risks,” said Jacobs. “None of the risk when they lend people money. When it comes to assets or homes, they take ownership of the home.”
Jacobs went on to discuss how peoples’ misunderstandings when it comes to living on credit are sadly due to a lapse in basic financial education and information. Furthermore, Jacobs warned of a certain amount of disinformation that such financial education and information provide.
“The people running America as we know it are the banking industry, and there is no one teaching us to habits of the bank. Where does the bank put the money? Where’s the bank growing their assets?” asked Jacobs. “How is the bank able to put themselves in the position of authority in every single situation? These are the things that we have to study.”
At some point, though, even after the first three steps are taken care of, Jacobs reminded that you still have to address the core issue: why do Americans give the banks so much power? The answer seems to be a lack of understanding and discipline.
“Why are you wasting your money…? A large majority of Americans, we’re spending thirty to forty percent of our money that’s going to a banking system that wins every time,” said Jacobs. “And then, we’re trying to take 10% of our money, put it in the market, and say that’s going to beat what we’re paying the bank. That’s absolutely crazy. If you were to flip that and say, ‘Listen, I want to recapture the money that I’m giving to the bank, how can I get the banks out of my life?’ Well, first of all, you have to eliminate the dependency on banks.”
“The first thing that people think about when ‘I want to build a business,’ when ‘I want to buy a home,’ or when ‘I want to get a car’ is ‘let me see what I can get from’ the what? From the bank, then the bank becomes your daddy. The bank becomes your mask, and every time you wake up, you’re like, ‘Dang, I’ve got to make sure I pay my mortgage, I’ve got to make sure I pay my finances, and I’ve got to make sure I pay my credit cards.’ And if you don’t, the bank then dings your little credit score, which will not allow you to borrow from daddy anymore.”
To learn more about Jake or to get involved with the Private Banking Blueprint, make sure to check out his website. Also, check out his Instagram here.