Would you like to take back control of your financial future, without gambling your hard-earned money in stocks, real estate, or other risky investments?

According to Pamela Yellen, author of Bank On Yourself: The Life-Changing Secret to Growing and Protecting Your Financial Future (Vanguard Press, March 24 2009), none of the more than 100,000 Americans who use a Bank On Yourself plan lost a single penny in it as the markets crashed- in fact, their plans continue to grow safely and predictably.

What is Bank On Yourself?

It's a guaranteed way to grow your savings, without the nail-biting ups and downs of stocks and real estate, based on a specially designed type of life insurance policy – one that you don't have to die to 'win”.

The Bank on Yourself plan lets you recapture every penny you pay – including finance charges – for things like cars, vacations or even a college education, all while growing a nest-egg you can predict and count on.

You can take a predictable income at retirement with potentially little or no tax consequences, under current tax law. And you can do it when and how you wish – without those restrictive 401(k) withdrawal rules.

What type of life insurance policy do you use for Bank On Yourself?

There are two basic kinds of life insurance-the kind you rent, and the kind you own. It's a lot like the difference between renting and owning a home.

The most common type is called term insurance – you're renting it and you have nothing to show for the money you spent-unless you die during the policy term, which is usually ten to twenty years.

Ninety-nine percent of all term policies never pay a claim, according to a Penn State University study. Most experts agree that term insurance is designed to terminate before you do.

The second type is called a 'cash value' policy. Like owning a home, the payments you make build equity for you.

The Bank On Yourself plan uses a specific type of cash value policy called 'whole life” that has some bells and whistles that put the growth of your money in the policy on legal steroids – without the risk or volatility of stocks and real estate. Not even one in 1,000 financial advisors and 'gurus' – including Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey – talk about this kind of policy, but it'll beat the pants off any other saving or investing method I've come across.

What do you mean when you talk about Wall Street's 'dirty little secret'?

My husband and I have been investing in stocks and mutual funds since 1987, and we’ve never even come close to getting decent long-term returns-even after hiring three of the country's top financial planners. They all charged hefty fees and all lost our money during the longest-running bull market in history. A blindfolded monkey throwing darts could have done that!

I wondered if it was just us. I decided to dig deeper and discovered that almost nobody is getting those lofty returns the financial pundits promise! In fact, the typical mutual fund investor has actually losing one percent a year over the last 20 years after adjusting for inflation, according to the research group, Dalbar, Inc. People have been digging themselves deeper into a financial hole every year, with no way of knowing how long it will take to crawl out.

Wall Street will never tell you it's the norm, not the exception, for the Dow to go nowhere for painfully long periods of time-up to 25 years! How is the average person supposed to gain financial security with that kind of performance? And hiring an 'expert' isn't the answer, as my husband and I discovered the hard way. Eighty percent of all investment advisors and mutual funds ended up doing worse than the overall market, many with significantly more risk.

Blindly following the advice of Wall Street and the financial 'gurus' who insist the only way to build a sizable nest-egg is to risk your money in the stock market, is what got us where we are. How many people are happy with the state of their finances? What more proof do we need that conventional financial and retirement planning strategies don't work?

How did you learn about Bank On Yourself?

I've been a business consultant to financial advisors for two decades. My clients were always telling me about supposedly “safe and effective” ways to grow wealth. I investigated over 450 of them, only to discover most were worthless. One of my clients finally brought the Bank on Yourself plan to my attention. I researched it for months before I finally put in my own money and discovered it beat every other financial product or strategy hands down.

So how does a Bank On Yourself policy enable you to grow wealth safely and predictably?

With the dividend-paying whole life policy used for the Bank on Yourself plan, you receive a guaranteed increase every year. Neither your principal nor your gains are lost when the stock or real estate markets tumble.

Neither your principal nor your gains are lost when the stock or real estate markets tumble. And the growth is not only guaranteed, it's exponential, meaning it gets better every single year, simply because you stick with it.

Instead of dreading opening your plan statements, you look forward to getting them, because they always have good news and no ugly surprises!

You may also receive a dividend. While dividends are not guaranteed, they've been paid out every single year for over 100 years by the companies preferred for Bank On Yourself plans – including during the Great Depression.

The companies preferred for Bank On Yourself plans are among the ten financially strongest life insurance groups in the world. They are not owned by stockholders and are able to focus on the long-term interests of policy owners, rather than the short-term demands of Wall Street. Policy owners are protected by a five-layer safety net.

You mentioned that you could use a Bank on Yourself policy to get back what you pay for cars and other major purchases. How is that possible?

The average family will spend close to half a million dollars over 30 years for cars and vacations. By simply running those purchases through a Bank On Yourself policy, you could have all those dollars back in your own pocket, without the risk of traditional investments.

The conventional way of buying things is to finance, lease, or pay cash. For example, if you finance a car, all you have to show for it once it’s paid off is your car, worth a certain trade-in value. If you lease the car, you turn it back in when the lease is up and have nothing. If you pay cash, you don’t have payments, but the car has lost value once you drive it off the lot, and your savings account is empty.

All of these scenarios are a losing proposition, because you either pay interest when you finance things, or you lose interest you would have had if you kept the money invested. However, if you save your money in a Bank On Yourself plan, you can borrow it to pay cash for your car – or anything else – and the money in your plan will continue growing as though you never touched a dime of it.

That's amazing, but you know what they say – if something sounds too good to be true, it often is.

I didn’t believe it either until I tried it for myself. Here's how it works: When you take a loan from your Bank on Yourself policy, you're borrowing against the cash value of your policy and using the death benefit as collateral for the loan. If you died with a loan outstanding, they'd simply deduct it from your death benefit.

But dividends are calculated based on your policy’s death benefit, not the cash value, and the companies we use for the Bank on Yourself plan pay the same dividend whether or not you have a loan out against your policy. This feature allows you to use your money in the policy and still have it working for you. If you want to get the maximum growth from a Bank on Yourself plan, you must “pay back” the amount borrowed from your policy. But the money you're paying back to your policy ultimately ends up in your pocket, instead of someone else's pocket.

What kind of person will benefit most from Bank On Yourself?

People of all ages, incomes, and backgrounds use it to reach a wide variety of short-term and long-term personal and financial goals and dreams. These include building a rock-solid retirement plan, saving for college without going broke, self-financing business equipment, and reducing debt while increasing your savings. You can't put a Bank on Yourself plan under your pillow and wake up rich tomorrow-it's not a magic pill. But if you have patience and discipline, it pays a lifetime of benefits.

Can you tell us about your $100,000 Challenge?

It’s very simple. I will pay $100,000 to the first person who uses a different strategy that can beat the Bank On Yourself plan.

There's a ton of misinformation and ignorance about the plan. Not even one in 1,000 financial advisors or experts fully understands it, and many have never even heard of the type of policy used for the Bank on Yourself plan.

But I know from personal experience how powerful the plan is. If my husband and I had to rely on our mutual funds and real estate, we'd be in the same boat as most Americans. And I have thousands of letters from grateful folks who've used the Bank on Yourself plan and survived the financial crisis with their nest eggs intact and still growing.

As a business consultant to financial advisors for two decades, Pamela Yellen investigated hundreds of savings and investment plans before learning about Bank On Yourself. She ultimately became convinced Americans have been brainwashed into believing they must accept risk, volatility, and unpredictability in order to grow a sizable nest egg. She has assisted in training 200 Bank On Yourself Certified Advisors to help their clients implement this strategy properly. For more information, visit www.BankOnYourself.com

The book is available at Barnes and Noble, Borders , Amazon.com and at BankOnYourself.com.

For more information contact: Karen Ammond – kbcmedia@att.net