Ep 68: Is there a Massive opportunity in the Life Insurance market? Featuring Tony Steuer

Episode 68 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (37:03)

Episode 68 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or Acast.

Episode Summary

Tony Steuer joins Adam Holt and Derek Notman to argue that the profession’s move from product-led selling to holistic advice overshot, and that life insurance is now the thing holistic planners most reliably fail to discuss. Holt supplies the most striking evidence, drawn from Asset-Map’s own data across roughly a million people entered by advisors who are largely CFP professionals: more than 400,000 of those households could not absorb the loss of their income. Steuer’s technical contribution concerns in-force illustrations, which project a policy’s values forward from current values, as against the sales illustration produced at the point of purchase. His observation is that many planners do not know the distinction exists, and that obtaining an in-force illustration from a carrier can take repeated attempts. The remedy both land on is a genuine annual policy review.

What this episode covers

• How the shift to holistic advice ended up excluding protection planning
• Asset-Map data on how many advised households could not absorb a loss of income
• In-force illustrations versus sales illustrations, and why the difference matters
• Why getting accurate policy information out of a carrier is harder than it should be
• Annual policy reviews as the mechanism that catches all of it

Full Transcript

Machine-generated transcript of this episode.

Welcome to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast. My name is Adam Holtz. And this is Derek Notman. We are your hosts, both veteran advisors and FinTech CEOs who challenge the status quo, question everything and have fun doing it. Hear honest commentary on the challenges facing advisors today. And be part of a community where we can all rethink the profession. Now on to our episode. Adam, is life insurance a ripe opportunity for advisors? Ripe opportunity. You mean like fruit is ripe? Sure. I mean, I prefer fruit that is ripe. Yes. Okay. I don’t want to eat it. Has life insurance gone through this thing where it fell off the vine, rotted, and then, you know, went to the ground, the seeds and then re-grew.

And now is it, is it ripe again? Is it, have we kind of come full circle? Wow. That’s a really interesting analogy. Yeah. Especially because that was a very like death analogy and you’re talking about life insurance. Well, I guess it’s reborn, perhaps, perhaps reborn opportunity. That’s an interesting question. So I got to ask, why do you ask that question, Derek? Well, you and I both started as insurance salesmen, right? Oh, yeah. Say it like that. It sounds like it’s horrible, but okay. We were selling life insurance door to door. Okay. No, I was never selling door to door. What are you talking about? I was afraid to go to the door.

I was like, how did I get into life insurance? But yes, I know what you mean. You know what I mean. And we’ve seen a massive shift. We’ve talked about it many times. We talk about it at conferences that we’ve had this massive shift away from product led sales to holistic advice, leading with advice and so forth. And I have this feeling like we’ve almost had the pendulum go too far the other way. And are we really being holistic as in, are we actually talking about life insurance? Are we having those discussions with our clients? And if we aren’t, maybe there’s a massive opportunity. I have been saying that there is a massive opportunity for five years.

I don’t know if I’ve anybody heard me, but I hope that we’ve been ahead of the game because what is clear, is that this great wealth transfer topic is popping up everywhere. What does that mean? It means that the baby boomers are moving their money to the next gen. Well, guess what? A good amount of that money is going to be in the form of it’s going to be in life insurance, death benefits, right? Nobody’s talking about that. Like think about the amount of death benefit the boomer population has where they bought whole life. Cause they were, you know what? Everyone talks about what, how many trillions are going to pass, but how is that trillions made up?

What’s the pie chart there? Is that just retirement and investment assets? It’s not life insurance. So how much a life insurance is going to, you know, a lot, a lot, and it’s a great, it’s a great tool to do it. But if you don’t help your clients with it and they leave an IRA that’s seven figures, now the next generation is pissed. Oops. Whoa. Yeah. No, that’s true. I’m thinking about this now out loud, right? Here it comes. It’s coming in a podcast form is that the life insurance benefit that our parents have, or that let’s say baby boomer generation has, will be a part of the estates of our current X gen clients.

I did some research and what I find really interesting is that yes, there’s talk of this wealth transfer and all this money that’s going to flow. 3 trillion in assets to the next generation over 20 years. And they break it down to real estate and investments and private businesses and so forth. You know what does not included in that figure life insurance death benefits. And so I did a little bit more research in 2022. For example, just in the U S the total of life and annuity benefits was a hair under $800 billion in one year. So you go over 10, 20 years, you’re dealing with trillions of dollars that we kind of forgot about as part of this asset transfer.

And where’s that money going to go if you’re not paying attention to it? Nobody even knows where it’s going to go, right? Because nobody’s even asking the question about your life insurance or your parents life insurance. And it’s a serious asset and it’s liquid. It doesn’t even require reallocation. So for those of you who are asset gatherers, we’re basically saying large checks are going to come into the household or not, right? Because it’s been mismanaged. I’ve seen plenty of policies just implode because nobody checked whether they were going to survive. Like there’s not enough cash value and not paying enough premium. Nobody checked this, let alone the beneficiaries are wrong.

So you’re totally right there. This is a huge part of the generational wealth transfer. Nobody’s talking about. And it’s starting to create a blue ocean. So if we really want to deal with generational wealth transfer, we need to pay attention to the fact that this is a financial instrument. Nobody understands anymore. The agent that sold it is no longer in the business or could care less or there’s no relationship. And now we have clients out there and we have prospects that have no clue whether the current products they pay for actually serves them. And so it begged the question when we were asking this question of ourselves, who could we interview to talk about life insurance?

And we couldn’t pick someone who was a commission agent from day old who had a bias. We wanted to pick someone who is completely agnostic. And so we found Tony Stoyer, who is a CLU and a licensed actuary and the financial literacy expert, speaks on the news all the time, was part of the California Department of Insurance curriculum, is constantly being interviewed. And we said, we got to get his perspective on life insurance in the current market. And if you do get a chance, I know he’s written a book, Questions and Answers on Life Insurance. It’s totally available out there in the marketplace. Really technical, but very readable.

It totally has. Well, let’s hear what Tony has to say today and take it from here. Tony, thank you so much for joining us on The Rethink Tank. We’re really curious. What’s your unique perspective of the financial advice market right now? Well, I think we’re seeing some trends in the financial advice market that are really good. We’re starting to recognize that there’s more to it than just the numbers, that there’s a real sense of people and their culture and their background and what they actually want to achieve. So we’re moving away from being strictly product-oriented to being goal-oriented. And I think that’s, to me, what’s really exciting about the future financial advice.

Now, you’ve been focusing on the life insurance marketplace for a good number of years now. How have you seen that evolve in the advisory market? Because so many of us have moved to asset management as a primary business. And I would say almost the life insurance market has gotten, I would say not ignored, but put in kind of second position by far. What are you seeing there in the life insurance marketplace? Well, it’s exactly as you say, Adam, is I think there’s been a trend away from, one, there being professional life insurance advisors that a lot of family life insurance agents are financial planners. So I think that’s had an impact.

But I think the other thing that’s had an impact is the products themselves, is that risk protection is often overlooked. But what I’ve seen is that people oftentimes think like a lot of these products are super complex and I don’t really understand them. I don’t want to talk about them. I’ve had a bad experience with the life insurance industry. So they get overlooked or put to the side. And I think that’s a big part of what’s going on in the market today. Would you say that that’s also a missing opportunity because they’re not addressing that? Does that lead to anything even bigger or more systemic with where the industry is headed because they’re not doing that?

Is there a larger upcoming challenge because of that? Well, I think it’s turning off a lot of people to the insurance industry as a whole. If you’re on TikTok, there’s like many videos about be your own banker with life insurance. So people have this whole perspective about life insurance rather than thinking about insurance. Insurance is insurance. The first page of an insurance policy says, this is an insurance contract. It doesn’t say that’s an investment anywhere. And then what happens in my experience working with wealth management advisors over the years, Department of Insurance, litigation attorneys, is that people say, well, you know, I have these insurance policies, but I had no idea what they work.

The agent told me they would do this. They don’t do that. I’m paying thousands, tens of thousands. I’ve seen people paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for these insurance policies and they have no idea what they are. And the policies aren’t serving anyone except the insurance agent who made a hefty commission. But the real secret that nobody wants to talk about is insurance policies are being bought by people who don’t know what they’re buying. They’re being sold by people who don’t know what they’re selling. They’re being sold by insurance companies who have no idea what they’re selling and the regulators don’t understand or have the capacity to regulate these products.

You know, insurance regulators are really under-resourced as compared to securities regulators, for example. Wow. I didn’t realize it was that dire is the word to say, but that’s super interesting that it’s not just the consumer that is in the dark. Sounds like the whole chain start to finish is there’s issues there. There are, and it’s, it’s really frustrating as I spent about 30 years as a fee-based advisor and working with a fee-based financial planner, it’s a, well, you know, did the agent bring this up? Well, now the agent can bring this up. Well, can your request would come in force illustration, which is a read projection of values going to the future based on current values, rather than the sales illustration, which is just a bunch of made up numbers at the point of sale.

And, you know, the financial planner will say, well, the insurance agent doesn’t even know what an enforced illustration is. And then I’ll say, well, can you get your client to request one from the company? And the company will send one and it’ll take like 10 tries to get one from the company that actually has anything to do with what the client is requesting. And you see this across the whole distribution chain that there’s these kinds of issues. It’s such an important product in the overall ecosystem of financial advice, right? No different offense and defense have to play together. We, we have been seeing a lot of, we’ll call it consternation about insurance policies and the turnover in the agent population, not actually servicing the policies that were sold.

So nobody remembers, well, what, why did we buy this? Why, why do we have this? And I can, I can relate to that a lot growing up in the insurance industry myself. I started out as an insurance agent and I got 26 years ago with the attempt of getting into the financial planning industry and became a big fan of the product and so forth, but did see what you’re talking about. So we’re curious, given that knowledge of the obscurity of this black box product, what action steps would you recommend for all of us to start taking now or to start rethinking? Well, I think one is that financial planners need to think about, hey, this is something that my client really needs, that this is of value to my client.

And even if I’ve personally had a negative experience with life insurance, either with myself or that I’ve seen my clients have a negative experience, that they need to realize that, well, one, it’s one of the pillars of the CFP designation. So it’s something you’re pretty much supposed to do, but that you need to realize that this is something that can really add value to your clients. And it is also something that nobody else is talking about. And that life insurance is a very valuable thing for your clients. It’s going to provide liquidity to their family when it’s needed the most. So they, you know, since you can start to take the process of, you know, what insurance policies do you have at least to make a plan of reviewing those policies to see if further action steps need to be taken?

You know, this is making me think, Tony, this actually leads to our final question about what you think might the industry might want to hear and debate. There’s this talk about fee only versus AUM versus a commission based thing. And there’s, I know it’s hotly debated and I’m hearing you say that life insurance is core and it’s taught in CFP. And I agree, it is a core component. So who’s right and who’s wrong and who’s responsible. I’m just wondering if you can wave a magic wand, how would we fix this? Or what do people need to rethink maybe where their current camp is at? Well, I think what we need to rethink is what’s really the core of what we’re trying to do.

And this gets back to the very first thing I said is that we need to get away from thinking about the numbers and the product to what are the goals. The goal of life insurance is to make sure that there’s risk protection in the event of something that though what’s happened is these products have become so incredibly complex. If anybody’s ever taken a look at an equity index, universal life policy, for example, where you have the mortality costs, you have participation rates, you have market index rates, you have apps on the policy, you have all this stuff. But really when the client comes in, somebody purchases an insurance policy where they think what they’re purchasing is something to take care of their loved ones when they die.

But instead what they’re sold is this incredibly complex vehicle that’s got all these possible permutations and things that can happen that it’s really unwieldy to manage. And I think as an industry, not only for insurance, but for all of our products, we need to think about what is the client really trying to accomplish and what’s the simplest way and the lowest cost way for our clients to accomplish that. I always think about how maybe the product manufacturers need to be a little bit closer to the field. I get some consumer feedback instead of just commission feedback or how easy or hard is this to sell.

I get it. Those are factors, but the ultimate purchaser of the product, if they don’t understand it. I think you see features creep you see it with technology. Look at the iPhone and all the things that our iPhone can do. I’d probably use maybe 1% if I’m lucky of the features on my iPhone, but we see the same thing with financial products. Or somebody will say, well, what if you graded the insurance policy could do this? And then so they add that feature and all of a sudden you have this Frankenstein financial product that really has gotten away from what it’s supposed to do at its core.

And I think that’s the key is that we need to keep our eye on the ball and what we’re really trying to accomplish. And I think that’s challenging. It’s easy for me to say, but it’s challenging to do in practice. This is great. So what should a financial planner who may not come from the insurance world actually do to start an annual? Is there a set process or some resource you can guide us to help them follow a framework or recipe? Well, of course, if it’s okay, I’d recommend my book, Questions and Answers on Life Insurance. I have given some presentations, this podcast is a good example, but I’ve given some more detailed presentations that I’d be glad to share links to.

But the basic things you can do is to start the review process, check that the party is the contractor accurate, is the beneficiary the right person? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve reviewed an insurance policy and it’s an ex-spouse who’s the beneficiary. And you know how many are really happy with that situation? Well, that’s true. Okay. So I take that back then there is somebody who would be happy with that. Most people are happy. Make sure that the coverage is still necessary. I’ve had advisors, sometimes their clients will have five or 10 insurance policies they’ve collected over the years. Are those insurance policies the clients still paying?

You know, clients paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for coverage they don’t need. And then if they do have a permanent life insurance policy, have a prayer to review it. As I mentioned, you can request what’s called an enforced illustration from the insurance company. If you want to just ping me, I can send you a boilerplate letter that you can send off to the insurance company. But as for that, just see, you know, how the policy is going to perform. Is it going to perform as expected? Not as the agent said it would, because it’s never going to perform as the agent said it would.

That’s one thing we know about sales illustrations that they’re a hundred percent wrong from the minute they’re generated because they’re predicting an uncertain future. We could get into Monte Carlo here, but that’s probably a little bit farfetched. But really see how the policy is actually going to perform based upon today’s findings. And so I think that’s something every advisor can get. All right. So what did you think about Tony’s comments on life insurance market? I really like that he’s shining light on this. It’s actually a bit refreshing, you know, funny that both started insurance and you and I got away from it a bit, you know, as times have changed and the whole industry has done that, but he is spot on and that there’s a lot of things that we should be paying attention to.

And it really is just as important as an IRA, as an investment, as a 529 account, et cetera, et cetera. I think we’ve gotten almost too far away in focusing on what life insurance is and how valuable it is. How about you? What are you thinking? Yeah, look, it reminded me of the stuff that unfortunately most parties are not talking about. You know, when he talked about how there’s been a shift from product oriented to goal. I mean, it’s true. We had to meet our requirements. We could say we were a financial planner all day long, but if we didn’t hit our monetary requirements and asset gathering, which was traditionally premium, we got in trouble, right?

We potentially lose our jobs, right? So we never lost the fact that you can be as a planning analyst as much as you want, but if you don’t bring home the bacon, don’t matter. And I think that that mentality is still very much in the mind of a lot of financial planners who transitioned over time, but have forgotten how to actually sell life insurance and forgotten that they need to because nobody’s now got a gun to their head saying, you better sell this life insurance or else you’re not going to hit quota. And because they don’t have to anymore, people are running around without seatbelts.

I think it’s a huge miss because it drives me crazy when people say I’m a holistic financial planner and I’m like, how come you’re coming up red lights and asset map? They have no protection coverage. That’s cool. You’ve got some interesting insights because of that. How many advisors haven’t checked off the life insurance box? A boatload of supposedly best interest advisors. 1 million people in asset map right now. Those are from advisors. They’re CFPs mostly. And there are over 400,000 of those households that couldn’t handle the loss of their income. Their entire family would lose their house. It’s that bad. Well, who sold them the insurance?

Who placed it? Who insured it? Who checked? It’s sad, man. And when Tony says the shift in advice has really changed, has moved away from this idea of I don’t want to be a salesperson, don’t want to have sales, just want to retain assets. I get it. It’s a great business to retain assets, but it doesn’t mean that we’re really actually taking care of the family just because we don’t want to sell life insurance anymore. It really is important. And you mentioned it, the CFP, one of the core pieces is insurance. Now I get it if you don’t want to sell insurance or maybe you grew up in the bank or the wire house channel and you didn’t really get, or even like a large RIA, you never really got insurance exposure.

And that’s okay. We’re if you’re not, bring someone in who does have the conversation. Just because you don’t sell insurance doesn’t mean you can’t have the conversation. You can still talk about it. Well, what did you think when he talked about how the complexity might be stifling? What did you think about that? Oh man. You know, big evolution. You know, I can’t really ever remember a client. I have sold thousands of life insurance contracts and I don’t think I ever, I can’t recall a client ever asking for more complexity. Make this harder for me to understand, right? It’s real simple on their mind. If I’m not here tomorrow, my kids, my wife, my business are going to struggle.

I need to fix that. Cool. Here’s this thing called life insurance. It’ll fix that for you. The financial part, at least. Yeah. This is why it’s funny because especially in my early years, a lot of my colleagues with similar tenure would go show up at appointments with 20, 30, 50 page illustrations and focus on using the illustration to sell the product. I never did that at all. I kept it in the folder. I talked about it conceptually. Hey, do you want to see how this thing works a little bit? Oh, okay. Cool. Here, here’s some pages here. I’ll leave the illustration with you, but we never focused on how the sausage was made.

We just focused on what it did. As he says, focus on the goals, goals of life insurance. I had great sales because of it because that’s what your clients don’t want to know, like internal rate of return and mortality and riders and step-ups and indexing. No, no, no. Does this take care of my wife and kids tomorrow if I’m not here? That’s the goal, right? It’s true. Well, I mean, look, there’s this constant debate of whether term or permanent insurance makes sense. Our attitude was always, always calculate what the need of capital is, decide whether the client could afford or care about having a permanent solution or a term or temporary solution.

Then when you went to term, which 80, 90% of that need was met from term insurance for the period that made sense, from an A rated convertible company. Next, just get it done today. You can do this literally two day underwriting, if not same day, if you have an easy underwritten case. I think a lot of, a lot of firms have gotten rid of their underwriting. I know my firm that I started still has a full underwriting team because it is a lot of work to do insurance. It’s not an easy thing. And I think from a business standpoint, a lot of advisors have said, I’m going to jettison that effort because it’s not necessarily recurring revenue.

Business is difficult. People are not in great health. I’m always dealing with where they want to lie on the app. There’s a lot of, I think, I think, aggravation on the business side associated with life insurance. But then of course, Derek, it’s creating a huge opportunity because there’s a big void. There are very few professional insurance advisors anymore. Look at this. Tony is a fee-based insurance advisor for how many years? He’s got like 30 years in the business. He gets hired by all of these experts that come in and do actual testimony around it. And you can hire someone like that today. An RIA can bring that person in and pay them a fee to go do the work they don’t want to do.

Yeah. How cool is that? And it goes, it goes right to the whole question here today is, is life insurance the new blue ocean or opportunity? Is that the place now that we can focus because so many people have gotten away from it? Oh, life insurance salesmen are bad. Life insurance is bad. By term, invest the difference, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think we’ve gotten so concerned with those, those things that we forgot why it was there in the first place. And let’s face it, life insurance has been around a lot longer than Roth IRAs, you know, or whatever you want to call it, right?

No, but look, isn’t it, isn’t it the case like, you know, you’re in traffic and, you know, three lanes of traffic deep are just sitting there, but you see this open lane on the right, you figure everybody’s getting out of that lane. They’re moving over to the left. And then you like, once you get up, do you realize that people were just all just following the crowd? They could have been in that speedy lane the whole time, but it was like, Oh, don’t touch it. It’s got cooties. And I, you know what I’m saying? They’re just following the crowd. Meanwhile, advisors who recognize that there’s a huge gap there can start delivering real value.

And frankly, I think what we’ve seen is that so many of the ex insurance advisors are now getting into wealth management. If you don’t address life insurance as a conversation, as a matter of being part of your process, I got to believe some of these other advisors who do know it are going to take your AUM business because they can do both. They’re not just testing the engine, they’re testing the brakes and the seat belts and the airbags. Cause they know you’ve got your family in that car and they’re not going to let you drive it off with just saying, Hey, look, your engine souped up.

I didn’t check the brakes. Like that’s, a huge mistake. And I think it’s a great opportunity to, for those that realize it. Great analogy. I’m glad Tony’s shedding light on it. There’s definitely been a change. What are some things that you think that those listening today can do to maybe try to adjust a little bit how they’re working with their clients? Well, I think that one of the things that Tony brought up is this complexity, especially on the permanent life side. And I don’t know if you know, do you know Bobby Samuelson? That name rings a bell, but I don’t know. He’s considered, for those of the people that are really deep in the insurance space, he’s like an expert that engineer.

He takes apart these policies and I, and we’ve hired him every single year to come speak to us for an hour and a half to a group of individuals in this space. And it’s unbelievable. He tells us that these policies are so complicated that it’s true. Tony said it. The regulators can’t even figure out how they’re coming up with these numbers. And it seems to me that all the features that have been added to these permanent policies have certain tax benefits. I get it. And have certain riders in this condition and that condition, if it’s a full moon and you have a long-term care event and your brother’s name is Bob.

Like in that situation, we, you know, we can pay you a benefit, but if one of those things is not true, then you’re skunked. And what’s happening, especially with the index universal life contracts is that, you know, obviously the stock market’s been doing great. What happens if that turns? And I think we’re starting to see that the mechanics and the, and the, the math that was driving it always assumed the market was going to go up. If it turns around, it could be, it could be leveraged down. And that’s the, that’s, I think the challenge is that when we, when the audit, the industry created these crazy concepts, because they’re like, Hey, I can sell it better if you make it really complicated because it can do all these things.

It solves every single problem. It’s kind of like you buy the iPhone for its capacity and you use 1% of it. Like you said, it, but by the way, you have no battery life because, because this thing can’t last, there’s too much going on that they’ve never tested. And it’s not like true whole life. Like it’s boring and grandpa had it at work. We’re talking about some really modern products and I think it could actually cause a lot of pain in the space. I think it doesn’t need to be so complex. That’s what he’s saying. So make it easier, make it simpler. Well, that’s, but that’s my follow on is like, so what do you do?

What do you do with that information? The advisors should be doing annual reviews. And, and if you don’t do policy reviews with your clients to uncover the fact that they own these complex monsters, or if it’s a complex and it makes sense, it still makes sense. I want to know that it still makes sense based on what you care about today. And I think we all need to be the catalyst for that going forward. That’s no question. How do you do it, Derek? Any reviews, definitely, but go a little bit deeper than just that. So for example, I just met with my, my top client and she’s like, can you look at this thing?

And like, so I manage all of their money, a huge client, client for years. And she brings out this statement for an old life insurance policy she’s had for years that she never told me about before. Or so we added it to the asset map. It’s on there now, but now the homework assignment is let’s go get the enforce illustration. Who is the beneficiary on this? What type of insurance is it? And so forth. Do we still need it? And that was even their question. Do we need it? And so, yeah, great to have the review. Do you have life insurance in general? Is your family, your business protected?

But go deeper, find out more information. We would do the same if you were looking at rolling over a retirement account or wanted a second opinion on your investment allocation. We would want all the details. Do it with your insurance as well. That’s true. I think, look, for those of you that don’t know, you need to order what’s called an enforce illustration. He mentioned it. An enforce illustration or just getting the declaration page is a great start is really required. Almost every client we know loses their policy. They don’t have the original document. If you didn’t sell it or place it, you don’t have a copy of this thing.

So you got to write in paper. There’s very little digital submission to this. Write in paper a letter, a good old-fashioned letter on the letterhead that says, please do this. Antonio even offered, if you reach out to him on LinkedIn, that he’ll send you his version. It’s a spoiler plate. I think it’s a really great place to start because it says, hey, illustrate it this way because there’s a billion ways you could illustrate it. Can you imagine actually running for somebody a financial plan and say, okay, commit to this plan for the rest of your life and nobody remembers what it is, but you’re committed, like the premium plan.

You have to re-illustrate this stuff and that’s an important aspect. I also think it’s really important if you don’t have this capacity on your team, your financial planning team or your advisory, whatever, you’re not going to build it in-house, please build relationships with those that are experts that you trust. You got to trust them because we all know because this stuff is so complicated, it winds up being a trust decision, not necessarily a knowledge decision. And so you got to make sure that you’re working with people who actually know what they’re selling and promoting and can actually do the due diligence on rating and all this other stuff.

The company’s going to be there in years when you need them to pay this claim. So I think those are really important aspects. One thing I would add to when you’re requesting policy or the import policy stuff, ask for a full policy brief because they’ve got like a one-pager policy brief, but you can ask for a full policy brief, which usually is a couple of two, three, four pages. And it’s got all types of information on whether if there’s dividends, what’s the story with the dividends, what’s going on with investments, if it’s an investment-based contract or something like that. It gives you a much deeper view of the policy versus just a real basic one-page brief.

So that’s something else that I would recommend doing. You know, I realize in this conversation and the way that Tony might be perceived in this case is also that we might be anti-life insurance. I think the irony is that the opposite is true. I’m actually very promoted of insurance and I really love the business because it is one of those areas where people are not educated and it allows me to educate them. And I hope advisors listen to this and say, this is my opportunity to be a star for them in an area that’s really not a fun topic and also complex and has a history and a legacy of being sales culture.

That being said, as Derek already said, it is a blue ocean. And with respect to permanent and term insurance, I have to tell you, of all the people I know, I am probably the most overinsured person there is. I literally bought more term of life insurance than as much as they would let me get because I’m protecting my family on my entire capacity of earnings. But I also have some permanent insurance and I also have some overfunded investment style, tax leveraged policies that I have bought for myself and I’ve actually fully funded. And one of the things is that when you use these tools over long periods of time, it’s like anything.

We don’t know, Derek, which one is going to work out? Is the term going to work out better than the permanent? I don’t know. Most valuable insurance is the one that pays a claim. Okay. But until that point in time, it’s all a confidence game. It’s like just buying security blankets so that I know my family is going to be okay. Or as you said, my business obligations, et cetera. And I think that’s an important stuff. Just make sure whatever the product is, it makes sense and it fits for the client based upon what matters to them. And that they understand it. They care to you that you don’t understand the SMA that I told them to.

Well, they have no idea. But if they can repeat back, okay, this insurance is going to be for this amount. If I die tomorrow, family is taken care of. Got it. Thank you. Let’s now talk about retirement planning or whatever. It’s a check the box. Let’s check the box. Let’s get people okay. And then let’s micromanage actually the details of which types of policies we’re going to use based upon their tax structure or their ownership, et cetera, et cetera. Right. I would add too, if you’re an advisor that doesn’t want to check the implementation box of insurance, like you’ll have the conversation, but you don’t want to get licensed.

Fine. Find someone that can, that you trust, like you said earlier. Absolutely. Right. Like the other advisor on my team, he does have his insurance licenses. So if something needs to happen, boom. Right. So we can get it done. Or even your firm. Right. People on the insurance side. Right. So there’s ways you can do that. Find a trusted source, knows what they’re doing, has options. You don’t have to be an expert, but you got to have the conversation. Right. And I look, that’s a great point. We can close with this is that, you know, there’s, there are certain situations where an advisor is captive to a certain carrier.

Okay. That’s one model. Maybe they know that product set better than anybody. Right. Like I only sell Nike. Okay. You know, Nike shoes, every model there is. And then there are those that have a, obviously an emporium where they can go to the, to the marketplace and try to shop. And then you got to decide what’s right for you. I, you know. Full locker. What locker? That’s right. Is that where you go for your shoes? Or do you go to the Amazon store? I’m old school, man. I don’t even have an Amazon account. You don’t have an Amazon account. You don’t have one. Or an Amazon account.

No, no, I don’t. Okay. Great. We’re taking Fintech advice from you, I think. Class Amazon. I still buy books. Classic shoe cobbler doesn’t go to foot locker. I don’t either, actually. All right. Well, with that, let’s thank Tony for his work. I was really fun to have another topic we haven’t talked about in quite a while. So thank you, Tony, for what you’re doing. Derek, any closing thoughts for us? Yeah. Everyone that’s listening, thanks again for your time. We appreciate it. Sorry, it’s been a little while since we recorded. You had the summer build rooms there, but we’re back in it now. And take something you heard today and implement it.

Share it with somebody else. Make someone’s life a little bit better with something you learned today. Love it. That’s great. Don’t forget to subscribe. And of course, we’ll see you on the next podcast. Thank you for listening to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast with Holt and Notman. Be sure to subscribe now and join the ongoing conversation. The information covered and posted represents the views and opinions of the guest and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of AssetMap or Connector. The content has been made available for informational and educational purposes only.