Expert Reviews IULs Whole Life Insurance & Infinite Banking

 Whether it's IUL or Whole Life, is it possible that that asset could unlock more cash in the future? From what I can pick apart, and I've got a pretty good understanding of Indexing Versa Life Insurance and how these things work, if you own something like Whole Life Insurance or Indexing Versa Life Insurance and you hold on to it as a retirement asset, the stability that it provides gives you a lot of options to use other assets in a way that you wouldn't normally use them because you don't own that other position. It's absolutely a failure of the implementation of the product, not a failure of the product itself. At its core is if the Indexing Versa Life Insurance product can in fact accumulate at a faster rate than the loan, and if it doesn't, what happens? Somebody asked me very recently, like, what goes into telling somebody they should buy this or they should buy that? And I told this individual that at the end of the day, we tend to show people both options. It just happens to be the case that most people at the end just choose Whole Life Insurance. As I started to look at Universal Life Insurance and understand the differences between things like cash value accumulation tests and guideline premium tests and how that impacts Universal Life Insurance as an accumulation to them. There definitely was a moment where I sat back and said, okay, there's real merit to this. What would you say to the person that's saying, hey, I love this. Why don't I just fund Life Insurance take loans and fund more Life Insurance? And I will say this, I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of phone calls because of this. Like, a lot of things are used in marketing and they're half-truths. If your banking is a concept started to gain more steam and that kind of opened a whole new world of possibilities and so that is when I started to realize, okay, there is a specialty here. We sell a lot of Life Insurance to people who made risky-ish bets paid off but realized that doubling down would not be good. Let me sort of set the stage with what I understand about Curtis and MPI, as I believe it's called. Hey everybody, welcome back to another Better Wolf podcast. I am here with Brandon Roberts from the Insurance Pro Blog. We were joking before we hit record. They've been having their podcast for 10 years and counting and they hold the record for having the most cloud in the insurance industry when it comes to podcasters and blogs. So it's an honor, Brandon. Thank you. We've been talking for a little bit. I'm grateful that you are coming on the show. I'm not in my studio today but I'm making the best of on the road studio. Yeah, you bet. Thanks for having me. So before we dive into just like insurance topics, I really value hearing people's stories and getting really the why behind why they do what they do. For anyone that listens to you or reads the blog, they know that you're an insurance nerd. You own that name and you really know your stuff but I know that you just weren't born out of the womb loving actuarial tables. So it's like how did that passion begin and where did you get into the industry and what was like the aha moment where you're like, hey, I actually want to dedicate my life to this. So I have a tendency to like to pick things apart and that's true of kind of everything. So I came into the industry originally assuming that I was going to be focused much more on the investment side and joining the industry straight out of college being 22 years old. There were not that many people who had any reasonable amount of money who wanted to talk to me about their their finances. And what I did find is I ended up talking to a lot of people about the options they had in their 401k because just about anybody you tell or anybody you walk up to and say, I'm in the finance industry or investments, they'll typically run by you the various options that are in there. They're 401k plan and ask you what your thoughts are on them and which ones they should be in which is fine for conversation but it's not a great way to get paid. So I started with Guardian and while I was there, I ran into a lot of conversation taking place with respect to whole life insurance and for me it kind of became a mission to figure out what the big deal was. And so I spent a lot of time and I mean a lot of time running various iterations, in illustration software just to pick it apart and see what happens if we we pluck that string or pull that cord. And that's when I started to realize just what was possible purely from an accumulation point of view. And then later other things came about infinite banking as a concept started to gain more steam and that that kind of opened a whole new world of possibilities. And so that is when I started to realize okay there is a specialty here and it's very niche but there are people who do or could be very seriously benefited by this. And interestingly I started talking about it quite a bit online trying to find various avenues. So there were a couple of forums way back in the day and I decided to larence the insurance pro blog back in 2011 after I left Guardian and it was interesting the number of people that were out there who were vaguely aware that you could do something like this with cash value life insurance. And the number of people who were looking for someone who was very much a subject matter expert so I decided to take up the cause and become a subject matter expert because there weren't that many other people that were really dedicated to it. Even when I was at Guardian as a career agent there were people who understood whole life insurance was a way to accumulate value but they didn't really get the pieces in parts and they were in it much more for the sake of well we sell whole life insurance so that's what we talk about but how to manipulate it and do fancy things that's not my thing. So not a lot of it was going on and in fact the first time that I submitted a case that was very much manipulated to focus on cash accumulation. The new business coordinator called me because they weren't okay they didn't know what to do with this like what what the certain inputs I have to use and I don't get what's going on here. So it was it was eye opening because I thought for a long time that people were holding back like there there were there were tricks to the trade that I was not privy to and it was going to dig this out of people and it took me a long time to accept no they're they're not hiding anything they just don't know. But it became very much the people who came to me looking for this and the gratitude they had about somebody being able to speak about this and and walk them to the process. That's when I decided okay this is this is where I should focus this forget the investment side of it there are plenty of other people can talk about that. I'm going to go I'm going to go subject matter specialty on this. Was there was there like a moment where you were like like the epiphany happened when it came to life insurance or you talk about it being an accumulation tool I'm sure sure like over funding or fully funded or max funded it was kind of like that interesting concept of like but like was there something that you learned or was there just a epiphany that went off to be like why is it everyone teaching this or why is it everyone doing this. I certainly it it was much more gradual not kind of a moment but more an event to get there and my eyes I've always just naturally been slightly on the safer conservative side when it came to accumulation not that I don't make certain high risk bets personally I have but I have always appreciated the sort of steady as you go approach to things and so it it really became more about that to me and then watching other people in the industry especially when they were focused on investments and I I came about just before the collapse of 2008 so I watched a lot of people around me hunker under their desk as they were fielding all kinds of questions about what was going on with the market and what they could do and why this happened and why as professionals were they they not able to avoid this sort of situation and in all honesty there's there's only so much one can do to hedge risk when you go into investments that are implicitly risky and so for me it became very much about non correlated assets and there's a sort of traditional basket of that that's not really non correlated at all life insurance has always remained the most non correlated in my eyes. Yeah one thing that makes you guys very unique is you talk about whole life and you can go super deep in whole life you also talk about IUL and you can go super deep in IUL and all kinds of life insurance and I really appreciate that about you and I know that you guys I was I had my moment of fame in your in your podcast probably a year and a half ago I don't I don't know it was a while ago where you know I came from the world where it was essentially learning that whole life is superior and IUL is not and a lot of the people that I've learned from gave really good you know I would say good talking points and all those things and I'm grateful for the education that I learned and now I'm speaking to you saying like I want to be super well-rounded I don't want to be the stick to the talking points this is why I believe and don't like I don't want to learn and so as I you know as I've learned and you know I've been open-minded we we do both and I'm still skew more towards whole life but it's like I like dude I want to be open-minded and like do the right things for the client and be able to articulate and truly help our clients do the right thing how did you get into IUL because if you came from Guardian you probably started on the whole life side and then we're open-minded and then like how would you explain the pros and cons because you get people that are very passionate I read your comments I want to talk about infinite banking next because I think there's a lot that we could talk about there but it seems like you get super opinion opinions on both sides and I'm currently at a conference where majority majority is IUL and the thought of you doing whole life is kind of like look down upon so yeah um I remember at Guardian one of my first exposures to induction versus life insurance was somebody that I prospected was small business owner I started in upstate New York because I went to Syracuse University so I'm in the Syracuse area and I just happened to prospect this the small business owner who owned an induction versus life insurance he'd actually he'd replaced it a few years ago he had a VUL and some agent came along and convinced him that he should move into this other product he didn't really understand why he was there but he owned it and I'm looking at it and I'm fairly new at this point and I'm I mean I know universal life insurance conceptually but it's doing some stuff that I've never seen before and so I I went to other people at Guardian to get more advice on this and as luck would have it the sort of go to life back end expert for us at the time was a guy who spent quite a few years at Lincoln he was very familiar with induction versus life insurance and so that that was helpful but the the guy who ran the office that I was attached to told me that universal life insurance his his take was this he has sold zero universal life insurance policies in his career he'd been around for like 40 years at that point and in his mind he'd sold one too many so that's my initial exposure um and when I started the insurance pro blog I didn't talk a lot about universal life insurance I kind of categorized life insurance as cash value life insurance which was basically whole life insurance and then term insurance and when I was was launching the insurance pro blog I was definitely at that point going through a moment of of much more investigation to understand the ins and outs specifically of index universal life insurance because I felt at the time had a good understanding of traditional universal life insurance and variable universal life insurance um but being at Guardian index universal life insurance was off the table um it was back then so I didn't spend a lot of time looking at it and I was in New York where there were far fewer products available so I didn't have to compete with it all that much um as I started to look at universal life insurance and understand the differences between things like the cash value accumulation test and guideline premium test and how that impacts universal life insurance as an accumulation tool there definitely was a moment where I sat back and said okay there is there's real merit to this there are going to be people who would absolutely like to go this direction versus whole life insurance if they're looking to accumulate cash in life insurance for the purpose of wealth accumulation retirement and complaining whatever maybe and I started to bring index universal life insurance specifically into the fold as I was looking at proposals for people and seeing how it compared and as has traditionally been the case it is very strong when people are looking at it as a retirement income supplement plan um and that's where a lot of universal life insurance sales sales started to take off for me but I too came from a world where universal life insurance is kind of a dirty word and I spent a little bit of time um perpetuating the rumor that universal life insurance had evils and whole life insurance was was undeniably superior which I have apologized for on numerous occasions and um continue to feel bad about at times but um thankfully I don't I don't think I was in a position where I necessarily talked anybody out of universal life insurance that was at a serious detriment to it because fairly early on I I turned direction on that so um I want to I want to just throw some talking points at you and then we can talk about the universal life so it's like uh we've I've heard a lot that it's like there's a lot of levers so there's there's more things that there's more variables that could go that could go wrong I've heard that cost insurance can increase that's that is like a big talking point uh that if you again don't know a ton about index universal life insurance or whatnot it's like oh cost insurance can skyrocket um and we've also heard like in the 80s some some of the horror stories of you know policies blowing up getting a letter and saying you need to fund fund more um and so those are those are just some of the the reasons the talking points that people that do whole life are saying like hey you're gonna put money in the life insurance what like if you're gonna invest just invest your money why why mess with certain variables and insurance shouldn't be an investment what would you say that because I I know that a lot of those things are talking points and just like whole life insurance you I mean whole life insurance can be a horrible place to put your money and it can be also an amazing place to put your money and it could be the same company a lot of times it's how you structure that and and so you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater right so to the to the argument that universal or index universal life insurance is complex um I would throw down the challenge to explain to me or reconcile the payment of a dividend or participating with life insurance policy and ensure for me that the company paid you the right amount um I think that the the complication argument is one that can cut both ways and it's it's dicey for people to try and make that argument against universal life insurance or index universal life insurance specifically because there are plenty of things about whole life insurance that we can know are complex and cryptic and strange um the rise in cost of insurance piece I understand the historical point and I understand the worry um there are no doubt were people who bought universal life insurance 80s 90s time frame and they did it in a time where the assumption about interest rates were far loftier than they ended up prevailing and as a result people ended up with universal life insurance policies that were going to require substantially higher premiums to remain enforce or much lower death benefits remain enforce and it's it's absolutely a failure of the implementation of the product not a failure of the product itself um I have seen numerous aged universal life insurance policies sold at that time frame that were funded quite heavily and there at no risk of um labs the problem came for all the people who purchased the product assuming that they were going to get a discount on premium and get for example a million dollar death benefit that was maybe half the cost of what whole life insurance was trying to to get from them those are the people who have had the biggest struggle with universal life insurance because it turns out there is no no way to escape the actual cost of insurance and so if if whole life insurance said it needed 20,000 dollars a year but you bought universal life insurance because the agent told you it was only to be 12 that that should have caused some apprehension um it didn't or whatever reason with a number of people they bought and found out years later that that was very much dependent on an interest rate staying at a certain level which did not happen um so the rising insurance cost piece unfortunately there are too many agents that want to sell against universal life insurance who pretend like rising insurance cost is just this sort of unbridled sort of it can go wherever the insurance company wants it to go and that is what tears it all apart and I'm aware of no situation where we can look empirically at that and say yep this insurance company has just totally put it to these clients um there have been cost of insurance increases um there have been people who have needed to put more money into universal life insurance policies as a result of interest rate assumptions going down lower than they were supposed to I know there have been a few lawsuits that have been come about mostly in survivorship products where cost of insurance has gone up because investment results from the insurance company have underperformed expectations um I'm not immediately aware of any of those that necessarily were in critical risk of lapse but there are some people who have discovered that the the timeline that they thought they had before policy would lapse is now more consolidated and that has caused some iron um but again none of these are failure points of the products they're failure points of the implementation of the product and there should have been more care taken when these things were implemented right and that's that's kind of one of the things that I say when people are like full day frames the in remeat setting and suzi orman it's like listen we would all agree with them if we saw the average implementation of how life insurance is set up it's it makes me cringe inside sometimes and and what people are being told and how things are being implemented and this is it really doesn't matter if it's whole life or IUL from a standpoint of a lot of times the implementation is not done properly and it's just it is what it is it's a lot of times you could you could make the argument that someone's still better off but knowing what we know it's it can be kind of frustrating to see that inside when when it comes to the universal life conversation the whole life conversation and when someone comes to you is there a way like is there a way to is there a couple questions that you asked to figure out like where you should lean or is it really tough case by case basis because I'm just wanting to know like how you do the filter in your head from a standpoint of if you properly designed life whole life or properly designed IUL where do people lean and why do they lean there I view the strengths falling largely in an income being the most critical goal versus cash in the interim being the most critical goal so if somebody comes along and says I am looking to plan for retirement income purposes I have just I've learned or heard that you can use life insurance for this application and I think I want to implement that as one more bucket in the the retirement income plan universal life insurance is strong for that application if they come along and they say I want to buy life insurance because I know about infinite banking or I just want another place to accumulate some cash for whatever purpose and I have a strong likelihood in my mind that I'm going to start taking money from this thing the policy alone or whatever have you early on like maybe in the next five years or something like that whole life insurance tends to be a stronger bet for that it doesn't have to contend with things like surrender charges and it does accumulate cash a little bit more quickly than universal life insurance tends to so that's kind of the first categorization that I try to make where do they fall there regretfully most people tell me well I want to do both so that that makes it hard that that's kind of the most critical differentiator to me now we have stated fairly publicly that that though we are completely indifferent between the two products and think that you can accomplish basically the same goal with with both of them regardless of your your objective some minor refinements based on that scenario just walk through we still very much tend to skew on the whole life side just in terms of what people ultimately buy somebody asked me very recently like what goes into telling somebody they should buy this or they should buy that and I told this individual that at the end of the day we we tend to show people both options it just happens to be the case that most people at the end just choose whole life insurance and honestly I think a number of them choose whole life insurance not because they have thoroughly gone through the iterations and decided definitively this is the right one for me but they've kind of settled on something about whole life insurance or something about index universal life insurance that they were a little uncomfortable about and that's where what puts them squarely where they fall I don't I don't find the argument to be worth it to bowl to to really kind of labor the point with them and say no no no you should you should absolutely go in this direction if they do great but ultimately I think they'll be fine with either product yeah let's let's talk about infinite banking this is this is one of the one of the doors that opened for me when I was young a lot of the people that mentored me came from that world and I I learned early on to be a stickler about truth and like say the truth and not be misleading and I will say this I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of phone calls because of this like a lot of things are are used in marketing and they're they're half-truths and I realized that it's a really it's a really cool concept and it's a really this like you know like let's look at the banks let's understand how to do banking and yet there's so many bad teaching out there and there's a lot of marketing out there and I'm not I'm not like I'm not this holy person I do marketing as well so it's like I'm just I'm just wondering you guys have taken pretty hard stance but you you ultimately teach cash value overfunded cash value life insurance and you teach people how they can utilize as an asset but yet you also kind of attack in a way people that are super infinite bankers and some of the things that they teach I'll let you talk about things to like about that movement things that you're maybe a little bit dislike and maybe we can have a good conversation about it yeah so I want to I want to sort of split this in two areas at first and we'll kind of go from there so a lot of the criticism that has come about just taking shots at various agents over the years really was born out of what we were seeing when all of this launched for for the from me and then later brandly with the insurance pro blog we used to run into a lot of people who were being proposed or had bought life insurance policies predominantly whole life insurance policies that very much played up the idea of using life insurance as a cash accumulation play but they made no effort to to optimize cash fairly in fact several years ago there was a relatively young guy who reached out to us he was he was working with a pretty big name at Northwestern Mutual and was looking to buy a policy and he discovered what we were talking about in terms of cash optimization stuff like that and a confront this guy about it and this guy basically blew him off and told him you should buy what I've proposed to you because it's good for you and when he asked him point blank well how do you design policies that you buy for yourself this guy told him well wouldn't make sense for me to pay myself a commission which was his admission that I do this the way that you want it but I'm not going to do it for you now I we used to run into so much of that that it caused a lot of frustration in our eyes when it comes to to infant and banking a lot of people think that I don't like it I have no issue with infant and banking I personally don't really get why it has a name though I do understand that you have to lead people to some sort of natural progression to something in an order to get them interested sometimes you got to you got to put a name on it because that that makes them stand up and take notice my my issues for infant and banking I I look at it as going sort of we have Nelson Nash's original iteration of it which was very much focused on business owner planning like this is how people who own businesses can acquire financing that can be quite difficult to get from traditional avenues and that was in my eyes brilliant it was a really great way to present life insurance as an option to those people and and I see me harness a very critically important component of the cash accumulation aspect especially for somebody who's still alive and then we got the just awful sort of re iteration from Pam Yellen which was all about hey you can do this and it can be all about your your unscrupulousness and sadly to me it seems like for a long time the infant and banking people wanted to put up a wall between them and the bank on yourself people because the bank on yourself people were selling vacations and cars and stuff like that whereas the infant and banking people were much more about the the the institution of the idea as almost a another economic school of thought and in recent years that's gotten a lot blurrier for infant and banking and a lot of those people they don't uphold that same sort of we're not the bank on yourself people and they seem to be a lot more open to blurring those lines and being okay with people buying policies for reasons that most people in finance would look at as being rather rather irresponsible as far as as why you're you're going about this so that's been more my problem I also fundamentally I'm not a believer in this idea that the banking system is ready to rob grandma from her last pennies and it is fraught with with problems and set up to to ultimately fail if that were the case I personally don't see where life insurance is the safety net it's it's like people aren't going to buy a whole life insurance policy to stick it to the Fed it might be it might be like a good talking point but it's like it's not the reason I'm gonna you know buy a life insurance policy I think the two things that trigger me sometimes is people being super aggressive on funding and we see the thing like premium equal income and this this stuff is being caught like two day the other the other problem I have is just using policies by cars or paying off your mortgage and all this stuff and like mathematically taking a chapter out of you know Pam's book and saying like oh you can actually be wealthy buying a car because you get uninterrupted compound growth and you know and it's like yeah and that's a half truth any any two cents there like I agree with you from the standpoint of banking when you teach your clients on how to take a loan or there are certain principles that you have when it comes to funding and how they should use their policy and it's not like by taking a loan you're not making extra money unless the activity that you do with that loan is greater than the loan cost or control cost that's that's when you have that then that can be a powerful asset if done properly but then they're you're taking on potential risk that needs to be modeled in to that scenario it does and you know there are plenty of people all across the United States who could take the original iteration of infinite banking and implement yeah we've done it with a bunch of people and what's interesting about a lot of those individuals is they run businesses that are quite successful and despite their their success and the revenues that they have been able to generate and the the businesses that are very consistent at generating income they have a lot of of rather poor lending options available I mean we've we've talked to a number of people running many millions of dollars a year in revenue businesses and their options for for lending to do business 10% and so when we start talking about life insurance as a way to take some of that excess cash that a lot of them are sitting on and store it somewhere and use it as a financing mechanism and the interest rate is 5-ish percent that all on its own gets them very very excited yeah that's that's incredible any any like dues or do nots to overfunded cash value life insurance has relates to infinite banking because I want to talk about the next subject which is a little bit off topic but I just wanted to just put it end of this chapter on from from the standpoint of what you've seen any other advice or things that you want to share about overfunding life insurance and some of the maybe horror stories that you've seen and some of the examples that have that done really well I think the the best sort of a cautionary advice is to not assume that if a little is good and more must always be better we have been approached by people who are trying to figure out ways to put all of their income or something like that into life insurance and lend all of it back out and and theoretically maybe this works but there's a lot of things that could come along and disrupt so I remember we got we got an email a year ago from somebody who wanted to put basically everything that he had in disposable income and even kind of non-disposable income into a life insurance policy and then not pay his income taxes and it was his theory that when the IRS came after him with a tax lien he would be able to take money out of his 401k to satisfy that so that he could get it out of his 401k because he wasn't happy that it was in there and my response to him was well that that kind of makes sense in theory however when you are facing an IRS lien you don't get to choose where the money comes from they do so they might choose your 401k they might choose your life insurance policy there's no guarantee I can give you that by virtue of stuffing it all in life insurance and not paying your taxes which I really don't think you should do is going to end in what you're looking for so sometimes people dream of these crazy crazy things and there are times where there are agents who dream of these crazy crazy things and it's it's not good it's it's it's fine to implement this but just understand that there is there is moderation that is necessary what would you say to the person that's saying hey I love this why don't I just fund life insurance take loans and fund more life insurance the people call this you know laddering policy other than it being against the rules and you get you lose your license and all that what would you say from a standpoint of like why that sounded good idea because borrowing to to buy more is almost like using one credit card to pay off another there is this this cycle that starts and if if you are of considerable means in theory you could you could implement that and run it to a point where you're going to die before it catches up to you but for most people that's that's not going to happen whenever you buy a new policy there always going to be certain expenses at at at inception that are going to make trying to maximize what you have dollars by taking money from one policy and buying a new one hard like that's that's hard to overcome versus just leaving the money where it is now and letting it accumulate. yeah with you one with you all right let's talk about index universal life one one one person that's a great marketer out there is Curtis Ray and he he does a really good job branding and he has calculator on his website that kicks out a pretty amazing income number and we we did a Google trends and actually some of his you know strategies are trending last month so he's definitely at the marketing thing down what are some you know for those people that are not familiar with with what Curtis teaches he's essentially you know using index universal life with primarily one company and then teaching people how they can really take some of that money and then fund fund more and you know I won't get into the strategy there but that's essentially the standpoint of using leverage with with index universal life and when you look at that arbitrage over a long period of time like you know it's better than anything in the world obviously some of my red flags come up if I'm being honest like I'm a little biased and at the same time I want to be as fair as possible I thought you would be the best person to talk to about the strategy because you're like you've seen it all you're you're not like pro you do both products but you also like our geek and like look into strategies like that you have any comments or any thoughts I don't again I don't want to put you in uncomfortable situation you can say I plead the fifth we move on no it's fine um so let me let me sort of set the stage with what I understand about Curtis and MPI as I believe it's called um so I don't remember where this came to me from but I have sat through a like YouTube video presentation of his talking about what he's doing and how it's supposed to work and from what I can take apart here it's it's boiled down to its most simplest forms we buy a policy an index universal life interest policy with mutual avoma and we take a loan against it within a few years we buy a new policy and we just keep doing that because in theory if we are able to get an index credit on the on the kind of prior IULs that are better than the loan that we're paying interest on we will ultimately accumulate more money and that is mathematically correct the the question becomes will you necessarily be able to generate the index credit high enough to always be overwhelming the accumulation of the loan um to me it reminds me of index universal life insurance in its infancy when we used to have kind of unlimited indexing illustration ability um wasn't totally unlimited but it was high like eight half nine percent index assumed in perpetuity credits on an IUL product and loan rates that were like four or five percent indexed loan rates and what that did is it allowed insurance agents to show people these income scenarios where they saved twenty thousand dollars a year for ten years and they started pulling half a million dollars out of the policy from like their mid 60s to age 100 and the reason it did that is because the spread between the loan rate and the accumulation assumed rate was significant um I feel like this is kind of going back in that direction which as an industry we've tried to get away from we've had regulation that's come along to get rid of that ability um and have definitely put a lot more um speed limits in place when it comes to how we assume these things will unfold into the future um the the issue at its core is if the index universal life insurance product can in fact accumulate at a faster rate than the loan and if it doesn't what happens and what's really interesting about that whole marketing scheme is I'm not aware of any functionality that allows us to evaluate okay if if I do this and my index credit is less than I'm thinking it's going to be what's the net impact on this in fact um I know because mutual vomah has come up a number of times as we've done um illustrations for prospective clients um as a recommended company to look at and um the weird thing about them is to my knowledge you can't change the index credit that's assumed it's static it's 6 and a quarter percent which is higher than I would have been comfortable assuming like 10 years ago saying nothing about right now yeah and and you know the first time I was told we can't change it it's just it is what it is um but it's a good product so I'm thinking well okay maybe there's something I'm unaware of maybe there's some really great cap rate to an index feature or something that I'm missing and from what I can pick apart and I've got a pretty good understanding of index universal life insurance and how these things work and I've spent a lot of time speculating on what various caps mean for what averages we can assume the product has a 10% cap rate on a one year point of point S&P 500 index which is not high it's not industry leading um it has a high uh participation index option with like a seven or seven and a half percent cap currently and then an uncapped strategy with a 50% participation rate which is one of the worst uncapped IUL indexing features I'm aware of um I don't know how we get to six in the quarter but it's not something I would at all be comfortable assuming um and again six was the high end of what we were looking for as an assumption back in like 2014 so to be where we are now with interest rates and be assuming something over six match shooting for the stars and and on top of that you're you're then playing with leverage which in a rosy world makes everything better and in an unrosy world yeah accelerates accelerates things yeah I mean we've and and I mean that's that's been an issue for premium financing with index universal life insurance for a number of years and thankfully that's gotten a little little better but there was a time when we assumed something like three three and a quarter is alone in six ish percent as the accumulation rate and it looked amazing when we when we did that from a premium finance standpoint um the same principle at play here now using sort of your own proprietary calculator to to project values that raises some regulatory questions all in until I would never touch that yeah and I say that as somebody who has a a whole life calculator on on the website but we took all those numbers from a real whole life product and created a database with them to give that people an idea of what you might be able to accomplish with a whole life product and that that was no fancy sort of max cash thing this is just a plain old whole life policy and this is what the output was yeah and and there's there's there's other factors like is it possible that cap rates on old products can be lower than what the company is is advertising and so like there's other things and and I've always been told this and I'm grateful for my mentors who've shared this with me they said Caleb never sell life insurance as an investment you will all it will always bite you in the butt um and just like don't don't try to like oversell this understand the pros and cons it can be an amazing supplement it can be something that can be an and in retirement you could even use it as retirement income and at the same time like I've just I've been really aware because when I first started I was like you know I was super aggressive from a standpoint not aggressive as you can be with whole life right but it's just like oh this is like the world's greatest thing and now as I've been in the industry for a couple of years and and met people like yourself I I actually like become more convicted about life insurance and less aggressive from a standpoint of it's like it's not it's not like the best asset out there in the world and all the stuff it's like an amazing foundational asset that I think can enhance your life and it's and it's a part of your life and I don't know if that makes any sense but it's like I've I've like gain conviction in this but then become way less hype because I've just realized like this is a long-term thing and I don't want to do anything that tries to prohibit that or oversell it because in a lot of cases I've seen fit people have to go you know things fail and not turn out the way that you thought it was going to be and it's a lot of times with these overhype concepts and I just don't want to be a part of that. Yeah well I there's a there's an agent that reached out to me a number of years ago and he told me when when he first found the website his initial impression was they're dumb and the reason for that was he at the time was working in the infinite banking world he was kind of working for some other agency that I think specifically was selling mass mutual but I don't I don't remember exactly and so he was he was out selling the concept of infinite bank and about a year or two after he had been doing this one of his clients called him up and said hey I took a loan and I paid interest on my loan and you told me that when I do that I'm going to receive that interest back when I do that it's like that extra dividend or whatever but you told me I was going to get my my interest back so I'm just I'm looking at a statement and I don't see where they paid me back my interest so can you tell me where I'm going to get that and he is like I'm no idea so he went to to his people at this agency and they're like well I mean it's a theoretical construct where that interest goes towards the payment of the dividend to everybody and so now he gets to go back to this client and tell them yeah I guess you don't exactly get what you paid directly back and and that was when he actually reached out to us to let us know that that he came back and found us because it turns out maybe maybe we weren't as dumb as he thought and and I mean we we've worked a relationship from there we keep in touch on occasion but this this is this is a problem when you oversensationalize these ideas I agree go out and tell somebody that there's something that's going to happen but then when it really comes time to have what you said take place and it does in there's a big problem yeah before we before we wrap up I want I want you to talk about life insurance in retirement you you you guys have been talking a lot more about this on your podcast and it's whether it's whole life insurance as a potential bond alternative as a potential a newty enhancer are just giving you more options in retirement one of the things that kind of had epiphany for me is whether it's IUL or whole life is it possible that that asset could unlock more cash in the future that concept and again you can correct me you can give your your own way of communicating but that concept was like okay it's not just the growth of this widget it's what having a properly structured widget can enhance in your other portfolio that is something that I've learned the last year or so I've had Dr. Wade follow on Jason Sanger at Wolf Building Corner Stones and trying to better articulate why life insurance can enhance other parts of your retirement life and I've heard you guys articulate this quite well so first I'll start by admitting that this is by no means original philosophy from from either one of us I largely stole this from an article that Guardian used to reproduce when I was there as a career agent and the concept is basically if you own something like whole life insurance or index universal life insurance and you hold on to it as a retirement asset the stability that it provides gives you a lot of options to use other assets in a way that you wouldn't normally use them because you don't own that other position so for example if you have whole life insurance and you have equities you may end up spending down equities in a way that you wouldn't normally be comfortable doing when you get into retirement because you know the whole life insurance is going going to continue to increase in value and it will always be there for the purpose of tapping for cash it may supplement what you need to but your your cavalierness so to speak in terms of what you're willing to withdraw or even what you're willing to invest in as you get older maybe dramatically different because you own that life insurance position I mean I have advocated other for other people have personally been involved in significantly riskier investments than I think I would be willing to go after if I didn't own cash value life insurance because I know that if something turns sideways on this it's got a lot of time to sort itself out and I've got other money that's not going anywhere with respect to unsurprised losses or excuse me surprised losses so having life insurance in retirement allows you to do that and in addition for your typical couple owning life insurance as a retirement income tool gives you the ability to leverage the death benefit to again either spend down the life insurance or other assets and know that one of them is going to die first and most of the time we can speculate on which one it's going to be and we'll get it right the majority of the time so that death benefit existing allows a sort of refilling of the retirement account so to speak that also allows people to be in a position where they can unlock more of the cash that they have and they don't have to be quite as worried about what they're spending and how much is left year over year well we'll say did thank you thank you for saying that um is there is there anything else that you want to go on record for saying or any any other piffies that you want to say before we wrap this up um I think the the one comment that has been a very early adoption for me with respect to whole life insurance and the index of universal life insurance as a strategy inside the portfolio um it is a excellent tool to sort of lock in the success that you've had with something else we sell a lot of life insurance to people who made risky ish bets paid off but realized that doubling down would not be prudent it may work but they're not willing to bet on that so what happens instead is they've come to us they fund a life insurance policy for a certain number of years and that gives them the peace of mind to maybe dip their toe into that riskier thing again but knowing that at the very least they have this position from this gain that they got however and they're not going to lose that and that means a lot to a lot of people yeah it's it's very much a foundational asset that um you know having a solid foundation can be beneficial super beneficial depending on where you're going and I also love what you said about you know being able to take more risk potentially or do have have options to do other things because you have money that's not necessarily correlated to that um the the book psychology of money um talks about this concept of your 0% savings and how that can actually unlock greater wealth he had nothing to do with life insurance but when I read it um I was like man that that's that that concept is very similar because it's what's what's the ROI of having seven months of liquidity and saying yes to a business opportunity whereas you didn't have that seven months of liquidity you might not say yes that business opportunity and it may that could have been a massive difference in your life um I want to I want to just end with a non-insurance related question and it's it's a it's a legacy question I end all of all the shows with this question essentially goes like this if this is your last day on earth and you're with the people that you love the most you can't give them any podcasts or blog or book you've ever written um but you can give them one last conversation um what are you going to make sure to highlight in that conversation me personally I'm going to dive into a discussion about not trying to get lost in silly little details which sounds very strange for someone with my background but the truth is I very much partitioned that in my life so life insurance is one thing where we dig into details everything else I don't get lost in that kind of stuff I personally look to experts to fill me in on the details I need and then make a decision from there and trying to to gain mastery level understanding of everything in life that's impossible so to the people around me I guess the the one parting piece of advice is don't try to master everything because it'll never work I appreciate that man appreciate what you're what you're doing in the world um I will link to your blog your podcast is there any other ways that people can stay connected with you I know that there's a lot of advisors and agents listening to this I know the you guys have incredible resources for advisors that really want to go deeper um how can people connect with what you're doing and maybe join that life insurance nerd club um reach out there's there there are ways to contact us through the website and um we're always always willing to engage with people we can't get back to everybody all the time that just happens um but um we we are definitely interested in other people's perspectives and ideas and thoughts there's a number of of podcasts that we've put out that are purely from questions or suggestions that other people have come to us with so we are we're open we're approachable and um it flows more primarily through the website amazing Brenner Roberts thank you so much you bet