I want to ask you a question because when people think about life insurance, at least those that have done a little bit of education around it, they'll immediately lead with it as it's an investment. Correct. Do you view it as an investment? No, no. How do you view it? Yeah, so the number one mistake I see many people make, I was having a conversation this morning with one of you, is they'll look at insurance and they'll compare it to an investment. And I can see where a lot of times it can get looped into comparing it to like an investment because some of the tax advantages. And some people can create the argument or the pitch that it's like, this will outperform investments. I think that is a huge mistake. And I think if anyone is trying to share that message, that would be, I would just, I would not, I would not lean into that. Life insurance is more of a place to protect, grow, and use your money. And so if I could, I'll just take a step back to understand I'm a big framework person. And then I'll end. I'll answer the question at the end. So we take a step back, write these two words down, wealth and efficiency, right? Wealth and efficiency. When I was at the bank, I had very much this epiphany of like, I want to help people become wealth efficient. Well, number one, how do we define wealth? Because we're better wealth. If you don't know what wealth is, and you're here to want to become wealthier, that's kind of weird, isn't it? A lot of people, there's a lot of books, there's a lot of people that are watching YouTube videos, reading, journaling, but sometimes we're not defining what is the thing that we actually want. So can I, who has a definition of wealth? I just want to hear from a couple of you. How would you define wealth? Yes, financial freedom, great. Just shout them out. Resources, cash flow, doing things on your own time, liquidity. There's... Yeah, the health. There's no wrong answer. Let me ask you this. There are people out there that trump us all in this room on many of those metrics. I'll take Warren Buffett, for example. He's well in his 90s. He's worth over $100 billion. And yet, Carlton and myself wouldn't even think twice about trading places with him. I would go out on a limb and say majority of people in this room would not trade places with one of the worlds on paper. Richest man. What does that tell you? That tells you, number one, we do a really bad job at prioritizing our priorities because we don't feel like 100 billion. I don't feel like 100 billionaire, but what we're saying is we value our life more than 100 billion dollars. That's a wake-up call. That for me is like, I don't need to put cold water on my face with, you know, that's a wake-up call. That's a wake-up call. And I try to remind myself of that every day. So our definition of wealth, and you may want to write this down, is intentional living. The beautiful thing about that is Carlton's intentional life is different than mine. And every single one of you have a different metric for intentional living. But my encouragement would be define what intentional living looks like. We don't have time for that today. Maybe I'll come back sometime. We'll do like an intentional living mini workshop. But then the second thing is... So intentional living is the metric. So the beautiful thing is no matter what I say about anything or anyone else on this stage, don't let that trump or take the place of what intentional life looks like for you. It should always enhance you showing up more powerfully and living more intentionally. Number one, efficiency. How do we define efficiency? Efficiency is removing any friction to get to your desired result. Well, what is your desired result? Hopefully it's intentional living. You get really clear about your desired result is intentional living. I live in Nashville, Tennessee. I flew in late last night to get here. I didn't drive. I didn't walk. I flew because that was the most efficient way to get to this destination. The beautiful thing about tax strategies and working with many of the people in this room is what they're doing is they're helping remove friction to live more intentionally for you all. That is why you're attracted to this room. That's why you guys are taking notes and showing up so powerfully. And so that was the framework of I want to help people identify their intentional life and then remove as much friction to get to that. So where is life in... how does life insurance come in? Life insurance is not an investment. It's not going to be the end result that you should go for. But as I've learned about utility and giving your dollars more than one job, how many people in this room have a smartphone? Better question, how many of you do not have a smartphone? You have a dumb phone or don't have a phone at all? There's always one. Okay, welcome to be a hip room. I talked to some older people that are like, I have a flip phone and it's a great example. Why do we have a smartphone? It's efficient. Now let me ask you this, is your smartphone an investment? Yes. Okay, I'm gonna push back on that. Yes. When was the last time you looked at a statement? What rate of return does your phone give you? But it was a real quick yes. And here's what I want to say is we can't think about not living without this. The amount of jobs that this does is my alarm clock, my sound machine. It gets me to point A to point B with Uber and Lyft. I'm able to call, I'm able to text, I'm able to be on all social medias. I'm able to run our business off this device. I can't imagine not living with this. Everyone has this because it gives us more utility. The point and the epiphany that I had around life insurance, and this is not anything new for me, but it was like, stop thinking about it as the end result. And I believe if people understood the power of life insurance, they would look at it more of like a foundational, why I have my cell phone. It should be at the foundation because I believe it gives you so many jobs. It gives your dollar so many jobs. And if you understand all those jobs and how they stack up, you would be more efficient, and I believe you would live more intentionally. And if that's not the case, you shouldn't do it. But that was like the epiphany that I had. I wasn't able to articulate it like that at 21, but I knew that there was something. And then over the last many years, we've been developing that message. And I have a baby YouTube channel compared to this man. Can we give Carlton a round of applause for a million, 1 million subscribers? The impact of that is incredible. Nice to see you guys. I'm on my way. I'm on my way. And so it's an honor to be here. So what are those elements that give your dollar more than one utility? What would you say? So imagine me drawing a picture of a stick figure. That's one of the only things I can draw, by the way. So a stick figure. We'll put some muscles on it to make it, okay, Carlton, okay? A strong stick figure. And the question I have is, think of person A versus person B. What most people are doing. is, and I'll just say most people in this room, most people are making money and they might be doing tax strategies and doing other things which are great. They have cash and they're either spending it or they're saving it. We call it consumption. Consumption is anytime you overpay the government. Consumption is anything that's the cost of living your life and then saving it is something where you're setting aside. What most people are doing with the savings, that's what we focus on. That's what we focus on. Tax strategies should come first. It would be a mistake to go right into products and how I maximize my savings if you're overpaying the government. You all are in the right place, but once you're maximizing saving money on tax, then it's like, okay, where am I saving and how am I investing? What most people are doing is they're saving their money into some type of checking savings account and then immediately taking that money and putting it into real estate properties, the market, crypto, you name it, investing in your business. All of those things will get the best rate of return. A majority of people here are business owners, I would believe, or very, very highly compensated W-2. And what that tells me is you are your greatest asset. You are your number one asset. Your ability to operate, period, is the reason you're in this room. Don't ever devalue that, okay? So those are the type of investments. All that we're doing when it comes to life insurance is we are just adding that in between as a portion of your assets, not every dollar. but a portion of your assets saying, what if we could save into life insurance? What if we could immediately protect my family? What if I could continue to have liquidity? What if I could have turtle-like growth rate? I mean, we'll get into growth rate in a second. It's not going to blow your socks off, but better than a high-yield savings account over time. And I can utilize that capital with a built-in, like a home equity, think of it like a built-in loan function that I could use capital to what? To invest in things that are great. that create cash flow, that help me live more intentionally, that appreciate. And so what you can essentially do is protect your family, create, there's other benefits like creditor protection, there's a lot of other benefits that I can get, and I have the ability to invest in what I want to invest in, which I'm a big fan of businesses and investing in your development first and foremost, and then diversifying in other things when you feel like you're maximizing the cash flow from creating value. Caleb, you made a very important point. I teach people how to save money in life insurance. Talk about how some people can save money in life insurance and some people aren't saving money in life insurance. Yeah, I mean, majority of people, when you think of life insurance, you actually think of death. And if that's the case, if you're buying life insurance, there's a lot of people that buy term insurance. I'm a fan of term insurance. Actually, we own convertibleterm.com because I'm a fan of a certain, like, getting life insurance with options. So I'm a fan of insurance, but term insurance is an expense. that you don't want to use, okay? You don't, when you pay your term insurance, it's not like when you pay your car insurance, you're like, I want to get my money's worth, I need to crash my car. You don't want to die, okay? So that is an expense. When we're talking about life insurance, the thing when we attract a lot of people to us, all they're merely looking at is a better place to store and use their money. So what we're doing is we're reverse engineering. the life insurance contract and maximizing the cash. So how do we do that? Life insurance is a contract first and foremost. That's all it is. Not all contracts are carried equal. Life insurance is a contract between you and an insurance company. So the first thing that we need to pick is the right insurance company. There's probably 15 insurance companies out there out of the hundreds and thousands of insurance companies that you could work with that you should only do, you should work with. They need to be heavily regulated. They need to have strong financials. They need to have a strong track record. And I like the fact that they're mutual, meaning that as a policy owner, you're part owner of the company. So picking the right company is important. But the second thing, and I would say is almost more important, is you've got to make sure that that contract is optimizing the outcome that you want. You want to write that down. Optimized outcomes is another thing that we really drill in on. And the outcome that a lot of people come to us, if you want... permanent life insurance, usually the outcome is either an estate planning. So you have a ton of, you don't want to, you know, you have a trust and you want to make sure that you're properly funding that trust. Estate planning is an outcome. The other outcome is you want to maximize cash. And so we'll talk about maximizing cash because I believe that is the thing that most people are coming to us. If you want to maximize cash, you want to make sure that you're paying as little money to the insurance companies for the... insurance aspect and you want to put as much money in for the cash aspect. And so what we do is you overfund and there's a lot of different fund strategies for that. But our goal is to get as little death benefit as possible for the amount of money that we can put in. So it's a ratio. And we get really creative with actually adding some term riders and PUA riders. And I might be going over some of your heads, but at the end of the day, we're like, we are obsessed with how do we take this contract and we optimize the outcome. of storing and using cash. And as a result, you, I mean, just straight up, like you make, we make a lot less money, probably one-tenth of what someone would make by setting up a traditional or typical life insurance policy. The reason we're good with it is we have clients in all 50 states, and that's our brand. But it's not that all life insurance is bad. It's just if you're going to do this, and you're going to optimize for cash, make sure that you're setting it up to optimize cash. Don't get an middle of the road type of policy. And so that maybe was a long answer for a short question. No, that was a great answer. Why do you think insurance companies allow you to do this? They allow you to bring down the death benefit in order to push more cash in. Why is that something that they allow? Yeah, that's a great question. When insurance first got started, there was none of this innovation. There was like typical permanent life insurance. And then there was what's called a, back in the day, people were able to put a ton of money in to a one time. It was called a single pay life insurance policy. You could put like a million dollars into life insurance and it was like it grows all tax free and it would be like no death benefit. It would just be like this like true tax loophole. And then I think somebody was bragging about it and put it in the newspaper. And then Congress was like, wait a second, this is like, are you telling me that once you save a dollar, you can put this thing in and it grows tax deferred, you can use it tax free and you get it. it gets passed on income tax-free to the next generation. Like that's what essentially can happen when you set this up properly and you're doing it and it's seeming like an investment. And so they're like, no, we're gonna call that a modified endowment contract. So everyone that did it was grandfathered in, but going forward, you can't put all this money one time and have it look like this. So it needs to be insurance because we'll give these tax benefits to insurance, but this looks like an investment. And so insurance companies got creative and they're like, okay, well, what we're gonna do is we're going to figure out ways to get enough insurance to be able to check the box of the tax benefits, but we're going to optimize this for cash value. So you remember when I was talking about term, term insurance is cheap. Well, a lot of what these companies will do is they'll do some type of internal term insurance inside the policy to artificially bump up the death benefit to check the box of this is insurance, but it's the cheapest way to do that. And then it blends down over time. Again, super technical, but he asked the question, and that is the answer to how how these things develop from a standpoint of getting creative. And again, not all companies are created equal. And within the companies, you would be amazed. There's hundreds and thousands of different ways to structure policies, and that's not an over-exaggeration. And so it does get a little bit technical, but there's a lot of moving pieces. But when done right, it can be a very powerful asset. Okay. So there's term, there's whole life, and there's the ability to build cash inside of the insurance policy. Now, we hear this term of borrowing against your policy? Are you even borrowing against your policy? Is that the proper way to say it? Explain to us how the proper terminology exists in the insurance space. Well, I love this because he used the right language and that never happens. Okay. What, how many of you have heard of the banking on yourself and seen videos, infinite banking and all that stuff. And what a lot of times people will say is you can get rich by buying cars. So let me break this down. What they're saying, and it's not true, but this is what they're saying they're saying Fund your money into life insurance. A lot of times they want you to put all your money, which I do not recommend. Put all your money into life insurance, and then what you should do is borrow from yourself, buy things that, you know, may or may not be an asset. A lot of times they're not using it as an asset. And then pay yourself back. And now you're paying yourself interest and blah, blah, blah. And so they're really overcomplicating things, number one. And it sounds good on paper. And is it a half-truth? Yes, it's a half-truth because... your life insurance is still getting you the benefit. But really, we need to separate this into two equations. Equation number one is, do you have life insurance and is that a benefit for you long term? Yes or no? Yes. Okay, done. And if I'm going to use my money or if I'm going to use capital, I need to make sure that the activity over here is a plus to my balance sheet, not a negative. And instead of taking my own money, which you're not taking your own money, you're borrowing against your own money with the insurance company, like a HELOC, a built-in loan. And there's actually many banks out there that will give you the ability to loan against your cash value as well. And so instead of taking my money, I'm loaning against it. And the reason I can get such great terms is life insurance is the most boring, stable asset, period. So I can get very good rates, high loan-to-value ratio, and I don't have to even have to pay that loan back. especially if it's with the insurance company, because the insurance company has a liability called my death. And so when I die, whether I have cash value or not, they're just going to pay the death benefit minus the outstanding loan. And so you're not loaning from yourself, you're loaning against the cash value. And the only reason that makes sense is if your activity of what you're doing with that cash value is greater. I don't care right now what's happening over here, and we'll talk about growth in a second. Your policy is getting you all those benefits. It's doing that regardless. A lot of infinite banking people want to essentially be like, your money's going over here, and then you get to make bad decisions over here, and you're still okay because this thing is happening. Okay, but wouldn't you rather make good decisions over here? And then you essentially have a dollar that's protecting your family, growing tax deferred, can be used tax-free, can be passed on income tax-free, has different creditor protections, is safe, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and gives me the ability to buy things. like real estate, invest in business, partnerships, crypto, not investment advice over here. But the idea is I can essentially take a dollar and give my dollar many jobs, going back to the cell phone example. And those, the people that get it, the banks, corporations, wealthy clients, like when they get it, it's like, okay, this is not a get rich quick thing. This is a, I can protect my family. I can do a great things with estate planning, but I don't have to say see ya for the next 30, 40 years of that capital. So the opportunity cost of using money while it's benefiting you now. just not now and in the future is kind of the unlock from a standpoint of what we're working with. So you can borrow from the value of the cash value, the cash value of your life insurance policy. And the goal would be to invest in something that can give you a positive ROI. Correct. So what do you see most people borrowing from their policies to go then invest in? And then what happens to the assets that they're borrowing from? Is there uninterrupted compounding? Yes. And you can you explain what uninterrupted compounding means? Yes. So let's talk about the uninterrupted compounding first. Okay, so In a life insurance policy, one of the questions that we'll get is, what's the rate of return of life insurance? So another way of answering that is we look at what's called the internal rate of return. This is after everything, commissions, cost of insurance, this is the actual rate of return of the policy. So I want to be very clear, when I answer this question, I'm not factoring in all the other benefits that you're getting with life insurance. I'm literally just comparing this to a savings account. Fair? So we can't compare it to a savings account because it gives you all these other benefits. Right now I'm just comparing it to a savings account. An internal rate of return of a life insurance policy, and I am just going to talk about whole life for now. There's other policies that potentially could create a greater upside, but we'll go whole life insurance for right now. The internal rate of return over a long period of time, like 20 plus years, will be anywhere from like 3.5% to like 5.5%. So we'll say 4.5% to be in the middle. 4.5% internal rate of return year on year. No one's excited about that. Right, like high-yield savings accounts right now are around that, but like over time, life insurance will outperform high-yield savings accounts, and if interest rates stay this, then just increase my numbers that I gave you, okay? So four and a half percent, what like long-term growth rest of your life, but it's a tax-free four and a half percent. So in a high-yield savings account, you guys know that you have to pay ordinary income tax on that. So if you factor in, and I love California for these examples, right? If you have to factor in California plus state taxes. Now that 4.5% might be around 6%. You get where I'm getting that math? And then when you're starting to add buy term and invest a difference, well, if you buy term, that's money that you're no longer able to save. So if you factor that in, the cost of buying term insurance, now it's bumping up to 7%, 8%. And then if you factor in any other fees, so I'm not saying life insurance is getting get at you an 8% or 9% return. It's not. Well, when you factor in a high-yield savings account and you factor in other things like death benefits and alternative fees, whole life insurance, very boring old whole life insurance, gives you a pretty great rate of return, and it gives you the ability to do that and be able to hit home runs at the same time. Does that make sense? Does that concept make sense? And so what was your second question? Uninterrupted compounding. So you're... They're that, that. four to five percent internal rate of return is going to grow to the day that you die. And there are very smart people out there, Ernst & Young, PhDs, like, and what they're saying is they're literally just looking at life insurance as a better bond. When you look at bonds and you look at whole life insurance, like, it would be hard long term to say, yeah, I like bonds better than whole life. Because whole life gives you bond-like returns, better tax efficiency, a permanent death benefit and a lot of other benefits. And so. there are many people out there that are just like fund life insurance, have this as a bond portion of your portfolio and have better income. And the, the reason they like it is there, a lot of times we get more conservative when we get older and you're literally building in your volatility buffer into your, into your portfolio. And so whether you do it that way or whether you do it something like Carlton and I was putting money in, our dollars are literally going to grow to the day that we die. And when we pass on our families and our trust and our foundations, are going to get a leverage benefit of not just our uninterrupted compounding growth, but they're going to get a higher number getting paid on to the next generation. And so uninterrupted compounding is, can I make a decision today that will literally grow and benefit me to the day that I die, regardless of how I live my life? I could be a train wreck, but that life insurance contract will guarantee certain things to happen. Yeah. And to simplify that, for those of you guys that are wondering, when you borrow from your policy or borrow from the value against your policy, The uninterrupted compounding means is that the money is never actually touched in your policy, it continues to grow. And I think that's probably one of the many reasons why I love life insurance as an end asset. That being said, it's also an asset that can be utilized for estate planning. So can you talk a little bit about how people have utilized setting up life insurance to cover estate taxes after they've... Yeah, I mean, there's... At the end of the day, I won't comment on special trust strategies on how to avoid estate planning. taxes in general, but if you are, if you are in that, if you are have 10, 15 million, like if you are anywhere close, potentially paying estate taxes, the, one of the best things that you can do is get somebody in your world that can help navigate that for you. Okay. So with that, the estate tax thing is off the table. Cause hopefully anyone that has a state tax problem in this room will work with someone and not have an estate tax problem. Then the next question is, OK, if you pass on income tax-wise, and life insurance is income tax-free. That's one of the benefits of life insurance. It passes on income tax-free. And so there are many people that may not need all of their money. They may not need all of their money. And so whether you need access to all your money or not, life insurance is just a leverage tool to take a dollar and leverage and amplify that dollar at an unknown time. And that's what many people have used life insurance, even if they're not using it for the... use case scenario of using your money and growing it and reinvesting it. They're literally just like, I want life insurance. I want to turn my $50 million or $5 million into 17. with no risk. Hey guys, I just want to interrupt real quick. If you're watching this and have an index universal life policy, a whole life policy, have any type of insurance policy in general. And you're like, I want to know if I'm on the right track. I want to know if this is set up properly. We at better wealth want to help you. We want to give you a free policy analysis and show you, are you on the right track? Is there some things that you potentially could be doing better? And so we have a link down below that you will have access to. We would encourage you if you have a policy and you want to see if you're on the right track. Check that out. And if you're someone that's watching this and you're like, I want to talk to someone, maybe setting up a policy for myself or I have questions, we would love to serve you. You can also see a link to have a call with someone on our team. Back to the episode. And so there are many of our clients that care less because when you get to that net worth, you don't necessarily care about using all of your dollars. You want to take a portion of your portfolio and amplify it to the next generation. And life insurance, I mean, the Rockefeller family is probably the best example of this. I'm not endorsing. what the Rockefellers have done over the last 100 plus years in politics. What I am telling you is every generation is getting wealthier and wealthier. How do you think that is? It's trust and life insurance. When every kid is born, they get life insurance that gets put on them. It's owned by the trust, and every generation it cycles back in, and that's a way for them to keep money in the family, but ultimately make sure that every generation is wealthier and wealthier. And there's many... many wealthy families that fall apart after three generations because this proper planning is not the case. So I don't know if I answered that question as articulately as maybe you're looking for one. Well, I think we're now curious, have you put those structures in place for you? Absolutely. My baby girl, Vivian, has a life insurance policy, and we got a life insurance policy on her a month after she was born. And what I plan on doing, and we could talk about some fun case studies, but... That is going to be, and I'm a fan of Ross. She also has a Roth. Like, there's other things, because she's a model in our business. But that's, I won't, I'll get, that's not in my, not tax advice, not tax advice. But at the end of the day, this life insurance policy, even on a baby, has early cash value. I'm the owner of it. I'm the owner of that policy. And as my baby girl grows, her need. for money is going to increase. That's what I've been told, right? And so whether it's college, whether it's a car, whether it's a business, whether it's her home, like this is going to be her banking system that she's going to have capital to use. And one of these, I will transfer the policy over to her, maybe not when she turns 18, but the goal is to transfer that policy over to her. But I want to start teaching her, number one, there's no such thing as free money. Because even if you pay cash for something, you're disrespecting. the value of compound interest. When you pay cash for a car, great, but you just gave up what that dollars could earn you the rest of your life. Life insurance makes it a lot harder to disrespect the value of the dollar because when you use capital, there's built-in cost to that, which is actually, there's built-in cost to everything. Sometimes you just see it, sometimes you don't. And so what I want to be able to do is teach our family those principles. And once I maximize life insurance on myself, which I'm very close to doing. The next policy that I'm going to purchase is actually on my dad. Now, hear me out here. This is not morbid. My dad will die most likely before me. And I can buy life insurance on my dad and control the cash. So I can control the cash of that policy. But then I can become the beneficiary. And when he passes away, that tax-free death benefit will get paid into our portfolio kind of deal. And so... If you do three generations and keep those three generations, you don't have to be the Rockefellers and be multi-billionaires. You can ensure that each generation is set up. Now, the last thing I'll say is, if you want to do it and want to make sure that wealth lives beyond you, you have to do trust planning because you can have the best intentions. And I've seen people have the best intentions, and it still falls apart with all the right things because sometimes people don't value money if they've not. worked for it. And so again, there's cool things that you can do, but I would highly recommend working with somebody who could help structure that. Yeah, I love that. And I set up a life insurance policy for my daughter as well. I love it. And I know some of you guys are probably thinking, well, why a life insurance policy when you do a 529 plan? I know that probably crossed some of your guys' minds. And you have to think about what Caleb said in that response. Whether my daughter needs to pay for tuition, a house, whatever, I have cash value that I can borrow from. Your 529 plan is strictly for education. Strictly for education. So if you want to be limited, make limited decisions. Or you can make strategic decisions. You can have a 529 plan, a Roth IRA, plus have, you know, the life insurance policies, what I'm doing for my daughter. But the reason why I like the 529 plan still is because the IRS updated the guidelines. If we don't utilize those tuitions, we can roll whatever we don't utilize over into a Roth IRA for our children, right? Maybe they don't use all the tuition. Maybe they just decide not to go to college because, I don't know, they've become AI, become millionaires in high school or something. I don't know, but I would love for them to be able to roll over the funds that I was putting in that 529 plan into a Roth IRA so they have money growing tax-free. Guys, this has been incredible. Can we give a huge round of applause for Kayla Williams? Absolutely incredible.
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