The interview you're about to see was filmed right after our life insurance summit back in June. I had to pull Todd aside immediately after his presentation because it was that powerful for me. Todd Langford is known for being the calculator guy, but in his talk, he started with something deeper, a mindset shift that honestly gave me my biggest aha moment of the entire event. You're going to hear what that aha moment was, as well as dozens of overlooked life insurance benefits. And lastly, we even came up with a brand new idea in the middle of our conversation. that could forever change how we advise our clients in real time. Let's dive in. All right, Todd. So you just got done speaking and normally you're the calculator guy. You're talking about, and we're going through calculators and we're looking at pure math and you tell stories through math, which you still did today. But in your talk, you started with the philosophical conversation, which I've never heard you start with. I think you were fished out of water, which is fun to see. I'll take a little bit of credit for helping you get there. And so what was great, and you said something so profound. You said, and I fall victim to this all the time. When it comes to life insurance, so many times we try to, we throw math at people. Like, for example, like, here's the rate of return. This is how it works. And then we try to get them to understand all the other benefits of life insurance. I do this all the time. I try to get someone to understand the math, like internal rate of return, when you factor in taxes, when you factor in fees, when you factor in cost of insurance, this, and da-da-da-da-da-da. and I feel Like I'm catching up. But I've been doing this for years and years and years. And when you spoke and said that we should reverse that, I'm telling you that was my biggest aha moment of the entire two days. And we've had a ton of great speakers and a ton of takeaways. You saying that reversing the order, starting with the philosophical, then going into numbers was something that I'm gonna take to the bank and hopefully be able to serve more people. Yeah, I'd love to see how it comes out. from your side. But what happens is, I think, is everybody knows that life insurance has a terrible rate of return. So we're challenging our client already when they've got that in their head and they're thinking about their dad who said, don't talk to an insurance agent or their buddy or whoever else it is. And all of a sudden, you're showing them that life insurance actually has a better rate of return. It has a better rate of return and it does all these other things, but your client is in a little bit of a defensive mode. And when you Push that out there, and it's a rate of return. It's a great rate of return, but it can always be beat. Everybody always looks at the perfect scenario on an alternative. If the market continues to go up, it's going to blow this out of the water. Yes, it will. And so now, as an advisor, you're forced to say, yeah, but it has all these other cool things. Well, the client's already in defense mode, so the client's immediately going to say, I never wanted those things. If we do it the other way around and we look at solving problems. Then what it allows us to do is say, well, we have something that'll solve the problem of what happens to your savings during a temporary disability, or what happens if a death occurs, what happens if all these other things occur, and wouldn't it be great if that was solved? And your client agrees to that because they're not under any pressure or anything else, and they can think rationally because they're not having to defend anything, right? Then when you show the rate of return and they say, well, but such and such can beat it. Yeah, but can that also provide all these other things that you agreed were important and solve the problems that you have? That's a whole different conversation. Do you suggest if you're sitting across the table or virtually with a client to mention the benefits of insurance or do not even mention insurance and just talk about outcomes first and get them to agree like, yeah, that would be great. That would be great. That would be great. And then you talk about insurance, guards go up. But you say, okay, it does all this stuff. And the epiphany I had was like, okay, it checks all these boxes. But the big negative is the rate of return, because we've always heard that it's a terrible rate of return. And then when you could show it's like, it actually is not that bad of a rate of return. And you get all the benefits. Is that how you'd go? Exactly. Okay. So talk to me about, summarize some of the benefits that you mentioned. I don't expect you to list all of them. And by the way, if you want the entire PDF, Todd, you are so generous enough to. make that and we'll make sure that there's a link somewhere where you can access that, that what, what you, what you laid out, but like, talk to me about some of the benefits. We're not even talking about rate of return, but talk about some of the benefits that you mentioned that you get while having life insurance. Yeah. And it's not an exhaustive list. It's just, you know, it's a short list that I use most of the time with clients and I'm not going to go through a list with a client. I'm going to, I'm going to look at, okay, what is the client saying these are some pain points. can we solve it with these things that's when i'm going to bring those pieces up or if i look at their the financial picture and see there's some holes in here there's some areas that And then I'll bring it up and say, would it be nice if you had X or Y? And one of the big ones, and I think it's what we forget about when we're looking at investments, and life insurance is not an investment. We need to keep that clear. It's a savings vehicle, right? It's not an investment vehicle. Investments have risk, and life insurance is able to solve that risk problem. So we have a great emergency opportunity fund that actually has a great, great return. because where is everybody else put to have an emergency opportunity fund they're looking at cash they're looking at checking accounts savings accounts that are taxable that you know don't have the death benefit don't have all these other pieces around them and and the problem with that is most people don't analyze that in their rate of return with their investment so as an example i go and get a piece of real estate right um It's supposed to do certain things, but there's some risk there. It might not. We might have a change in the market. Maybe it's temporary, but I need something to get me through that. So the cost of buying real estate is also the cost of having money sit in cash, right? And let's have a life insurance policy to fill that role. So the cash value gets to do that and multiple things. So we get to a process, if we understand the full strategy, of having $1 do the job of multiple different things. And so we can eliminate some other costs. you know, it gets rid of our term costs because now then we don't need term insurance. So that term and opportunity cost, again, an investment or a purchase that we make that we hope to not collect on. Now, isn't that a weird thing? Right. It's an expense we don't want to collect on. And yet we know we need to have it if we're responsible. Right. For the rest of our family members. And so so we've got something now that's multidimensional, as you mentioned, it takes that on during the accumulation process or phase of life. there's a place where we use the life insurance. We can lean on it when we have a better opportunity that comes out. Instant cash. Most of the time, a great opportunity. Why does it come around? Because somebody's short on cash and they need cash. Not when we can get the bank to go through the approval and give us a loan and decide, but right now. And it may be that the bank would loan us the money cheaper, but if it takes a couple of months to get the money, the deal falls through, okay? I can use my life insurance to jump on that opportunity and then refinance it later if that's... you know, beneficial. It's interesting. Are more options, more options I feel are better than less options. Right. Period. It's like if I could have five options or 10 options that included those five and five more, even if the five more don't seem to be valuable, why wouldn't I want that wild card? Why wouldn't I want that opportunity to, because I don't know what the future holds. Do you remember what a couple of the examples you used on stage? Just, just because it's like, I want to... I want to go from the clouds to now more practical. Like what were one of the benefits or one or two benefits that you use? I think one of the bigger ones is kind of interesting because everybody focuses on the cash value, which is great. Because again, it's that emergency opportunity side. But I think the distribution phase is really where the life insurance shines. And that's where a lot of people don't understand the benefit. It's like. okay, this is going to be something I'm going to leave to somebody else. No, what it does, if we understand the whole process, is it unlocks strategies that we otherwise couldn't do during that distribution phase, which allows us to spend more money. And you mentioned options. The greatest thing an advisor can offer to their clients are options because the one thing we absolutely know is 30 years from now, the financial environment is not going to look like it does today. There's going to be differences. And if we lock people into a... set course where it's got to be this way, they're going to be subject to the bad things that happen during those cyclic times. And so if we can get out there in the future and we can look at, hey, now we have a way to unlock a reverse mortgage without disinheriting our family. We have a way to strategically be able to minimize the sequential return risk that happens during the distribution from our market assets. Because when the market's down... If we pull money in a down market, we have locked in the loss. There's no fixing that. So if we have another asset that we can lean on, all of a sudden we can make those market assets perform way better. So the beauty of life insurance with other assets is it makes everything else better. It puts us in the driver's seat so that we're only using those assets when it's the optimal time as far as the financial environment is concerned. The interesting thing is, as a... calculator or a math person, it's hard to sometimes validate options or opportunities. It really is. So for example, like how would you value creditor protection? Every state's a little different. Texas, where you live, better creditor protection than other states. How would you benefit? How would you value safety? How would you value the tax benefit? Like some of these things can actually be valued if you calculate it. But my question would be like, how would you go about about that with clients? Would you just try to get them to, is it a yes or no? Like, is this something like, how do you get them to visualize the... these benefits before you look at the rate of return. Does that question make sense? It does. And that's a difficult thing to put a number on because it's a potential solution for a problem that might not happen. And so it's that safety factor. But safety or certainty is an interesting thing because of the impact that it has. And that impact is if we feel certain, What does that do to our ability to produce? See, that's a total different thing that's outside of that altogether. It's like that changes our ability to produce. You know, I was talking to a long-term friend here at the event, and he said, I had a weird thing happen to me. He said, I just turned 65. And he said, all of a sudden, my disability is gone. My waiver of premium is gone. And what I've realized is. That certainty that I had during the time that it was there is now gone. And so how has that impacted his ability to produce for all these years? It's made him a much better producer as far as producing value for clients across that time frame because he didn't have that load on his mind. I'm going to verbal process something with you in real time. And I want to get your thoughts on this. Imagine if there was a financial solution. It's okay. Imagine if there was a financial solution. that you could take someone's entire financial portfolio and you could kick out a red yellow green on each one of those benefits think about that so it's like okay here let's let's list this might not be compliant at this point but let's list 30 benefits you know life insurance might check 25 out of the 30 okay but but if you have that and let's say life insurance is 25 of your portfolio you'll see how that and so So then imagine, so the rate of return, because right now, most people are making decisions off of one metric, which matters, but we're making it trumping everything. And it's like, would you rather get a higher rate of return and sacrifice 24, 30 other benefits or get slightly less rate of return and get other benefits? It would be kind of a no brainer when you look at it that way visually, but most people are not thinking this way. And so I'm just thinking in real time, how cool would it be if we could analyze someone's financial situation and for them to see in not just numbers, net worth projections, cashflow projections, which I think would be powerful in itself, but like a visually red, yellow, and green and all these other benefits. And I may not care about so-and-so benefit, but I may care about it. And I may be like, I don't like the fact that my portfolio is red. in creditor protection, or I don't like the fact that my portfolio is red when it comes to tax efficiency. So I'm explaining this in real time, but that's something that I'm wondering, if you were to go and visualize that and build that, where would you start? Because it feels a little overwhelming. Hey guys, I just wanted to interrupt real quick. If you're watching this and have an indexed 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. Yeah, I mean, it's tough to think about where, you know, how you value it. But I think what would be interesting is to look at it from the standpoint of maybe statistics. Like, what is the statistical chance of this particular event happening and how well protected are you in here? And so maybe that would be a way because, you know, there's certain things like disability. Where I live, would I get volcano insurance if it was available? No, there's no volcanoes around us. Okay, that'd be silly. Okay, so I would love to have that risk covered, but there's not much risk for it to happen to me. So having that in the metric would be an interesting piece to allow, too. You know, hey, you've got a 30% chance of this happening. Is it worth covering or is the expense too much? But I think one of the issues is people make decisions. before they understand the real cost of things. Right? And so we need to really analyze what is that cost? What is this going to take away from you in the future to protect something today? And, you know, I love Vince's line that I talked about up there. You know, if you... If you ask your clients, an overwhelming majority of them would say, I would rather have 100% chance of getting to 95% of my target well than a possibility of getting to 100% and a strong likelihood of way, way less. And I remember that in my head all the time because I think that's an important thing to get across. But what's interesting about that statement, and I think it lets people kind of open up their mind and think about it, the reality is we can have. All that protection, all that certainty without it costing us anything to do it, if it's strategically put in place. And that's the difference. It's crazy. You could have higher cash flow in the future, better protection, and a lot more green boxes checked. Why in the world? It's motivating for me as we talk because it's like you and I know this and yet. we're in the minority and we're the fringe. And I mean, we've talked, you know, offline about what do we need to do to get a strong community of advisors. So here's my ask. And I don't do this often. Obviously, if you're interested in truth concepts, there'll be a link down below. If you're someone that is an advisor or a financial professional and wants to do like the right thing for your clients and wants to go that extra mile. please comment below. My email is caleb at betterwealth.com. Let us know, you know, Todd, you're working on some cool things. We're having conversations and I think we always want to figure out how we can up-level and I really appreciate your diligence and commitment to up-leveling. Is there anything else that you want to say before? Yeah, there's kind of one last thing. I think something that people ask about a lot of times, if they don't ask it, they're thinking it. It's like, Why do you always look at life insurance first? That's a good question. If you can do all these other things. And the reason is, over, for me, more than 35 years in the industry, what I've seen is because of all those things a life insurance policy has the capability of doing, since it's not just a one-dimensional tool, it solves a lot of problems for most people. Now, there needs to be a deeper analysis into the client situation, find out, does this fit? But in my experience... I've never seen where it didn't fit because it does all of those things. And so why, if it's the best thing out there to solve the problem, why would I start by looking at something that doesn't have that kind of credibility? Right? Yeah, I love it. Todd, thank you for being here. Thank you for being a great support. Thank you for being a pioneer in our space. Thank you for having me. Thank you in advance for the calculators and conversations and stories that you're going to be working in real time to make our lives easier and our clients' lives and the people that serve us. their lives that have more clarity. Thank you. Thank you.

‍