One Product Doesn't Make you a Fiduciary!

Hello, Chad. Owen, with retirement realized, got a little bit of mood lighting going on in the back. It's sun setting right now. Heading back for my last appointment for the day. I want to share a situation that happened with me and, man, it's been a little bit of time since last time I talked with you guys, but I've gotten a lot of feedback about how these vlogs help you because that's really what. What it comes down to. I just want to help make our industry better. I want people to succeed. I want them to continue to grow more and more. And I ran into a situation today. I've actually had two and a half weeks without a sale. A little frustrating. I don't like going a week without a sale, let alone two weeks, let alone almost three weeks. And I go to one of my last appointments of the week, second to last appointment, and I finally get a sale. Not a big one, 110,000. Not a real big one. But still, to me, it's sale. So I'm happy with that. And I go through the whole process. Everything's great. He wants to move forward. He's asking me, what do we need to do. We start filling out the paperwork, and I go to find out where the money's from, which I already knew. He already told me it was in variable accounts. I asked him multiple times, isn't it an annuity? No. Is it mutual funds? Yes. And so we find out, paperwork's filled out, and I asked for the statement, and it turns out it was a variable annuity. And I'm like, okay, no problem. We can still move forward with this. But I'm looking at the statement, and in the statement, or the actual. The year to date statement, it shows he has an income account value. Excuse me, apologize. A death benefit amount farther than the bonus would have covered. And I think it's important for us to understand, obviously, when it comes down to suitability or ethics and integrity. I mean, I don't need suitability to monitor my business. It's my ethics and integrity. I want to make sure I'm doing the right thing for this client. So the Death benefit was 120,000. Doll, 29,000. The actual account value was 109,000. I'm like, man, you know what? This product we're using right now, it's not going to work. It's not going to be best for you. Now, remember, I've seen people do this before where they tell the client, you know what, Just go ahead and surrender the policy and actually just get the Money for the policy, have it deposited into your check, into your checking account because it was non qualified money. And don't worry, I'll come back and you can write a check for it. That is so wrong and so unethical. It's unbelievable. I've seen that so many times. So I was saying, you know what? We just can't do that, guys. We got it. In our industry, we've got to make sure we're doing the right thing for our clients. We wonder why we have watchdogs trying to monitor what we do. It's because we got a lot of people trying to do things they're not supposed to be doing. But anyway, so we go through this whole process and we. I said, we can't do this. And you could tell he's really, really bummed. And it's funny because he had me autograph my book. He's been listening to my radio show for a long. So, Tim, I'm kind of like a celebrity. And he's, man, I'm real sorry, didn't mean to waste your time. I said, hey, it's not a problem. So I'm driving back. We're leaving the. I left the house and I'm thinking, you know what? I know I can't do a traditional bonus annuity from the standpoint of ever meeting the death benefit, but is there a product out there that I could get that death benefit up higher? In other words, more than what he had, or at least really, really close to it? Of course, with a little bit of. I'm like, man, you know, I know there is. I remembered a product that does that. So I called him back and I say, hey, I found a product. We can get your death benefit right where it is right now, and we can get you out of the risk of the variable annuity. And we don't have any fees on the product. And it turned out to be great. I mean, I felt like I accomplished something for him that he really wanted to have done. He didn't want to be in the variable annuity anymore. Now, of course, I didn't recommend whether he should or shouldn't be in that. That was his decision. He said he didn't want to deal with market volatility. He didn't like the high fees, therefore he didn't like the variable annuity. But I was able to supply and meet that need that he had, that concern that he had. But let me say this. I'm saying all this for one particular reason. I train agent after agent after agent, and all I hear is, I say, hey, what companies, what products do you sell? Oh, I do X company or I do Y company. And I'm like, wait a second, what other companies do you do? Oh, I might do this one over here. So do you know all the different companies and the products that are out there and they're like, no, I don't. I only sell one or two companies. I said, now let's go to a side note of this. We're all supposed to be fiduciaries right now. Which of course if this district court upholds, then we don't need to worry about this anymore. But let's just say we call ourselves fiduciaries. How are we truly a fiduciary if we're only carrying a few products? How are we truly a fiduciary if we don't know what's best for them? If we're not using the right product, if we're only saying, hey, this one product meets all needs. And this comes from another client that I actually met with today. And this guy gets up in this seminar and he goes, our product gives a 20% bonus and there's no fee. And if you ever hear of any sort of 1% fee, you better run. Well, number one, as a fiduciary, you're not allowed to recommend a product until you know if it's better for them or not. Number two, there's no one product that never meets all people's needs. So are you really doing the best for the client by only using one or two products? That's why technically the term fiduciary drives me up a wall. Because person from ABC bank or ABC Financial Company that they're a captive agent for. How can you truly say you're acting in the best interest of the client when you have to report or, or do what your employer tells you to do first? You're not. Your best interest isn't to the client. Your best interest is to keeping your job. And if you're a captive agent, which I'm not a big fan of captive agents, I, I think you need to be able to have the flexibility of picking what's products. The best and most captive. Captive agen do not have something that meets most people's needs. I mean, they might have one or two really good products, but there's so many different circumstances. So if I would have known what product was best, if I would have had the.

Library of products I have available, then I never would have been able to help this client and I would have went Away him feeling defeated because I didn't meet the need that he thought I could meet because circumstances change. So I'm just saying this for a couple things. Number one, make sure you don't falsify any sort of document or make up anything so you can pass suitability. That's just wrong. This is what gets our industry in trouble. Number two, if you have a knowledge that you just right off the top of your head, you know all these different products, I went off and I drove away and I thought about a little bit because it was a significant difference. So I had to think about, okay, in my doing the math, make sure I read up, made sure the product did exactly what it says it did. I was like, okay, I'll check this out. And when I found that it did, I went back. I don't sit there and go, well, it wasn't part of one of the two or the three companies I use, so you're out of luck. So I apologize. This is a little long today, but I just wanted to cover some things that have kind of been under my skin a little bit. As far as the whole fiduciary thing, don't call yourself a fiduciary unless you're truly acting in the best interest of the client. And make sure you're using all the products that are available out there. That's a toolbox for you. So in other words, you can go to a house and you have a big box of tools, you can fix a lot of problems. It's the same thing when you go to a client and they have all these different issues or concerns. The more products you have, the more product knowledge, the more solutions you can find to their problems. So, guys, I appreciate your time. Once again, if you're, if you're watching this on YouTube, subscribe, hit like comment, ring the bell. Make sure you get notification when my new vlogs come out. And I have some great announcements that are coming up real soon with retirement. Realize we have all sorts of good things that are going on. But I appreciate your time, I appreciate your falling. I appreciate your guys's comments. I see a lot of you on LinkedIn a lot. But once again, don't ever think I take for granted what I get to do and how we get to work together. It can be a lonely world out there. And when we're working together, we make our industry better. When we're being ethical, we make our industry better. So, guys, I appreciate your time. You have a great day. We'll talk to you later. Bye. Bye.