Ep 217: Does Long Term Care Insurance Make Sense with Blake & Rod from Money Insights

It can still make sense to have, you know, individual be an owner or at least be the insured on their own policy to tap into, you know, the death benefit if something were to happen. It can, it can be a benefit, but then that way to get that, that, you know, essentially the long term care benefit on both spouses as well.

Welcome to the Next Level Income show where it's our goal to take your income, your investments and your life to the next level. I'm your host, Chris Larsen. If you haven't yet, get a copy of our book for free, free at our website, nextlevelincome.com. that's www.nextlevelincome.com. just click on the book link and I'll even send you a copy if you put your address in. On TODAY show, we have Blake Grogan and Ron Zabriski. Blake is a wealth strategist whose role primarily involves interacting with current and prospective clients of Money Insights. He has been in the financial services industry for 8 years, primarily working with maximum overfunded life insurance strategies. Blake graduated from Gross City College with a bachelor's in entrepreneurship and he resides in Michigan with his wife and three children. And his free time enjoys playing golf and Michigan State athletics. Rod is the president of Money Insights, working directly with clients and the team to create an enjoyable environment for all. He has worked in financial services since 2009 after a decade of working in small businesses for others. He holds an MBA with an emphasis in entrepreneurship as well as an undergraduate degree in marketing communications. Rod's married to his wife Jodi and they have seven amazing children. And today, both Rod Blake as well as myself are going to be talking about the various strategies that we personally employ with, with Money Insights as well as answering some questions that a lot of listeners have had about long term care insurance and how it can blend in with the strategies that we are using today. Blake and Rod, welcome back to the show.

Thanks, Chris. Glad to be here.

Yeah. Yeah. Great to have you here. So we're going to be tackling a topic that I've been getting a lot lately, which is long term care. And it, it can be very confusing because it, it's, it's complex and you know, there's a lot of different pieces and parts to this. And as, as the three of us were this topic, I thought it would be good to do an overview first of, of the strategy that I have at the core of my financial plan, which is, you know, cash value life insurance. You know, Blake, I know you work with, you know, a lot of our, our clients on our investment optimizer approach. And you guys have both been on the podcast before. But if, if you guys don't mind, just give a quick overview. And Blake, if you want to go first, just a, a little bit about your background and what you guys do at Money Insights, that'd be great.

Yeah, sure. So, you know, at Money Insights, we do a couple things. We help educate people on various types of alternative investments. You know, a lot of the things that Next Level Income is doing. And then one of the strategies that we'll plug into that we call the Investment optimizer, which is using, as you mentioned, high cash value life insurance, basically as a replacement of your opportunity fund for those type of investments. So you're not replacing the investing that you would do. You're just basically optimizing how money flows in and out of your account. So, you know, very briefly, I know you have webinar on your website that people can go watch more details. But very briefly, if you're saving up for, let's say a real estate syndication or a car wash and you have to put a large lump sum into those, typically four people are using that strategy. They're just building up money in a bank account because it's safe, it's liquid, but it's just not doing a whole lot for you in between those deals.

Right.

You're not earning much, there's no tax advantages. So that's where we're using the investment optimizer strategy, using a high cash value life insurance policy to store your money before you go and invest in those things. So you're going to get the same safety and liquidity, but a higher rate of return. And then a death benefit comes along with it. And then there's some other benefits that we'll jump into here in this podcast. Then the ability to leverage that into it and into the investments, have your money working for you in a couple places at the same time, but just a better way to flow your money in and out of deals.

Yeah. And you know, Rod, I started working with, with you and Christian at Money Insights, and this was before Blake came on board on the team a few years ago. And the reason is, I've told the story a couple times on the podcast in previous episodes, is that my wife and I started our policies before my first son, Ethan was born. He's 14 now. So, you know, we're talking about 15 years ago and we, I was looking for options for 529 plans. You know, I was like, well, I don't know, if I love 529 plans, I'm not a huge fan of qualified plans for, for multiple reasons. But, you know, for example, it's like, let's say you have a kid that, you know, grows up and like my friend's son wants to do an H Vac apprenticeship and have his own H Vac business or, you know, electrician or that sort of thing. Well, maybe, maybe he's not going to use his 529 plan, you know, but that money could be used to start a business if it was in, for instance, a life insurance policy. The other thing I'm not a huge fan of in the qualified plans is that you have limited investment options. And, you know, when you have great cash cash flow options like, you know, we do here in the real estate space, it's nice to have access to those. But I started these policies with the very simple idea of just having a guaranteed amount of money for my son for college. And then I realized that I could use the cash value for other options for building spec houses like my wife and I did, and then invested in syndications and even starting your own syndications as my partner I did in 2016. And you know, as I started doing this, I had a call Gez about eight years ago with my agent and he said, man, Chris, I wish everybody was doing this. And I said, wow, why didn't he tell me about this? Why'd I have to learn on my own? And that search led me to Money Insights with, with Christian and you, Rod. So what Blake talked about. If you want to learn more about the investment optimizer approach, specifically check out the banking link on our website. Also, Rod, you wrote a terrific book, which I wrote the little intro a little forward to. If you want a copy of that book which details this strategy as well, send an email to infoxtlevelincome.com infoxtlevelincome.com and just say, please send me a copy of the Money Insights book with your address and we'll get you a copy sent out. But Rod, you mind sharing a little bit about what little listeners will. Will learn if they get a copy of that book in there. And really, you know, why you and Christian, you know, started Money Insights and why you do things the way you do?

Yeah, I'll start with myself personally. So my start to the journey began. I was in college and I dad Poor dad by Robert Kiyosaki. And that just changed my whole mindset, you know, moving forward in life. And the reason is because, like my Family was entrepreneurial. We were the very much the. Go to school, get a good job, you know, create this kind of security on someone else. Right. And then I got my eyes open to, hey, if you're a business owner, you can do things completely different. And from a tax standpoint, controlling your own destiny standpoint.

Yeah.

And then when you invest in alternative assets, real estate, your. Your own and other people's business, all these different things, it's just a completely different way of living life right then. And what the traditional side would teach. I just put Money in your 401k and do all that kind of thing. So, yeah, I was. I was on that path. I wanted to be a business owner. I met up with Christian in 2010, and initially we weren't setting out to start a business, but we were just setting out to help people be more smart financially in their lives. Right. From a life insurance standpoint.

And.

And, you know, I'm kind of preaching the choir here. But yeah, a lot of people hear that, and they're like financials, you know, and wealth building and all this kind of stuff with life insurance. What's that all about? Yeah, but I think what. What it did for us is it allowed. It allowed us to understand the really the nuts and bolts of the life insurance side, how to build it correctly and do it right. So that by the time we then started working with people like yourself who maybe already are in the alternative space, or we meet up with a lot of people who are wanting to get into the alternative investing space, and then we just teach these kind of, I don't know, tips and, and tricks, you know, kind of thing to make it better, like make your invest. Do the same investing, like Blake said, do the exact same thing you're. You're doing and do. We're just going to make it better, by the way that we, you know, optimize it through the investment optimizer.

Yeah, no, I love that. And that's one of the reasons I like working with you and Christian and Blake at Money Insights is that, first off, you guys didn't try to pitch me on something when I first spoke to you, you guys said, hey, this is what you have. This is what you can do to really optimize the policies that you already have. And that impressed me because all the other groups I talked to try to basically sell me or resell me or move my policies over. And I really appreciated that. And I incorporated really all these lessons in. In chapter three. Blake, as you mentioned in the. In my book, which you can also get at the website. So we got a couple books here for you today. But yeah, we, what I use for our Opportunity Fund and Opportunity Fund would be, would be classified as basically where do you put your money in between deals? And Rod, what you said and Blake, what we, what we put together in the webinar at the banking link or nextlevelincome.com forward/banking is the investment optimizer which really taking your investment strategy that you're already doing in cash flowing assets and marrying it to one of these specifically structured life insurance contracts. And what I love about it is we've done this for a lot of clients now, Blake, is that this strategy essentially pays for itself. So you know, we talk about in that webinar how you actually get higher rates of return. And you know, one of the things is, and this is, this is the thing that I really don't like when I have this conversation with individuals that say, oh, you know, this is not a great investment option. It's not an, like, we're not, we're not saying, hey, this is an investment option. This is a, as you kind of talked about, Rod, this is a system of how to flow your money through this. So you have the protection of life insurance, how you have the enhanced benefits from your return perspective, but you also have, you know, these, you know, some of these guarantees that you get with life insurance. And you know, one of the things is whenever I have a conversation with somebody says it doesn't make sense, I say, well, what happens if, you know, you die? It, you know, like my father did when I was five years old. What happens if your kid doesn't go to college, right. And you can't use that 520 plan, 529 plan. What happens if you exceed the, the limits on the estate tax? And you know, oh, well, that's different. Well, that's what we're trying to teach. We're trying to teach people how to be rich and truly live, you know, these lives and, and do that. And one of those things is, is long term care. Now Blake, I know we've talked about this, but like the policies that, that we set up for my wife and I, you know, so maybe we'll talk about kind of three different examples about like, hey, does long term care make sense? You know, kind of a younger individual, maybe like somebody in their middle age and then somebody that's older. Like you mind sharing kind of one of the provisions that, you know, like, I know my policies have them this long term care rider provision and, and how that works as part of a policy because I, my, my bet is a lot of listeners that have these policies, they have this and they don't even realize it.

Yeah. And it's something that we try to hit on, you know, as people are setting these up, that you have this additional benefit. So you know, we are using, with the investment optimizer, we're using whole life insurance which has a permanent death benefit. But because, and you know, maybe we can get into more of some of the struggles that long term care industry has had. Yeah, but, but because we have this permanent death benefit, an insurance company, as soon as we put that policy in force, they are on the hook to pay death benefit. So it's worked out that you can put these riders on the policy which we put on for, for every one of our clients. And, and it's a free rider. But specifically what you're talking about here is what we would call a accelerated death benefit for chronic illness. There's also one for a terminal illness as well.

So let's pause real quick. So you just said something I think is very important. So let's say I go to my, my, my homeowner insurer, insurer, State Farm, and I say, hey, I want to add a rider for, I don't know, like maybe I bought my wife a piece of jewelry for our anniversary. I say, hey, I want to add a rider for this. They're going to say, okay, here's how much it's going to cost. What you just said was that this is a free rider that everybody that sets these policies up gets.

Yeah, that's correct. And you know, one of the issues, I'll just touch on it here with long term care insurance, like you know, traditional, not involved life insurance at all, is that you're paying premiums for often a really long time. You know, if I could set it up on someone, you know, my age, in their 30s now, but you know, depending on what age you are, you're going to be paying into this for a really long time. And I think about 50 of those never actually pay a benefit. Right. So you could be paying for it for years. And even the, you know, in certain situations the premiums could increase as people are getting older. So there's kind of some horror stories out there just because it's, it's a tough market.

And these are specifically long term care policies.

Exactly. Yep, yep. So long term care policies. And that's why some people have, you know, wanted to stay away from. Yes, they want the protection, but it's just a tough. It's a tough product. What, because of that permanent death benefit that we have on these policies. Essentially, what the insurance companies have said is you can put these riders on and we'll attach it for free. So, you know, and we're setting these up primarily to build cash value and invest and things like that. Yes, there's a death benefit that's coming along with it, but there's also this chronic illness rider that's coming along. So basically what. What these riders say is that if you lose two of the six functions of daily living, then you'll qualify to accelerate the death benefit. So basically, they'll pay you a portion of your death benefit before you've passed away. And it's a good deal for the life insurance company because they're. They're going to owe you this money eventually, so they can pay you.

I gotcha. So that's why they do it for free.

Yeah, exactly. So there is the cost to it, but the cost is on the back end. So it, you know, and there's formulas for this. So depending upon your age and when you trigger at 65, let's say you said, I need a hundred thousand dollars, it might cost you $350,000 of death benefit to do that. So 350,000 that your family would have gotten on your death, they're going to give you 100,000 now if you're 85 years old, it might be. They'll give you 100,000 now, and it costs you 150,000 of your death benefit. So the benefit, though, is that time.

Value of money, effectively.

Right, Exactly. Yep. You know, life expectancy is a certain age, and then, you know, based upon what age you need these funds, they're going to give it to you. So the benefit is that we don't actually really pay for it until the back end and when we use it. So it's just a benefit that we get for free when we set these policies up.

Yeah. So, for example, like, let's say you have a $2 million policy, Blake, what you're saying is if. If you can't perform two of those activities of daily living, you would qualify to start drawing that death benefit before that. And it may be really close to dollar for dollar, or if you're earlier on in your life, it may be. It may be less than that.

Yeah, but it's a great. But it's a great option to have. I mean, you might have other as, you know, if you're building up your passive investing, you could have things like that. Having a big liquid bucket that you can tap into for a lump sum can be massive at that time of life.

Yeah, I, so I was just talking to a friend of mine, he's a financial planner, yesterday at my son's lacrosse practice and he was giving the example of a couple. They're, they're older, they're retired, and the husband is going to be going into an assisted living facility. Their current expenses are, you know, around, around a hundred thousand dollars a year. So eight, eight to $9,000 a month and it's going to cost them $5,000. So, you know, if they have one of these policies, which I, I can tell you they don't, unfortunately, but they could draw on that for his $5,000 per month in this scenario. And it's, I got to say, you know, it's, you know, they should have the same rule for our politicians. Right. If you can't perform two activities of daily living, then you have to get to retire. Right. That would be a good. We should have that rider. Can't we do that? I'm just messing around. Hopefully, hopefully people appreciate that that's a joke, but maybe it shouldn't be. So, Rod, again, I think this is, you know, if, if you are looking into these policies, you know, if you, you know, certainly make sure if you have a policy that if this is an option, you take advantage of it. You know, kind of. With, with this being said, Rod, you know, you've been doing this a long time. I'm just going to ask, you know, just the question, does long term care insurance even make sense anymore for people?

Yeah, it's a great question. And the challenge is you asked that question from the consumer side.

Yeah.

And the insurance companies are asking themselves that question from their side because they've had a really difficult time correctly playing it out correctly because like Blake said, if someone buys it when they're, and maybe you're, you know, your friend, if you're in your 40s or 50s, chances are it's going to be decades before you need it. Well, yeah, price of healthcare has gone up dramatically over the last 10, 20, 30 years.

Right.

So if you're, if you're committing to pay that bill, how do you price the premiums correctly so that it makes it palatable for people to buy it and allows you to have the resources you need when it comes time to start paying these bills out for people. So now on the consumer side, it's a challenge, right. You look at the, you say, oh great, do I want to pay whatever 300 bucks a month as a 40 year old, 500 bucks a month as a, as a 40 year, 50 year old. And it just getting higher and higher as you get older. And so you could say, well, when I was 55, it was a good idea to get into it, but now I'm 75 and they keep increasing the premiums. I haven't yet.

Right.

I'm getting closer to the time where I'm more likely to use it, but they're increasing the prices. I mean, what do I do?

Yeah.

So there's just some really inherent challenges with it. And then like Blake said, roughly 50% of people who have the insurance don't ever end up using it. In that sense, it's like any other type of insurance.

Right.

We buy autos, auto insurance, hoping we don't ever use it, but for just in case. Right. Health insurance the same way, homeowners insurance. So in that way it fits in that same category. But man, can you imagine paying hundreds of thousands of dollars over, you know, three or four decades and then just not ever needing it or using it. So just create some inherent challenges.

Yeah. Whereas I mean, I just, just kind of going back to, you know, what Blake was talking about. I mean, if you put that same $500 to work into a life insurance policy, you know, it, that does, you know, like you said, hundreds of thousands of dollars are going to be accessible in multiple different ways for you. And you know, you can actually use it to, you know, through the investment optimizer approach, which just as a reminder, this is. I pulled out a copy of the book here. This is a copy of the book you can get. Again, just shoot us an email at info@next levelincome.com info@next levelincome.com say, please send me a copy of the Money Insights book with your address and we'll send you a copy. And it walks through that strategy or you can check out the webinar at the banking link. So yeah, it's, you know, it's one of those things, Rod, where a lot of people say, oh, just doesn't make sense. There's too many variables out there. You know, what, what do I do? You know, in this scenario? You know what? I guess at what point is it too late to take advantage of this? And you know, from a life insurance perspective, you know, I guess first from a long term care perspective. So let's say you're in your 60s and you're like, hey, I want to, I want to protect my family. From this. Because if, if, if you're a listener, if you're listening today and you don't know the way it works today is if you want to qualify for Medicaid. So if you want the government to pay for your long term care, you basically have to spend down nearly 100% of your assets. Raise it down to $35,000. Is that right?

I think it's 2000.

Is it 2000? I knew it's low. I know it's low. I thought, I forget. Yeah, it's aside from a home, like.

You can keep your home, you can have a car. Right. So there are assets like that that they don't count against it. But man, in terms of like liquid assets, retirement assets, all that kind of stuff, it's really low.

Yeah. So basically you're, the point is you're paying for long term care unless you've, you've basically spent all your liquid assets are given them away, which, you know, that may be an option for some people, but chances are if you're worth several million dollars, you know, you don't want to blow through all that before doing it. So I guess the first question, Rod, is, you know, at what point is it just like, like this long term care doesn't make sense. Like, like almost definitively. Is there any certain scenarios where it just. Yeah. Are you a high income business owner or professional earning 2, 300,000 or even more a year, potentially still feel like you're living paycheck to paycheck? Are you comfortable working until you're 65 or 70 to retire? Or do you want to achieve financial independence and live life on your own terms? You could join myself and Matt4 and learn how we both became financially independent in our early 30s. We'll teach you how to make, keep and grow your money. Teaching you strategies to maximize your earnings, keep your income that you've earned through tax strategy and legal structures and ultimately teach you how to grow it by determining your personal investing strategy as well as teach you how to analyze investments so you can grow your passive income to the point to live life on your own terms. Our coaching clients reliably do this in seven years or less. To learn more, check out our coaching program at nextlevelincome.com forward/coaching. That's nextlevelincome.com forward/ coaching.

Good question.

The.

I mean if you can't over can no longer for it because as with other types of this kind of insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, they're going to underwrite you.

Right?

Right. So they don't want, they don't want to be just taking people on who are to use it. Right. That would be, wouldn't work economically.

Right.

So they're going to underwrite. You still have to be healthy enough to qualify for it.

Right.

But I guess not necessarily an age issue as much as it is. Are you healthy when you're looking for it?

Gotcha.

But did you get to a point where you've, whatever you heart attack or you've had, you have some sort of chronic thing that you're dealing with? Well, they just may not take you on or even if they do, the premiums are just going to be enormous.

Right, that makes sense. Yeah.

That's kind of the practical part of it.

Gotcha. Yeah. So it's, Yeah. I mean at some point when you're like in your, in your 90s, 80, late, like 80s, it's probably not going to make financial sense. Right. Because it's a, it's like as we were talking about Blake, it's a time value of money. It's the. You know what I love about life insurance is it's actuarial. It's just numbers. It's just the law of large numbers. So you know, the life insurance company just looks and says what are your chances based on your age of this occurring and then based on your health etc and doing those things. And what about Rod, from a life insurance perspective, like where, where does it not make sense to. I guess, you know, assuming you use the rider, like is it, is it the same thing? Like you know, based on your qualifications but financial perspective, is there, is there an age that doesn't make sense?

Yeah, I think it's the same thing being able to qualify for it. So we have clients who are obviously getting life insurance policies in their 20s and 30s.

Yeah.

And the primary goal is not long term care. Their primary goal is what we talked about earlier, investment optimizer and, or cash or tax free income in retirement and or death benefit protection for their family and or estate planning. Right. There are a lot of different reasons why someone may get that policy and, and it's just going to carry forward. So then you say okay, well what about people in their 50s or 60s or even 70s? And again as long as they can still qualify for a life insurance policy. And it makes sense to do that probably in other contexts if you're only getting the life insurance policy for the long term care.

Yeah.

It's probably not going to make a lot of sense. Like the premiums you're going to in There. And again, the only reason you would do that is if you said I want someone to get a benefit.

Right.

Even if I don't use this while I'm living. But someone's going to get a death benefit.

Yeah.

And that's part of the thinking then. Great. Yeah, makes sense. Right now let's say someone gets to a point where they either age out because again, once you get into your 70s, it's more difficult to create a life insurance policy that's efficient in, in providing that.

Yeah.

Or you, you kind of. No. Can no longer qualify. Just from a medical standpoint.

Yeah.

There are other options they have, they call asset based or annuity based long term care. And essentially what you're doing then is you're taking a lump sum. Let's just say you take whatever $100,000 that you have sitting in a qualified account somewhere and you move that into one of these hybrid annuity contracts that, that also covers long term care. The kind of benefit you can get is still more, it's more beneficial if you can qualify from an underwriting point. But even if not, if you're not on your deathbed. Right. Basically, then you can qualify for some level of, of long term care benefits so that really people of, of any age can look at it. It's worth considering and looking at it to see, hey, does it make sense to do this? And in that case you're not paying an ongoing premium, you're just dropping a lump sum into this annuity. From, from the standpoint of the growth of the value of the annuity or whatnot, they're not great. Like you might have like a 1% a year growth rate or something on the cash value or on the annuity account. But the point is that there are added benefits for long term care. Same kind of thing. You, you no longer can do any two of the six activities of daily living and, or cognitive impairment and then the, the benefit kicks in. And one thing that I think is important to point out on this long term, one of the other challenges that they have is that they're defining what the benefit is. In other words, how much monthly stipend do you get when you qualify and then secondly, how long does that last?

Right, right.

Yeah. So again, if I'm making a decision today and I'm 49. Right. So I'm not eat it likely for another 30 to 40 years, well, who knows what the costs are going to be when that time comes.

Right.

And so again, that's the beauty of the life insurance. Because if I'M accelerating portion of the death benefit. They're not turning around and saying, hey, here's. Here's the most you can get as a monthly stipend. They're just saying, here's the total that you have access to. You get to decide how you use it.

Ah. And that's. Yeah, and that's what I love. Like, there's, you know, the, the flexibility that these policies have. And they're private contracts, right?

Correct.

But just to underscore one thing you mentioned, Rod, I think, you know, I've had this conversation. We'll kind of give a couple examples here. I had a conversation with a young Gentleman, he's about 35. He's like, I love this strategy. I want to do it. And, you know, I said, well, hey, like what? You know, do you have a family? You know, you married, basically. What is your insurable interest? He goes, I'm not married. I don't have any kids. And I was like, okay. I was like, well, why do you want life insurance? He goes, well, I don't really necessarily want life insurance. I just want to use this strategy. And I said, well, you know, I said, look, I don't, I don't hate to not sell you on this idea, this concept, which I love, but I said, if you don't, if you don't have a beneficiary for it, you know, if you don't have a planned beneficiary, like, why do you really need to pay for it? So look, if you're listening and you know, you're single and you're making a lot of money and you, you don't have, you know, a family or a cause that you want to contribute money to, maybe it doesn't make sense for you, but, you know, certainly when you have that insurable interest, I think that's the question that you should first ask yourself. And then, Blake, we just, we just finished up a couple policies on a couple, and they're both, correct me if I'm wrong, but about 65. And, you know, so just from an age perspective, like, the numbers work well for them at 65. And they also were able to put these long term care riders on their policies as well.

And I think that one thing to add there too is oftentimes we'll, we'll split up the amount that you want to do on both spouses. Right. So it can make sense to have, even if you're like, hey, you know, the primary breadwinner, let's say, and I don't really need insurance. On, on my spouse. For, again, for whatever reason it can still make sense to have, you know, individual be an owner or at least be the insured on their own policy to tap into, you know, the death benefit if something were to happen. It can, it can be a benefit, but then that way to get that, that you know, essentially the long term care benefit on both spouses as well.

Gotcha. Yeah, so that's, that's a great point. You know, it's like, you know, maybe you have a $2 million policy on, on the primary, you know, breadwinners you mentioned, but maybe you're better off doing 1.5 and 500,000 or a million and a million from a, a cost effectiveness perspective but also from a benefit perspective and do that. So you know, I love that, I love that strategy for doing that. That's exactly actually what that with that couple ended up doing. And when you get higher. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Rod.

Yeah, no, I was just going to circle back because you mentioned the, that doesn't, they're not married, they don't have kids, you know, things like that. But we, we actually do write a lot of policies on people like that. And again, it's, it's not because like your, your friends said, it's not because they're looking specifically for the insurance part of it now, but the investment optimizer part of it valuable. But then eventually if, if they live out their dreams, whether they end up getting married or whatever or not. From an estate planning perspective, it's valuable. From this long term care perspective, it's valuable. From a tax free income perspective, it can be valuable. So I guess I would just say don't eliminate yourself just because you don't currently have that immediate income replacement type of need because my family's counting on me kind of thing because a lot of other reasons why someone would want to do it.

I appreciate you saying that because that is one of the things these policies also act a lot like, like a private pension plan where you have, I mean that's, that's why it's one of the reasons it's the base of our, our financial pyramid is that you know, you get, you get that immediate death benefit, but also you have a guaranteed return that converts into a guaranteed amount of income in the future. And I mean we certainly don't say there's any guarantees in, in the real estate space or you know, the stock and you know, bond world. But you know, this is one of the rare instances in the financial universe where, you know, there are guarantees that are out there and doing that. So that's a great point. Especially like, let's say that that gentleman, you know, did have plans to get married, did have plans, you know, to have a family and said, hey, I want to, I want to do this. While the rates are still make a lot of sense, there's still a lot of good reasons for somebody in that category to do it.

Yeah. And in fact, we have a lot of people putting policies on their kids.

Right.

Yeah, even minor kids. As, as a, like, catalyst to, hey, number one, we're going to get you insurance while you, we know you can qualify for it. But, but number two, probably more importantly is I want to teach you the culture, the, the twos of, of what I'm doing in terms of investing. And one of the core pieces is the investment optimizer. And so this is, this has your name on it.

Yeah.

Initially the adult is the owner, of course, but, but eventually you end up passing that on to this child. When they get to a point where you're like, yeah, they, they have this, they, they're going to be responsible with this money, then you pass it on and, and they just carry on that. They basically pass the torch. Carried on.

Yeah, I love that. And hey, the last example I'd like to go through, you just, you just kind of, you mentioned catalyst. You kind of gave me a catalyst for a thought here. You know, Blake, you know, for somebody that, you know, maybe they're, they're, they have a windfall coming up where they're growing their earnings and they say, hey, I'd like to set up one of these policies. And you know, typically they, they work well. You know, when you have, I don't know what's like kind of a minimum amount to set up an investment optimizer strategy from an annualized perspective.

We'll set it up for whatever you want to set aside for investing. But you know, typically that'd be a minimum would be five or ten thousand dollars a year on a, on a low end.

But for somebody that wants to lock in insurance, let's say they're in their 30s and they're like, hey, I'm growing my business. I'm thinking of a specific, you know, couple that, that we've been talking to, you know, that, that are growing a very successful business, they're looking at convertible term. So they're taking out convertible term policies that they can ultimately convert into these permanent whole life policies. Right?

Yeah. And I mean, I'll use myself an example. You know, I've got little Kids, I use the, an optimizer strategy. I have multiple policies set up. But the way that we set them up, we're just going to design them for the least amount of death benefit possible based upon how much we want to put in. So, you know, it's different way of thinking about insurance because we're more focused on the cash benefit. So for that reason, I might only have a, you know, I put it this way, I don't have a death benefit to cover my family if something were to, to happen to me, right. So I'm building up cash there. So what you can do is supplement this with what we call a convertible term policy. So convertible term is, is term insurance. So it's, you know, you might get it for 10, 20, 30 years. You're paying a very low premium, you're not building any cash value, but you get a very high death benefit. So if you're someone who's out there in your 20s or 30s, or you're like, hey, I think my, you know, financial situation is going to change over the next 15, 20 years, it can make a lot of sense to lock in that insurability. Get this convertible term policy in place while you're, while you're healthy now, because what that allows you to do is convert to an investment optimizer style policy or any other permanent life insurance policy that has these benefits that we're talking about without going through underwriting. So for myself, for example, let's say I get diagnosed with cancer next year. Well, I can just, then I can still do this strategy because I have the insurance company on the hook to treat me like I'm a very healthy, you know, guy in my ease, because I have this convertible term, even if I'm on my deathbed, I can start converting these into permanent policies. So that can be a strategy that makes sense if you're young or if you're like, I want to do edgy later or even if you're doing the strategy now, but you want to do it at, you know, bigger numbers down the road. That's where convertible term fits in.

Yeah, and I love what you mentioned. You said, you know, you can, you know, like my wife and I started, you know, with, of two policies. We had another two policies. You had policies over kids. You have convertible terms. You can stack these policies. And so this, this approach is scalable from, from, from all different angles. So I think if you're listening and you're intrigued by any of the topics that we talked about, you know, whether it's the investment optimizer approach I think. For starters check out the webinar at nextlevelincome.com forward/banking or click on the banking link. Get a copy of our book as I mentioned and feel free to send email to infoxtlevelincome.com and just say please send me a copy of the Money Insights book with your address. And then if you are interested in, you know, some of the long term care options that we talked about, Rod, or just seeing how any of this and any of these strategies apply to your specific situation, you can set up a free strategy session with us and just email us at or email me directly. Chris nextlevelincome.com and we can get a strategy session to set up. Talk through your specific circumstance and see what may or may not make sense for you. Ron, always good to see you. Blake, always good to see you as well my friend. Thank you both for taking the time and sharing your wisdom with our audience today.

Thanks Chris.

Hey Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to gift you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome.com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for listening to the podcast. Also please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.