How Much I Made My First Year As A Life Insurance Agent

What is going on? Ladies and gentlemen, in this video, I'm going to be sharing with you how much money I made in my first year of selling life insurance, specifically final expense life insurance. Now I'm going to be breaking down basically like kind of like what I was doing. And then at the end of the video I'm going to reveal how much I actually made and then sharing some of the mistakes and lessons that I learned along the way so that you can avoid making those mistakes, learn from my lessons and hopefully make a lot more than I made in my first year. Now, if we haven't met yet, if you don't know who I am, my name is Tim Shulker. I run the Life Insurance Sales channel, which is what you're on right now, where we basically put out a bunch of free content to help insurance agents like yourself make six figures over the phone. I also have a company called Advanced Agent Marketing where we provide, you know, coaching and marketing services to help agents generate their own leads, you know, and implement automations into their business so that they can make more money. So that's kind of what I do full time and then I like to put out content on YouTube as well. So that's who I am. I got into the industry about three and a half years ago back in 2021. So I was a wee old, you know, 19 year old kid just getting into the business and I didn't really know much at all, right. So I got recruited into the business with actually five of my friends.

Some of them I was doing like solar door to door with and some of them like I had known from high school and I actually had like a house that I was living in with a few of my friends. So we were all kind of, you know, hanging out. My business partner, like my business, the guy who's my business partner now, his name's Julian, he was working as waiter at a fine dining restaurant and this guy came in, recruited him into the business, was like, hey, you know, I think you'd be great at this insurance thing, which you know, is pretty much how everybody gets into the business. So somebody recruited him in and then he basically told us about the opportunity and like all of us were like, okay, let's do it. We jumped on board and we started doing this. And so basically the model I got recruited to, it was a free lead model, direct mail, face to face. So they would send out all of these mailers, the mailers would advertise a free Walmart gift card. People would send it back in, you Know, usually just wanting the gift card and actually wanting life insurance. And then we would take these mailers and drive anywhere from an hour and a half to two and a half hours away from our house to work an area. So we would get like one county at a time, and we would go and knock doors in that county and call leads and set appointments and then drive out there and run those appointments. So we would usually be in an area for like a week. And then each week we would be like, in a brand new different city or a brand new different area. And that is essentially what I did. That was my, you know, my experience getting into the business. And so, to be honest with you, I had a pretty, pretty fun time doing it. We worked a lot, but it was like, it was one of those things where, like, when you're all doing the same thing, right? Like, all of my friends were doing this. So we all just had, like, crazy stories and wild experiences to tell. But what happened after a few months is like, we, you know, we weren't really making much money, right? And so I had quite a bit of savings that I was sitting on. So for me, like, you know, what would happen is, like, I would get. I would get a pretty decent check one week, and then it would be like a few weeks until I would get something else. Because what was happening is we were just getting absolutely slaughtered with chargebacks, right? And so the money, like, when you first get into it, you get all these, like, big checks up front. And then over time, they just started to kind of like, thin out and thin out and thin out as my earlier business was charging back. And so, you know, a lot of my friends ended up dropping out of the business. A lot of them ended up failing. But me and Julian, who's my business partner, you may have seen him on other, you know, YouTube videos on this channel. We were the two that stuck around. So we ended up doing, you know, about a full year of this particular model, selling insurance face to face in the field, going, you know, balls to the wall, all at it. And at the end of the year.

On my W2, or not W2, 1099, after paying for gas, because we were driving from place to place to place to place to place, right? After paying for gas, after paying for food, because I was on the. On the road all of the time, and gift cards, because with the leads that we were getting, we had to pay for the gift card to give to people. I ended up making around $26,000 for the year. So working, I made $26,000, my first year selling insurance. You may be watching this and you're saying, like, that sounds absolutely terrible. And you heard 100%, right? It is very terrible. And I think the reason that I ended up making so little money is because of these mistakes that I'm about to go over with you, right? So I have some notes here on the other screen. That's why I'm looking over there.

Before I actually dive into the mistakes I made, a lot of people, like, this is a very common thing in our industry. And just like, overall with people, everyone likes to be the victim of their own story, right? So, for example, people will have gone through a situation like, similar to what I did, where we, you know, put in all this work and you just didn't see results and you didn't see success. And they'll say something like, oh, I got scammed by my imo, right? Or, you know, they screwed me over. But in all reality, like, I have a big problem when people say that because they take all of the responsibility off of themselves, and they also take all of the power to go to do something differently off of themselves, right? So I didn't get scammed. I didn't get screwed over. I made poor decisions, and then I let the people around me convince me to continue to do that. But at the end of the day, like, I was smart enough to know that what I was doing didn't make sense, but I just kept doing it because I wanted to see it through. And so don't say, like, if you've had a bad experience at an IMO or you joined an agency, that's not great. Don't say you got scammed because all of a sudden you have no power, no control over that, right? Like, I worked for a whole year and made 26 grand, and the year before that, I had made multiple six figures. So, like, I didn't get scammed, though. I just. I made a mistake. So these are the mistakes that I made, right? Basically, you know, the biggest lesson that I've learned over my time in business and my time in this industry is, is that your time is your most valuable asset, right? Your time is by far your most valuable asset. And so everyone has the same amount of it in a day. But the only difference between you and somebody richer than you or somebody more successful than you is how they spend their time, right? And so when you're spending your time driving and door knocking and doing all of these, like, things that make your day less efficient, right? Or watching Netflix or drinking alcohol or Smoking weed or whatever bad habit you have, you're spending your time in a bad. A bad way, right? And so the fundamentally, the model that I was working in was not an efficient model and it was a poor use of my time, right? I was basically, you know, half of my day was already gone just from driving, right? Two and a half hours to the area, two and a half hours back. That's already five hours of driving, plus all the time between in each individual house driving, right? And now I'm spending money on gas. So when you're getting into this business, you need to look at your day and figure out how you can allocate most of your day towards dollar producing activities. And this is why I think if I would have gotten into this business doing telesales, I would have made a lot more money in my first year, right? Would have made a lot more money my first year. Because fundamentally, telesales is a more efficient business model. You're able to talk to more people, you're able to stay in one spot. You're not spending money on gas. All you have to do is dial. Like if somebody, you know, charges back or they hang up on you. Like, the only thing that you spent was some time on the phone and your. The energy of clicking the dial button with your finger versus if you drive two and a half hours to somebody's house and then they cancel their policy and you spent an hour and a half with them getting everything set up and all this time driving to them, like, that's a lot of sunk costs into that client, right? So fundamentally, like, I was working a business model that didn't make sense and I knew this, but I just kept doing it because I just wanted to see it through and my friends were doing it. Right? The other thing too is your business is literally just a system, right? Fundamentally, every business is a system. So attention or leads is the input and the output is issue paid policies. My system was like the equivalent of driving like a 1980s beater Saturn car. That's like the front bumper is driving off or falling off and the seats are rusted through. It was just a total, like a terrible vehicle, right? My leads were people that wanted a free gift card. My way of selling these people was driving out to their house two and a half hours away. And then I got some policies, but a lot of them charge back, right? And so your business is fundamentally a system. Your leads are the gas that you put into your car. Your car is the model that you use to sell, right? That's like the script, how you're getting in front of these people, how your sales process all that, that's the vehicle, right? And the output, that's just what you're going to get. That's like the, the performance of your system, right? And so when you put in like water into a shitty car, which is what I was doing, you're gonna get bad output, which is why I made 26k. And so basically, like I say all that to basically demonstrate the point that like if you want to make a lot of money selling insurance, you fundamentally number one need to have a high quality like source of leads, like good gasoline to put in your car, right? You need to find a source of quality people that are actually searching for life insurance, right? That's the first step. The second step is like creating your selling system. So this is from getting those leads and how you convert those people into issue paid policies. So what I've learned over the course of time is that the best way to do that is to have like a CRM, use a dialer, have automations that go out that are basically nurturing people so that they'll eventually buy from you. That is fundamentally the best way to do this business, right? And so when you have high quality people going into a high quality system, you get high quality results. When you have low quality people going into a low quality system, you get low quality results, right? And so that like of all of the things that I've learned over the course of, you know, the three and a half years I've been in the business.

Of my first year actually, like selling insurance and barely making any money, that is the biggest thing that it comes down to is good inputs into your system. Good system equals good outputs. So how does this apply to you? Right? Well, if you're just getting into the business, make sure that whatever lead system that you're going to work, or whatever lead system your IMO has, or whatever leads you're gonna buy, they're quality leads. They actually want life insurance and they're serious about the product, right? Number two, make sure that you're actually working an efficient system. You only have so many hours in a day, you only have so many days in a year and realistically you only have so many years on this earth. So make sure that you're using them valuably, right? Don't just, you know, take a list of a bunch of leads and call them with your cell phone and then be like, oh, this business doesn't work, right? Like you, you have to have a efficient way to work your leads an efficient way to work your pipeline so make sure that you get a good selling system and then just spend time and just invest your energy into getting good at this and I promise you you'll make more than 26 grand in a year. So learn from my mistakes. Those would be my biggest takeaways for you. If you want to learn more about how you can generate your own quality leads we have a free course link down below. Just click the first link in the description you can get access to a free course where you know I'll show you how to start generating your own leads as soon as tomorrow and hit the subscribe button for more content like this. And if you want to make more than 26k in a year watch some more of my videos. Go through that free course and I guarantee you that you will see a lot better success than I did. So take care and I'll see you guys in the next video.