Selling Final Expense Will Ruin Your Life! (Let Me Save You)

So if you're currently selling final expense, this video is my warning to you. For three years, I was selling final expense and involved in that industry. Over the period of that time, I dealt with thousands of dollars in chargebacks. I had an agent stick us with $30,000 of fraudulent debt. And I ultimately learned some of the hardest lessons that I've ever learned in my entire life. I'm making this video because I want you to understand the real issues and problems and what is your reality will be if you spend time selling this product. All right, so let me give you my background, how I got into the industry, and I'll just kind of tell you the story all the way throughout. And hopefully this saves you a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, gets you to a path where you can make much more money, much quicker, much faster, and much easier. Okay, so. And this is coming from somebody who used to make YouTube content about selling final expense, right? So I got in the industry back in 2021 and I was recruited to a free lead final expense model where basically they would send out these mailers, right? Direct mailers. And the whole marketing idea was send this back for a free Walmart gift card, right? So they get the stack of mailers, send them all out, and then they would get the mailers. We'd take them, we'd go buy a bunch of little Walmart gift cards. We'd load up five bucks on each of them and we'd go out and knock doors. Okay. And essentially what that became is we would drive from coast to mountains in North Carolina. There's a hundred counties exactly in North Carolina. We would go and sell all across the state, right? It was me, my current business partner, Julian, you can see him on the channel, selling insurance, me and him. And then we had a bunch of our friends that were also doing it. So it was almost like I was like 19, 20 at the time. And so it was like a little insurance frat, basically. Like that was my college experience. And it was a good time. Saw a lot of crazy things, had some. Some very interesting experiences. But what I realized is after doing this for nearly a year, my. I had only made around like $26,000 in take home. Okay. And to give you guys a little bit of background, prior to this, I had had a E commerce business where I basically sold things online. I did, it did drop shipping, right? And I had like a successful store. I was making $30,000 a month as an 18 year old. So I was used to making a good income, right. And so I Did this, like, I had some, some money on the side, so I was able to kind of like float it. But a lot of my friends went broke during that time period, right? We were just getting drowned in chargebacks. I was writing over $20,000 a month, but after paying for gift cards, paying for gas expenses, everything, and then the chargebacks, I didn't really make any money whatsoever. All right, so essentially what happened is my business partner and I, we decided, hey, like, I don't think this free lead, final expense thing makes sense. We're going to leave, right? So we got out, we left the imo. They ended up holding our contracts for.

The year. We couldn't sell. We couldn't sell. What we were going to do is go sell Medicare, but they locked us out of the Medicare business for about 12 months. We were basically like dead in the water. So what we did is we went and we said, okay, like one of the big problems with this whole agency we were at is, is because they were sending out gift cards, like gift card mailers. Basically a bait and switch. We said, okay, cool, what if we can go and figure out how to generate better leads? So we set off to do that, right in the time that our contracts were held. So we, we found a couple agents, we started testing a bunch of things and like, we learned pretty quickly, like, what the best strategies were to generate highly qualified, high intent leads. And the majority of what we focused on for that period of time was doing it for specifically final expense. That business ended up taking off. We had a ton of agents hitting us up, asking us what to do, showing them all these different things with lead generation, etc. And that's ultimately the business that I run currently, Advanced digital marketing, right?

So ran that business since about 2022. And what I started to realize is like, a lot of my clients, they'd get a bunch of leads. The marketing was, was fantastic. They were getting great cost per lead, but everyone just had the same problem, right? Like all of these agents, they would sell a bunch of business and then all of a sudden they would get a bunch of chargebacks and then they would come to us and say, like, hey, I think it's the leads. It's like, no, I mean, we're literally saying this is life insurance. Click here to learn more and get a policy, right? Like, it was about. It was basically as clear in terms of marketing as you could be. There was no bait and switch. There was no targeting broke people. Like, it was literally, this is like, get a final expense policy, right? I'VE looked at a ton of the other marketing. It was not the marketing. And consistently, for months and months and months, what would happen is we would get someone that would come in, they would sell a bunch of policies, and then after about two months, the chargebacks would start hitting and they would fail out of the business, right? And this kept happening for months and months and months, right? And this is coming from someone who was doing it on the marketing side. So then we decided, okay, cool, why don't we just start selling ourselves, right? Like, let's go back to. This is about a year after starting the marketing company that we have now. We said, cool, we're going to go back and we're just going to sell our. Sell, like, sell these leads ourselves. So Julian, my business partner, I was doing all the marketing and he would go and he would close deals on the leads, right? So we very quickly got him to selling 30, $40,000 a month. And in the short term, we, we didn't have a ton of chargebacks, right? It was like 30k a month, 40k a month, et cetera. Probably like 10 to 20% of the business would charge back in like the first month. But what started to happen is, like, the remaining.

People would start to charge back from two months ago, three months ago. And next thing we knew, like, we were basically funding the next batch of leads every single time. We were generating leads on Facebook for like five, six bucks a pop. So the margin was as good as it could possibly be. Okay, it was as good as it could possibly be. And net per month, we were netting after expenses around 15 to 20k per month, selling 30 or 40k after chargebacks, leads, expenses, everything.

But the problem was like, Julian was working like 50, 60 hours a week, just like grinding on the phone, styling all day long just to do that. Okay? Just to do what we were doing. And that was with our cost per lead at like $5 or $6. So we're like, okay, cool. You know, if we're netting 10, 15, 20 on a good month, like from you doing this, why don't we recruit and bring on other agents? Let's build a agency of final expense agents, right? So we did that. We started recruiting a bunch of people. That's where we got really, really good at recruiting. Like, we recruited 554 people that applied to join our agency in a matter of four months. We obviously didn't hire all those people, but they did all apply. So at this point, he's doing 20, 30 grand a month.

In AP or more like 30 to 40, actually, if I'm being honest. So we bring out a few more people, they start selling. And I'm noticing the same pattern, right? People come in.

They grind hard for two to three months. All of a sudden, they either get burned out or they get a bunch of chargebacks and then they leave. And that just kept happening with the top producers at our agency. What I was doing, like, both Julian and I were working 60, 70 hours a week from managing the agents, recruiting people, doing the marketing, doing the sales, training all these people. And we scaled the agency up to. To over a hundred grand a month in AP in, like, three months, right? Like, we. All of the things that you should do to have a successful business, we did those, right? We got up to 100 grand a month within 85 days. But the one problem remained, we were still barely making any money. Like, at that point in my business, I was pulling out around $3,000 a month and Julian was pulling around $3,000 a month. It's not because we didn't want to pay ourselves more. It's because after all of that business, even we sold 100 grand a month. This was a free lead program. So we were paying for the leads, paying for their dialers, etc. Even after all of that, our net after chargebacks and everything was just so low. Okay, that's what I want you guys to realize is, like, as somebody who has came on YouTube and talked about, like, the success of the agency, it was a successful agency in terms of production. But when you're selling final expense, like, what they don't tell you is the chargebacks are always horrible. Anyone that's telling you the chargebacks are not horrible is lying to you. They are lying to you. Okay? Like, the best retention rate on final expense I have ever seen is like 75, which means every policy you write.

One out of four is charging back.

That's terrible for any other business. Nobody would tolerate those numbers. All right? Nobody would tolerate those numbers. So after running this free lead program for a few months, we decided to shut it off. And essentially, I still hadn't learned my lesson then, right? I still had not learned my lesson then. So we decided, all right, here's what we're gonna do instead. We're going to build a brokerage, right? That's not free leads. We're going to run people's ads for them, specifically for final expense. I don't know why I was still on this. We're going to run their ads for them. They're just going to pay Us for the marketing and then we're going to generate the leads for them and then we'll just earn a percentage of the override. Right? Like a normal agency. Except we were going to also have a marketing company that would run all the ads so the individual agents could get low cost leads. Right?

And so we started recruiting people, we started kind of building that up.

And the same pattern kept happening. Right? This is what you'll realize, look at any agency, you will not find one final expense agent that is at the top of the leaderboard for more than a year. I guarantee that they will all burn out or they will all get slammed by chargebacks. It happens every single time. The only person who wins is the agency owner who's doing the churn and burn or they're selling leads, okay? That's the only way it works. I've seen the ins and outs. I know it. I'm not throwing anybody under the bus. But this is the reality of what happens, okay? And I'm saying this because I want you to avoid losing three years of your life to final expense. Okay? So the story continues. More producers come in and leave. More producers come in and leave after just a few months. That's what happens every time. Because people like, it's such a grind for what it is. You can make, don't get me wrong, you can make six figures selling final expense, but you will have no freedom and you will hate your life. Guaranteed. Guaranteed. Okay? So anyway, we continue to scale this brokerage thing. Bring on more agents. Bring on more agents. And one day, a few months down the line, we get an email, right? Actually, it wasn't an email. We get a fat deposit in our bank account. Fat, right? Like $11,000 on an override. I was like, whoa, who wrote a bunch of business? What's going on? Right? So we look into it. It's all from aig. Like, okay, what's going on? All from aig. So we call aig, turns out some agent, some scumbag from months prior that was at our Freely program when we had, that had gone out and written $40,000 in fraudulent business.

And ran off to Brazil. $40,000 in fraudulent business and ran off to Brazil. Meaning that me and Julian had to eat all of that debt.

That he had. He had accrued and he had earned all the fraud business. We have to eat that. Meaning that when you total up the amount of money that I have personally made from selling final expense with the free lead agency.

With.

When I was working at the free lead agent, when I was working at the free lead agency. And then when I had my own free lead agency, a massive portion of the money that we actually made was wiped out by the $40,000 roll up. Right? A massive portion. And so this basically led me to learn to, to learn one of the most important lessons in business. Right. And that is that the quality of your business is going to be determined by the quality of your customer. A lot of these guys that like recruit agents and tell them to sell final expense, they'll brag about how you can make money selling to anybody. That's cool. But you shouldn't do that. Like it's not, there's not bragging rights to be able to make money selling to people that are like poor and desolate. That's not like you shouldn't be bragging about that. In my opinion.

It's just fundamentally a bad business model. You are relying upon people to make consistent monthly payments when they have very like their income to expense ratio is horrendous. Right. And I'll explain what I think people should do instead in just a moment. But like when you go and you serve better clients and then you go back and you think about like what final expense actually is, like you're haggling people over $30 a month. Like when you, when you're in that, when you're in that for so long, it starts to almost like change the way you view money. Which if you want to make a lot of money in this industry, like you need to, your mindset is very important. And when you talk to people all day that are worried about $50 a month and like there's such a scarcity mindset. There's it like reprograms the way that you think. And I think it really does a lot of harm for your financial well being, in my opinion, personally. So.

To summarize.

Nobody will sell final expense for years on end and consistently be at the top leaderboard. Okay. They burn out every time. Every time. Okay.

The other piece as well. I'm not saying you can't make money selling final expense. You can, but you will constantly be on a hamster wheel chasing your quality of like, it's like you play whack a mole, right? Like you, you sell one policy and then you move to the next one and then this one pops up and you gotta like whack it down again. And so you're constantly chasing people to get them back on the books. And I'm not saying you can't make money in it, but it's not the best way to make money in this industry. There's no argument. Nobody can convince me that that is the best way to make money because I've done it, right? Like, I've done it. I've tried it out, in and out. The second that I stopped selling final expense, and the second that we stopped doing marketing for final expense, I'm telling you guys, ladies and gentlemen, no exaggeration, our income 4x'd. 4x'd, right? So you can't tell me it was a skill issue, because the second we stopped doing it, my income 4x'd.

So if you're stuck in the final expense grind and you're like, they're like, there's. There's no way that this is what the industry is all about. Like, there's no way that this is how all these guys are making all this money. You're freaking right? Like, that's. That's true. Don't believe the bs.

Like, they put agents on that when they're new because it's simple. It's not a bad place to cut your teeth, but you have to have an exit strategy or you'll end up like me and you'll waste four years of your life. Granted, I view it as business boot camp because I got really good at business selling final expense and like, doing marketing for people that sell final expense. Because if you're selling final expense, you're not making that much money, which means that you don't have that much money to pay me. So I had to get really, really, really good at generating leads.

So that's what we did. And when we took that same, like, the same skill set that we have, the sales skill set, the lead generation skill set, the marketing skill set, et cetera, and literally just started serving people who are serving better people right now. The only way that you can get me and my team to run your ads and generate leads for you is if you're an agency owner or you're selling annuities or selling advanced markets like Iuls or Infinite Banking, that's the only way. Because you can close one policy legit. If you've. If you sold filing expense for a while, what I'm about to tell you is gonna blow your mind. I have a client right now who's working on closing one policy, and the commission on that policy is $371,000 from one deal.

Most final expense agents will never, ever make that in a year. All right? And the last thing I will leave you with, I know all of the people who do final expense. I've talked to all of the guys who are top final expense producers. They all have money problems and I'm not saying that to expose anyone because I'm not going to name any names. There's some people that are in the final expense space that I have a lot of respect for and a lot of love for. But all the producers, the agents.

They write a lot of business, but they don't make a lot of money.

It's true. It's 100% true. So my warning to you, if you're new to the business, start on final expense. There's nothing wrong with starting there, but have an exit strategy. Start learning about how annuities work. Start learning about how Iuls work. Stop. Start learning about how cash value whole life insurance works. Like they'll people. It's called advanced markets and it makes it sound all complicated. Just read a book. Read a couple books. There's some great books on them. Read power of zero. Read becoming your own banker. Right? I don't know if. Read some Tom Hagna stuff on annuities like educate yourself, develop your skill set. Because I'm telling you, if you're in that side of the business, it's so much more rewarding. You deal with higher quality clients, you make so much more money per policy. Another one of our clients, 416k in annuity in one month. First month, using our, our marketing. If you look at the money on that, let's just say he's at an 8% commission on his annuities. Okay.

$416,000 times 0.08. That's $33,000 in commissions that he would have netted in one month. Two policies. All right, if you do 33K and AP with final expense, you're going to need a week vacation because you're going to have had grinded your face off. So hopefully I've made myself very clear on my opinions. Hopefully I can save you a lot of years and a lot of heartache because literally the second I stopped and got out of that side of the business, forex. I'm not talking about forex trading. I'm talking, I'm talking about 1 times, 2 times, 3 times, 4x what I was making. So.

Do it that way. You will.