Sign New York Banking Agreement Myself

Industry sign banking new york agreement myself

welcome to the money answers show with host jordan goodman whether you are starting out deep into your retirement or somewhere in-between the money answer show has to know how to help you now here's your host - jordan goodman the answer show this is jordan goodman your host my guest this hour is Mark Willis he is the chief executive officer of Lake Growth financial services he's also a certified financial planner and an author of a book called the sixth secret to lifetime financial security welcome to the money at the show mark thanks for having me so let's just do a little brief history of you and and your background leading up to founding this firm and doing this book yeah thank you it's it's a it's quite a while Brian I'll keep it brief for your listeners I was the kind of person that did not think critically about financial advice for many years in fact it wasn't until after graduate school that I even paid attention to my own money and it was only after we left school with six figures in student loan debt with no plan to pay it off that we really realized how deep into the greatest Great Recession we were and so my wife and I we moved to in a very expensive city Chicago and really had no job and no way to pay down that massive student loan problem that we'd built up for ourselves in school so I started working for a CPA firm all of my training had taught me that mutual funds you know buying term investing the rest all of the classically trained financial planning that they gave me was you know a big wake up call when I realized that the CPA I worked for was having to call her clients and say and this is like one of these nationally recognized CPAs okay but she was calling her clients saying I'm sorry I missed her client misses client but I just lost you a third of your life savings so I just lost you half of your life savings you're not going to be able to retire like you thought and some of these folks were 61 62 years old so I was sort of realizing that traditional financial planning was not exactly the the best or even the most efficient way to prepare for a financially secure future so that's a little bit about me in a very quick nutshell there's more to it of course I'm sure so what is different about Lake Growth financial services than traditional financial planning firms so yeah we sit down with folks in an advisory role we sit down and review everything from a high level 30,000 foot view and we believe that you can create a financial future that you can count on without taking a bunch of unnecessary risks I mean where is it written that we have to put all of our money into investments or speculative instruments just to get to the life we want in our future so yeah we work with folks that are interested in creating a stress-free financially sane future and hit their milestones without taking a bunch of unnecessary risk so your chief strategy is called the bank on your self strategy so right and I mean it's been around for a while there's people who've been advocating this it's based around whole life insurance right so most people think of whole life insurance as kind of boring and expensive and you know gonna get get particularly great returns on it what is the misconception about whole life insurance that you think it's it's a much more powerful instrument if used right great so you're right it was a surprise to me when we were going through the Great Recession that whole life insurance policies were already growing and gaining with with interest and in some cases even dividends even as stocks and real estate work just crashing so I had never even heard of that concept or seen that asset class perform and to come to find out it's an over 200 year old financial vehicle so it at least captured my attention now I like many people had a severe bias toward whole life insurance as an asset class and so by looking at it through the lens of my bias I almost didn't look any further I almost turned away and didn't think it was anything worth pursuing I'm glad I didn't and I still don't think you should totally pour every last penny into a dividend paying whole life insurance policy but if it's structured correctly and we can get into this if you'd like if it's structured correctly the policy grows with tremendous cash value accumulation day 1 month 1 year 1 unlike old fashioned whole life insurance that our grandparents may have had these policies have tremendous capital that you can use as a financial management tool right from the start and it doesn't do too poorly when it comes to cash equivalent returns so it's not supposed to keep up with the best years of the stock market you will be bored to tears with your policy in terms of its rate of return however after seeing what's happened to the market even in the last few months losing almost 20 percent and of course in 2008 losing almost half maybe boring is exactly what we need for a part of our portfolio now this is not true for all whole life insurance policies there are some companies that offer what you're talking about this Bank on yourself strategy and some but do not what's the difference between traditional whole life policies and the policies that you're talking about here it's about as different as say Oh a battleship and like a high-powered speedboat they're both in the water they're both the same vehicle the same chassis but we're shrinking down the expenses and the costs and the commissions and the net amount at risk to the insurance company we're really pushing down on the the expensive part of the whole life insurance which is the death benefit and we're choosing instead to flood most of the clients contributions or premium into a specific writer that we use or an option on the policy that's designing it from day one to accumulate cash so it pays no commissions it has very little death benefit relative to the money you're pouring into it it's all cash growth and that's a dividend yielding cash value that's then a part of your contract for the rest of your life so by doing it in designing it that way you just you're you're building it for cash accumulation not so much the death benefit and what kind of rates of return can people expect on these kind of policies right yeah I've seen them as low as three and a half percent I've seen them as high as seven seven and a half and so it's in that ballpark over the last fifty five sixty years or so it's been in that range so it's not ever gonna be twelve fifteen percent like you might get in the best years of the market but it's also importantly it's never gonna lose value when markets crash so it's just a steady predictable accumulation and one more quick mention on the return it is an after-tax return so these policies are you know doing an after tax of four to six percent let's say and it's an after tax after fees return so to compare that let's say - oh maybe like a 401 K which is taxable and does have fees you know you might need to do eight to nine percent depending on your tax bracket just to keep up with the policy in a 401 K let's say what makes the difference between the three and a seven percent returns at the different portfolio the different insurance companies have or it's tied someone to the stock market why would you get you know three versus a several percent or something in between kind of return some of everything you just said there since it's not tied to any market it is based mostly on the profitability of the insurance company so again this is a mutual life insurance company if you know you typically see a little bit higher cash for internal rates of return when the policy is mutually owned as opposed to publicly traded so there are insurance companies out there I don't usually recommend them for this strategy but there are publicly traded insurance companies out there whereas mutual companies Jordan have you know the ability to just basically pass along all the profits to you and me the share the shareholders in other words the policyholders there's nobody else taking a profit off the top in other words another way that this might affect return is just you know your you know the age and health you might be in on the overall the the internal growth mechanisms or the just the size of the death benefit but the main thing to keep in mind is how did the adviser or agent design it if it was designed for death benefit exclusively it's going to grow a lot slower and be closer to that three percent range whereas if it's designed more focusing on the cash value and more modernized for cash accumulation the returns on the cash value especially in the first few years will be much greater and give you an overall IRR that's a lot better over the long term now to do this back in your self strategy it has to be a long term strategy this is not something you put money into in the first year you could take it out because you need for that thing to be compounding how long should you expect put money into it and have it compound before you start borrowing it out great question speaking of borrowing maybe we'll do this here in a little while we can talk about how this can be used as a financing source and increase your overall portfolio yield even further but to your point yeah the policy's cash value is available within 30 days of starting the policy so you put the money in and you know within a month or so it's got cash value you can borrow out I'll give you a quick story my wife and I when we first started our first two policies we took a loan in just a few months after starting our first two policies to pay off one of our student loans so we kind of bought back our debt and in that way we took back some control over the first of what would be many different student loans that we'd pay off with the policy so again we can kind of get into the loan feature and what I think this is really where it's where it shines you know returns are fine but what I want is predictable liquid capital for my purchases my real estate deals paying off old debts that's where this thing really fits I think into a lot of people's portfolios okay but again how long should do it I know you it's available within 30 days but that's not you're typically recommending you're particularly recommending that keep it in there for quite a while before you borrow out so that it has time to accumulate or so what is the typical time period that you think people should plan on having it accumulate before they borrow it out well to be honest actually in in many cases folks in the very first year even in the first few months will use it immediately because when you borrow from the policy it keeps growing with dividends even on the capital you borrowed so I'll tell you a quick story I had a real estate investor who poured in six figures into a policy and in the very first month took a loan against it to buy a new condo rental condo now why would she do that well the power of this is when you borrow from the policy it's gonna continue to pay you a dividend as if you did not borrow the money out and at the same time Jordan she had the condo paying you know appreciating in the neighborhood there and paying a rent check to her and she used that to repay the policy loan so there is really no except just to make sure you're not being foolish with the cash and spending it on a casino or something there's no reason to just let it sit so can sow or inside your cash value for years and years before you use it it's supposed to be a living breathing financial pool of cash and what's the advantage of doing this over say a 401 K which people think of as the most tax-efficient way your money is growing tax deferred for many years inside that okay well it's it comes down to what do we believe about the future of taxes in this country if they are even 1% higher in the future which we all now know at least for 2026 our our existing tax law will expire and we'll go back to higher tax rates in just six years if our 401 K for contributing to those 401 KS with tax deferred dollars don't forget tax deferred does that mean no tax it just means we're postponing it until the future so we're putting our money into a tax deferred instrument letting it grow tax-deferred and then we pay the government whatever they want to charge us when it's come time to retire that to me doesn't feel like freedom it feels like a bank who's lent me some money and they don't know what interest rate they're gonna charge me until it's time to take the money out yeah very good okay we're gonna take a break this is Jordan Goodman of the money answer show my guest this hour is Mark Willis he's the CEO at Lake Growth financial services based in Chicago he is big on the so called banking on yourself strategy his book is called the secret to lifetime financial security and you could find him at his website Lake Growth calm we'll be back after this [Music] we're always talking business talk to an expert 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this is Jordan Goodman your host my guest this hour is Mark Willis he is the chief executive officer at Lake Growth financial services based in Chicago he is a proponent of the bank on yourselff strategy his book is called the secret for two lifetime financial security welcome back to show Marc thank you so we're talking about the difference between this kind of banking yourself using whole life insurance and what people might have heard of which is called index Universal Life Insurance where it's tied to the S&P 500 or some kind of a stock index now what they say about that is that is it goes up to a certain level that's gonna be a limit but like this it doesn't have any lost potential if the market goes down you get a zero in that year so what is the advantage of disadvantage of an IU L compared to the bank on yourself strategy using whole life insurance great question yeah we get this aligned iYou ELLs are a very attractive financial vehicle and it's it's taken I think the attention of many insurance agents and financial planners and myself included so I took a hard look at this and at the end of the day I came away not being impressed in fact I have an episode on our podcast it's called top ten reasons not to own index universal life insurance for you know when when if clients want to dig deeper into this but the main reason why we steer clear of this for our clients his indexed universal life policy is because it's a ticking time bomb of internal costs now there's costs to any insurance product cost for insurance administrative charges are going to be deducted however from the indexed universal life policy every month and imagine having annually renewable term insurance on a policy that lasts into you were 121 years old so Jordan you can imagine every year that cost inside the policy of an indexed universal life policy anyway is gonna get more and more and more expensive the more birthday candles you have on your cake now the index like the sp500 does not always keep up with that ageing body of ours and so at some point and it usually happens around the sixty year old mark or so the policy starts to shrink as the cost of the insurance exceeds it exceeds the growth of the cash and there somewhere around the mid 70s or so we notice folks stop having enough cash in the policy and the insurance policy collapses on itself so when we see this working for our for when we see this working well as if someone's in their 20s and has no intention of keeping it their entire lifetime but we just say let's put it into a whole life policy where the cost don't explode like that and you can design the policy from day one to know what the cash value is going to be and not have to worry about indexing going up down or sideways so the difference is the whole life you lock in the insurance rate at the age at which you get it whereas with the index universal life it's like a term annual renewable term that the cost of the insurance is going up every year that's what you're saying correct I'm looking at one of the tables where it's a cost of insurance for an index universal life company right now and when you're 30 years old per thousand dollars of death benefit that cost is only 12 cents that's not too bad but by age 65 that cost skyrockets to $1.00 88 for the same thousand dollars of death benefit and by age 75 it skyrockets up to five dollars and 33 cents for the same thousand dollars of death benefit so either the index has to be going up just into the stratosphere like the S&P 500 has to be going up until you know and up just tremendously to keep up with this policy where it starts to gobble up cash value to make up for the increasing cost now that's why we stay away from this policy I mean the last ten years the stock market has done very well so maybe it's worked out you would have gotten a you know high rate of return more than you would have had the cost of yeah yeah but you say get a bear market when you get a zero you don't get a negative you get a zero then you're the costing Sheriff keeps going up eating away at the cash value correct yeah just because the index is protected at zero doesn't mean the costs are gonna stay flat on an i UL and so will you stay away from those for those reasons and you know unfortunately you know this is according to The Wall Street Journal and New York Times there's over a dozen lawsuits against index Universal Life companies who have sold these policies so on the the policies that you recommend there are different kinds of whole life insurance providers you like the mutual companies maybe you could name some of the companies that offer policies that do fit the model that you're talking about that will work with your particular strategy sure yeah and and just to be clear you know we don't pick any one company we do work with dozens of insurance companies that meet all of our criteria I'll list a few of the characteristics first they all give some names so these are mutual life insurance companies that have been around for over a hundred years we want to make sure that they've been around through the Great Depression through the Great Recession Jordan you want to make sure too that they've been consecutively paying you and the policyholder dividends without fail for at least a century so that's the kind of financial strength you need to look for you also want to make sure that the policy is whole life insurance dividend paying whole life and you want to make sure that there are paid up additions attached to the policy in the correct amounts so this is where the engineering of the policy gets really important where I'd say definitely check out any advisor that's been trained through Bank on yourself that's why we went through that that process and our firm here took us about three and a half years to do it and I couldn't agree more with the strategies they've trained us in the the next thing I'd say is look for and this is very important I know it's going to sound sort of arcane but look for policy loans that are non direct recognition non direct recognition what that means is the policy has to continue to pay you a full dividend even while you have your loan out on the policy as if you had not taken the loan that gives you the power of letting your money do two things at once there's a lot of great mutual companies out there that will penalize you when you take a loan out and reduce your dividend Houston insurance company do that I mean they don't have the cash to earn a dividend um so how can they pay you on money they don't have to invest yeah great question so it is you are actually using your cash value as collateral for the loan so your collateral is your death benefit essentially it's the safest loan that the insurance company could ever offer and the insurance company keeps enough cash on hand not just for your cash value but your entire death benefit so their general portfolio is large enough you know so that even if you were to take a loan of five hundred grand like we had a client do that early last month to buy a real estate property with cash purchase for five hundred grand within about a week you got it that policy had a several million dollar death benefit so the policy's cash in the general fund of the insurance company is large enough that they don't miss it they continue to pay a dividend not on your cash value but on the death benefit that's how they're able to do that because they've got investments that are fixed income corporate bonds all over the world and the the loans on policies are only a small fraction of what the insurance company is receiving in what would be some of the companies that you'd like to deal with that yeah this criteria so you want to work with the companies in the ways that I just mentioned some of them that you might have heard of some you haven't liked MassMutual New York you want to look at maybe Lafayette life insurance definitely a great company for this strategy Foresters financial they're fraternal benefits Society and so they pay out just like a mutual would security benefit security mutual life insurance of New York these are companies that we tend to lean on but we certainly don't we aren't exclusive to any one company because it's important that we're an independent working for our clients and what kind of Commission's are involved in buying because it's not explicit it's all kind of in there what kind of commissions compared to traditional whole life insurance where what ninety percent of something the first year Freeman can Wells Commission right yeah yeah it's actually I like to compare both the old-fashioned whole life insurance and to typical 1% assets under management costs on mutual funds to and in fact are one of our podcast episodes talks about it in granular detail we have a spreadsheet laying it out and everything so for example for a gentleman who puts a thousand bucks a month into a policy like we would engineer it we typically cut those Commission's by cutting the death benefit down you're able to cut the Commission's down by about fifty to seventy percent and Jordan just to kind of give your listeners an idea here in over a 30-year period if you're putting a thousand bucks a month into a dividend paying whole life Bank on yourself designed policy here the Commission's to the agent is somewhere around six thousand dollars over thirty years if you're putting in a thousand bucks a month over three years similar contributions a thousand bucks a month into some term insurance plus 1% AUM on an investment portfolio if the investment portfolio did about 5% a year the investment advisor is going to make about a hundred and fourteen thousand dollars off of her investment three years over the 30 years so which of those numbers seems fair to you you know six thousand dollars Commission or one hundred and fourteen thousand dollars Commission now we still make you know good living around here but we certainly don't want to take that much off the the clients portfolio if that's good retirement money for somebody and then on the borrowing side what kind of interest rates are typically being charged when people want to borrow against the cash value yeah the insurance companies get to set those typically and you see that before you sign up for the policy and such I have been blown away by the favorable interest provisions on these contracts let me give you a sort of a specific example in just a minute the insurance companies that we typically work with have a five percent simple interest rate and it's compounded only annually in arrears so again let's kind of change that over to English now what that means is simple interest on a loan is when you're charged interest is always better than compound interest charge down alone I mean I mean I wish our mortgages work this way Jordan I wish you know our student loan companies did this to simple interest loans mean you pay your principal first all year long and lower your APR so if we were to kind of just compute this out to a real life example over four years if you took a policy loan at five percent simple interest the over the four year period your real APR and we've done the math on this is about 1.9 percent APR meanwhile you're getting a spread or an arbitrage because your policy is doing much more than that in terms of internal rates of return that's very good and that's much lower than most most policies are five seven percent something like that traditional hole-high policies that's right well and so it's important to remember that these are lines of credit that you control so when banks stop lending in the next downturn whenever that time comes a year 10 years from now whenever it'll be the folks that have that permanent cash that's available for them to take advantage of opportunities to increase their yield in the marketplace and because they don't have to repay the loan on any specific schedule they can wait so back to my example of the lady who bought the condo she just you know she could have waited until she sold that condo five years later to pay off the policy loan there's no required repayment plan it's pretty phenomenal when you think about building some more control into your future and also it's a backstop in case the economy turns down I mean in 2008 there's a big credit crunch and people's credit lines were cut back so really this wouldn't affect you in that case that's right yeah exactly think of it like a HELOC that you get to decide how big your line of credit is for yourself yeah very good we're gonna take another break this is Jordan Goodman of the money answer show my guest this hour is Mark Willis he's the chief executive officer at Lake Growth financial services based in Chicago his book is called the secret to lifetime financial security a website you can find out more about him is Lake Growth calm we'll be back after this [Music] stocks bonds investment opportunities financial news and talk we can help call us now toll-free eight six six four seven two five seven nine zero eight six six four seven two fifty seven ninety voice America Business Network do you or someone you love have a life insurance policy that's no longer needed or not affordable did you know that you can sell your policy for cash your reason for buying life insurance has probably changed thousands of Americans turn to life insurance settlements to help sell their policies they act as your representative getting the highest market offer for you you've got nothing to lose by simply inquiring if you're over 64 with $100,000 or more of life insurance you may already qualify call 877 for 85-66 8284 is--it funding live.com life insurance settlements discover the true value of your life insurance 877 for 85-66 8284 mning relationships to help improve the lives of his listeners [Music] the face of change in the world is increasing exponentially and shows no signs of slowing down leadership is 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so we were talking about this bank on yourself strategy so let's talk about the some of specific uses and how that might be better than doing it in other ways college being a big one people taking a lot of college debt or they use ignore accounts or 529 plans to save for college how can this strategy be better than those as a way of financing college well there's a number of reasons that I have personally put opened up a policy specifically for my daughter she's only coming on three years old now but we will know the guaranteed amount that will be available for her college on the day she's ready to graduate so when you have specific deadline funds like this the whole life policy really puts you in control of your money and of course then once it's ready to go to college and spend to come spend on college funds you know when you use the funds in the policies we've been describing in the previous segment your policy if you take a loan against it will keep on growing as though you hadn't spent it so that's been huge for us and I guess one other thing to keep in mind is that that cash then available to spend again in retirement if you repay the policy loan after you graduate after the kid graduates so one more quick item on this the cash value does not account against you when you apply for federal student aid so many 529 plans your equity in your home your income all of it is calculated on the FAFSA form and the CSS profile that the forms that are required for most college applications funny enough cash value life insurance is one of the few things that does not get reported on these college forms allowing you to store more of your wealth and and look poorer than you maybe really are and get access to bigger grants and scholarships along the way it's more of an ancillary benefit so how what is the benefit of doing this compared to a tax-free 529 plan or a uniform gifts tomatos Act account as a way of building up money for college okay yeah with the up m'as and AG m'as the gift miners aren't those typically put in the minors name once they become aged majority okay I don't know about you and I was 18 I probably wouldn't have spent it all on college maybe maybe a nice car or two right but otherwise you know they're they're tied to the market 529s and most Muslims are tied to things that we cannot access or use or control and once you spend the money in a 529 it's gone for good and if the kid is not interested in going to college or decides to be the next Bill Gates then all that money in that 529 is penalized if you get it out for any other purpose so I've already used the policy that's you know we designed for my daughter for other purposes and hope to help give her to get her to college with with those funds but if she decides to start the nex you know billion-dollar business I'll give her a loan to help her get it started instead of going to college yeah okay you said that you'll know when the child is young you'll know exactly how much cash are you gonna have 18 years from now in the future how do you know that if the difference the rates of return could be anywhere between three and seven percent that would make a big difference on how much cash value has built up many years in the future that's a great clarifying question yeah so before you start your policy you're given a schedule by the insurance company of the guaranteed cash value accumulation every single year for the rest of your life so it's either gonna be you know whatever rate of return it is it's going to be clearly spelled out to you before you sign on the dotted line and say yes I'll take this contract so it's not like it wavers a lot one one year to the next now there is one factor that is not guaranteed and that is the dividend so when I said that I have a guaranteed predictable amount that she'll have at age 18 I'm assuming no dividends on that schedule but if we assume today's dividend rate repeated for you know the next 18 years 15 years then you know that number is variable and it can't change it's just a matter of how much extra profit do we have above the guarantee that that we are promised by the insurance company does that answer your question the guarantee is typically at about a three percent rate what is the guarantee typically yet right yeah you'll find the guarantees built on a schedule of increases it's going to increase on a certain rate every single year and yeah it's sort of underneath the overall return that you get from the dividend and the guarantee so in planning when you plan with the climate what kind of rate of return do you expect with the guarantee plus the dividends over an 18 year time frame I mean it can't be exact but just roughly what are you counting on again you know you might look at it different depending on if you're 75 years old starting one of these or 25 years old starting one of these but you know you could see it in that same range that we described somewhere between four and seven percent depending on how the policy is designed and most importantly to like where interest rates are headed if interest rates stay as low as they've been then you're gonna see a lower end of that spectrum if we start to see interest rates rise like the Fed is has shown us at least in the last few months or so we'll see what happens right with recent policy changes but if interest rates get back to normal levels then the dividend Rises right alongside them so the vast majority of the insurance company investments are in fixed income vehicles whether it be bonds or real estate mortgages things like that then they're not that exposed to the stock market is that right that's right less than 1% of their funds are in any kind of equities so that gives you more predictability that's what you're saying correct yeah and they're holding those bonds to maturity they're not worried as much about reinvestment rate risk as us mere mortals you know they're looking at it as mainly an income stream that they can use to payout their death claims and operating their business and so forth yeah so the other one is real estate so building a portfolio of rental real estate or even buying your own home what's the advantage of using the bank on yourself strategy compared to traditional getting a mortgage and a downpayment sorem well again it's all about where your money lives if you have your money living in a place that you control the environment you win if banks owned the financial environment where your money lives the banks will win it just comes down to something that's simple you know if you've got a big pool of cash for purchasing whether it's your own home or investment properties and you see a property that you believe will you know do the birth strategy well or we'll do the kind of fix and flip where the rental rehabs or the refinancing strategy whatever your strategy might be or heck even just using the policy for your own personal first-time homebuyer down payment if you use your policy to buy that property all of a sudden your money is working in two places at once you know it's it's growing and appreciating hopefully in the home you just purchased or the multifamily you just purchased and it's still earning an arbitrage over inside your policy and you get to tell the policy and the insurance company if and when you ever repay that loan if you never repay the loan and you take it all the way to your grave let's say then the policy death benefit is just reduced by the loan that's outstanding so the insurance company knows they'll be made whole made whole on that policy loan you took all those years ago either you'll pay it back and recycle the money back into the policy to use on your next real estate purchase or you'll you know take it with you to the other side of heaven and they'll they'll net out that loan and give your family the net death benefit yeah and how about funding a business I mean it can be risky a lot of businesses never succeed if you've taken it a loan against your insurance and the business fails you don't have anything is that recommended to borrow gets the policy to fund a business yeah let's talk about two things there you brought up a really good point I want to make sure folks hear me like this is not some magic pill that solves every every ill that we might encounter in life you can still mess these policies up and life still throws you curveballs too so I'll mention two those things that you just brought up there the first the policy can lapse and if you have a bunch of gains in the policy when that policy lapses it'll be taxable on the gains so you want to work with an advisor that's not just you know rip shot giving you financial advice but is looking at it from a competent perspective looking at it holistically which is what we believe we do through our firm it's just why we sit down look over all the moving parts in your financial life before make making any recommendations but on the other side of the equation a business that does go through bankruptcy let's say that you owned a business and you decided hey you know what I'm gonna take a policy loan to help fund my marketing campaign or buy some equipment all of those things are absolutely possible for you and you know I've got clients that do both of those things and many many more but let's say that you did take a loan from your policy and invest it in your business and then the business still turns South you still lost it all and let's say you went through a bankruptcy well the policy itself is in many states anyway protected significantly from creditors and predators that might attach themselves to your bankruptcy proceeding or if you pass away to your estate so generally speaking these policies are in some ways protected from bankruptcy risk and from debt collectors and so forth that's it stays off their radar yeah it's still something you have to consider very carefully before you just take the money and use it for business if the business is gonna work that's right yeah you still need to be a wise business owner and only invest in things that you know that you are sure you're gonna get a good solid return on whether it's your own business or a piece of real estate your podcast that's called the not you average financial podcast tell us a little bit about what kind of topics you cover on there yeah we've had a lot of fun with this strategy in particular it's not all we do here at our firm but we really believe that traditional financial planning as it's been classically trained and what I went through in my certified financial planner designation it it is not the all end-all be-all for folks financial future so we get into what happened to Wall Street's strategies you know we talked about protected income in retirement we look at asking ourselves well what do we want our money to do for us we dig into the history of the 401 K which it's only about what is it it's not even old enough to retire right I think they got it starting 401 k's just started in 1981 or so yeah so you know what is the real return of actual investors in the stock market and surprise it's it's only about three and a half percent over 30 years all these things we dig into on our podcast and this bank on yourself strategy we explore in greater detail so people can find out about that not your average for natural podcast.com correct anywhere we can find find podcasts we try to get it out there yeah thank you very good okay we're gonna take another break this is Jordan Goodman of the money answers show my guest this hour is Mark Willis he's the CEO at Lake Growth financial services and the podcast we just mentioned not your average financial podcast calm his overall website is Lake Growth calm we'll be back after this [Music] from the boardroom to you voice America business Network are you a homeowner tired of making monthly mortgage payments with little progress towards paying down your principal does paying off your home in five to seven years without making larger or more frequent payments sound appealing paying off your home in full than five to seven years is really possible thanks to truth inequities mortgage equity optimization system a money management approach that puts your money to work for you 24/7 if you own a home with some equity have a decent credit score and verifiable income you owe it to yourself to learn more about truth and equities program there's no need to replace your mortgage or refinance in many cases the system works for new home purchases as well as current mortgages your home is your largest investment own it outright in five to seven years call truth inequity eight eight eight two six two five five four o or visit truth in equity com eight eight eight two six two five five four Oh Jordan Goodman is an affiliate he recognizes quality solutions forming relationships to help improve the lives of his listeners business news and discussions are always changing in order to stay ahead of the game sometimes you need to be a follower you can follow the voice America business channel on Twitter at voice AM business again that's at voice a.m. business and stay current you've been listening to the money answers show with Jordan Goodman if you have a question for Jordan or his guests please call us now at eight six six four seven two five seven nine zero that's eight six six four seven two five seven nine zero now back to Jordan welcome back to the money answer show this is Jordan Goodman your coast my guest this hour is Mark Willis he is the CEO at Lake Growth financial services based in Chicago he's an expert in the bank on yourself strategy his website Lake Growth calm welcome back to show Marc thank you for having me so you talked about a difference between return on investment and return and a rate of income as ROI where was the difference between those yeah there was a you know recent study that was done by Morningstar which is just up the street from us here in Chicago it also included one of my former American college professors Wade fowl and David Blanchett some of these folks are PhDs in in financial planning and in economics and I was just floored when they came out with the 4% rule is dead you may have heard some about this yeah the 4% rule was something that came out in the 90s with different a different economic environment to be very honest it's it for your listeners if you don't know the 4% rule was this safe amount of money you could take out of your account and not run out of money during your lifetime so if you had a million dollars in your 401k you could safely so they said take out 40,000 bucks a year taxable of course and that would be what you could live on without running out of money or depleting the principle that did I do a fair summary to the fourth I'm sorry interest rate for a lot lower now than they were back then interest rates and then the beta on the market the volatility is up so we've had some great booming years in the stock market so that helped us some but even so with a 40% equity bond you know 64 40 60 blend they're in retirement they're asking us to only take out 2.8 percent now so again the millionaire lifestyle is you know a million bucks in your 401k take out twenty eight thousand bucks a year pay taxes on and you might be looking at maybe fifteen hundred bucks a month off your 401k deferred to taxes but you have to pay them in retirement when you can afford them less exactly exactly right yeah well not and even taxes aside that seems like a very inefficient withdrawal rate 2.8 percent that seems tremendously small so you're right rate of income matters as much as rate of return or rate of an return on investment because the the rate of income is typically what folks are saving for why are we saving why are we chasing rate of return most of us not all but most of us are trying to get the best income we can have in our lifetime in our retirement and so if the best wallstreet can give us is 2.8 percent of our money you know taking that out safely and predictably and only having a 90 percent chance of winning off 2.8 percent or running out of money well let's find a better place a more efficient place to get a larger withdrawal rate and just so happens life insurance we typically run for our clients about 5% withdrawal rates and can be up to 6 or 7 percent withdrawal rates which is mean is the difference between $28,000 a year from your 401k or 50 to 70 thousand dollars a year tax-free from a life insurance policy yeah so what if somebody has gotten to retirement they're in their 60s they've got a decent amount of cash they have not done this life-insurance policy yet and they are afraid of risk they don't want to put it in CDs where they're gonna earn 1% of something like that can they put a big lump sum in or have like a single premium policy and make this work yes in fact if you have let's say you've got a large chunk in a 401 K and you're like what do I do now you know one of the best ways we describe in in some of our material and episodes that we've done on this is yes you can do a single premium whole life policy dump in you know a certain amount that you feel comfortable doing as a part of your balanced portfolio and use it as what's known as a volatility buffer so in the good years of the stock market go ahead and withdraw money out of the 401k or brokerage account and live on that in the bad years let's hold taking money out of your stocks and instead have two to four years worth of living expenses over in your cash value life insurance that you can pull on for the two to four years of of down years that we might expect your portfolio to experience during your retirement the the problem with most people as their they're gonna go through those two to four years of recession in their retirement years anyway Jordan and if all they have is their equities and their bonds they're gonna have to take money out of their savings they're investing in their portfolio when the markets down which is like the worst time to take money out of your 401k is when the account balance is down it's like double pain right yeah so if you have two to four years or another number if you want more or less than that but if you have two to four years and your cash value policy and hold tight on your investments in the down years just pull from your cash value and then let your portfolio recover you can pull out very nice withdrawal rate off your of your investments much more than 2.8 percent and still have a nice predictable cash for you know the down years of the market as well is that sometimes makes sense to do an annuity or annuitize the cash value have so we have a regular predictable amount is that part of the strategy you can either annuitize it or you can take a combination of loans and withdrawals so for your listeners I I know that they would appreciate some of the differences here the differences really come down to the the safety of never run adding running out of money if you annuitize your cash value Jordan you're exactly right you can take that money out and even if you run out of money you'd never run out f income if you annuitize the cash value now the problem is when you annuitize life insurance or anything your 401k or anything else it generally removes the liquidity of your account whether it's a 401k or a cash value policy so you know some people look at it and say well you know let's do that with some of my money let's let's generate an income off some of this money annuitize it but let's leave the other portion of our portfolio liquid so here's how it works when it comes to income off of these Bank on yourself type policies you can leave the money liquid and take withdrawals of your cost basis and it stays completely tax-free and then when you get to gains you can switch to non-recourse policy loans and also comes the the loans come out income tax free now when you annuitize it generally means you're going to get taxed on some of that money when you keep it in the policy and don't annuitize it it's generally all of it available to you completely tax-free of course under current law right so that's one way you can you know keep out of the IRS --is grasp is not annuitized in the cash value and keeping that policy's income and more of a manual transmission rather than annuitize and moving it to automatic transmission that make sense because the the annuity you're taking it out as income and it's taxable as you're taking it out or is withdrawals whereas the other it's loans and loans are not taxable is that right that's good way to summarize it mm-hmm yeah okay so who is this a good fit forward who is this not a good fit for this whole Bank on your self concept I'll start with who it's not a good fit for we found this just a great fit for lots of folks but there are some people who just do not fit this strategy the first is it still takes saving you know don't look at this as you know you know pulling money out of the death benefit it's the cash value you can loan against not the death benefit so it still means we're living within our means still means we're putting away for our financial future and accumulating wealth eventually of course the dividends will exceed your contributions but it it is still your responsibility to save for yourself so that's what the first if folks are looking for instant leverage for money that's not theirs they'll be disappointed with this strategy also rates of return you know again we've kind of pushed on that some on this episode these policies are never gonna do the best years of the market 12 15 percent is not gonna happen with whole life insurance at least not in these interest rate environments now I'll tell you Jordan in the early 80s they were throwing dividends of 12 15 16 percent on whole life policies but everything else was doing that too if you go you probably remember mortgages were up there too but that's another one it's not gonna thrill you with market gains or terrify you with market losses um it is not some you don't feel like you have to count yourself out if you are too old or if you've had some health issues this strategy still works if you are the owner of a policy you don't necessarily have to be the insured on the policy so you know if that is a concern for any of your listeners a lot of our clients still do these policies is a part of their overall portfolio and they insure their spouse or their business partner or their children so it's not a good fit for those folks that are looking for great rates of return in the first few years especially there are still insurance costs or if you want to defer all your income in to be taxed later these are typically after tax designed more like Roth IRAs so if you do believe taxes will be lower in the future you might again be disappointed to have to pay your taxes on your Kairi there's a real advantage of starting this young I'm a young child or somebody getting their first job because you have many more years of tax free kind of accumulation that way right you know and I'll give your listeners something extra here too if you own a business and you have your children working for you in the business you can contribute what is the the limit is it around six thousand dollars a year you can pay your child and they don't have any taxes due on that money right for child like right yeah yeah yeah legally of course so if they're doing a legitimate business you can pay them get the tax deduction as a business owner paying your payroll it goes into their account income tax free if you use that money to contribute to a whole life policy it goes in tax-free it grows tax-deferred and then in their retirement they can pull all that money out completely tax-free so it's a triple tax-free scenario here it's one of the rare unicorns in the financial universe right though that's one of my favorite ways to do it for children policies in business owners well thanks so much we've had learned a lot about the bank on yourself policy from Mark Willis he's the CEO at Lake Growth financial services based in Chicago you can find out more at his website Lake growth dot-com and find out more about his podcast not your average financial podcast calm thanks so much for being on the money at the show mark my pleasure thanks again we'll be back next week with another edition of the money answer show goodbye for now thank you for joining Jordan Goodman and the money answers show if you have a question for Jordan please visit his website at wwlp.com