Attorney Puts Whole Life Insurance on Trial (Here's What He Found)

I mean the framework of how you an attorney think about life insurance.

If you're losing 95% of your money to a traditional bank or other kinds of things,

I think people should look to alternatives.

Life insurance as a terrible rate return.

How would you as an attorney respond to that?

Well, it doesn't. We're in a time where there's a lot of economic fallacies going on.

Just to be clear, if you look at history, we're right now pretty low when it comes to interest rates.

I think people need to mature a little bit and be willing to not demonize something

because they don't understand it.

We also are here with Barry. I know that you guys have been working very closely together.

You made a statement around life insurance being in guaranteed investment.

You take that back, you double down.

People have come unglued about this. I think it's kind of funny.

The bottom line is, look at your contract.

Why aren't we screaming this from the root talks?

It's because people sell it as an investment and 5% is not sexy.

From what I can see as an attorney, it absolutely is.

I might even make it worse, so maybe I should be quiet.

It's not like a 401k. It's not mutual funds.

It's not stocks. It's not ETFs.

The reason I said guaranteed investment is because...

Steven, Barry. Welcome to the Better Wall Show.

Thank you, Caleb.

Thank you, Caleb.

Steven, you're one of the co-founders of insurance and estates, which is one of the most

popular websites out there when it comes to estate planning and life insurance.

We also are here with Barry. I know that you guys have been working very closely together

and co-create lots of videos, a lot of blogs.

Barry, you're back on. You're only going to be with us for a few minutes,

but our podcast and YouTube video just dropped.

It's a little over 24 hours. It has over 2,000 views.

You've gotten a lot of comments on a statement you made about life insurance, my friend.

And so I thought instead of just having Steven defend you, why not just have you back on?

So I'm going to ask you about your take on the word guaranteed investment.

And if you stand by that and obviously you were able to read some of the comments.

But before we jump into that, I'm just so grateful, Steven, that you're here.

You're a active lawyer and you have so much knowledge when it comes to just how to help people

from the legal side, but you're also a huge fan of life insurance.

And I find that is very interesting. I find that life insurance could be a hated product.

It can be a misunderstood product.

And so we're going to have a lot of fun with that.

But I thought, Barry, since you're on, and since my audience knows you,

and we'll make sure to link your video down below.

If you've not seen our video yet on Infinite Banking 3.0,

why don't you just introduce Steven and give him his flowers before you address

the guaranteed investment statement that you made on the other podcasts that's making people lose

their mind? Yeah, it is, isn't it? Okay, great, Barry.

Yeah, so Steve is awesome. And what I love about Steven, his business partner at Insurance

and Estates Jason is they are both attorneys. They understand the world of legacy planning,

a state planning. But even in addition to that, they're coupling whole life insurance with this

planning. So we get along very well. My company focus wealth group, their company insurance

and estates. Steve is dialed in because he's telling people really about the true benefits

of whole life insurance from an attorney perspective, the estate planning, the creditor protection,

the legacy planning. He's very good at what he does and is a wealth of knowledge and information.

And I'll pump up insurance in estates.com and even their YouTube channel.

There's so much education out there for people to get. Nearly any topic someone could think about

in the estate planning world or life insurance world, they've addressed it. They have a

fantastic blog and town of YouTube content that they put out there. We encourage people to look

at that to simply get educated because as you know, education allows people to progress forward

and live more abundantly in their lives. Very beautifully, beautifully done.

Steve, you owe him a couple of lunches next time you see him. I mean, you get it with a straight

face too. I stayed with a straight face and he doesn't have a script. So that's beautifully done.

Well, question for you. I believe back in the day, do you guys insurance in a state? Do you guys

have like a United States where you could hover over each state and it would show you what life

insurance, like the benefits of life insurance, creditor protection in that state? Was that your

website? Did that? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We still have it. It's an asset protection sort of

interactive map. We've got life insurance there and we've also got some other asset protection

categories in there just to kind of show people how the protection varies from state to state

and for asset protection purposes, life insurance, it could be full cash value. There could be some

caveats on it. So we want people to have the accurate picture state to state and that's an easy

way to do it. I love that. I have a question while you're both are on here. So I'm trying to,

one project that I'm trying to figure out is like how to actually put the real rate of return

on life insurance. And when I say real rate return, it's actually that's misleading because it's

not the real rate of return, but it's one when you're factoring in all the other benefits when you're

factoring in things like creditor protection or not having to buy term insurance or if you're

factoring in the taxable equivalent value. And there's certain things that are easy to factor in.

Taxes, the fees that you're not having to pay and the cost of insurance. So those are like things

super easy to calculate. It's still profound. But then you get to the creditor protection. Now

in some states like California and others, the creditor protection is not something like that is

that special. But in other states, and I don't want to, you know, jump too far ahead, but like Florida,

Texas, it's it's amazing. How would you go about like factoring in like what's the equivalent

of what you would have to pay if you weren't going to put your money in the life insurance? Like

from our people putting using trust are they using special LLCs? Are they getting special like

umbrella insurance policies? Like how do you how would you factor in the actual like creditor

protection value if you're in some of those states? And how can I articulate it in a way that's

not misleading? Well, that's a huge, huge question. When I started out, I actually started my practice

in Florida in 2007, 2008. And one thing I learned real quick is that banks can be very aggressive

when you're on the wrong side of the bank. I'm sure we've all talked about that quite a bit.

Bank accounts are extremely vulnerable. If you get an order from a court, you can go slap a

lien on a on a bank account really fast and including wage garnishments and these kinds of things.

So whatever money is going in there is vulnerable. So the intangible, which I think you're getting

at Caleb is just, you know, that's an intangible value, right? The protection of safe capital

is as crazy. I mean, we can almost end the episode right here and just say don't just have this

because just for that reason alone, you've got safe capital tucked in a contract inside of a

contract that has state law protection surrounding it. And so when you have safe capital,

they are a capital that you think is safe, right? In a bank account. It's not. It's very vulnerable.

So now I want to answer your question. How do you quantify that? I mean, there's a huge piece of

mind component to that, right? It's just know that you're going to be able to negotiate with

creditors. So whenever I would get contacted about asset protection, usually it's when somebody is

already already in trouble. So right there, you've got a problem. There's laws around that

called fraudulent transfer and things like that. So if somebody contacts you because they know

that their cash is vulnerable and there's nothing they can do at that point because they already

have an active lawsuit in place. What's the value of that? Right. And you almost can't quantify.

I mean, it's that piece of mind and that negotiating power. So the reason that you would do an

asset protection strategy, whether it be a trust LLC, whatever it is, to try to get asset protection

around your your safe capital. Ideally, you want all your capital to be safe, right? Right.

Right. You know, if what. So if you're going to set up all those entities in advance, you might

pay tens of thousands of dollars to set them all up. You might go to our student offshore trust,

something like that. If you have a lot of wealth. So it's it's hard to quantify how valuable that

actually is what you did is you just created a situation where you have negotiating power with

your creditors. Yeah. And that that was really my question. Obviously, every one of us on this call

is a fan of life insurance. But if someone wasn't, but they still valued credit protection,

I would want to play devil's advocate with them and say, okay, what would be what would you have to pay

to get maybe the same benefits that you're getting by having your money and cash value and

you're saying that it could cost up to tens of thousands of dollars. Some some people could get more

advanced. What would be like the cheapest way to like get credit protection on some of your

assets that you wanted liquidity and access to? My producer just told me something wild. Only

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excited to keep growing with you. So as a protection comes from contracts and it comes from state

laws that enforce those contracts. So and by the way, life insurance is a contract. It's also a trust.

We know that but we know it's a contract. We don't always know it's a trust in a way.

So you have these multiple things coming together. If you wanted to set something up

equivalent to life insurance and have it be asset protection protected, you'd need to do a contract

of some kind. So you might do an LLC with an operating agreement. It's got to have asset protection

in it. It would have to be deemed to be a valid LLC. So any asset protection can be challenged,

right? So if you're the creditor, what are you going to do? I'm I'm suing Caleb for some reason

and he's got $100,000 in an LLC. What am I going to do? I'm going to say, well, this is not a

not a real business. I'm going to try to pick that LLC apart best I can. I'm going to I'm going

to demand the papers. I'm going to say where are all the partners? Did they, you know, were they

running an active business out of it? And attorneys will sell these and they'll say, well, if we put

the money in here, we're pretty solid. But the test is whether you can attack it. So you're going to

have a hard time attacking something like life insurance. Trust can be solid. And depending on what

state they're they're formed, they can be effective for asset protection as well. But you're talking

when you talk about trust. So an LLC might be three, four, five to $10,000. A trust is probably if

you're going to do an asset protection trust, it's probably going to start at at least 5,000,

probably more like 10 and go up from there, based on what you're what you're doing with it.

Well, to talk maybe as maybe a part two, I'm I'm really curious to see how like how we could

ethically factor this in. And I think that's a whole different project. But I we reason I care

so deeply about this is the more you educate people on like we just talked for five minutes on

asset protection. I've never seen someone actually factor that in to the IRR, the equivalent rate

return of life insurance. A lot of people mention it, but I find that it's like, okay, you mentioned

at credit protection. Great. But it's sometimes hard. Like sometimes I really like to see like

auction A versus option B. And is it is it true? I think Barry Dyck wrote about this in Pirates

Manhattan, where the N Ron executive still got the benefits of their life insurance and annuities

in the state of Texas. They committed fraud, but the the state was so strong that they still got

the benefits of insurance, even though they they scam people, which is you can you can feel bad

about that, but you also can feel really good about that to say like if they're getting the benefits

of insurance, how much more would that be for people that aren't necessarily scamming people

for a living? Yeah. Okay, I get me on that. Oh, go ahead. I was from a just from a simplistic

perspective. What's the you've got a person that has a million or $10 million in cash in their

main? Compared to that same million or 10 million in a cash value life insurance policy.

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