My Thoughts About 2025
As an Independent Marketing Organization, I have never been more excited than I am now to be in this business. What is “this business?” Helping our agents help their clients with annuities, life insurance, and long term care.
Today the oldest baby boomer is 79 years old and the youngest is 61. Yes, I know! Another baby boomer statistic! Every time I hear the tired statistics of a baby boomer hitting retirement age every X minutes, I am reminded of the story of the Irish band, U2, playing in Dublin. Their lead singer, Bono, stopped the show and started clapping very slowly and firmly. He then emotionally yelled to the crowd, “Every time I clap my hands, there is a child in Africa that dies.” At that point somebody yelled from the crowd, “Then stop clapping your damned hands!”
Although I poke fun at the constant baby boomer statistics we hear, there is merit to it and I see it every day. The number of 401k/IRA/CD/etc. transfers is much more prominent than I have ever seen. Furthermore, the dollar amounts are larger than I have ever seen. Reading statistics in the news is one thing, but actually experiencing the statistics is eye opening. I am witnessing the “opportunity snowball” getting bigger and bigger as time goes by!
The wealth that is moving around is huge! Baby boomers own over 50 percent of our country’s wealth: $80 trillion. With annuity sales, I remember when $100,000 in an annuity was a decent case! Now that is well below the industry average FIA sale. The annuity industry had its third consecutive record-breaking year with sales well over $400 billion! With long term care sales, I used to be paranoid while presenting a $20,000 per year long term care premium to a client, thinking they would pepper spray me after hearing the number. Then, I realized that many times they understand the long term care risk and therefore don’t blink an eye with that size of premium. What about life insurance? I don’t need to tell you that life insurance is one of the most efficient ways for these baby boomers to pass on wealth and offset taxes for the next generation.
Offering the above three product lines, annuities, life insurance, and long term care should excite you today! These three products can be viewed as helping your clients in chronological order:
- Stage 1, Annuities: The annuity helps them once they hit the “retirement red zone” to protect their money and/or guarantee a lifetime payment stream.
- Stage 2, Long Term Care: Later in life there is a 7 in 10 probability you will have a long term care event. Whether the client has non-qualified money or is all “qualified” there are solutions available to leverage those dollars.
- Stage 3, Life Insurance: Passing on a tax-free death benefit to the next generation.
I also look at the baby boomer statistic (10,000 baby boomers per day retiring) a little deeper. Many of those baby boomers retiring are also your competition, other agents! The average agent is over 60 years old. Some are retiring and some will stick around. For those sticking around, the opportunities are huge. All of this wealth moving around will be left to fewer advisors/agents to manage. This should be exciting if you don’t plan on retiring anytime soon.
With all of the above said, here are the opportunities in product as well as practice management that you can leverage:
- Annuities: With where interest rates have gone, accumulation indexed annuities have S&P 500 caps in the double digits! For guaranteed income (GLWB) annuities, the payout rates have never been higher.
- Long Term Care: Today over 90 percent of the long term care business is in the “hybrid” space. That is, annuities/LTC hybrid and life/LTC hybrid. Work with your IMO, like yours truly, to understand these awesome products. For instance, there is a product where you can move over qualified money into a hybrid long term care policy. How do we do that with pre-tax money? That is a conversation for another day.
- Life Insurance: Carriers are getting much better with accelerated underwriting and the rest of the application process. This will continue to improve your experience and the client experience.
- Technology: Related to #3 above, whether annuities, long term care, or life insurance, the E-App solutions that exist are fabulous and continue to get better! Doing away with paper apps can be a way to literally cut your time dealing with paperwork by 75 percent.
- Volatility: I as well as many Wall Street money managers believe that 2025 is going to be a volatile year in the stock market. Volatile markets are almost always good for fixed and indexed annuity sales. Watch for the volatile markets and call your clients when they happen.
- Seminars: Seminars are back after the COVID fiasco! My IMO is getting registrants to seminars for less than $25 per household. That means for $1,000, you should have 40-50 registrants! Gone are the days of buying pallets of “mailers” of which 99 percent will go in the trash! There are more efficient ways to market for seminars. CG Financial Group has mastered this process. Three seminars that are very popular are: Social Security, Long Term Care, and Estate Planning.
- Virtual Meetings: The nation is now your playground, versus just your local area. Consumers are embracing Zoom calls more than they ever did. This means that you are no longer confined to just marketing in your local area. Learn best practices in selling virtually.
- Planning Software and Processes: I believe that consumers like buying into “processes” more than “products.” In other words, if you have a process that the consumer can go through in various steps that incorporates software with nice visuals, you will build credibility and trust. Of course, the product is plugged into this process.
Selling a product is often transactional. Selling a process is often consultative and nurturing. CG Financial Group has some remarkably successful agents that will walk a consumer through a process that takes five to eight meetings/calls. Sound tedious? Well, in the end, they are getting $1 million plus annuity sales quite consistently. - Social Media: In a world where social media “influencers” are becoming more prominent than Hollywood movie stars, why would you not leverage the same apps to be a financial “influencer?” By leveraging social media, you have the ability to market to millions of consumers, for free. Make videos. And while you make them, remember, perfection is the enemy of progress.
- Work with your IMO: Many agents like to “go it alone” without realizing that a good IMO can help you in areas you never thought of. There is so much innovation taking place that what we all knew last year is almost outdated this year. Things are moving quickly. Work with your IMO to keep up to speed, and be coachable.
Fortunately, I am extremely optimistic as I see more opportunities in this environment than I do challenges. However, if I were to think of our next year and the challenges that may arise, I would point to a few areas:
- Interest Rates: We have been spoiled lately, and I do not want us to go back to 2015-level caps and participation rates. However, it is always a relativity game. As in, annuities will almost always be higher than CDs.
- Inflation: Everything is so dang expensive! For agents to stay in business, they need to be smart with their money, especially right now.
- Regulations: New administration or not, our industry has always headed toward a more regulated and more litigious industry. So, take good notes in client meetings and get a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) System to keep track of correspondence.
- Paperwork: Related to #3 above, paperwork with all three product lines (annuities, life, long term care) is only getting worse. As are the carriers’ requirements for the annuity suitability forms to be perfect… Again, e-applications can change your life!
- Anti-Insurance Sentiment: With the recent killing of the United Healthcare CEO and also with many folks that were impacted by the California fires complaining about insurance companies, I am concerned about the reputation of “insurance” and “insurance companies.” We all need to continue to tell our success stories in order to offset the negative stories. [CG]
Why Did Mike Tyson Lose To Jake Paul?
This intentionally idiotic title has many of you saying, “Because he’s 31 years older than Jake Paul! Duh!” Of course that’s true! However, I would argue that even if Mike was still in his 20-year-old body today, that his mindset would inhibit his performance versus who he truly was 40 years ago. Allow me to explain and then draw a corollary to our business.
As I write this article I am somewhat disappointed that I wasted my Friday night watching this very boring Tyson vs. Paul boxing contest on Netflix, even aside from the technical glitches! However, the ladies fight was a great match. But I digress. I had hoped that Mike Tyson would knock out Jake Paul. I like Mike Tyson as he gets older, and he is the GOAT (greatest of all time). However, I have been a realist and understand that Mike Tyson is 58 years old, and Jake Paul (at age 27) is in the prime of his life physically. Father Time has an undefeated record. And Jake Paul is actually a great athlete not to be taken lightly! My friends thought I was crazy when I said that Jake Paul was going to win, much to my chagrin. Jake did indeed win by unanimous decision.
(Note: Many folks believed the match was “rigged.” Whether it was or not is not the point. Either way, my comments below are hard to deny.)
Me believing that Mike Tyson was not going to win had less to do with his physical abilities and more about his mindset as he has aged. Afterall, I have recently seen the training videos where he’s still destroying the heavy bags at lightning speed. Those training videos led many to say, “The old Tyson is back, and Jake Paul is in trouble!” I never bought into “Mike Tyson being back.” My lack of confidence in Tyson was not because of his aging physical abilities, but because his body language is completely different than what it used to be, which is insight into his psyche that used to drive him to knock people out. Again, what drove Tyson to kill his opponents when he was 20 years old was just as much about his psyche as it was his physical abilities, although his physical abilities were clearly superior. (I am obviously not a psychologist, but here is my view.)
In short, Mike Tyson does not have the killer instincts like he used to, even though leading up to this fight he convinced millions that “the old Mike is back.” Wrong! His body language, whether at the weigh-ins, photo sessions, on his way to the ring, or even while he is in the ring, is not as laser focused on his prey as the 20-year-old Mike was.
Thirty years ago, as he was entering the ring, or already in the ring, he only looked in one of two directions: Directly at his prey, or to the ground as he was contemplating how he was going to destroy his prey. It was internal, deep down in his gut. He wore all black, not looking around at what others were saying about him or cheering about. You knew that he was internally processing (maybe in an unhealthy way) what he was going to do to his opponent and how he was going to achieve his goal. He was hungry.
Today Mike’s body language tells me that he has lost this mindset when it comes to boxing. As far as body language, it is almost like Mike Tyson has become more concerned about other things than just achieving the “goal” of knocking somebody out. He’s looking around at his surroundings and not so much laser focused like a lion about to attack a bunny rabbit. When they ask for his commentary on what he is going to do to his opponent, he kind of shrugs his shoulders and says something fairly benign and non-convincing, almost like he doesn’t believe it himself. The 1980s and 1990s Mike Tyson made comments that you know he believed in his heart and gave some of us children nightmares. Do I dare say that today’s Mike Tyson seems self-conscious? Or certainly more “conscious” of things other than destroying his opponent.
However, why should he really want to absolutely kill somebody? Afterall, he has hit the pinnacle of the business, made millions of dollars, and has nothing to prove to anybody, certainly not to a 27-year-old kid (Jake Paul). He has become domesticated. Sometimes already hitting your “goals” will make you domesticated.
I bring all this up because once you have achieved high levels of success in our business and hit your “goal” you can become “domesticated.” Hence, the reason why we should continue to make new goals. I launched CG Financial Group, an IMO for independent agents, six years ago. As time has gone by, I hit a lot of goals that I set for my business. Every time I hit a goal, there was an inclination for me to say, “Let’s take a little break because I’ve earned it.” The fire burns out a little. This is called getting “fat and happy,”
Because I try to self-reflect a lot, I know when I am feeling “fat and happy” and therefore have made conscious efforts to quickly remedy this mindset along the way. You cannot let yourself get fat and happy, at least when it comes to doing something that you want to continue to grow. Naturally, Mike Tyson is a 58-year-old guy that no longer wants to beat people up, which makes it OK for him to be “fat and happy.” Conversely, I bet when it comes to your business and your growth aspirations, you do not want to get “fat and happy” and stagnant.
I have found that setting continuous goals and extending out the goal post is important for me in order for me to not become “domesticated.” Feeling “uncomfortable” is needed. If you continue to set goals for yourself and have a laser focus on that prey/goal, it is impossible for you to lose your edge. Again, I’m not suggesting that Tyson should be obsessed with being the world champion again, I’m just drawing the psychological corollary to why Tyson is not as “good” of a boxer as he used to be, aside from the fact that he is forty freaking years older!
When it comes to setting and hitting your goals, be that 20-year-old Tyson, don’t be self-conscious, don’t care about what those around you are saying about you, don’t get comfortable, don’t get “fat and happy,” and keep moving forward.