Money Strategies with Debbie

Brandon Shultz: Protect Yourself And Your Assets

 

Everyone has taken a hit financially, one way or another. In this episode, Debbie Bloyd is joined by Brandon Shultz of Transamerica Financial Advisors, Inc. to talk about these trying times for people and the importance of always having a plan B to prepare for the hard and usually unforeseen situations. Brandon and Debbie dive into the current need for multiple streams of income and why you should look to start your own business in the finance industry. Learn about the growing need for financial literacy and the different types of insurance and other options you need to protect not only yourself and your assets but also your family.

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Brandon Shultz: Protect Yourself And Your Assets

I’m speaking with Brandon Shultz. Brandon, you and I work together doing insurance and investment products for families. This is a trying time for people. They are seeing that they maybe weren’t in the position to be ready for this. A lot of people are finding themselves don’t have enough saved up for emergencies.

That’s a common problem not just for now, but always in America. Emergency funds, people don’t have them. When you look at the statistics, it’s staggering that most of America have between $400 and $1,000 saved. When you run into a situation like this and your retirement funds begin to dip, maybe you get laid off, a lot of different things happening. It becomes a struggle for people whenever they don’t have the basic things that we teach families that they need to go ahead and build like emergency funds, have their debt in control, have some liquid accounts that they can access in times like these.

They say, “That’s not going to happen to me.” What we’re finding out is that it happens to you and me. Our business changes and we have to zig and zag. To talk to people, we’re doing Zoom calls. We’re not talking to people. We’re changing the way we do business. A lot of people don’t have that choice. If they’re W2 employees, they have to make good on what they have as a salary. If they get furloughed or laid off or need to file an employment, that changes their whole family structure.

For me, now more than ever, we talk a lot about people needing some multiple streams of income, whether that’s investment income. Some people do real estate. We talked a lot about having a side business or having a way to take control of your income. Everyone’s seeing it. Everyone sees it as a major problem when all of your income resources are dependent upon a corporation that may or may not allow you to keep working, especially in times of struggle. The numbers are over 6 million people filing for unemployment. It’s staggering. Now more than ever, it’s important to take charge of your personal income. The best way to do that is through a side business. The barrier to entry is lowest and it’s got the greatest upside opportunity. Having some plan B is important for families, especially in times like this.

When we talk about plan B and starting your own business, you don’t have to start from scratch. You can join a company like ours and be part of our team that talks about money, savings, financial planning, and all the things that we talk about as you run your own business. It’s a great side business that can grow into a big business. A lot of people are going to find that they want to be more in charge of their destiny like we are rather than be dependent on a company that could lay you off at any time. Our companies aren’t laying us off.

 

You need something that you can control. There are a lot of opportunities out there, but I always look at a few different things when I think about business. One of them is, there’s a massive need in the marketplace. It’d be hard to find another industry that there’s a greater need of right now, the finance industry. Everybody’s worried about money. Everybody’s worried about their retirement accounts. Everybody’s worried about their income.

We’ve got solutions for that.

It’s a wonderful business because there’s a massive market need, but not just now, even when times are great. People need to make more money. People need to manage their finances. I feel like our business is a recession-proof business. When times are good, we get to do more business because we get to invest and help people go through the good times. When times are bad, we can help them in other ways. It’s a wonderful opportunity and a lot of people are stuck at home. In our business, we’ve been able to pivot, move everything online and our business is growing during this. In fact, we’ve closed for one month. It wasn’t our biggest month in history in terms of our own agency, but it was the second or third biggest month we’ve ever had.

People are seeing a need.

They’re going to need life insurance, all the different things.

No one slows down when times are good. Everything is good. Everything is rolling along and you don’t think anything can go wrong. It’s times like these, people will look at the things that we can help with. Our life insurance, that’s a big deal because you don’t know whatever is going to happen. Healthwise, you have to have your family prepared for health. If you have little kids like you have or college kids like me, we still have obligations that we want to make sure we put our kids on the best path. That’s going to be the insurance need for a spouse or for your kids, pay off the house, put them through an education. You have to have some money accessible for that. Not everybody has $1 million to pay off the house and put the kids through school. That’s what insurance is for. We can help families with that.

Now, more than ever, that was all around us. If you think about the last 2 to 3 months, we had the passing of Kobe Bryant. We never thought someone like that would pass away. Most people know someone who’s sick and they worry. That’s a reality. Life insurance is important. I have three kids and you have two as well. If I’m not around tomorrow, it’s important for my wife and my family to have some money and life insurance can do that and so much more. Life insurance is powerful.

When you don't plan, you fail. That's a reality. Click To Tweet

Your wife works. We’re not saying the spouses don’t work. We’re saying, if your spouse can’t make what you make together, that’s going to disrupt your home. Not only are you going to be gone but they’re going to have to sell the house, buy something that you can afford on one person’s salary and that changes everything. That’s too much transition and turmoil for little kids or for anyone to have to go through.

It’s huge. Let’s say both spouses work. Sometimes they don’t both work. Let’s say both do. If you cut out your spouse’s income, could you make your mortgage the next month?

If your kids are in private school, could you keep affording that? Could you keep doing vacations? If the answer is no, then you need life insurance. The other thing we talked about is different types of insurance products to protect your investments as you age. You and I both have these plans. I have long-term care. I’m a single mom. I’ve got long-term care for when I get old because God knows my kids are not probably going to take care of me and I don’t want them to. That’s a huge financial drain, thousands and thousands of dollars a month to live with help. We talked about the stock market and the investments going down. You and I are both working. We’re not worried about that. If we were in retirement, living off of our investments, we wouldn’t be worried about that. We don’t want to lose a third of our money in a couple of weeks and not knowing when it’s going to come back.

Both things that you bring up are important. Let’s take the long-term care one first. The number one thing that bankrupts families is medical. That can be through critical illness or through some long-term care need. The likelihood of needing long-term care is 78% to 80% for every American. The likelihood of encountering it is high and to not prepare for it makes no sense to me. It’s important for people to understand. Your kids may not take care of you. Maybe they will but they can’t work and take care of you at the same time. There could be money if they do decide to take care of you, keep you at home. There could be money by preparing for it. There are many things that are out there that can help people not run into the common things that we see people run into that cause bankruptcy.

With the investments that we talked about, a lot of people feel like they have enough money, but when they get to retirement, they realize they don’t have enough money. I don’t know what enough is. It depends on your way of life, where you’re going to live, how much you’re going to spend. Will $1 million be enough? Probably not. Not if you lose a third of it over things that you can’t help, which has been in the market. We did not see this coming. We saw turmoil in 2020 because it’s an election year. I don’t think anyone saw this coming and shut down businesses overnight.

Nobody saw this coming and nobody knows what the long-term impact is going to be yet. That’s a scary thought. We’re in the middle of it. We’re not towards the end yet. With businesses not functioning, we don’t know what kind of drag that’s going to have on the economy. That’s something that people are worried about and rightly so. Especially as you get closer to retirement, when you’re in your 50s and especially in your 60s, there are some great moves that you can make that can guarantee that the retirement that you have saved does not go down but still has the possibility to go up when the market comes back.

There’s a lot of bad information out there. I’ve had people say, “I don’t like the stock market. It’s a disaster.” You have people say, “I don’t like annuities. Those are disasters. I don’t like CDs.” You cannot like everything but you’re not going to gain any traction on your money. We need compound interest. We need to invest in something. Maybe you don’t like real estate, maybe you do. There’s a place for all of these products in your portfolio if you know what to do and when.

What most people do is there’s no plan. That’s the scary part. It’s cliché, but when you don’t plan, you plan to fail. That’s the reality. When there’s no plan, it’s not going to work out. We see it all around us all the time that people wish they could retire, they can. They get sick. They’re doing GoFundMe, all of these things. I’m not looking down on people that encountered that. I’m saying there is a way to plan so that doesn’t happen to you and it’s important to go ahead and do it.

A lot of it is bad information. I had a client that is in the middle of a reverse mortgage and had they come to me years ago, they wouldn’t be in this position. They had a lot of medical problems. He had cancer. Instead of filing bankruptcy back then and not paying any of his medical bills, he continued to pay all of his medical expenses. He has no retirement left at all, nothing. All he has left is maybe a couple of thousand dollars. He has had surgery since. He can’t go back to work. His earning potential came short. His wife wasn’t skilled enough to have a great paying job. They’re stuck. They want to know a different way.

 

If they had talked to some people during that time, they would have found a different way. A lot of people don’t want to ask for help when they’re going through bad times and how to structure things. They do what they know how to do. A lot of people go and ask people that don’t have money or have not been successful with finances their advice and they’re going to get bad advice. They need a team of people like we’ve put together. We work with CPAs and other financial advisors. We do insurance and financial advising. You need to talk to attorneys that do will. We put together a team of people to help you, so you’re not doing it alone.

In times like when we’re at now, people are wondering, “Are there things that I can do with what’s going on around me?” The answer is yes. This is what I think and most people agree that we will get through this. This will go away. We will come back stronger on the other side than we were before, but it’s going to take a little bit of time, especially in terms of the market, economy and recovery. What can you do to make sure you get the most out of that bounce back? I don’t know if we’re at the bottom but we may not be the bottom.

Even before this came out, we knew it was going to be a turmoil year for stocks.

We’ve been telling our clients for the last few years, “Every 7 to 9 years, we get a correction in the economy. We’ve had the longest bull run we’ve had.” When things are good, people feel like they’ll always be good. It’s the nature of people. Here we are in the middle of this one. It’s a great time if people haven’t spoken to someone. Sit down with someone that will give you free advice, that costs you nothing.

That’s us. We will do that.

It costs you nothing to sit down and take a look. Can you position yourself better than you are today so that when things do get better and as they get better, you can be in a better position? It makes a ton of sense to me.

People are scared because they don’t understand how all this works if they’re not money people like us. The best thing is we work for independent companies that allow us to use a lot of different products and companies. We’re not just selling XYZ brand, we’re selling the concepts and then we put you in the products. We help you make a determination based on what comes back from all the quotes that we get. We can show you all those. We talk you through the pros and cons of all of those. You can make up your own mind. We want to put you in a better position.

What drives us is education. We want people to understand what options are out there and what’s best for them. From there, then we can look at what solution is going to meet those needs and then people can make their own decision. We talked about the three big problems that we see. One is that people don’t save. Two is that they don’t know where to save. Three is that they don’t make enough money. All of those are information gaps, every one of them. People don’t know that it’s possible to save. They think they can’t because they’re living paycheck to paycheck. They think that’s the only way to live. We show them a way that they don’t have to do that anymore.

The number one thing that bankrupts families is medical. Click To Tweet

The second, they don’t know where to save. Maybe they have all their money in the bank and that’s 1%. Eighty percent of Americans that have less than 1% account, you’ll never get financially free that way. They don’t know where to put it. They’re also worried about risk and safety and all those things. They don’t know how to measure that. We can help navigate some of that and educate them and show them what’s out there based on their goals. We talked about a side business, being able to earn some extra money. That’s important. For most families, if you can earn an extra $1,000 a month and put that towards your future, how powerful would that be? That would be powerful.

We teach people the lines of business. You’ve got to be licensed. We help you through all that. Now is a great time to put yourself in a better position. A lot of people are saying, “If you come out of this time in quarantine without a new skill or without learning something or your bushes are cut and your house is organized, you wasted your time.” You find out it’s not that you don’t have time, it’s that you don’t care. This is something we can all put ourselves to care about is our financial futures.

Naturally, when things go badly, what people do is we get overwhelmed. We’re emotional beings. We get emotional and we get stuck. The message you’re giving is good. Now is the perfect time to take action. Have you ever had a time in your life where you’re stuck at home and you can’t work? You’ve never had more time than you do right now, so why not learn a skill? Why not start a business? Why not do some things that can make a change in your life in the future that you didn’t have time for before? Now you’ve got tons of time. There are all the technology and all the different tools that we have to be able to equip you to make these things happen. If you don’t take action, if you don’t come out of this thing stronger and better with a new skill, you missed out. It’s a wonderful opportunity as well.

I also want to say in one of the calls that we were on with our group, it doesn’t matter what language you speak either. We have multiple languages being spoken. Everyone needs to be represented when it comes to insurance and long-term care. That’s not just a middle-aged white girl problem. It’s all across the board problem. Don’t let the language that you speak hinder you whether who was on the call. All of our classes are in Spanish. They’re also in Chinese, Mandarin and Vietnamese.

We’re learning those three languages. We’re teaching about finances and teaching about business in those three different languages. It’s a wonderful opportunity. Many communities have been overlooked. The middle class, in general, has been overlooked by the financial industry because the net worth and the assets aren’t enough for them to pay attention to.

You and I both know places that unless you have $500,000 and you hear it advertised, “I don’t want to deal with you.” You and I deal with people who are starting out. It doesn’t matter how much you have to invest, we’ll help. I’ll tell them how to get a hold of me. You’ve been training people a lot longer than I have across the country. If people want to get ahold of you for information, how do we get a hold of you, Brandon?

We’re passionate about helping people. If someone needs help, give me a call. My phone number is (909) 614-3841. That’s my personal cell. I’d love to chat with someone if they needed help. You can also email me, it’s another great way, [email protected]. Those are two easy ways to get in touch with me. We’re passionate about helping people and anyone who needs help, has questions and wants free advice, that’s what we do.

You and I are here in Texas but you have a team in California. This is all across the United States. It doesn’t have to be where you live. We can Zoom call you and get you involved in our business and add you to our team. Thanks for being with me, Brandon.

Absolutely, Debbie. I appreciate it.

Important Links:

• Brandon Shultz – LinkedIn
• [email protected]

About Brandon Shultz

With WFG Financial Services Life and Health insurance.