Adding Fuel to Your Alternative Investment Strategy with Blake Brogan
Blake. Thank you for joining us today.
Excited to be here. Taylor, it’s been fun talking with you before the show.
Oh man, we have for our listeners, we’ve been on the line for literally an hour, a little over an hour having a very detailed discussion about what we’re going to talk about today on this show.
But before we dig into that, Blake, could you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do and your business?
Yeah. So money insight is a strategic wealth-building firm. We work with a lot of high-income earners, as well as alternative investors. Our tagline is taking people from high income to high net worth.
So we teach some alternative strategies that you can plug into the investing that you’re already doing. I’ll give you the. 30,000-foot view of my story. I’ve always loved business finance and went to study entrepreneurship. When I was in college, went to one of the only schools that were offering that as a major.
And I learned about these strategies that we’ll probably talk about here. At college, I learned some people who were using them and my family had been in the finance world for a while, but I had never. These types of strategies specifically. So when I got out of college and started working, I started implementing them in my life and enjoyed what it was doing for me.
What changed the way I was thinking. So I’ve been working with money insights again with high-income earners and alternative investors and just teaching them how to optimize what they’re doing.
Awesome. And, before we dig into frankly, what you and I have been talking about privately for the last hour for the listeners out there who don’t know about the strategy, or, could use may be more information to understand what we’re going to dig into.
Could you give us that again more about that? We’ll come down from 30,000 feet to, a 10,000 foot view The strategy.
Yeah, that’s great. So the primary strategy that we focus on is what we call the investment optimizer. You may have heard it by other names. We try to focus on using this strategy as a way to enhance the investment.
That you’re already doing. It’s a pretty as simple message. So what typically happens is, let’s say if you’re a syndication investor, you build up capital in a bank account until you have enough money to invest. You liquidate that and invest into syndication. Whenever you feel like you have a good deal as that syndication kicks off cash flow, it just goes right back into building up your bank account.
And that’s just how the cycle happens. So the investment optimizer is simply. A better way is to store and utilize your capital. And so what we use is a very special type of life insurance policy as an alternative opportunity fund. So the purpose of this is just to enhance what your money is doing in between deals.
So obviously there are some inefficiencies with savings accounts. Not earning anything which you’re earning is taxable, right? So with the investment optimizer or these very specially designed life insurance policies, you can expect, maybe up to a 5% return on the policy over a long period.
There are tax benefits. So there’s tax-free growth and use of the policy. There’s creditor protection. There does happen to come along at death. Which is of more value to some than others. But then really the secret sauce is the way that you can leverage the policy to be able to have your dollars working for you in two places at the same time.
And I know we talked about this before the show, but we can get into exactly how that works here. All right, great. And for the listeners out there one of the main themes of our conversation we were having before we were recording was around. Not my concerns with the strategy itself.
I think overall the strategy of using whole life insurance when people understand it is it seems sound, and I’ve met several people who use it for themselves, that aren’t in the business of marketing the policies that have positive things to say about it. So I want to be clear about that.
I think people are using this constructively. My concerns are more around the ways that. Not Blake’s company, right? Not you, but the ways that others market, these policies, they tend to make pretty lofty promises. And the term that you’re not using here, which I certainly appreciate you. Might’ve heard this called infinite banking in the past and nothing’s infinite.
Adding Fuel to Your Alternative Investment Strategy with Blake Brogan
And that I think makes too many promises. And, th this is what I wanted to dig into today is. Concerns about, how the kind of other people in this industry make big-time promises that I think set people up wrong. And I’ve noticed that, you guys.
You’re not doing that, which I appreciate. And I don’t know let’s talk about that a little bit and how this can be done more responsibly and reasonably and not, saying we’re going to turn our clients into the Rockefellers, yeah. That’s great.
Let’s jump into the term, infinite banking, which we believe makes this a little bit different.
So when people talk about infinite banking, oftentimes they’re starting with people saying, this is a better way to accumulate wealth in the stock market, or they’re taking people who are more typical in the way that they’re investing. They talk about how you can use it to finance cars, college education, pay off debt.
And to give them some credit. That’s true. You can do all these things. I don’t think it’s necessarily false with what they’re saying at all, where we take it from the standpoint is, our clients tend to be higher-income earners tend to already be alternatives. Alternative investors. So who is, investing in cashflow.
So we’re not saying, Hey, change the entire way that you invest to go utilize a life insurance policy. We take it from the opposite approach to say that, okay, if you’re investing in syndications, in businesses, in real estate in some way, Any alternative investing, that’s going to kick off cashflow.
The investment optimizer is hyper-focused at just adding a layer of profitability and just enhancing what you’re already going to be doing. So we don’t take it from, Hey, we have this entire better way of building wealth and it doesn’t matter what rich families have done for hundreds of years.
We take it straight from the standpoint of okay, if you’re investing and you’re typically using savings accounts, money markets, checking accounts, to build up your cap. We go right to the numbers and say, here’s how the investment optimizer or the specially designed life insurance policy, when plugged into what you’re already doing is going to give you better results.
So if you do want to check that out, we have webinars at money, insights.net, and an education center. I think you’re going to find the way that we explain it is a lot different than maybe other people in the industry are doing it. So right now,
And again, that’s really what I have appreciated about our time together for the listeners like blink.
And I don’t have a relationship beyond the context of this interview and then our, our, before this, I’m not a client we’re not working together, at least at this time in any way that could change in the future. But as we record, that’s not the case. And. I was telling you before we hit record that I’m considering not talking about this topic on the show anymore, because of concerns about how others use very flowery and generous language to market these policies as though they’re, I don’t know.
They’re magic dust. That’s going to, again, turn you into a rich, powerful family. If you’re somebody that’s making low six figures and that. That’s just ridiculous. We should be looking for things to help grow our wealth more in line with our goals and our strategy. But again, the flowery language is a concern for me.
And I think you guys seem to really and that.
I think some of the things that I’ve heard in the past Taylor, maybe to your point, look at the life insurance policy as like the hub of all your wealth-building, right? So this is the place where you go to build wealth. It can be based on the rate of return and the tax benefits might be better than putting money in a 401k or something like that.
Again, I know the message is very simple, but you’re just plugging this into what you’re already doing anyway. So for example, and I know we took a look at some of these numbers, but we have an example on our website that we show where, okay, let’s say you’re putting in $500,000 is the amount that you’re going to want to invest.
So you can save that money. Savings account before you invest in syndications or multi-family or whatever you’re doing versus the investment optimizer. So the investment optimizer at the start, and this was one of your concerns, Taylor, I know is that you don’t have full access to the capital right away.
We might have 75, 80% on day one. But we have clients who still put money into policies and leverage those, 30 days later to go invest. Why are they doing that? What we do is just run through the numbers and show them. That even though there’s going to be a slower start in years, one, two, maybe even three after 20 years, what we show is if using our basic assumptions you could have turned that 500,000 into 20 million using a savings account, which is an incredible amount of wealth to build. So real estate, the investing is where the wealth was built. However, if you just flowed that money through the investment optimizer and you had less money from the start. Which we took a look at just using those same assumptions, nothing changed on the investing side.
We would have ended up with 22 million and some change. So simply by adding this in as your opportunity fund, as the way money’s flowing in and out of the investments. You added $2 million that you wouldn’t have had you used the same account and we take all the costs into account. So again, the purpose of this strategy is not to say that, oh, this is going to be better than investing in syndications.
What, what you’re teaching your clients, how to do. This is just a way to add a layer of profitability. As I mentioned, just add the rate of return onto what you’re already doing and it’s just a numbers game. Are you going to come out ahead using this strategy or just using the bank account, like you probably typically have been doing well, and again, I think that gets at the heart of a lot of my concerns about this will say this realm of the whole life, strategy?
Is that right? Oftentimes the language that others use in this world would imply that for that case that you named, okay, if you don’t use the policy, you’ll be at 20 million. If you do use a policy, you’re going to be at $300 million that’s and they don’t make me put those numbers to it. But the language that they use heavily implies that’s going to be the case.
Sure. So going back to my example, W where was the wealth generated? The real estate, right? The syndication, the what? The businesses. So the reason that I got excited about doing this strategy myself when I started, I was maybe 23 years old when I opened up my first policy, wasn’t because, oh, this life insurance policy was going to do all these great things for me.
The fact that I believed in myself, my ability to create wealth in business and investing. And so I needed a place to store capital before I went to go do all these things. Now, as I’ve learned more, get a little more sophisticated with the way I’ve done it. I realized I didn’t do it necessarily the best in the past, but the mentality was never.
Oh, life insurance is the key to my financial future. That’s not the case. Life insurance was just the way for me to store capital. That’s liquid, it’s safe, it’s growing right in whatever, all the benefits that you can get from it. And now I have access to go invest in the things that I believe are truly what’s going to create wealth.
And again, I know we had a conversation about this, but I, yeah. The way we think about it, the way we teach our clients is certainly different than maybe how most people do it. But oftentimes it has to do also with the type of people who are attracted to our business.
Maybe, Considering not discussing this topic on the show anymore, other than maybe having you back is because I can’t imagine after this conversation, going back to talking to somebody who uses the more flowery language that maybe make some of those promises that are just ridiculous, because.
I don’t I just think it makes the wrong process. Now. Now I’m curious. You mentioned you would have done things differently, for your case, you were getting started in your early twenties, which, most of our listeners are not in their early twenties, but in your case, what would you have done differently?
A lot of it had to do with the way that we can design policies now, and we. One of the things that we focused on because all of our, not all, but a high majority of our clients are either entrepreneurs. They’re business owners. They’re alternative investors. Flexibility is huge. So as we’re designing policies, we try to make it as much flexibility as a bank account. So we think of it as essentially it’s a bank account on steroids. So some of the languages that people have that they might be concerned about is thinking oh man, how am I going to come up with the premiums every year to go put into this policy? And I don’t want to get into necessarily all the details of how we do that.
Again we have those conversations. One-on-one basis, but essentially the way that we design policies now, if flexibility, and just suitability to the people who are utilizing the strategies is much more important. So we start with. What dollars are you looking to allocate towards alternative investing in the next year, five years, 10 years?
And we build the policies around that. And so that’s why the policies can be, as small as maybe $10,000 a year. And we have people putting in multiple seven figures a year, but we’re starting with the idea. How can we structure this policy to capture the dollars that you’re going to use for investing, but it all starts with understanding the numbers again, that’s why I would point you to our website just to check things out.
But once you understand the numbers, how the strategies work, we have clients with 15 policies. We even have one client, I think, with over 60 policies, right? Because once you understand how it works, you’re going to start figuring out how to layer them on top of each other. And it just becomes part of the way that you address.
So I guess that this gets into the weeds a little bit, but to me, I was like, I don’t know enough to understand why somebody would have 60 policies as opposed to, one gargantuan policy. And again, it’s into the weeds of that person’s specific situation, but at a high level, why would you have that many policies as opposed to, one.
So you start with one and they might’ve for them. At that point when they started, might’ve been one gargantuan policy, but if you start to like me, I have more resources. Now you could say at 31 than I did at 21. So as your wealth expands, you can just start new policies as you’re investing income growth.
If you have maxed out how much money you can put into a policy, you’re a believer in the strategy. What do you do? You just open up another policy to capture more of the dollars that’s going to go into investing. Then there’s also the point where at some point, we have clients who have maxed out their insurability.
They can’t do more on themselves. So they do on spouses, on children, on business partners, right? So there’s a laundry list of ways of why you would want multiple policies, but we don’t start saying, okay let’s set up five verse 10 life insurance policies. That is smaller. Now we start with one policy.
What makes sense? And then how do we optimize the way that you’re going to use this for the investment that you’re doing?
Okay. And another thing that I appreciate about the way you talk about this is the direction that you come at it. The value that you’re planning to invest in alternative investments over the next few years, as opposed to, Hey, let’s revamp the way this person builds their wealth.
Certainly, make it work for these alternative investments. And they should put it in that. If somebody and we were talking about this before we recorded is let’s say we’re going to be. Investing in syndications for the next few years. We’re not sure. How long I at what point does it start making sense for someone I’m only gonna invest in syndications for it?
And this is not me saying this is a hypothetical, I’m only going to invest this indication for the next two years versus I’m going to be investing in this in syndications for the rest of my days, as that vision, where’s that kind of dividing line where it starts to. Makes sense. Yeah.
And so we run people through the numbers and take a look at those kinds of things.
But I’ll try to give you just a general example. I think if you’re thinking I’m only going to be investing for the next two to three years you’re not going to see the value. So probably somewhere, if you’re going to invest for four or five years, Is where, again, just take a look at the math.
You’re going to have more wealth by flowing your money through these policies and then leveraging them to invest in the things that you were already going to do anyway. But, to answer your point specifically, I would say if you have at least a five-year time horizon, for us, we’re a little bit on the younger end for investors, right?
Surround yourself with the people who you aspire to be like.
We have a much longer time horizon. It makes total sense. But as long as you’re thinking, this is something I’m going to probably be doing for four or five years mathematically, it comes out of. Using this strategy.
Okay. Okay. That makes sense. One of the things, and again, we discussed this in the hour that we talked before recording one of the things that started to shift my mind in a favorable direction about this strategy more generally is.
The number of people who I’ve met that are just clients. They’re not, I’m having one-on-one conversations with them and they say, oh, I added this to my strategy. And it’s helping. And how are you guys, at your company, incorporating that in your business because client testimonials are huge, in any business?
That’s the best question you’ve asked. And this is something that we, this is something that we’ve thought a lot about. So we have a podcast, the money insights podcast, where we invite clients on as much as we can to share their full story is about, maybe their thought process before what they’re doing.
Now how to employ how they have implemented. So if you want to go back, you can go check out that podcast, learned some things we’ve amped up in our client testimonials. You can again go onto our website. We have an entire testimonials page probably 1520 individuals talking about how they’re utilizing the policies now, but the reason I think that’s such a good question, Taylor is because.
A lot of people, work in a space where we’re working with people on these strategies every day. So we talk to people who make total sense to them. They know a lot of people who have been using it. And they just get educated and plug it into their investing.
There’s a. Portion of the country who are investors, who don’t know a lot of people who are doing it. So you want to have a lot of confidence that what you’re doing, you’re not just being sold on something, but what you’re doing is going to have a big impact. And we try to share as many client stories as we can just to give people some more familiarity with what’s going on.
That there’s a lot of people. We’re, again, we’re talking with people, multiple people every single day who are plugging into this, however, You wouldn’t know that from the outside, if you’re not dealing in arenas where people are talking about it, I’m glad that you’ve had some people who have at least who aren’t in the business who have talked about how they’re utilizing this with their investing.
Because I think once you take some time and understand just the nuts and bolts, have a conversation, get your questions answered. Like we’ve been able to do during this recording and before, so once you peel back the layers of the onion, it’s not that complex. And if we can add more profitability to what we’re already going to be doing anyway, right?
Why is it not worth taking a look at that?
Absolutely. Again, I appreciate the way you’re talking about this and getting back to my comments about, others using very flowery language here now, before we, move on to the final part of the show. Are there any aspects about this topic that you’d like to address that I haven’t asked about?
Or any points from our hour-long conversation before this that you’d like to touch on before we.
I think a lot of our conversation. And what you’ve talked about is just listening to people in the maybe hearing things and just making assumptions off that. I don’t know if, I don’t know if I have a specific answer to your question other than the fact that I would. Seek out. And we’ve tried to provide opportunities to do this, seek out people who are utilizing it themselves.
We have some people who are more than happy to share what they’re doing. And I know I’m repeating what I said in the last one. I’m not sure if this is specific to your question, but just finding people who are already doing this and hearing their stories, I think is the most impactful.
The thing that you can do to wrap your head around the strategy that may seem, is pie in the sky at the end of the day. It’s not. It’s pretty simple actually.
I appreciate that. And I think that’s a good comment and that’s, again, for me as I consider this as a potential part of my strategy in the future.
Talking with people who are already using it, who are in private conversations. Just tell me about what they’re doing, that helps build that mental model and a better understanding of how it can be used. And again, I also appreciate the way you’re talking about it as adding fuel to something you’re already doing rather than.
Kind of using it to take loans out against buying cars and stuff, because that doesn’t make the liability of cargo away. I just, that doesn’t make us.
Yeah. And again, you can do those things. I got to give credit to people saying, you can do those things now, are you going to become financially ahead doing that?
I don’t know. I haven’t really, that’s not really where we work again. We’re looking for people who are pretty sophisticated investors. Maybe you’re a high-income earner, right? There are just natural inefficiencies that happen in the way that you’re investing and what we use as the investment optimizer.
These policies are you. I think you use jet fuel, right? You’re just adding jet fuel onto. Already doing so if we’re already going to be doing it anyway, why not pour an additional layer of profitability and additional rate of return onto what you’re already getting.
Nice. Nice. Once again, I appreciate the way you talk about this and I appreciate it.
We get an hour-long conversation before we were, we recorded and. I don’t know I had fun. I sure did too. I don’t know. We’ll see if we talk about this topic on the show again, in the future with other folks, maybe not, I don’t, I’m still making up my mind about that, but anyway, right now we’re going to take a quick break for our sponsor.
All right, Blake, I’ve got three questions. I ask every guest on the show. Are you ready? Let’s go. Great. First one. What is the best investment you ever made other than in yours?
So thinking about the way that I started and, I’m not, I’m probably eight, 10 years into this business, but we started by just doing things locally.
And it sounds crazy now with podcasts, with technology. But my answer to that question is going to be technology. The people that we’ve been able to serve, the people I’ve been able to meet versus the costs that I had to pay, just to get some basic technology setup. You say nothing’s infinite. I can’t calculate the rate of return on a couple of, a thousand bucks worth of equipment or whatever.
You have to be able to meet with people in all 50 states. Absolutely. Absolutely. Technology has changed a lot of businesses and glad to hear it’s changing yours. We had the best investment. Now we go to the other side of that coin, the worst investment. What is the worst investment you have ever made?
So again, I’m going back to the start of my career. I was just doing my thing, making a little bit of money. I needed money for something. I can’t even remember what it was. And I realized I was unknowingly putting money into a 401k. So I had every part of every paycheck was getting siphoned to this account.
I probably spent a couple of years working before I even knew any dollars were going in. When I figured out that my money was locked up, I decided to just rip the money. I don’t even think I got a match or anything to pay, pay the higher tax when I ripped it out plus a penalty.
Yeah. So in, in hindsight, would you have not put the money in the first place or would you have left it in once you found it?
I wouldn’t have put the money in the first place. What I did with the money was great. I was able to invest in some things that created more wealth, and I’m not saying 401ks are bad, but again, going back to my belief, that alternative investing in businesses is a better way to create wealth for my situation specifically, having access to capital was more important than not having access to it, but having the account value.
Nice. Okay. Okay. So my favorite question here at the end of the show is what is the most important lesson you’ve learned in business?
The most important lesson I have learned is to surround yourself with the people you aspire to be like, and this could be yeah. Investing business family. You could take this on any different topic.
A big thing for me was getting involved. With individuals who understood how to grow businesses, run businesses more efficiently than I could do on my own. I’m teaming up with people who were 10 years older, 10 more years more experienced asking questions about people from people I should say, who was 40 years into the business?
What did they do well, what did they not do well? So getting as much input from people who are a step or two ahead of you that you aspire to be like there’s nothing more valuable to that.
Nice. Blake, thank you for joining us today. And I appreciate our conversation here. That’s been recorded and the part prior that was much longer, that was not recorded.
If folks want to reach out, if they want to get in touch, if they want to learn more about you and your business or anything like that, where can they track?
Yep. Great question. Moneyinsights.net would be a great place to start. The money insights podcast. We put out shows weekly really tailored towards high-income individuals and practical strategies that you can implement to grow your wealth on our website, there’s what we call the assessment, where you can go in and check some boxes about your specific situation.
You get a score and then after you get that score, You can contact us, but there are also some practical ways that you can increase your wealth based upon the things that you learned about through that assessment. So anything money, insights, podcast, website, and then I would go to our education center.
If you want to know more about some of the strategies that we’ve been talking about.
Awesome. Thank you once again for joining us today, I appreciate you letting me have a bit of a gripe session about this topic before we recorded and then, airing I don’t know, airing out, helping me air out some of those grievances and address those.
And I appreciate that. I think you. From the context of this conversation, everything that you’ve shared, I think your, positive force in this space to everybody out there. Thank you for tuning in. If you’re enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and review on the apple podcast. Blake less left us one.
So I just did mom. If you know anyone who could use a little bit more passive wealth in their lives, please share the show with them and bring them into the tribe. Don’t forget to subscribe and check out the show. Join us here every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. I hope you have a great rest of your day and we’ll talk to you the next.
Bye-bye.
Adding Fuel to Your Alternative Investment Strategy
About our Guest
Blake Brogan
Blake has been in the financial services industry since 2015 and is passionate about teaching wealth creation strategies to entrepreneurial-minded clients who desire more clarity and control.
He earned his undergraduate degree in Entrepreneurship from Grove City College (PA). It was while in college where he first was exposed to families and business owners who were actively using Privatized Banking strategies to finance many of their entrepreneurial ventures.
He started implementing these wealth creation strategies in both his personal and business life in 2016 and has had the privilege of connecting with like-minded clients who are looking for a better way to build and protect wealth since. He places a significant emphasis on both the education of the strategies Brogan Wealth teaches as well as the philosophy behind them.
Before founding Brogan Wealth Strategies, Blake worked overseas with the Cru organization and in the Pacific Northwest with Logos Bible Software.
Born and raised in East Lansing Michigan, Blake currently makes East Lansing home with his wife Elizabeth, and two boys. In his free time, he loves playing golf and enjoys Spartan athletics.
Episode Show Notes
Blake has been in the financial services industry since 2015 and is passionate about teaching wealth creation strategies to entrepreneurial-minded clients who desire more clarity and control. He earned his undergraduate degree in Entrepreneurship from Grove City College (PA). It was while in college where he first was exposed to families and business owners who were actively using Privatized Banking strategies to finance many of their entrepreneurial ventures.
He started implementing these wealth creation strategies in both his personal and business life in 2016 and has had the privilege of connecting with like-minded clients who are looking for a better way to build and protect wealth since. He places a significant emphasis on both the education of the strategies Brogan Wealth teaches as well as the philosophy behind them.
Before founding Brogan Wealth Strategies, Blake worked overseas with the Cru organization and in the Pacific Northwest with Logos Bible Software.
[00:01 – 06:33] Opening Segment
- Get to know Blake Brogan
- Blake introduces Money Insights
- Enhance your properties with the The Investment Optimizer
[06:34 – 15:01] Adding Fuel to Your Alternative Investment Strategy
- Infinite Banking and Big Time Promises
- Blakes alternative to promised outcomes
- How to add an additional layer of profitability to your business
[15:02 – 25:11] Structuring Policies to Capture the Dollar
- Flexibility is huge!
- Start with a single policy and create more
- Blake walks us through the journey of making sense of investing strategies
- Why you should seek out people and listen
[25:10 – 32:35] Closing Segment
- Quick break for our sponsors
- The first step to growing your wealth is tracking your wealth, income spending and everything else about your finances, you can start tracking your wealth for free and get six free months of wealth advisor
- Learn more about Personal Capital at www.escapingwallstreet.com
- What is the best investment you’ve ever made other than your education?
- Technology
- Blake’s worst investment
- A 401k
- What is the most important lesson that you’ve learned in business and investing?
- “Surround yourself with the people who you aspire to be like.”
Connect with Blake Brogan through LinkedIn. Visit their website Money Insights and listen to the Money Insights podcast .
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Tweetable Quotes:
“Life insurance was just the way for me to store capital that’s liquid, that’s safe. It’s growing right in whatever the benefits that you can get from it. ” – Blake Brogan
“You want to have a lot of confidence that what you’re doing is really going to have a big impact.” – Blake Brogan
