Grow Faster, Reduce Taxes, and Secure your future with Mark Willis

Full Transcript

Taylor   0:02  

What's going on guys? This is the passive wealth strategies podcast. Thank you for tuning in. I'm your host Taylor load. Today, our guest is Mark Willis. Mark is a certified financial advisor. today we're talking about some of the details of strategies that you can use with whole life insurance, to be your own banker, potentially reduce some of your tax liability, give yourself more growth over time, and just a really interesting opportunities for busy professionals, high income professionals to retire with more money in your pocket just by setting up this detailed plan for your investments. This is not just for the real estate investors out there, but this plan definitely lends itself to real estate investing. Marc is a two time number one best selling author and the owner of Lake growth and finance. services, his financial firm based in Chicago, Illinois. We recorded this interview in mid March 2020. As the financial markets are collapsing, we had a bit of an update just before recording this, but my expectation is that things are going to continue to look worse, it's going to get darker before it gets lighter. So we in the interest of having a long term plan and a long term strategy, I'm happy to have this conversation about, again, reducing our tax liability planning for our let's be honest, it's a life. It's a whole life policy. We're planning for our death, we're planning to have benefits to pass on to our air. So it's a good time to have this type of conversation. When things are not looking as good as they once did. There will be light, but first, it's going to be dark. It is not a dark episode. But it is a bit of a dark conversation if you're not prepared for it. So, once again, our guest is Mark Willis, from Lake growth financial services. He also hosts the not your average financial podcast, which is a fantastic, fantastic brand fantastic idea and he shares his strategies on investing in real estate, paying for college without going broke and creating an income in retirement that you will not outlive. For those of you who don't know, I'm your host, Taylor lode, I'm a real estate investor, a real estate syndicator. I buy multifamily real estate with passive investors. I'm a busy professional just like you love talking about investing. I love talking about these strategies that we can use to grow our wealth faster. If we did then if we didn't know them. So here we go. Conversation with Mark Willis from Lake growth financial services. Mark, thank you for joining us today. Taylor. My pleasure. Glad to be on It'd be talking with you. For the folks out there who don't know you. Can you introduce yourself, tell us about your background, and we'll get into the topic for today.

Mark Willis  3:07  

Sure, I'm a certified financial planner practitioner. I'm also a bank on yourself authorized advisor. More importantly, the family man got a little girl with a beautiful wife. I own a financial firm here in Chicago, Illinois. We work with clients who want to grow wealth and become their own source of financing, no matter what's going on in the markets.

Taylor   3:28  

Nice. So, you know, typical Certified Financial Planner advice is, you know, it's not so much like a bank on yourself, invest in mutual funds, all those kinds of things, whatever mutual fund a particular CFP is selling for my experience and it sounds like you have a fairly, say uncommon take on these things or you know, that's what we hear in this space is uncommon take on things with which can allow us to increase our return. So what does bank on yourself, mean to you know, the average person

Mark Willis  4:00  

Yeah, it's a concept. Most importantly, it's a way to think about how to approach your overall financial life. So I'll start at 30,000 feet. we'll zoom all the way down to the to the runway if you want to tailor the problem that I saw when I was going through my own financial life and lives of our clients, as we set up this financial firm, was threefold one that was out of proportion, right? We're talking literally a third of our lives. A third of our life's income will go to a bank, a third of our life's income, according to the US commerce Bureau. if time is money, that's literally a third of our day gone, a third of our waking hours gone, just servicing and being a slave to a bank on top of that taxes, right, but I don't even need to go there. Next problem I saw was lifestyle. We're all living way beyond our means. The McMansions and so forth. Then finally we couldn't save as much because All of our real money was going to the banks, credit cards, finance companies and then keeping up with the Joneses. So we all couldn't really save as much. So we had to speculate on riskier and riskier assets. It was really interesting. I was doing some research and in 19 4011 cents on every dollar went to debt for the average American. In recent years, it's been more like 36 cents. Wow, our average dollar. Yeah. In 1940 we saved 27 cents on the dollar. Now we save about five cents on the dollar and that's for everything. retirement, kids college emergency fund, you know, medical emergency job loss, I mean, it's five cents on the dollar really going to do enough. Right. So my, my problem was I found myself in that problem, right? I was in debt up to my eyeballs. Student loans were six figures $120,000 between my wife and I mostly me. So we had to find a better way and learning to think like a banker to not just pay off the debt, the Dave Ramsey way. But to literally become our own source of financing to sit on the banker side of the desk has allowed us not only to pay off our student loan debts, but actually to become a line of credit for our own investments and build true wealth no matter what's going on and who's sneezing on whatever side of the world. Right.

Taylor   6:26  

Right. So, you know, just to follow up on that he mentioned who's sneezing we're recording this on Saturday, March 14 of 2020. Where you know, where we kind of seem to be, we're just hitting the inflection point of Coronavirus in the United States and things are starting to shut down and are going to be released probably in the May timeframe. So, you know, my expectation is that continued things will probably continue to deteriorate. I don't think we're going to get better for a little while. So I think when this comes out, it will still be a concern, Corona virus and all those things. But, you know, to go back on, you know, savings rates and how much money that, you know, we spend our time just making money to send to banks in terms of interest. It seems like some of that has to do with, you know, the, how low interest rates are, you know, right now, and compared to historically, there's just not a lot of incentive for us to save money and put into a bank or is that counting what people are saving and investing to?

Mark Willis  7:30  

Oh, no, yeah, that 5% includes your 401k contributions that includes any kind of real estate investments you might be making. These are the averages, right? Nobody's an average. But what this means is our listener, if you're double the average, let's say you have half that much debt and double that amount of savings. That means somebody else is twice as bad. Right? To make that the average. Yeah, the average american, according to the Federal Reserve, doesn't even have $400. To cover an emergency. They'd have to sell something or go into debt. That's Sort of landscape we find ourselves in. Honestly, my prayers and hopes are that whenever you're listening to this, that you're in a healthy place, you know, on a healthy level. You know, my, truly I mean, I'm on Tinder. , you know, you know, hopeful that all is well for whoever's listening. But man, if you have $400 going into this crisis, health crisis, financial crisis, I mean, we just saw Taylor, check this out. Statistically, we had a 10% drop on Thursday in the Dow. then we had a 10% upswing on Friday. That hasn't happened since October of 1929. Wow, what was going on back then? Right. So with that kind of volatility, I mean, take the virus out of the equation. We are not just in volatile times, we are in turbulent times, and should our money be tied to things that we just simply have no controller or, you know, have no control over? I would say No, there's nothing written Then stone that says I have to put my money into things I can't access or control.

Taylor   9:05  

Absolutely, absolutely. So when it comes to becoming our own banker, presumably that's, you know, it's a real estate investing show. That's for a debt to invest in real estate, right. I mean, I can't imagine what else you might use that strategy for. Sure.

Mark Willis  9:22  

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, real estate is one of the ways we can keep calm and carry on in days like today. You know, it provides security, it's less volatile than the markets. Certainly, you can live in it. If you had to write. You can house hack, you know, you can use it as a significant tax shelter. It has incredible tax benefits. It always has. I mean, it's been a wealth generating tool since the pyramids. So you know, we're looking at a long term, financial asset and again, yeah, as a CFP, we're generally back to another point you made Taylor we're as a as a group of folks as cfps aren't generally just pump in Real Estate because you know, you can't get a fee off that, you know, you can't put that into the meat unless it's a real, you know, going into a mutual fund or whatever. But I don't think that I would. That's not in the best interest of our clients to just recommend things that we can get paid on. That's, I think, you know, going against the CFP code which is tacked in our clients best interest. So, yeah. When I started looking at my own financial life and those of our clients, I was looking at it from the perspective of the smallest hinge that could swing the biggest door. Do you know the focusing question or have you ever heard of this by Gary Keller? The focusing question is, what is the one thing I can do today? So that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary? That's a really cool question. Because then you got one thing I don't have to have 10,000 things on my to do list. in fact, I've got it right here on my whiteboard. When I walk in, it says I get my one thing done today, everything else is a distraction. I started thinking that that's probably a good way to look at our money to like, if I could put, you know, what's the one thing I can do with my money? Such that by doing that one thing, everything else in my financial life becomes easier or unnecessary. So let's think about it. Like if you couldn't have your money to be in one place, or do one thing, what sort of characteristics would you want your money to have? What would you want it to do for you? And that's kind of where I started my financial life. I started saying, hey, if I could wave a magic wand and create a perfect financial instrument, such that by creating this instrument, everything else in my financial life became easier or unnecessary. What would it look like? What kind of attributes would I want it to have? Right? I mean, I started creating this sort of list. I'll give you my list tailor. But I'd be curious if you'd add anything here. You know, I wanted easy access to cash for my investments. You know, I didn't want to have to sell something or pay a bunch of penalties to get my money at liquid And especially in turbulent times, like we're in right now, there's some great opportunities. If you've got cash on hand, I wanted it to be safe, I wanted some sort of predictable guaranteed return. I want some sort of tax advantages, both in terms of deferring taxes today, and also getting it out tax free in the future. I wanted some sort of, like freedom when it came to what I could put into the thing I didn't want the government telling me I could only put six grand into a Roth IRA. You know, what kind of Yeah, I mean, what kind of solution is that? Right? So I wanted some sort of way to keep it private. I didn't want it to be exposed to creditors, if someone slipped on a banana peel outside of one of my rental properties. I didn't want them to sue me and take this asset from me. So I wanted to create this sort of perfect financial instrument in my mind anyway, before I started putting labels on it, right. So that's my little list. But Taylor, I'm curious, anything you'd add to that list? Anything I

Unknown Speaker  12:55  

didn't mention?

Taylor   12:58  

Interesting. I'm not, I'm not certain, you know what exactly I would add. I mean, to me, you know, big priority, especially for a lot of high paid professionals, is strategies that will allow us to minimize our tax bill. I don't remember if you mentioned that but at least reduce the marginal rate that we pay. Because high pay professionals pay the highest taxes of basically anybody compared to people who live off of their investments and invest prudently. So yeah, ways we can optimize our tax bill, it is your your comment about only being able to put six grand a year into a Roth IRA, or any kind of IRA definitely rings true for me, as I, you know, do max out those tax advantaged accounts and it's, for a lot of people out there, it's there's just not enough of a tax advantage to to really mitigate some of the taxation issues. So you brought up some very good points. So you know, Presumably your strategy has addressed those issues for you.

Mark Willis  14:04  

Yeah. Unfortunately, of course, for a lot of your listeners, I'm sure Roth IRAs aren't even on the table anymore due to their income fade outs. So yeah, yeah, we looked at the landscape. I looked at 450 financial vehicles products as I was going through my CFP training, and yeah, of all things Taylor a, an old fashioned dividend paying whole life policy fits all those categories. Even as I looked at it, I was sort of dumbfounded thinking, Hey, you know, Dave Ramsey would never want me to do this. Right. It's a good sign. If you're listening. If you're listening, Dave. Yeah. This is not the kind of whole life that you know, the white coat investors talking about or Dave Ramsey's talking about, you know, this is a modernized form of whole life insurance. That does some things really well, in my opinion, there's no better coupling asset to the real estate portfolio. Then whole life insurance. I'd love to talk about that some share even how I've used it for our private placements that I've personally done, and specifically how it works and what it isn't for your listeners today.

Taylor   15:14  

Yeah, I mean, that's a topic I would say that I'm not super savvy on. I mean, I've heard it before. I feel like I still don't fully understand the strategy here and how it works. It is complex. I know that it works. But it is definitely worth putting in the work to understand So yeah, absolutely laid out for us.

Mark Willis  15:38  

Real simple, you know, somewhat like our smartphones. They're very complex and how they were engineered. somebody took a lot of care in their design of this thing. But all I know is I can swipe up and it works. Right. Now if it was engineered correctly. We shouldn't have to know all the right vocabulary. I'll get into some of this neck, a little next little bit here, but it's very simple. It's a place to park your money in between your deals. it's a better place in my opinion than any other cash equivalent in our portfolio. So let's talk about it. Why whole life insurance of all places, right? We could be talking about anything. But does it do what we want our money to do for us? So here's what all life has done. It's increased in value guaranteed for 160 years, the returns are better than other places, we could keep cash better than money markets better than CDs, certainly, these days. The cash is easy to access for our investments, you can usually get the money out in about four or five business days with no access penalties, whatever you'll have, since it is life insurance, you're guaranteed to leave your money more to your family more than you could save for them. Most importantly, for this discussion, it allows us to become our own source of financing. So we're no longer beholden to the banks. I don't know what's going on with the banking industry when you're listening to this, but you know, what's settled? quote by Mark Twain a banker is a fellow who will lend you his umbrella when the sun is shining. But once it back as soon as it starts to rain

Taylor   17:09  

so interesting. Yeah, this mark guaranteed line of credit. He was a genius. So yeah, as you mentioned it's grown, it grows faster than CDs and such. So what's the rate that it grows at?

Mark Willis  17:21  

Yeah, over time. that's the key word. The policies that I've seen designed, well are anywhere from between four and six, six and a half percent. That's an after tax return, meaning that after fees, expenses, taxes included everything.

Taylor   17:36  

Okay, so what is producing that return? Is it I don't know if it is invested in something like a basket of stocks investment, real estate, like what's the actual thing producing that return?

Mark Willis  17:48  

So it's less of an investment and it's more of a business model. Think of it almost like the profit margin of the company you're a partner in. So if it's a mutually owned life insurance company, there's another vocabulary word. It's owned by you and me. There's no other stockholders, shareholders taking profits out of this business. It's almost like we're partners if you know like how lawyers are, they buy in as partners, right? Then you get to share in the profits of that of that law firm. Well, in this case, you're your buy in as a policyholder, in essence, you're an owner in that mutual company. anytime that company has a profitable year, they shell out profits, dividends, but even if the company is not profitable, they would still on contract law have to give you an increase in your cash value guaranteed. So that's where I say the call the policies have grown guaranteed, not my guarantee, but the company's guarantee for over 160 years. But most of the companies that I would recommend folks check out have been paying profits on top of that guarantee almost like icing on the cake for at least a century. So the returns are not it's not meant to be your investment portfolio, it's certainly not an investment. It's it's supposed to be again, it's a parking space for your money in between your other deals, other investments you might make.

Taylor   19:14  

Okay, so it's a parking space for deals and how hard is it to move money in and out of say, you know, like a self directed IRA, something like that? Has it taken a couple days to get the wires handled? And you have to do paperwork and things like that. I mean, how, right, yeah, how liquid? Is it? And are there any requirements about like, if you take it out and put it put the funds in an investment that you got to have him back in and three to five years? Or you're How often do you have to re up?

Mark Willis  19:47  

Yeah, so the whole life contract will let you use the money, get the money out within about four or five business days. you can get it out in two ways. This is where things get really interesting. So one way you can get out is through a traditional, just regular withdrawal, right? So you can just withdraw the money out, you put the money in, you can withdraw cash out, if you have cash value in the policy. This is not term insurance. For those that aren't familiar, there's two kinds of life insurance, I just turned on your rent, like renting an apartment, there's no cash and renting an apartment. then there's whole life insurance, which is like owning a house where you do build up cash, you do build up equity. That's the cash that you can use for your investments. So back to your question, that cash that you've built up the equity in the policy is your money, you can withdraw that money, or, and this is where things get interesting. You can tailor you to borrow from the insurance company and use your cash value as collateral. So I'll say that again. You let's say you got 100 grand and in cash value, and you borrow out 80 grand to invest in a private placement. All of a sudden, you've used your policy as collateral. You didn't spend Money, it's still there. so it's earning money for you, it's still continuing to grow as if you never touched a dime of that money. you've got your 80 grand out there in the private placement world, or the investment space or your rental property or whatever you're using the money for. there's no required repayment plan for the rest of your life. You could wait six months, six years, 60 years, as long as that policy is still enforced. When you pass away, the insurance company is happy to wait for the loan repayment, because it's a non recourse loan. it's self collateralized, meaning they'll just deduct it from your death benefit. They already know they're getting paid back when you die. They'll reduce your death benefit from a million bucks to whatever your loan balance was and give your family the rest income tax free.

Taylor   21:48  

Interesting. Okay. So, I'd like to talk about this in terms of like I believe let's I want to ask for some some recommendations for opening out, you know, my own features out there for the what would you advise a client of my, you know, characteristics to to do and the reason I asked this is because I'm 30 I have no dependents, no children, you have rental property and my personal residence. But the syndication properties that I own are all, you know, non recourse debt doesn't have my name on it. The personal residence does, but it's not a big property. There's not an enormous mortgage balance on it. But if I take out a whole life policy at this age, I do I get, I don't know better terms from the life insurance company or what you know, what's kind of the strategy, the time value strategy of taking out a policy when you're fairly young as opposed to not fairly young not to put yeah

Mark Willis  23:00  

I'll give you two answers for your audience one for you, Taylor. then one who's for a guy who's or gal who's, you know, 5060 years young. So yeah, it's always better. Our parents should have done this for us, right when we had our birthday, you know, our very first birthday, I mean, and yeah, time value of money is awesome. This is an ever increasing, uninterrupted compound growth machine. Here's exactly what I mean by that. The stock market is not compound growth. The stock market is not compound growth, because volatility breaks compound growth. Every time we lose money like we did this last week, or we might in the future. That is money will never see growth for us ever again. We are not in a straight line. Only thing that's true, uninterrupted and that's the key word there. uninterrupted compound growth is a system that never goes down but only goes up. So whole life insurance by its actuarial does Design is designed to only do a straight line projection always going up and in the right direction. So for a 30 year old or a 60 year old or even an 80 year old time value of money works in the right direction for you. Actually, I did the math on this. For someone who's 20 years old, to someone who's 35 years old to someone who's 60 years old, even a 60 year old if you put $1 into the efficient part of the whole life policy, not the old fashioned kind that Dave talks about, but if it's using specific writers called a paid up additions writer, if you put that dollar into the paid up additions, even if you're 60 years old, you'll triple your money over your life expectancy with current dividend scales, triple three $3 and 60 cents for every dollar you put into the paid up additions. if you're 30 I'm gonna do the math on that. At age 32. Your life expectancy every dollar with current dividend scales grows to $24 and 30 cents every single dollar can't do anything about it, right? It's just gonna do that no matter what the market does. So you can even use that dollar in and out in and out of your policy for your rental properties, your syndication deals, marketing, expenses, payroll, and that money continues to grow and compound as if you hadn't touched the money. then when you do have a profit, let's say you sell a real estate deal, put it back into your policy to be spent and wait until it's to be spent again, right? over and over and over again, you just recycle the money in and out of that policy. It's sort of your parking lot, right? We keep using that idea. You know, my, my car isn't meant to live in my, my parking space, my garage. It's meant to get out there and do things in life, but it's always coming back to the garage. that's where it lives in between. It's trips same with my money, my money goes from my policy, to our real estate deals. then over here to a family vacation, and then over here to pay for my daughter's college someday, but it's always coming back to my garage. My policies.

Taylor   26:03  

Interesting. Okay, so I appreciate that analogy of your car that stays parked in your garage. it's an interesting way to put it. So you take out the policy, put funds in there, then you can take them out. Is there like what restrictions are there too, as to what you can do with the funds when you take them out to invest them in? Yeah, anything?

Mark Willis  26:28  

Yeah, sure. Yeah. Good question. So first, let's talk about the restrictions of putting money in. We talked about the poor little Roth IRA that can only hold 6000 a year of contributions. Yeah, you know, we've got folks that are doing 10 times 60 times that per year into their whole life policies. You know, you can do any amount that you can be approved for by the insurance company and can go into a policy 100 grand a year, 500 grand a year, a million. You know, it really comes down to what you're wanting to contribute to this financial vehicle. Once It's in there, it's growing on a tax deferred basis, and you can get the money out for any reason, any reason with no taxes due under current law. So, and it's been that way for 100 plus years. So you can use it for any reason, unlike a self directed 401k or self directed IRA, there's, there's self dealing with life insurance, you can fix up your own kitchen, you can buy a house and then live in it, you can, you know, pay off a student loan debt, if you have debt. Or doctors, I'm sure would love to find a better way to pay off that medical debt. Just, you know, putting that money down the hole. So yeah, you can use the policy for any purpose, personal business, investment, otherwise, whatever. then it's, you know, there's no restrictions. There's no limit on what you use the money for.

Taylor   27:49  

Hmm, okay. As far as fees that are typically charged by, you know, the life insurance company and what are typical costs of these policies, you put cash in And that gets a cash value but, you know, get something for nothing. I mean, what do you have to put in every year?

Mark Willis  28:06  

Yeah, every policy is designed differently. You're exactly right. Don't do this to get rich overnight. You see, there's an expense to life insurance, even a well designed policy is going to have some sort of expense. Everyone's gonna have a different number here. So, you know, I'll just use round numbers, I guess, you know, maybe in the first year, you have 75% of your contribution available as cash in the first year. So you put in 100 grand in the first year, you might have 770 5000, to borrow, and to use in the first year. By the third, fourth year, usually you put that next hundred grand in, and it's growing by more than $100,000. That's different from breakeven. But now the costs of the policy effectively are gone. Here's what I mean by that. If the cash value grew by 110,000, in your three to your four, and I'm sorry, In the same hundred grand in year four, what was my expense for the $3 million death benefit, let's say if it grew by more than my contribution, and I've got a life insurance policy worth 3 million bucks. By year four, I'm actually getting paid to keep that policy enforced, not technically, but in essence, I'm getting paid 110 grand and I gave them 100 grand. Now I've got you know, I've got hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash value that I'm hopefully using for investments and syndications and personal needs that I might have got in college, whatever it might be. Does that Oh, it's your question.

Taylor   29:42  

I think so are they I mean, is there like so I take out you know, health insurance or whatever I'm at that pays premiums every year. I mean, is there an understanding if the policies run write that effectively the premium is washed out, but in that interim, we have to be probably making Payment premium payments, things like that, like, hmm, is there something new? What do those typically look like?

Mark Willis  30:07  

Yeah, you know, it's funny, it's a good way to it's a great question. So when you put money into a bank account, you call that a deposit, right? You put money into real estate or 401k. We call that an investment. When you put money into life insurance, we call that premium. The mainstream, mainstream financial wisdom is pay as little premium as possible, get your pennies into that life insurance, rent it for as cheap as you can, and get away with as little as you possibly can, and invest the rest in other things. This is really flipping that upside down. My hope, personally, is to pay as much premium as I possibly can for my policy for as long as I possibly can. The reason is, the design of the policy gives me as much premium as I put into the policy. Again, that's just the word we use to contribute content. contributions to Whole Life Insurance. The more premium I put into my policy, the more cash I have. So yeah, like I said, if you put 100 grand into the policy as a premium, in the first year, you might have 75,000 bucks, right? That's the most expensive that that policy is ever going to be in the second year, the third year, and then the fourth year, let's say, Now, it's the cash value is growing more than your premium payment. So what is the cost? You know, I don't know I worked it out with a guy earlier today over 48 years and worked out to about 75 bucks a month for his cost of insurance. It was really in the first three or four years that that expense was there, but you live over your entire lifetime. pass away. This guy put in nine in our example, he put in $950,000 over 16 years, and then he took out $1.9 million over his retirement years. So what was the cost? Right? He gave them 950. He pulls out Tax Free income at $1.9 million and with this he still had half a million dollars left as a death benefit for his wife at age 95. So the cost was the delta between his contributions, his premium, and the cash value in those first three or four years, which worked out over his lifetime, about 75 bucks a month. But that's different from saying that that wasn't his premium, right? That was just the cost Delta in the premium versus cash value. For every person, they're gonna have different numbers, but the key is what were we using that money for? In the meantime, hopefully, he kept packing that money into the policy and kept using it. Like, you know, I have and have intention to do over my lifetime to keep using that cash value for passive investments. Taylor I know are running. We're running close on time. So I'll keep this very brief, but I have a private placement. We just pulled some money from one of my policies and invested in some mobile home parks. Investing, my policy continues to grow with interest and dividends as if I had not taken that loan out. I've got the money generating cash flow for me on the mobile home park investment, as that loan is as that investment yields, profits and distributions, I'll use those distributions to pay back the policy loan, and recycle the money back into my policy and then use it all over again, for another deal that we come across. So that's kind of the mindset that we take with our clients.

Taylor   33:29  

Interesting. Okay, so another thing I want to hit before we move on here is you know, getting started you mentioned mean, like $100,000. Initially, I guess, premium into the policy, like you said, I mean, is that typically what it looks like no other folks who have taken these our they're starting with 100 grand in is it? You know, is it 100? Is there a sliding scale option if folks don't want to start with 100 they want to kind of get their feet wet and everything like

Mark Willis  33:55  

Yeah, what does that look like? It can be a couple hundred bucks a month. You know, it's probably as small as I've seen work for folks. You know, there are no averages and your financial life, you know, you are your own unique person. So maybe it's, you know, 30 grand a year, maybe it's 3000 a year, maybe it's 300,000 a year, it all fits if it's in your best interest, which is why we really recommend two things. One, sit down with a bank on yourself authorized advisor. There are too many advisors out there who call it different things. You know, I won't name any names. But this is a very common strategy. there's a lot of Have you ever seen how your granola bars at the grocery store will say all natural on them? Yeah. But what does that mean, right? There's no, there's no quality check on those words. So bank on yourself. authorized advisor is a trademarked phrase, and it's a specific training, authorization. It's the only one in this industry. It's sort of the USDA Organic of this concept. So you want to make sure you're working with someone who's gone through that training, my mentors have taken me through that training. there's about 200 professionals that have that designation in the country. The next thing is you really want to Yeah, you really want to make sure you have a one on one meeting with that person. Just let them listen to you and explain your concerns, your goals, your financial objectives, because they'll build the policy correctly for you. take as little commission as they possibly can to design the policy, right? And then build as much wealth into the policy for your spec, whatever you're trying to accomplish.

Taylor   35:33  

Nice. Nice. So right now we're going to take a quick break for our sponsor. All right, Mark, I got three questions. I asked every guest on the show. Are you ready? Let's do this. All right. Number one, what is the best investment you've ever made other than your education?

Mark Willis  35:50  

Okay, I hope this counts, all right. But early on in my business, I lost a really big client, they had already become a client. We had already set up a policy And they got snookered away by another financial professional to get them back in the stock market. I lost the client and it hurt. It hurt big time. It hurt my pride mostly. Right. But I learned so many lessons. I hate to say that this might still count as education, I don't know. But it was a financial investment. I lost about 12 grand, let's say. So I made a great investment because I took every last nugget of wisdom out of that experience, and have avoided a lot of the pain in the future. So I hope that counts. Taylor

Taylor   36:40  

I will count it. On the other side of that, what is the worst investment you've ever made?

Mark Willis  36:47  

I would say and this will be counterintuitive, I think too, but using cash to pay off my debts was the worst investment I ever made. Which sounds weird, I know. But there's two problems with Paying off my debt with cash one, I lost all the opportunity cost on that money. If I'd put that money into a bank on yourself type policy first, and then used it to pay off my debt, I'd be you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars wealthier in my retirement years. But I just paid cash. I just threw that money down the hole. The other problem with paying off that debt and why it's the worst investment was it was super low interest rates. Taylor was like 2.8% back then. So yeah, why was I doing that? I don't know. I just didn't know any better. So the worst investment, paid off one debt.

Taylor   37:32  

Yeah, is a gift of an interest rate. Third question. My favorite question at the end of the show is what is the most important lesson that you've learned in business and investing?

Mark Willis  37:45  

Again, I'd say finding the smallest hinge that swings the biggest door is my most important lesson that I've learned. You know, you don't have to chase the rate of return. If you control the entire financial environment where your money lives. I could care less What your mutual funds were even what your private placement did. But did you control the entire process? Meaning Did you have a line of credit that's guaranteed to you? Did you have predictable results that you only have access to and can control? If you have the smallest hinge that swings the biggest door, you know, if you put your money in a place where everything else becomes easier or unnecessary, you win by default. It's awesome.

Taylor   38:25  

Nice. Nice. Well, Mark, thank you for joining us today if folks want to learn more about how this whole process works, and you know, really kind of get maybe more personalized advice, something like that. Where can they get in touch with you? Where can they learn more,

Mark Willis  38:40  

Growing more wealthy and calm is the best website for us to get connected. either me or one of my colleagues would love to sit down just chat, maybe answer some questions that came from this episode. So that's growing more wealth.com grow more wealth.com. Well,

Taylor   38:57  

great. That's an awesome URL. I love that brand. So, thanks for joining us. Thanks for your explanation today. I'm always interested to learn more about how these advantaged strategies you know can work for us and save us money in the long run and help us grow more. So, thanks for the lessons today.

Mark Willis  39:15  

Rock and Roll. Keep up the great work. Thanks,

Taylor   39:17  

everybody out there. Thank you for tuning in. If you're enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts very much appreciated. Do you know anyone out there who could use a little bit more passive wealth in their lives, please share the show with them and bring them into the fold. Thank you for tuning in. Once again, hope you have a great day and a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you in the next episode. Bye

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