Hello, and welcome to the You're An Asset Podcast. I'm your host, Casey The Dollar, and on this podcast we're gonna find out who is an asset in the financial industry – and who is just an ass.
I actually own an insurance agency. We're licensed in almost 50 states, we have over 500 clients, and I have over a hundred thousand followers on TikTok just talking about life insurance. It's crazy to think about how far we've come in the last two years. Our goal with this podcast is to bring honest, factual information to our clients, followers, friends, family, anyone who wants it, especially since we know how social media can be.
I've become quite a trendsetter on TikTok with how I talk about universal life insurance. My most popular trend was probably that whiteboard content that I started doing over a year ago because now when I get on TikTok, it's like I see all these different creators doing the whiteboard content. They even copy my same opening line. The "what does it look like for a 36 year old female to contribute $500 a month into an index universal life insurance policy. Let's find out." You know, and I've made a lot of friends on TikTok, but I've also made plenty of enemies, which is the perfect segue to the first topic of our show today.
This person is huge on social media. We did not invite him to the show because we know he probably wouldn't show up and they've created such a stir in the IUL space. We hear about them a lot. Our clients ask about what we know about them, and about their product. They want us to help them understand it. Other professionals in the industry have taken stances against this product in this person. I've even had this person come to my videos and call me out just for talking about IULs. It's safe to say that this person is going to be the first official ass of the You're An Asset Podcast, and it is none other than, Mr. Curtis Ray and his MPI product.
Now let's set the foundation of Curtis Ray, MPI, IUL. Like I mentioned, Curtis Ray has done a lot of different things to land this spot. So Curtis Ray came into the financial industry in 2014. MPI, as far as I can tell, was started in 2020. It's currently 2023. It hasn't been a super long time, right. MPI stands for Maximum premium indexing and MPI is literally an IUL, an indexed universal life insurance policy that's been rebranded and called MPI.
There's a lot of different layers on top of the IUL to create this MPI plan. So, an IUL – already considered very complex, like that's what we're up against. And then you take MPI, which is an IUL with all these extra features. It paints a really pretty. for people interested in, in using the product. But so many people have such a hard time understanding it.
A lot of people have come to us wondering, you know, how does this thing work? How do you use it? What does this say? And I just don't understand how people are able to make a decision on whether to buy this product because of how complex it is. So let's compare them apples to apples for a better understanding.
An IUL has a 0% floor, so you can't lose money to a market crash. An IUL earns uninterrupted compound interest, not due to the 0% floor, but because the value of the policy remains the same, even when you take out money in the form of a loan. So you earn interest on the entire value of your policy as if you had not touched the money or taken out that loan. And an IUL has tax advantages like tax-deferred. Tax-free access and tax-free transfer of wealth.
Now, with MPI, it is an IUL from the beginning. However, by year three, that's when things change pretty quickly. It sounds cool and fancy, but really they're just branding the participating fixed loan. So let's talk about what a participating fixed loan is. A PFL or a participating fixed loan is a loan option inside an IUL policy, it's sometimes referred to as an alternate loan. So let's say you pull out a $6,000 loan, it's at 5% interest. That's $300 of interest. That $300 gets to participate in the growth of your policy and earn interest. So what Curtis did with his MPI was highlight this loan feature, which is amazing, but it's not quite unique and they make it look like it's something special and it's really not participating.
Fixed loans are offered at a lot of highly rated carriers and they can usually be used the first year of the policy. And so an IUL has all these . Things and then you make it an MPI and it, then it turns into something completely different. So what's different about it? Well, we've gotten a lot of MPI illustrations from potential clients and people asking us, “Hey, can you look over this?” On year three, that's when things look different.
So what happens? Well, year three comes along and you can qualify to be in the MPI match RELOC program. And what this RELOC program does is it says, whatever amount of money that you have liquid in your cash value of your IUL, we're gonna open up an equal size line of credit and you can take that line of credit and put it into your policy as extra premium.
But when it goes from the line of credit into the policy, it's considered a loan and the loan has interest. And so the hope is that this line of credit that's being loaned into your policy as premium actually earns you an extra two to 4% interest inside your account. So what's actually happening here, right?
What's happening is this basic IUL, they're allowing you to take advantage of other people's money and do a little extra leverage. So when, if you qualify for the RELOC program and, you use this line of credit to put it into your policy as extra premium, those are all loans. And we're hoping to earn interest by paying more interest.
Be it small, because every dollar counts, right? We know that every dollar counts. Every dollar adds up. And it seems okay. However, the fine print within MPI I illustrations will tell you that MPI match after loan rate. Has a floor of 4% and a cap around 6%. It also mentions that the average interest earned is between two and 4%.
So in year three, you wanna qualify for this RELOC program, you open up the line of credit, you start adding that money as premium. The floor of 0% goes away. No more 0% floor. While that money is being loaned and leveraged to hopefully earn you more interest, it's possible that you could lose the money. There is no 0% floor, it is not protected, and the hope - the best hope of all of it is that you earn maybe an extra 4%, right?
Your OG IULs have a participating fixed loan and someone could utilize them in a basic IUL that we offer and get the same results as MPI. They have rebranded the IUL so much that it's almost deceptive even in the way they talk. For him to say that a traditional IUL is bad compared to an MPI is just a flatout lie. His product is an IUL with features that are unrecognizable to people because they're not common. It also makes it hard for people to compare MPI versus IUL. They don't know much about either.
Trying to compare them is almost impossible. Part of the deception from Curtis also comes from the fact that MPI has only been around since 2020. If you look at an MPI illustration, it's gonna show you historical returns of an MPI product starting in 2007. MPI was not even a thing in 2007, which means that no one has had an MPI policy for even 10 years, so there is no history of the returns of an MPI. There is no one out there who has successfully used an MPI product to retire. It's just, it hasn't been around long enough. So then to have these facts and information on the illustrations that you're giving out to clients – is deceptive.
What's also sad is that it took us a long time to figure out what exactly was going on with MPI, you know, and we live and breathe this stuff all day, and we really had to sit there and think about what he was trying to accomplish, what his illustrations were saying, and how all this stuff worked. So I can only imagine how hard it is as a consumer, as a potential buyer, trying to decide if this is a good idea or not. Especially when you see everything on TikTok or social media and the claims are just outlandish. They're outlandish. Of course you would be intrigued. And then you sit down and it sounds fancy and it's all dressed up pretty.
Curtis has said some things to me about only offering IULs to our clients. I mean, Curtis has said as much as "how dare you not offer your clients the best," and "an IUL is awful compared to MPI." oh, ah. And that's what we're after here, helping people get all of the information so that they can make their own decision that best suits them. Something else Curtis has done that qualifies him as an ass in this industry is the way he talks about other retirement accounts.
By having a life insurance license, we are not allowed to give advice about investments or securities. We can talk about them and how they fit into someone's financial portfolio, but we can't guide them to make a decision within their well-defined contribution plans or any. We do talk about the differences between IULs and 401ks, but we do not tell people to stop funding their 401k or their well-defined contribution plan or that they should not take the benefits that are being offered to them or that they should stop contributing the match.
We don't even like saying that they're bad. We start seeing these ads of Curtis saying, "your 401K sucks. Your Roth IRA is shit. MPI beats everything" and these are paid ads. I didn't think you could do that. Right? I mean, people come after me just for mentioning the differences between IUL and a 401k, and Curtis is literally being paid to make videos and say that a 401k is awful. It's garbage. And it's absolutely against compliance. I mean, we are not licensed to give investment advice or advise anybody on what to do with their 401k or their well-defined contribution plans.
So Curtis Ray has been in the industry for about nine years, right? Which is seven more years than us. I'll take it fine. Valid. However, I don't think that it matters. I know that people might think it matters but I come from a background of helping people, the backgrounds that we have, give us a new perspective on these products that actually puts us in a different kind of position than your average guy who just walked into the financial industry. When we look at these illustrations and we think about the value that these policies hold, we are not seeing dollar signs, no matter who wants to say that. We're not seeing dollar signs. We're not seeing, “wow, our business can grow.” We're seeing how it can help somebody, and if we have that look. and someone who's been in the industry for 10 years doesn't have that same view. We win every time. We win, every time. We spent months on end doing nothing but trying to understand these policies, the math, the mechanics, how to structure them, and made no money. We made no money sitting there trying to figure out how to best use these policies and who needed them and who needed to know about them.
And I'll stand by the fact that I think that integrity trumps time in an industry every day.
So Curtis Ray caught the attention of this small company called Honest Math. And Honest Math deserves a very small asset trophy for calling Curtis Ray out, for trying to do the math to try to get people the correct information.
Right – so honest math, if you're listening, you've positioned yourself as an asset for the time being. However, a few of the things that they did in their comparison was not fair. If you want to go find out more about what I'm talking about, you can go to Twitter, type in Honest Math. They've been having some back and forth between themselves and Curtis Ray, but their math was MPI IUL versus everything – versus 401(k), 403(b), pension, SEP ira, Roth ira, all of them. Verse one product…Which, diversification is the key here with finances always. You do not just get an MPI or an IUL and say, yep, that's my retirement. No way. You have IUL, a 401k, a brokerage account, you have all of these different things. If you went back and looked at my content on TikTok, you would see a very repetitive theme of diversification, diversification, diversify everything. So that is an issue, right? It's not fair to say anything versus one product because of course the majority of the products altogether are going to outpace one product. Okay, yes, we understand this. But then the next thing was, Honest math, put IUL and MPI as one thing and as we've gone over in the show already, MPI and IUL – not the same.
So Honest Math, I would love to see some real numbers of just an IUL, but also an IUL with a 401k with a brokerage account versus not with an IUL, right? That would be more fair. Honest Math did the best they could with the information they had, which is why they are not an Ass for today. Compared to what I've seen out there, they really have a pretty good understanding of the product and the features and how the underlying mechanics work. But like I said, IUL and MPI should not be marketed as the same thing. That is one of the standards or the one of the biggest values that we have at Power 3 Financial is that the IUL, we never are marketing the IUL as a standalone product. It is a product to supplement a product to be combined with what else you're doing, and especially the IUL plays a role in reducing your taxable income at retirement.
Anybody can benefit off of that, even if the idea of their IUL is just to supplement a small portion of their income so that they save money on taxes later on. Life insurance offers protection and the tax advantages and the money is accessible during your lifetime. It has features that other retirement accounts don't, which is why positioning it as something to add to your financial portfolio is what we are all about.
At Power 3 Financial and on the You're An Asset Podcast. If you have an MPI policy or if you went and talked to Curtis Ray or somebody at MPI and were potentially going to purchase an MPI product, we would love to hear from you about your experience, whether it was good or bad. Just to get some more insight, you can reach out to us, send us an email. Power3financial@gmail.com. If you wanna reach out to us for another reason, because you wanna chat, because you want more info, because you wanna talk about getting your own policy set up, feel free, check out www.Power3financial.com. We would love, love, love to hear from you.
All right. All right. It is time for the sweetest thing. This segment of the show, I'm gonna read aloud three of the sweetest comments that I received on social media.
The first one is from @thatsthatgirllaura, who says:
"This kind of message is misleading, untruthful, and there's no mentions of the downsides to investing risks or suitability, and thus we must conclude that the lady speaking does not hold any licensing to make such claims. If she did, she would know this whole video is a no-no. "
Well, @thatsthatgirllaura, I do happen to be licensed in 49 states, I believe. The licensing is there. Suitability doesn't actually pertain to life insurance. It's a big word though. It's a big word. Good try. And then, To talk about the risks of investing would actually be irrelevant considering we're talking about life insurance. Thus I must conclude, that @thatsthatgirllaura, you don't actually have any licensing or certifications in the insurance industry, the financial industry and um, in much. My company is a hub for education about cash value life insurance. And if you would like to reach out to us, we would love to hear from you, Laura.
All right, number two. Number two, @jrdangelo:
"She would be a lot smarter if she didn't have pronouns in her bio"
Burn. I didn't know that pronouns contributed to your IQ. It's very…that's new information for me, but I'm gonna use this comment to take a moment to say that if you have pronouns, you actively use pronouns, you're part of the l LGBTQ community, the trans community. Power 3 Financial is your place if you want life insurance. If you wanna talk about retirement options, and you want to know that the people that you're working with respect you, validate you, appreciate you, and will allow you to take up space. We are here. We are here for you. And I am not gonna take pronouns out of my bio just because it offends people. If anything, it makes me wanna keep them there even more. And if you don't like pronouns, you have an issue with this, it makes you uncomfortable, please do me a favor and do not reach out to Power 3 Financial, no hard feelings. No hard feelings. You go anywhere else. Power 3 Financial has been cleared as a safe place to be and we would love to be your insurance agents.
The next one? Yeah, next one. Last but not least, George Camel Blue Check Guy. Tough guy:
"Hey, everyone. Ignore her advice. She's peddling her terrible permanent life insurance product to collect fat commissions off of you."
I wish, man, I wish I was collecting fat commissions, George. What's funny is I do know that insurance agents can make a ton of money. We can, but we can if we choose to disrespect our clients. We can, if we choose to design an insurance policy in a way that benefits us. So yes, there are agents out there making fat commissions and it's possible. But if I were to make fat commissions off of people, they wouldn't have a cash value, and I would immediately look like a hypocrite. I get less commission so that I make sure that my clients have a cash value and that they go and they tell their friends hey look, this person actually set my policy up in a way that benefits me and my money is here. That is not something that is common. And I apologize to anyone out there listening who has had a bad experience with an agent who didn't feel like they were being told the truth. Because I know, I know what can be done to these policies, to manipulate them to get a bigger commission. And the the ideology that I've had from the beginning is that I would rather make the smallest amount on every single policy that I set up and have thousands of happy clients, then a hundred pissed off ones that I'm hoping don't come back and try to, find me later when they realize that I did wrong by them. By designing policies with the minimum death benefit, I'm giving myself the least amount of commission possible.
That is what we do. That is our standard. Considering we're two years into this and minimum death benefit, max accumulation has been the bread and butter of how we design policies the entire time from the jump, if I wasn't doing what I said I'm doing, I would already have a line of people down the street trying to come from my throat. They would already be there. I've been in the industry long enough that I told people, you are gonna have a cash value by year one.
If I had lied, I wouldn't be sitting here right now sitting on a reputation that is, for the most part – clean. Other than, you know, me getting sassy sometimes with people on the internet, that's where it's dirty. But George Camel, you know, financial advisors – they collect fees. George, I would love to see a video about how much you make off of your clients.
Well, I do have a really awesome comment that I wanna share because it'll make up for JR D'Angelo, whatever the hell.
So on that same video, actually, not that it matters, but same video, someone with the handle @winegirl33 commented:
"Hubby is a financial planner. He keeps saying, why do you think it's called life insurance? Blew my mind. Paid for our kids' college."
Isn't that amazing? I love seeing those comments of people using this in real time. There was another girl that was like, I've been leveraging my policy for the last two years. I'm living proof. You know, and then there's of course some of you underneath her that says,
"no, you haven't."
It's like... People on the internet are hilarious. How do they know ? Yes.
Well that is our show today. Thanks so much for listening. I'm your host, Casey The Dollar, and you can find me on TikTok and Instagram @CaseyTheDollar. You can also follow our company @Power3Financial. All appropriate links should be below if you need 'em.
Thanks so much for listening. See you later!
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