I gave this talk in Orlando at the MDRT. How many heard it there? If you did, it was in front of 1,000 people and you were kind of stuck. You had to listen to me talk and walk. When I’m doing it in front of maybe 25 or 30 people, this is going to be a lot more fun for me. I’m not a professional speaker. I’ve been fortunate enough to speak in front of a lot of large audiences because of Top of the Table involvement. But, I’m not great at it. I’m going to be asking questions. Let’s make this more of an intimate group.

My wife told me to do this. I advise you all to do it. Add up all the death benefits that you’ve sold in your lifetime. I’ve been involved in this business for 36 years. I know I started work young. Thirty-six years. If you added up all my death benefit, it would be more than $1 billion. My wife said to me, “Think about it. You’re a billion-dollar industry. Just you. And I bet many of you here have a lot more than $1 billion. It’s amazing that we generate that much revenue into society.

So, I’m here to learn from you too. Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you do, but people will never forget how you make them feel.” My wife has that saying in her office at home and I read it often. It makes a lot of sense. How many times have you been in a situation where somebody said something to you and you weren’t really listening, but if they mention something or told you a story that really resonated in your gut, you remember that person? I think we, as advisors and insurance people, need to remember that. Make sure to get in their shoes.

How many have read the book Steven Covey’s “Seven Habits?” Great. I think it’s a life altering book. The seven habits, I practice them. I probably fail everyone, every day, but then I certainly learn. And one of them is “seek first to understand, then to be understood.” What it means is before you blab into somebody’s face, get in their shoes. Find out what makes them tick. We have a lot of racial tension in our country right now, unfortunately. Walk in the shoes of a white man, walk in the shoes of a black man, once in a while. Get a feel for what they go through every day and then maybe you can try to get a better feeling for how they look at it and vice versa.

And just like your clients. Before you start into something and start berating a client or arguing with a client, maybe they had a bad day. Find out a little bit more about what they’re all about. I’m a big believer in Steven Covey. If you haven’t read that book, please do so.

Again, I started 35 years ago in this insurance business as a debit agent at Prudential. Anybody know what that is? Scotty does. I used to knock on doors collecting premiums. $10 a week. And they taught the technique where you stick your foot in the door so they don’t shut it. Seriously. They taught you some pretty tough techniques to make sure you got in the door. You’d find out the name of their neighbor and after you sold them, you’d walk to the next door neighbor and say, “I was just at your neighbor’s house and she spoke very highly of you. She thought maybe you might have some reason to talk to me about what I did with her.” You kept going door to door. That’s how you did it. And it worked.

You learned how to say things, because you only had that one shot with that client.

The other individual that I hold true to my heart is Ben Feldman. How many read Ben Feldman’s book? How many have seen the video, “The Man From East Liverpool?” The guy was the best wordsmith. I think it’s still good today. Would you agree? Everybody watch that. It’s still good today. It’s a video he put out, probably in 8-track or reel-to-reel. He had the best one-liners and stories that I still use today.

The fire in the theater story. They’re the best stories. Go back, pull them out. It’s really ironic now, one of my friends is his son, Marv. Which is kind of cool because, at MDRT, I get to know Marv and I consider him my friend. Here’s the guy who helped me get started. I’m a friend of his son. So, Ben Feldman is another one.

The guy today was great, about the storytelling. He was outstanding. I love that guy. I love telling stories and I’ll tell a lot of these stories today. I’ll fail the three tests that he says. I put you in my shoes. Imagine. If you heard somebody tell a story that made you react and it was so compelling, I try to do that with selling insurance.

I’ve been in this business 35 years, so I’ve had a lot of aha moments. I’m going to share seven actual cases that people have said to me and then how I overcame them. Sometimes I made a lot of mistakes. And then I’m going to turn it on you. Maybe you have better ways of doing it.

But the first one is what do you say when somebody asks, “What do you do for a living?”

“Sell life insurance.” That’s one good way.

“Succession planning.”

I find that sometimes people in our industry get tongue-tied. They don’t know what to say. I can tell you right now, if you don’t have it memorized, top of mind, just like that, you’re missing the boat. Because first impressions are so important. If you fumble over what you say to that person when they ask, “What do you do,” if you don’t know exactly what you should say, you just missed a big opportunity.

I’ve heard some strange stuff when I’ve asked this question. I’ve heard, “I’m a dream catcher.” What is that? A dream catcher, sounds like something they do in Las Vegas. “I’m a dream catcher.” I’ve heard somebody say, “Well, I have a three-step process. First, I meet my clients and discover what they want to accomplish regarding their finances and their goals. Then I run a plan.” That’s a process. In my opinion, it’s got to be really quick.

I’ll tell you what I say. First I always say: “Thank you for asking. My clients work very hard at creating wealth. I make sure that it goes to where it should go, in the most tax efficient way, when they’re gone.” That’s all I say. And they say, “Tell me more,” and then I get into it a little bit more. But I don’t say more than that.

My clients work very hard to accumulate wealth. My job is to make sure that that wealth goes to where it should go in the most tax efficient manner when they die. That’s it. In a nutshell that’s what I do.

I would practice that. That was one of the things: What do you do for a living? If you don’t take anything away from here, please write it down, memorize it so it comes off just like that. It’s so important.

This is another thing I learned over the years: how to set the stage for a productive meeting. I make sure that when a client is coming to meet with me, they know why they’re coming. I tell them that we’re going to meet and we’re going to talk about transitioning your wealth. I like “transitioning” versus “transferring.” So that’s another word I use, “transitioning,” which is a little bit less harsh than “transferring” or “passing on” your wealth or inheritance. I don’t say “estate tax.” Why is estate tax always a bad word to say to people? They think of attorneys. That’s a good one. Too complicated. What do they usually say? “I don’t have an estate.’ That’s a good one. But they say, “I’ve got that all taken care of.” I hear that all the time, “I’ve got that all taken care of.”

I make sure they know they’re coming to talk to me about transitioning their wealth. And they have to have three things. They have to have “leave-on money.” In other words, I’ve done a plan with them. I know that there is going to be money left over at their death. There’s nothing worse than talking about transitioning somebody’s wealth when they’re not going to have any. That’s not a good use of my time. So, we know there’s going to be something left over. I don’t care if it’s $1 million or $500,000 or $10 million, they have to have something left over.

Number two, one of them has to be healthy because, obviously with insurance, you have to have someone out there. If they’re not healthy, I still meet with them because it’s important to transition their wealth. I just know that life insurance is now off the table, which isn’t good for me, but that’s OK. I still do it.

The third one is: They have to love someone. We’ve all had those clients who say, “I don’t give a damn what happens to my family when I die.” I get that all the time. I don’t want to talk to those people. Move on. Go find somebody else. They have to love someone.

One of the wisest men I met when I first got into the insurance business was Irv Nelson. I was complaining one day about insurance business and he said, “Just remember one thing. You’ll never sell somebody life insurance unless they love someone. Don’t ever forget that.” I’ve always remembered that. It is so true. Life insurance is a selfless act.

We get this all the time. Right? “I don’t believe in life insurance.” I’ll tell you a story. Imagine being in your office. I was in Des Moines, Iowa, meeting my clients. I was in an office and this client was from the country of India. He lived in Des Moines. He owned a bunch of hotels. He was worth about $20 million. We had a lot of his money already. He walked in with his wife, his son and his daughter-in-law who was pregnant. And the first thing he said to me was, “Dale, I do not believe in life insurance.”

Now, the young Dale would have probably argued with him right then and there asking, “Why?” The more mature Dale said, “OK. That’s fine.”

I always start my conversation with a T chart. I usually talk about all the stuff that they have inside their estate and I list it all. I list all their assets. I have it written down, their home, their value, their accounts, everything, all of their buildings, everything is inside their estate. And then I say, “There is an IRS wall and, Mr. Patel, you can’t get through that wall. There are only a few ways you can get through that wall. You can gift it, but you’re limited to how much you can gift. You can give it to charity. My job is to make sure we get these assets from here and move them over here while you’re still alive to avoid that IRS. Because what happens is, at the end of your death there is a big estate tax.”

They follow. I talk about all the different strategies we have. Charity. I talk about grantor chain annuity trusts. All the alphabet soup that we talk about.

When I got to the end, I said, “Now, there is one tool we can use. We can take $2 million from here and put it over here and make it $7 million just like that, with the stroke of a pen.” That’s was a Ben Feldman, “stroke of a pen.”

He looked at his wife and he said, “That’s pretty good.”

I let it sink in. “The problem is, Mr. Patel, you can’t have it.”

He said, “Why not?”

I said, “Because you don’t believe in it.”

He looked at me and said, “You’re good.”

So again, don’t panic when they say, “I don’t believe in life insurance.” Just say, “OK. Fine,” and go on to your discussion.

If I had said, “Let’s take $2 million and buy life insurance,” what do you think he would have done? He would have never done it. I didn’t sell him life insurance, I sold him a way to transfer wealth. Most tax efficient manner.

Next one. “Why don’t I just buy term insurance?” How many get that one? I don’t know what it is about attorneys. Are there any attorneys in the room? I don’t want to offend anybody. There’s one. I should ask attorneys this: When they go to law school, do they have a class on buying term insurance? Because most attorneys I talk to, the first thing coming out of their mouth is, “Buy term insurance and put it in an ILIT. It’s cheaper.” What do you say?

[inaudible]

That’s a good one. I love that one. You guys get that. “Perfect. Let’s buy term insurance to age 100.” And what is that? GUL. Thank you.

I always do this at a client. Age 25, 60 and 100. I’ll say, “This is your life. At this stage in your life, why do people buy life insurance?” Protect the family. Mortgage. I say, “They buy it if they die.” You have a definable need and a definable amount of money that you want. So, the word is “if.”

When you get to here, what word changes? Everybody knows that, even my clients will know it. We can no longer buy term insurance because we don’t know when you’re going to die. So we have to buy insurance that is permanent. Meaning it’s guaranteed to pay. We just don’t know when. And I don’t say words like “whole life” or “UL.” I just call it “permanent insurance.” And over here, more term insurance.

Sometimes, if people can afford it, you can pull this over to this. You can get it to age 50. I use this all the time. Amazing how many clients always get the win right.

[inaudible]

People who buy term insurance are poor people planning to be poor all their lives.

[inaudible]

Yes, they don’t have to worry about it. That’s good. Thank you.

How about this one? “What kind of life insurance should I buy?” You get that a lot? I get this quite a bit. I tell clients, “There are two main reasons people buy life insurance. You can boil it down to these two: death benefit and cash accumulation. Those are the two main reasons you buy it.” And I tell them, “It works like a tug of war. The more you pull on the death benefit, the less emphasis is going to be on the cash accumulation. Or the more you want the cash accumulation, the less death benefit. It’s like a teeter totter.” They seem to understand that.

If they say they want life insurance for retirement and they want the cash value, what kind of product would you sell them? Indexed UL is a popular one. Whole life. Variable life. Something that accumulates. And you lower the death benefit. I can’t tell you how many times I get underfunded insurance policies. What I mean by that is somebody came to them and said, “We want to buy a $1 million policy but we want some cash in it,” but they don’t fund it to the max. They fund it somewhere down the middle. That doesn’t accomplish anything. You’re better off buying a combination of permanent and term insurance. If you’re going to buy permanent insurance, the IRS is going to limit you how much you’ll be able to put in it. Well, put as much as you can into that limit. It’s a great deal. If the IRS says it’s too good of a deal, I’m going to put as much as I can.

In Florida, I use this a lot. Anybody here surfing? How to surf? Body surf? Some of you knew. What happens when you’re riding a wave and you catch a wave? What happens when you catch it way out there? You ride it all the way to the beach. It’s fun. What happens if you don’t quite catch a wave? Right into the sand. And you just end up scraping your nose. I’ve done that.

In life insurance, it’s the same way. If you buy a life insurance policy and you underfund it, you didn’t catch the wave early. All of the costs that come out of that life insurance policy in the early years just sucked you right into the sand. You didn’t take advantage of it. So, get on top of the wave early and ride that thing all the way to the beach. In Florida, it works pretty good. You up in Canada are thinking, “A wave? What’s a wave?”

You’ll get this one in Canada. I always say, “Buying term insurance is like peeing in your pants in the middle of wintertime. At first it feels pretty good. After a while, not so much.” My Canadian friends, you can relate to that. I grew up on a farm in South Dakota and everybody knew what that was like.

I had a 35-year-old male that said, “I can put $14,000 into my insurance program.” He needed $2.5 million of coverage for his family. So, if I took the $14,000 and bought a $2.5 million of death benefit, did I get above the wave? He’d come to me in about 10 years and he’d be mad. “What do you mean, I’ve got an underfunded VUL and it’s just not performing?” And you just bought the most expensive term insurance you’re ever going to buy.

What I would do is take $2,000 and buy a $2 million, 20-year term policy and take $12,000 and buy a $500,000 VUL. That’s what we did. Did I get paid more? No. But I know he’s not going to come to me five years from now mad. And I can’t tell you how many times I get clients coming in with policies that are underfunded. I love it, because it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. They did the wrong thing. Let’s correct it. I’m sure nobody in this room does that, so I preaching to the choir.

“Life insurance is too costly?” How many get that one? I get that a lot. Why do you think that is? Why do they say that?

[inaudible]

They focus on the cost, instead of calling it an investment. They call it a cost. Try to focus on life insurance as an investment, whether it’s for death benefit or not. Focus on it as an investment.

I’ll give you a story. I had a 78-year-old female, a widow, who had a net worth of about $5 million. She was underneath that exemption, so she didn’t need life insurance for estate tax purposes. But I knew she was going to have something left over and she loved someone and she was healthy. The other thing she did was she loved zero coupon bonds. Her portfolio, her husband loved zero coupon bonds. Liked to clip coupons and just loved it. They were getting 3 percent to 4 percent on that stuff. I said, “If I could find you a 4 percent tax-free, zero-coupon bond, would you buy it for your children?”

She said, “Yes. That’s a pretty good deal. Four percent, tax free, zero coupon bond. Where do I sign?”

So I showed her taking $1 million and purchasing a $1.8 million GUL. Guaranteed. The tax-free IRR at age 90 was 5.15 percent. At age 95, it was 4 percent. You think she bought that? Yes. I didn’t sell her life insurance. I sold her an investment. I sold her something. Take $1 million and make it $1.8 million, tax free. We just kind of took that cost out of it.

Now the interesting story about this, prior to his death three years ago, we tried to sell him a second-to-die insurance for estate planning purposes and they didn’t buy it because it was too costly. So I screwed up on that one.

[inaudible]

That’s exactly what I’d like to make sure you understand. You look life insurance as an expense, you’re right, you’d never sell it because it’s costly if you look at the internal costs of the life insurance policy. But if you look at it as an investment for the children or for the heirs, it’s a great tool.

[inaudible]

­­­

The problem is I don’t know when they clip the coupon. Which leads me to my next comment. “Life insurance is a bad investment.” I get that quite a bit too.

­­When I get this, I first ask them why they feel that way. Find out again, get first what they understand what they’re talking about and then whether I can help them a little bit. A lot of times I’ll agree with them because of what they’ve been sold. Unfortunately, not everybody in our industry is a Top of the Table producer with a lot of ethics. There are a lot of people in our industry who give us all a bad name. Would you agree? There is a lot of stuff out that you hear that gives us all a bad name. They kind of lump us all together.

I agree with what the guy said this morning. Never bash your competition. It makes you look really bad. I ­never do. If they try to get you to go into that, the thing I use all the time is I’ll say something like, “You know, I wasn’t here 10 years ago when you purchased this. So I don’t know the conversation. Can we do us all a favor and let’s just wall that off? We can’t do anything about that. Let’s start from now and see if we can fix it.”

Often it disarms them and they say, “Yes. You’re right.”

But if you sit there and say, “I don’t know why that SOB did what he did,” that doesn’t make you look very good. You’d like to, but it doesn’t make you look good.

I say, “If a client is looking for income for retirement, life insurance can be a very valuable tool.” Of course, you get the nose turned up. What do you mean? Insurance as an investment for retirement? I say, “Let me show you an example.” This is a true story. Mark Dorfman is in the room, he knows this client because I talk to him a lot.

But I had a professional baseball player, just signed a large contract. His contract, it was for something like $7 million a year for seven years or something like that. And baseball players are guaranteed contracts. Does anybody work with professional athletes? Baseball players are great because they sign guaranteed contracts. Once they sign them, it’s their money. A lot of them end when they’re 35, 40 years old. They’re done. So they’ve got 35 to 55 with nothing. I’ll call my friend in the back room. Brian helped me with this one because he was one that got me going on this. I use whole life insurance. Basic old whole life insurance. Stuff I bought and sold when I was 21 years old. This happened to be Met Life’s whole life and now they don’t sell it anymore. I wish they would. It was a good product. I sold it to him like this. I said, “We’re going to guarantee a cash accumulation. We’re going to have tax-deferred growth and tax-favored distributions.” You can’t say free. Not directly affected by market conditions. You heard Howard Sharfman talk about non-correlated assets. It’s a non-correlated asset. Strong dividend history. Attractive internal rate of return. Income distributions not treated as net investment income. And excluded from Medicare tax, that’s a huge one. And access to cash prior to age 59.5. What does that tell you? It’s not an IRA, not an annuity. And it’s guaranteed income tax-free plan completion death benefit. If something were to happen to you, this whole plan doesn’t go out the window. It still continues for your spouse.

We designed a $500,000 10-pay. In my world, that’s a touchdown. That’s pretty good. Total payments of $5,000. At age 50 to 70, we were going to take out $556,000 a year, tax free. Total distribution is $11 million. So, for a $5 million investment, now while he’s making all this money, we’re going to give him $11.6 million tax-free for 20 years. Then I look at the internal rates of return. At age 85, the internal, after tax, rate of return after he’s taken all that money is 4.52 percent. And guess what? At age 85 when you die, you’ve still got $12 million of death benefit. So total projected benefits of $24 million tax free to this family for a $5 million investment on a guy who could easily afford $500,000 a year.

I don’t have to be a very good salesman to sell that one. And we were lucky enough to get it with an agent who had a lot of relationships with professional athletes. I made a nice income for about five years on this idea. Until Met Life decided they didn’t want to sell that product anymore.

There are some good products out there. Guardian’s got a pretty good product. Mass Mutual has a pretty good product. I can’t sell the Northwestern Mutual. Ohio National. You’re right. They’re all good dividend paying contracts. But this is a good contract. And why do I like this one? Because of this right here. When you’re talking to a professional athlete, they like to look at the sexy investments. All the stuff, the large cap and the mid cap and the growth. Where does this one fit? Right here, the non-sexy stuff. We’re going to take $500,000 and we’re just going to stick it in this boring box right here. In the nothing box and let it just grow. It’s kind of like your safety net.

So again, you’ve got high earners, young people, attorneys, doctors. This is a great product for them. You can do the index too. I’m not saying index isn’t a good product. It would work. There’s risk obviously with the index. There’s risk here too with the dividends. And index will illustrate a lot better than whole life because, if you show an index product at 6 percent, it will blow the heck out of this. These are nice contracts. I love this product.

This is one of my favorite stories. I had a client worth $150 million. Insurance death benefit was $90 million. The annual premium was $2.2 million. I know what you’re all thinking right now: $2.2 million target is a pretty good income. That’s a pretty good case. We worked on this for two years. It was one of those where the client kept backing out. We had to use three or four different insurance companies. It was just a tough deal. We finally got it done and we had the meeting with the attorney. We were sitting around the conference room ready to sign over everything. I was ready to go party. The attorney said to the client, “You know, Mr. So and So, you don’t have to do this.” I wanted to just kill him, right? He said, “You’ve got enough liquid assets to pay the estate taxes, so we don’t need to do this. This is a lot of money.”

What the client did at the time changed the way I talk to all wealthy people. I was brought in by a broker, a Merrill Lynch broker. This Merrill Lynch broker did all of his investments and this guy turned to this Merrill Lynch broker and he said, “So what did you make on my assets last year? How much did you grow it?”

He said, “About $10 million.”

He said, “So what you’re asking me to do is take 2.2 percent of my growth and increase my net worth by 60 percent?”

I was thinking, “I couldn’t have said that better myself.”

And he looked at the broker and said, “This is a no-brainer.” The attorney sat in the corner. From that point on, I realized that wealthy people think in percentages, not dollar figures. If you’re talking to somebody with a lot of money, put your idea in terms of percentages of income or their premium or whatever. They think in terms of percentages.

If I would focus on the $2.2 million, it didn’t mean anything. But 2.2 percent of his growth of his portfolio, increases his net worth by 65 percent.

[inaudible]

Does Trump think in percentages? It would be nice if we knew what Trump thought. I don’t know if anybody knows what Trump thinks.

That was a good story and I tell you, a funny story about that one. There was a corner office broker that I was trying to get him to let me talk to his client for three years. He was a big producing broker. He never gave me the time of day and when we closed this case I was delivering wine to some of the assistants who helped us in this case. His name is Pete. Pete had the corner office and, as I was leaving, he said, “Dale, come here.” So I walked into his office and we sat down. He said, “Tell me about that case.”

I said, “Well, we did some private financing strategies to get under the gifting limits and using the AFR rates and all that good stuff. It’s kind of complicated but not really.”

Pete looked at me and said, “I’ve got clients like that.”

I said, “I know. I’ve been trying to tell you for three years.” From that point on, that broker would do $300,000 of revenue a year. Because once he heard about this one, word got out that it was a good deal.

Here’s another one. “How much insurance should I have?” If you’re talking to somebody who doesn’t have a lot of net worth, what do you usually say to an average joe out there?

[inaudible]

There are a lot of these calculations online that people can use where you put in their income and you figure out the coverage needed. Have you ever done that? It usually comes back to the old Ben Feldman rule, seven to 10 times your annual income. If you’re a single earner, it’s 10 times. If it’s a dual-earner couple, it’s seven times. Try the math, it’s amazing how often that works.

Now the vernacular changes when I’m meeting with a high net worth client. When they ask, “How much insurance should I have?” I say, “As much as I can get you.”

They say, “What do you mean?”

I say, “Well, you can’t get as much as you want. I can only get you as much as the insurance companies will give you. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“If the insurance company senses it’s that good of a deal, they’re going to put a cap on it. Let’s get you as much as I can get.” Often that works. It does work. It works: “As much as I can get you.” Because most wealthy people are very competitive.

“If so and so can only give me $20 million, well damn, I better get that $20 million.”

Try that: “As much as I can get you.” That works.

Here’s another one: “I’m under the gift tax exemption, so we don’t need to buy life insurance.” I’m getting a ton of that now and quite frankly, I will tell you that my revenue is down about 40 percent this year because of the Trump election. Whether you like Trump or not, he killed my business. Because he is saying he wants to get rid of the estate tax.

If you went to Howard Sharfman’s session, which I did, he’s right on. I liked when he said, “Take your remaining life span and divide it by four. That’s how many more administrations you’re going to live through. And that’s how many times estate tax is going to come and go and come and go.” I kind of liked that one. I took that from Howard today.

We don’t know what it’s going to be like, so why try to fight it. But I’ll tell you, I have a lot of clients, especially the high net worth clients, that say. “Let’s just wait.” And no matter what I say, I can’t get them to do anything. That’s frustrating on my part. So, if anybody has any help on that one, I’d love to talk to you. I’ve got some clients who, no matter how many times I talk about the internal rates of return and I say the things we all say, they’re not willing to write that check for that million-dollar premium. They’re just not willing to do that.

[inaudible]

And that’s one of the ones that Howard brought up yesterday too. That’s a good one. I’ve tried all that. When you’re talking to someone who is going to have to cut a check now for $200,000 or $300,000 a year, they want to wait.

[inaudible]

Yes, the cost of non-action could be catastrophic.

[inaudible]

Wealth transition, yes. There are times, no matter what I say, I’m just not going to get anybody to do it.  I’ve come to that conclusion, but it has cost me a lot of revenue this year. I’m hoping I can overcome it. I think once the dust settles, we’ll be able to get back in and get on the corporate taxes and the other taxes. There’s going to be some transfer tax, let’s just take care of it now. But right now it’s tough.

[inaudible]

And you don’t put it in trust? But if there’s no estate tax, how do you get it back? I see, now you’re just going to transfer it to the kids.

[inaudible]

I like that. The other way, I stole this from another TOT member, Moshe, a long time ago from England, people love their kids but they really, really, really love their grandkids. How many have grandkids? Scotty, I’ll bet you anything when your grandkids come to your house, they don’t get spoiled at all. Do they? Not a bit. I’ve used this to totally get out of estate tax revenue. Now we’re talking about transitioning wealth. I’ll ask them if they know the name of their great grandparents. And most of them don’t.

Yu say, “Do you know the name of your great-great grandparents?” When they say, they don’t. you say, “Do you think you would know your great-great grandparents if they were giving you $50,000 a year?” When they say they would, you say, “How would you like to be that great-great grandparent? How would you like it if every linear descendant, from now until eternity, would get a birthday gift from grandpa and grandma Scotty? How would you like that?”

I’m telling you, the grandmas love it. Grandpas are kind of like, “Whatever.” Grandpas like the legacy idea. Grandmas tend to want to give it to them now. They want to see the kids do it now. But grandpas kind of like the legacy idea.

Then I always say, “You always think you can only do this if you’re wealthy, but you can do it when you have less money.”

A story I had. We have a 74-year-old couple. They had $8 million and five grandchildren who they just loved. We gifted $1 million into a defective grantor trust with dynastic provisions. And then we added $50,000 annually and purchased a $2.1 million second-to-die insurance. They had the $1 million plus the $2.1 million insurance in this trust. You could seed this trust with $1 million and you could use that $1 million while you’re alive if you want, to give birthday gifts out of this trust to your grandchildren. And then, the beautiful thing is, when you both die, we’re going to supercharge it with life insurance. I stole that from somebody too, “supercharge.” We’re going to supercharge the trust with life insurance. It’s a simple, easy deal. We do a lot of those, grandma and grandpa’s trusts.

This is one that I use a lot when we’ve got a client who is worth $3 million to $4 million. They don’t have a huge estate tax planning issue. I say, “Let’s add CPR to your plan. We’re going to show you how you can consume your assets while you’re alive in retirement. That’s the C. We’re going to protect it from creditors and divorces. And then we’re going to replace it when you die.” What is that? Just buying a second-to-die life insurance policy. Let’s say they’re worth $4 million. You buy a $4 million policy and it’s protected at the life insurance death benefit, from creditors and stuff. “When you die, we’re going to replace everything you just consumed.” I use that quite a bit, the CPR. Put CPR to your estate planning.

It’s really simple. In fact, sometimes the clients will call and say, “I like that CPR thing we talked about.”

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I’m going to finish with this. Imagine yourself in a movie theater. And you’ve got your popcorn and your pop and you’re watching a movie. You get so engrossed in that movie that you actually feel like you’re in that movie. You’re sitting there, and you’re really getting into the movie. A drama, a love scene, whatever it is, you’re really into it. But I’ll wreck it for you. Now imagine the first time those actors received that script and instead of in a movie theater, you’re watching them practice that script. How bad is it? They’re reading it. It’s not even a movie. They’re trying to put the different voice inflections in it. It’s not even a movie.

I tell you that, when you’re out in front of a client, treat it like you’re a movie star. Practice. Practice. Practice. This is not a job for winging it. Winging is for losers as far as I’m concerned. Practice everything. That’s why I read a lot like the Ben Feldman stuff, overcome objections and things. Just have them so they roll off your tongue. You don’t even have to think about it. But practice, practice, practice.

I’ll finish with a poem that I always do. It’s a bedtime prayer. It goes something like this.

Now I lay me down to snore, ensured from several million more. If I would die before I wake, my wife would get a first … If I should live for many years, my wife and I should shed no tears. We can hunt and fish, come back our bucks with interest. In our old age, we keep our house and not live with our daughter’s spouse. So, thank God for the great endurance of the person that sold your life insurance.