“Protecting Your Wealth”

I had the honor to be a guest on Akers Financial Group’s weekly radio show last week on 105.7.

Brian Akers CFP, the owner of Akers Financial Group located in Forest Hill, MD, was the host and we dove into the topic of “Protecting Your Wealth”.

It was my first time in the radio “world” so it was pretty intimidating but also extremely fun. I had a great time that day and I’m extremely appreciative of the opportunity.

You can find Brian’s website here: http://www.akersfinancial.com/

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Transcript

00:00                                     This is planning with a purpose with your host Brian Akers, certified financial planner and founder of Akers financial group. Now bringing personal financial planning to the lives of our listeners and clients. One person at a time. Here’s Brian Akers.

00:18                                    Welcome to planning with a purpose. I’m Brian Akers, a certified financial planner and owner of Akers Financial Group. Today our topic is protecting your wealth and we brought in a special guest. His name is Jesse Cunningham from Mountain View Insurance. Good Morning Jesse. Good morning. Thanks for having me. Well Jesse is here but we’re not really here. It’s sort of a a recorded show that was done earlier in time so we are now into the future and you’re hearing this live which is exciting for both of us because we get to hear our show and not actually be there. That’s a long story I guess there I let Jesse, we welcome to the show like what we’re going to try to do here. Planning with a purpose today is talk about property and casualty insurance. Explain it, explain what the look for. Explain how to protect yourself and your family.

01:00                                     Absolutely.

01:01                                     This is also a precursor for our expo. We have a retirement planning expo that’s April 5th on a Friday. It’s in the afternoon from 12 to like seven. Now. Jesse is one of our speakers. He’ll be speaking on this topic that day. That’s a very important topic to protect our wealth from anything that could destroy our future. And so we really want to make sure we cover things here and also on that Friday. If you like it, if you want find out more information about anything you hear today, you can call Akers financial group at one eight three three AFGE team 1-833-AFG-TEAM. All right, Jesse, tell us about yourself.

01:37                                     Okay. So Jesse Cunningham grew up in Harford County. When it’s to see Mr C you can call it. I’m the fifth. Yeah. So, um, call me whatever you want. Um, grew up in Harford County, went to Calvert Hall, after college, moved to Hawaii. Okay, nice. Yeah, so this is where the name Mountain View Insurance came from. I met my beautiful wife out there, had our first son. We lived off grid three Akers of land, um, solar panels. The whole $50 a month was our expenses to run the house cause all which, which island were you on? Big Island. Hilo side of volcanoes. Volcano. Exactly. So technically I lived in Mountain View, which is like volcano. Oh, nice. Nice. So with that we sold the property, came back to Maryland, Harford county. Offices in Bel Air. Sure. Um, and we started a business. That was our seed money. So today’s topic is on protecting your wealth, right? So property and casualty, that means car, home, umbrella insurance. Right, right. So I’m one of the weird ones out there that thinks insurance is actually fun. So my goal is to make this fun today. Oh, Lord

02:41                                     I’m sorry I shouldn’t say it that way. All right, so those driving, are you properly insured? Don’t be scared as we’re driving or talking about basically, right?

02:49                                     Nope. There’s two camps in why you should have insurance. Okay. Constantly we are being bombarded with the commodity of insurance.

02:59                                     Exactly right. Lizards, all kinds of animals, women,

03:02                                     we’ll save you money now. 15 minutes or less, right? It’s all about a commodity. And then there’s the other camp that has assets. And they need to protect them. Absolutely. And that’s what we’re going to focus on. Yep. So imagine a castle, we have the store house, we have the treasure in the store house. You help people grow that treasure, right? Yup, sure. I try and I help people protect that treasure. We have a wall, we have a moat. So that’s the basics of what property and casualty is supposed to be. It’s not supposed to be a commodity. It’s supposed to protect your assets.

03:33                                     All right? So the idea is you take a look at what you own and you start with your net worth. We call that a financial fingerprint, financial fingerprint to US is who are you? What do you own? How do you allocate your thing? So you do the same thing when it comes to what do they own? House wise, what do they own dog wise? What the automobile, things like that.

03:52                                     Exactly. So big question is how much insurance do I need? You’ve heard of the term insurance poor? Yeah, right. Derogatory term for the insurance industry. But first we’d have to figure out how much insurance we need and how we do that is to figure out how much assets you have.

04:08                                     All right, so net worth and net worth and net worth would be your assets. Everything you have invested minus your debt, and that’s sort of a net worth.

04:16                                     Absolutely. So we take those assets and we say, look, Mr and Mrs. Jones, you have $2 million we need to protect. How do we do this correctly and affordably? Right? Oftentimes in our industry it’s opposite. They want to say, let’s do it affordably and correctly is second to that.

04:32                                     I want to pay this much money and then give me whatever coverage that that is. Exactly. Or when a new client will come in with us, the way the relationship works is this. When someone comes in for a financial review and we do our financial design, we’re sitting down with those clients. And then as we get to the property and casualty, they bring in their declaration pages, their quotes, and it sort of talks about what they have coverage. And then we’re talking about it has a financial planner, the overview of everything. We say, well in this, this case here, it looks like you don’t have enough coverage. And that’s because we’ve examined that net worth first. And then they really have never thought about it.

05:06                                     Absolutely. And it’s not the most exciting thing to, to look at your declarations page for insurance, but I love that you pointed out to your clients lets audit it. Let’s see what your, uh, your liability coverages are specifically. And is that enough for your assets?

05:20                                     Right. So if you’re playing along at home, you can get your insurance policy out and something called a declaration page. It comes with your bill

05:27                                     comes, it’s usually once a year, the declarations that will show all your coverages and it usually has the bill with it.

05:33                                     Okay. So we’re talking about a person, you said, Mr or Mrs. Jones, I believe, and there are $2 million. Now let’s just walk through what, what you want to do first, auto or home.

05:44                                     Let’s do auto. It’s a really interesting thing because there’s not many products or services that the government requires you to have,

05:50                                     right? But, but they require auto insurance. That’s when the state of Maryland, what are those limits?

05:56                                     Three Oh, excuse me, 30,000 slash 60,000 okay. Okay. That’s bodily injury. So 30 60, whenever they do that, 30 60 the 30 is what per person? Per Person and then 60 is aggregate. So per occurrence or per incident, that’s if you were to do something bad, right? You’re driving your vehicle, you heard someone, right? They see you. Yup. This is liability covers. This is what protects your assets. This is the front line. And so that’s um, the liability coverage, those as bodily injury and says 30 slash 60. I’m really gonna have any slashes there, right? The Ken. And later in the show, I’d like to dive into an appropriate amount to have, if you want to be qualified for an umbrella policy. So we’ll get into that later. But then the third number, um, I believe Maryland State minimums are 15,000. That’s for property damage.

06:48                                     Okay, so that’s, you’re in your car, you have an accent, he hit someone, you go in someone’s yard, tear up the yard, and that’s property. It is. And if I’m driving on six 95 going home, I hit someone’s Mercedes. That’s property too. Okay. So if you have $15,000, which is Maryland state minimum, and you hit a $50,000 car, guess who’s making up the difference? Uh, you run. No don’t do that. We did not endorse that in any way as a terrible joke. So a 30, 60, 15, 30 is covering the bodily injury of the person you hit 60 covers the rest of people in the car aggregate and then 15 would cover the car. Uh, exactly what the property, the telephone pole, you hit the car, you hit. Sure. Whatever that’s on the Maryland minimum, the Maryland minimum would make her policy cheaper. Absolutely. But is that coverage at all?

07:40                                     Right. So here’s the interesting thing. You can call me and I can save you hundreds of dollars off the bat. Right. I could cut all of your coverages down to nothing and save money. Exactly. But what’s the point? If you have assets to protect, that’s a terrible, terrible idea. Okay. Yeah. So what would dumb normal auto insurance coverage be like? Look, what should somebody buy this? Generally? It’s a good question. So there’s different stages in life. Okay. If we want to focus on retirees and they can do all stages, but let’s do that retirees, then we’ll do and work backwards. Dang. Can the know, do the people that have no money? The people with kids. Perfect. Perfect. Um, okay. If you, you’re retired 250,000 slash 500,000 okay. That allows you to qualify for an umbrella policy. Alrighty. Alright. And explain what umbrella that will go in that more later in the show, but just basics of umbrella. Okay. Umbrella policy is a strictly liability coverage policy. That’s, that’s what it does, right? If you get sued, you’re underlying coverage. This is the technical term for your car insurance, your home insurance. That’s underlying coverages. Okay. That’s the first line of defense. If you get sued. Sure. If the lawsuit exceeds that amount, the umbrella policy kicks into a million. All right, and that’s $1 million umbrella and that’s baseline. There’s, I have a client who has a $6 million umbrella. Right, so it all depends on your assets.

09:03                                     Absolutely. Cause you want to protect the assets with an umbrella policy. Many people when we have our events or our workshops are all around Maryland. What happens is when they come in to see us, we find that they do not have umbrella policies at all. They might have stayed very well and put million dollars, $3 million saved and then you don’t have any umbrella insurance and then that’s just a big thing we must fix. What I mean by that is you have to add that on. Now the umbrella policy, we are going to cover that in greater detail towards the end of the show, but right now on the auto, the coverage limits. So we had the retiree, you’re picking it up because they’ve saved and grown their money. Sure. Let’s go. Go to the middle. We’re talking about the family, younger family with kids. We’re not going to talk about families with 16, 18 year olds because that’s, that’s more difficult. But the, the younger family that has um, a lot of people in the car, this, things like that. What kind of coverage that they look at?

10:00                                     Right. So it’s an interesting question because the majority of your price for auto insurance comes through the comprehensive and collision coverage. Okay, so comprehensive and collision. Most people think of full coverage. That’s not a real term, but that’s what most people think. If you hit a deer or you covered, if you hit another car, is your car covered? That’s where the majority of the price for policy is. Right? So if you look at your bill, they’ll say comp comprehensive, that is covering what that is covering every. Another way to say it is other than collision.

10:30                                     Okay, so it’s comp is other than collision, does that mean so many dings, your windshield, the deer on dog, somebody hit

10:37                                     check tree falls on, yeah. Okay, got it. Yeah, but this is covering our car or somebody else’s car. Your car, your car and then then collision covers my car or out of context. So those two things are always covering your asset, your car. Okay. Now my point is that’s the bulk of your premium of your payment. Okay. You would be so surprised to increase your liability limits which we were talking about earlier. That’s not a huge expense. Okay, so if you are wise, you have a higher liability limit then what you may need technically right now because guess what? When you go to change insurances in a year, two years, three years, the new insurance company is going to say what prior liability limits that you have. We want to know and if you had the high liability limits, the new company is going to look at you favorably and guess what? Your price is better. Okay. So this is kind of forward looking. So then they start a class hue for pricing. Absolutely. Yeah.

11:32                                     All right. We’ll talk about pricing a little bit later. I have a lot of questions on pricing, but when it comes to the bulk of the policy, comprehensive and collision. So if you’re driving a car that’s under 10 years old, you should have comp and collision and then you have a decision on deductibles. Right?

11:50                                     Right. And so one of your clients was in our office. Yep. Lovely people. All of your clients are great. I know you must attract that. I don’t understand. But they’re great people and I tried to check only good ones. Well they are definitely good ones. And the gentleman said, I partially self insure and I get that if you have the assets, you know liquid assets to to shell out $1,000 deductible, no problem. Yup. Do it.

12:13                                     Exactly right. And so it’s part of a financial plan is to build your emergency fund. You build that emergency fund with the purpose to have the cash to cover a, a incident that might be a thousand or so since you’re not reporting any and every ding.

12:28                                     Exactly. Because if you report every dig, your price per month is going to go up and you got to pay more than the long run. It’s going to be a lot was the ding becomes at Dong is going to hit you really hard. It’s like a bell

12:39                                     fairly loud. And so, so we have um, we have like in that case you’re talking about yesterday, he has self insuring a little bit more, but having more cash in there. That comprehensive and collision. If you have a say three or four different cars you might insure for collision, the newer ones and then the ones that are 10, 12, 15 years old that might have not much collision value.

12:59                                     That’s exactly what happens. So they had four cars, there was a 15, and in 2010 they had full cup, full coverage. Remember that’s not a real term. They had comprehensive and collision on those. Sure, and they did not have those coverages on the other two. Sure. He said, hey Jess, if I get into an accident, it’s fine. I’ll just buy a new 1995 F150 foreign. Yeah.

13:19                                     All right. Well Jesse, this has been a good good. The beginning of our talk about property and casualty insurance, hopefully those out there listening or understanding the basic concepts of auto and homeowners insurance that we’re trying to cover today, but we’re also talking about our expo. We have coming April the fifth so April the fifth is a Friday. We’re going to start around noon, come register, get lunch. We also recommend that you register online@ Akersfinancial.com you’ll see an expo tab on that tab. You’ll be able to see their speakers or schedule and you can line up and sign up for each class. We highly recommend that you sign up and preregister so that we can have everything prepared for you and we can buy enough food for everybody. The day goes with classes at one, two, three and four and five o’clock we have music and food, and six o’clock we have a final speaker. He’ll talk about the stock market, so it’s a big day. Jesse is one of our speakers that day. Today we’re covering more about auto and homeowners. Then we’ll have more information about that after these messages.