EPISODE 220 WITH BRUCE WEINSTEIN: UNDERSTANDING INSURANCE AND ITS NECESSITY AND ADVANTAGE FOR BUSINESS OWNERS

Ready Yet?! Podcast Episode 220 with Bruce Weinstein: Understanding Insurance: Its Necessity and Advantage for Business Owners

Transcribed with Descript

Erin Marcus: Welcome, welcome, welcome to this episode of the Ready Yet podcast, where my guest today, Mr.

Erin Marcus: Bruce Weinstein, and I were talking about feeling old because I couldn’t get the tech to work, but yeah, never mind that, never mind that. But what we were talking about that I’m excited to share is about insurance. And before everyone rolls their eyes at me and go, wait, how is that exciting? I think. Our lives, our general lives and what we have insurance for gives us a very false opinion about insurance, right?

Erin Marcus: You have to have car insurance to be allowed to drive your car. You have to have house homeowner’s insurance to be allowed to have a mortgage. You have to have health insurance, though truthfully that doesn’t even behave as insurance anymore. So we have this very flat, one dimensional opinion. About insurance when I knew because of my background and I know you’re going to share with us There’s a lot more to be done and to be utilized With those products.

Erin Marcus: So before we get into all that and what you need to be keeping an eye out for in your business When it comes to insurance and how it can actually help you Why don’t you tell everybody a little bit more formally who you are and what you

Bruce Weinstein: do? Oh, man, I do a lot That’s easy, but I started in the financial 1986 not to be confused with that Yellowstone Prequel 1886 as, as I like to say these days, cause they’re awfully close together now.

Bruce Weinstein: It’s modern, modern times. And I probably drive cars like that. But I, I started as a financial advisor. And so I’ve been counseling and educating people for, for. For decades, like a long, long time. And 2020, my wife and I started an insurance only business, Weinstein Wealth Insurance Solutions, and we are duly licensed.

Bruce Weinstein: We cover everything in the world of insurance, all the way down to pet insurance. So we do auto, we do home, but we do business owner insurance, which we’re going to touch on. We do Medicare, we do life insurance, annuities, long term care, disability, health insurance season just ended for us. So, you know, Obamacare, private health insurance.

Bruce Weinstein: I’m not like 50, I’m not like 15 pounds. I’m hiding my belly. I see my belly.

Erin Marcus: Right. You probably haven’t been moved from your desk.

Bruce Weinstein: Oh, it’s terrible. But you know, you have, you have the the ACA, the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare as it’s formally known, you know, just closed. And so there’s a season for that.

Bruce Weinstein: There’s a Medicare season for, for making changes. They overlap. So if you’re duly licensed in those areas, it’s a double whammy. Been a little busy. Yeah. Been a little bit busy. So I appreciate. Scheduling this a little bit post post chaos. I had to push her back. So thank you.

Erin Marcus: So here’s a question for you based on what I, how I introduced this topic.

Erin Marcus: What do people get wrong about insurance? What are, what are the, what is the impression and what do they get wrong?

Bruce Weinstein: Well, I, you know, I was listening to what you were saying in the, in the. Intro part and a couple of things popped on my head is that there’s two sides of the insurance coin. There’s the committed and the discretionary and you were labeling some of the committed, which is the auto and the homeowners and technically and you phrased it properly is if you don’t have a mortgage, you don’t need to have homeowners insurance, but it tends to be one of our biggest assets.

Bruce Weinstein: So really, do we not want to? But Look, I’ve got a client down here that owns a 7 million house and he saw the homeowner insurance rates. He goes, screw it. I’ll self insure. Now, if you own a 7 million house for cash, you probably have some other money behind you. And so is he okay, potentially losing that house if there’s a fire or hurricane or something else, but the land alone is going to be worth, you know, a good chunk of it, but.

Bruce Weinstein: Again, those are choices. The average person out there with a 500, 000 home can’t afford for that house to be wiped out without some financial you know, coverage, right? So insurance. So, so you’ve got the, the committed insurance, and then you have the discretionary. And the discretionary is going to be things like, Do I buy life insurance or disability and when I’m older, long term care?

Bruce Weinstein: And so the, the, the fundamental problem is we are an insurance heavy society. And there’s just not enough money at the end of the day for most people to be paying for all this stuff. It’s just the reality, unless you’re making incrementally more money. And so I think that’s what tends to happen is people bargain hunt.

Bruce Weinstein: They underinsure. They don’t understand what they’re doing from a vulnerability standpoint. Auto being a big one. There’s a term called state minimum. Right. So every state or most states will have a minimum amount of coverage. But for the average person, it’s a drop in the bucket of coverage if they had a true

Erin Marcus: situation.

Erin Marcus: It’s a legal, it’s the legal covering you require, but from a financial standpoint, it’s not a good decision. No.

Bruce Weinstein: So. So, you know, there’s, there’s a liability coverage, you know, standpoint. And then if you have assets, if you’re not properly insured, then they’re going to come after your assets. And so that’s what you’re trying to explain to people, like, you can’t be penny wise and dollar foolish.

Erin Marcus: Right, and I think what is adding to the frustration around insurance, and then I’ll tell you my health insurance story, just because I think you’ll find it funny too much of the system is broken, and so we throw the baby out with the bathwater. Right too much. There’s so many stories. And of course, the media likes to go heavy on the negative because that gets attention.

Erin Marcus: We know how that works. So their coverage constantly about insurance companies refusing to pay claims. And so we throw the baby out with the bathwater and we don’t want to deal with the insurance industry. But that’s just so

Bruce Weinstein: short sighted. But Erin, you can take the same fundamental principles that the insurance companies apply and look at everything else that goes on with technology’s aid.

Bruce Weinstein: Like, how easy is it to ever get a human being on the phone when you need a customer service interaction? Whether it’s the airlines, the banks, the phone

Erin Marcus: company, everything’s a

Bruce Weinstein: bot, everything’s an AI, and then it’s trying to get a representative, and then again, God forbid, they’re offshore, you can’t understand them, they’re not really following what you want, they’re reading from a script, it’s like, now you gotta escalate, and it’s just a time suck.

Bruce Weinstein: And so, the intent and this is my tie in. The intent is to frustrate enough people to get off the phone and leave them alone. And if you’re truly persistent, then eventually you’ll get it done. Well, the insurance company plays the same game and I’m, I’m impacted on both ends. A, they will delay and deny claims as much as possible to keep the easy deterrence away.

Bruce Weinstein: Right. Because there’s always, there’s always a percentage that just like, forget it. I won’t be bothered. I’m too busy. Or I don’t care. And then there’s those who pursue. So they know there’s a percentage of people that will just walk away. On the flip side, as an agent that’s paid by these carriers, guess what?

Bruce Weinstein: They’re notorious for not paying commissions. And so we have commission trackers and every month we go in and we look and we say, we didn’t get paid here, we didn’t get paid here, we didn’t get paid here, and now we have to go pursue them to make them pay us our measly 20. And again, they know how many agents don’t track their commissions, don’t realize they weren’t paid, and they get to keep the money.

Bruce Weinstein: And so they do it on both ends, and it’s just a game. They do

Erin Marcus: it on both ends, and it’s my experience, so we had I don’t even know what company it’s, the health insurance, right, and after waiting 45 minutes to actually talk to somebody to explain to me what was going on because it just didn’t make sense why they were covering this and not that, et cetera, et cetera, and I said, okay, oh, it was about meeting the deductible, and I said, okay, so, just so I’m clear.

Erin Marcus: It’s Costco. It’s not insurance. And, and the woman, very nice woman, she’s like, what? I go, it’s Costco. What you’re telling me is because I am a member of your insurance club, I get a discount from that doctor. But insurance by definition is pooling money to cover costs. You’re not doing that. You’re not actually paying for anything.

Erin Marcus: I’m still paying out of pocket for everything. I’m just getting a discount because I’m part of your club. That’s Costco. That’s not insurance. And she was last. She thought it, you know, she, it wasn’t her fault, but.

Bruce Weinstein: But you’re, you’re accurate in the sense, but the paradigm shift has been in the last 15 or 20 years where people were used to a modest premium and decent coverage, low copays, low deductibles, low out of pocket.

Bruce Weinstein: And now that’s just not the game anymore. Health insurance has become more catastrophic based.

Erin Marcus: Well, our entire health care system in this country is only catastrophic based. It’s not health and wellness. It’s.

Bruce Weinstein: Well, you know, when you look at the Obamacare right now platform, the annual max out of pocket is over 9, 400 and yeah, you get your annual exam for free, right?

Bruce Weinstein: The women get their lady visits, the men can get their, you know, their annual exams. You get your colonoscopy if you’re over 50, like that’s wellness, so you get that. And then you’ll have some co pays to go see your doctor. But then if you go to the ER, bam, you know, deductible first, some expensive, you know, low co insurance, 40, 50%, there’s no more 80, 20 plans, very hard, very hard to find those.

Bruce Weinstein: I mean, those are gold. You’ll pay through the nose to have that. And I’m a proponent of, I’d rather pay as I go, not pay in advance. Well,

Erin Marcus: so that, so that’s one of my questions, like, because we can talk all day about what’s not working. But. I’m also a big fan of being real. So this is the situation. I can scream from the rooftops about how absurd the situation is.

Erin Marcus: My boyfriend gets mad at me when I start talking about end game capitalism. He doesn’t want to hear about it. But, but the truth of the matter is there is a usefulness. There is a necessity. There is an advantage. to utilizing insurance. So what does a business owner do? What, like, if you’re in this situation where you’re in charge of your own income and I can’t get DI because I work out of my house, what do the business owners need to keep an eye out for?

Erin Marcus: Understanding that it’s, even in a frustrating situation, there is a reason

Bruce Weinstein: for this. Well, the business owner is wearing two hats. Right he’s got he or she’s got their own needs to themselves and or their families no different than anybody who had a job and you know at the end of the day i gotta take care of my family and then and then there’s the needs of the business itself and so if we stay on a health insurance conversation well with the great resignation of covid.

Bruce Weinstein: A lot of businesses out there are struggling to hire and find talent, and then they struggle to keep the talent that they have. And so if they’re not offering health insurance benefits, they’re going to struggle retaining and attracting. And we push all the time to have those conversations with small business owners to consider offering coverage.

Bruce Weinstein: So what’s

Erin Marcus: accessible to them? I know a lot of my clients probably wouldn’t even think there was something they could even remotely do, but I think there’s more flexibility and options than people realize. Well,

Bruce Weinstein: I mean, it’s, it’s a, it’s a big question, you know, answer wise, it, it, there’s group plans depending on what state you live in, that anywhere from a minimum of two, like New York Florida is kind of like four to five.

Bruce Weinstein: Some carriers don’t want less than five. The rule of thumb is if you have five full time employees, non family per se, like you can’t take, you know, your wife and three kids and all of a sudden they’re all, you know, being on the plan. Now there’s a little flexibility with that if the spouses are in the business together.

Bruce Weinstein: Again, depends on the state, depends on the market and the carrier. So, you know, you have United Healthcare and a Blue Cross Blue Shield and the like. So, depending on your markets, there’s options. So, We, we can put together a census, we evaluate, we give them numbers. The business owner has to understand first and foremost, they’re required to pay for half of the lowest priced option for the health insurance.

Bruce Weinstein: So even if somebody takes a thousand dollar a month plan, if that’s not the lowest priced option, they don’t have to pay for half of it. The lowest price option is 400. Then the owner’s responsible for 200.

Erin Marcus: And, but this is like why it’s so important to talk to somebody about this and not just assume out of pocket that there are no options.

Erin Marcus: Like that’s not a terrible thing. That’s not a difficult thing to be able to help people obtain.

Bruce Weinstein: No, not when the, if the business owner’s used to looking at Obamacare and it’s going to pay 2, 500 a month and he can get a group plan and that same 2, 500 covers all his employees as well. Well, that, that’s a win, right?

Bruce Weinstein: And then you offer things like the dental and the vision and the disability and the law and the and the group life insurance. If you’ve got people that are uninsurable, they can’t get life insurance group, group life insurance is guaranteed issue. You can get somebody one, two times salary guaranteed issue.

Bruce Weinstein: That’s going to attract somebody who might be a diabetic and has, keeps getting declined or a smoker that doesn’t want to pay five X.

Erin Marcus: And I, yeah, and I think people need to realize. There’s more accessible to you than you think, you just gotta go talk to some people about how to do it.

Bruce Weinstein: Yeah, I, I have this line, You don’t know what you don’t know, which is why you gotta keep watching my show.

Bruce Weinstein: Which is, you know, my, my podcast is Ask the Plan Man, right? So, you don’t know what you don’t know, so, If you’re not talking to somebody who’s gonna at least tell you the things you don’t know and things for you to consider, I, you know, I refer to myself as a mudslinger. I’m going to throw mud on the wall, and I’m going to point out all the things that you need to be considering and thinking about.

Bruce Weinstein: And you tell me what you want to execute. But if you don’t know and don’t have these things, you don’t understand how vulnerable you are. Like, we just touched on disability. Even if they don’t have employees, if they’re self employed, what happens when they get sick or injured and now they can’t work.

Bruce Weinstein: What are you doing to protect your income? You die, somebody’s probably going to get a check, most likely you’re going to have life insurance. Nine out of ten times, people are going to have life insurance well over having disability. They don’t see disability as being a necessary expense, but the average person has a 15 percent chance of being disabled before the age of 65.

Bruce Weinstein: That’s one out of seven. And now we’re stuck having to feed you and bathe you and change the, the ramp at the doorway and, and put wheelchair acts. I mean, God forbid, whatever these things are, but you’re a burden on the family. There’s an expense now. You’re dead. We put, I’m not trying to be too, too

Erin Marcus: callous.

Erin Marcus: I used to say the same thing. If you’re dead, do you have a problem? And people would be like, yeah. I’m like, no, you don’t. Your family has a problem.

Bruce Weinstein: Right. Your family, right. They’re gone. But now you’re, you got a disability, the family, and you have a problem because now the income’s not there. The expenses have escalated.

Bruce Weinstein: So, what are you going to do? And so And

Erin Marcus: so often, Like estate planning, like a lot of things with attorneys, people put their head in the sand because they don’t want to think about it, or they think it’s too complex, or they think it’s inaccessible, when truthfully all you just need is a little bit of information to make such more educated decisions.

Bruce Weinstein: I say all the time, Erin, the society’s problems, amongst other things, are apathy and omnipotence. It’s not going to happen to me. Right. And, and I don’t care until it’s too late. And then they call up and they’re like, I just got a diagnosis. Can I get life insurance? No, moron. You can’t get life insurance now.

Bruce Weinstein: It’s insurance. Oh, I just had a car accident. Can you cover my car now? I need full collision. No. It’s not how it works. Yeah. Like, come on. People just.

Erin Marcus: So I got to know, considering you’re getting hit from every angle, why in the world did you decide to do this? Why do you find such passion in the product?

Bruce Weinstein: To do the work that I do,

Bruce Weinstein: I think the driving force behind it is, I’ve, I’ve moved from a financial advisor working one to one to doing this work now, especially with the podcast coming on shows like yours, doing my own, is being one to many. Mm hmm. I can get more information out, people in mass, than when I was working with them individually.

Bruce Weinstein: Now the ilk of client is different, you know, when you’re managing people’s assets and the brokerage firms you work with have minimums and, you know, you’re only working at a certain end of the, of the trough, and now you get into health insurance and Medicare, and these people are not necessarily as affluent as before.

Bruce Weinstein: And so, ergo, to your point, is with that. And let me be clear, just because people have money doesn’t mean they’re any smarter. There are plenty of dumb people out there with money. We

Erin Marcus: know a lot of brilliant, broke people. I’m not going to name names. We got a bunch of brilliant, broke people and I know a bunch of really dumb, rich people.

Erin Marcus: So with that, yeah, that’s mutually exclusive.

Bruce Weinstein: In that regard, there are plenty of people who just are not well off and don’t have the information and they don’t have access to people to give them the time of day to explain it. And so, you know, again, you, you go with the things that you hear the 1%, well, the 1 percent is not my clientele or that leaves 99%.

Bruce Weinstein: There’s a lot of people. There’s a lot of people out there at the 99%, right? And if you go with the 80, 20, even if it’s 20, one way or the other, that’s still a lot of people. So, you know, it, it, my passion has been based on my, Okay. You know, upbringing my, my journey, you know, my tribulations of just wanting to help people get the right information, get the right decisions.

Bruce Weinstein: Look, we, we, we, we do, we do a lot of varieties of things and there’s nothing that makes us feel better when a client. Literally last week sends us a check, sends us a picture of the check she got for 10, 000 that reimbursed her for something that we put in place to reimburse her if something happened and, and her specific situation cost her nothing.

Bruce Weinstein: That medical situation was protected with, you know, think of it as an Aflac type tool. It wasn’t Aflac, but. You know, she had an accident plan that would pay up to 10, 000 and she fell. She broke her foot, needed surgery and lo and behold, there’s a check for 10, 000. She was surprised and I’m like, that’s, but that’s what it’s, it works.

Bruce Weinstein: It works. You know, when they say, well, what’s that for? Why am I spending 29 a month? And I’m like, but that’s what you spend 29 a month for, right? So that you don’t have a 10, 000 boo boo. And again, I have lots of lines. So, you know, an accident. No, nobody intended to have that accident. She didn’t intend to fall.

Bruce Weinstein: You didn’t intend to hit that car. That tractor. Charlie didn’t intend to hit you. Right? So I came up with the word intendant. Intend. I didn’t have an intendent. Like, did you intend to go do that? No. Did you intend to have appendicitis today? No. You know, one of my mentors said, walk around a hospital, and except for the maternity ward, ask everybody in the hospital, did you plan on being here today?

Bruce Weinstein: He didn’t

Erin Marcus: intend to do this. And yet, statistically, odds are, at some point, You will find yourself in one of these situations. I used to think that when I first started commuting for work, like I had graduated college where I used to walk to school and I was commuting to work and I had this beater car that probably had no business being on the highway in Chicago to begin with.

Erin Marcus: And I’m thinking, okay, there’s a million people on this highway. First of all, there’s no shortage, but even with a million people on this highway, Every single day I saw at least three accidents. It’s the same, it’s roughly the same million of us at the same time during rush hour, right? So we know it’s a almost static million of us.

Erin Marcus: And if three people are having an accident every day, I can guarantee you I will get a turn. Like I’m watching this happen going, there’s no way if I keep commuting this far on this type of road. I’m coming out of this unscathed, right? It’s just not going to

Bruce Weinstein: happen. I said earlier about more people have life insurance over disability.

Bruce Weinstein: Well, we do know we’re going to die. Which then bodes the question, why aren’t you all heavily buying life insurance? Because you are going to die. You may not get disabled. You may not go in a nursing home. You may not have a car accident. But I guarantee you, You will die, right? Life, nobody gets out alive.

Bruce Weinstein: So shouldn’t people based on that have bazillions of dollars in life insurance, knowing they’re going to die and, and create phenomenal amounts of wealth for their families. Well, no, why? Because it’s not for me. It’s for them and

Erin Marcus: I’m selfish. Look at it as an ROI situation because especially for small business owners where, you know, you’re focused on growing your business, you think that this is an expense.

Erin Marcus: And so too many business owners treat everything as an expense as opposed to an investment. And in many, many ways, insurance, different insurance products, they’re a version of an investment in your business because they are the protection if and when.

Bruce Weinstein: If you have a business partner, we took, we counsel about key person, you know, it’s referred to as key man.

Bruce Weinstein: Obviously I say key person these days, but key person insurance or buy sell agreements. So again, if the listener out there, if I’ve got a 50 50 partner, me and my buddy, we grew up together. We’re best friends. We have this business. We’re married. We have wives and, and, and kids and families. If something happens to my partner, Okay.

Bruce Weinstein: His wife is now my partner. Does she know how to run the business? Probably not. Do I want to be dealing with her on an everyday basis? Probably not. I need to buy her out. Does she even want to do it? Right. Does she want to be bothered with me? Right? So if you don’t have a buy sell agreement funded with a life insurance policy, how am I going to be able to buy her out and retain full control of the company?

Bruce Weinstein: Right. So that’s a very fundamental item if somebody has partners and you do the same with disability, key person, disability insurance, because if my partner gets injured, sick, disabled, crippled, whatever, I got to pay. I got to pay. He wants a salary. He wants his equity stake. He needs his dividends. How am I, how am I replacing that person and paying him?

Bruce Weinstein: I need, I need the disability coverage. I need business continuation coverage. I need. So again, if you’re listening as a business owner, there’s all these other components that you do need to pay attention to, whether it’s now or down the road, but educate yourself and understand what. The Whiffam is, and why?

Erin Marcus: And that, and that was really what I was going to wrap this up with is going back to your comment. You don’t know what you don’t know. And there are certain things in your business, if you don’t know what you don’t know about social media or whatever, but if you don’t know what you don’t know about protecting the, in my opinion, inevitable crap that happens.

Erin Marcus: You gotta find out you gotta find out so but

Bruce Weinstein: not not knowing is not an excuse anymore You google this stuff like you I mean, I’m older than you but you know, we had the encyclopedias And then and then and then every year you got the new annual update, right? You had to put it in the back the shelf, right?

Bruce Weinstein: You were wealthy had encyclopedias like we we didn’t have we had to borrow others. So, you know Now you just google the stuff so you go to youtube you could there’s so much information So i’m putting my stuff out there so people can find it and hopefully edge self educate but You know, the I didn’t know is not an excuse anymore.

Bruce Weinstein: You just can’t. But that’s the apathy, right? That’s just, eh, you know, I don’t

Erin Marcus: care. Under the category of what do you want and how bad do you want it, this is another thing you absolutely have to be paying attention to. Love it. So if they want to chat with you directly, what is the best way to

Bruce Weinstein: find you?

Bruce Weinstein: Well, you go to planman. tv. P l a n m a n so my show is called ask the plan man the short code just go to plan man dot tv and you can google me or instagram facebook linkedin i mean plan man’s everywhere so just hit ask the plan man and you’ll find me hit me with your questions you want to watch my episodes tons of information out there we got longs we got shorts.

Bruce Weinstein: And here’s

Erin Marcus: the deal. The business owners I know are working so, so, so hard to create what it is that they have. Don’t keep it at risk, find out what’s going on and what you need to do. So absolutely. I know it’s not everybody’s favorite topic, but it is so, so, so important. So thank you for coming and sharing the knowledge, the insights, the stories, all of the things.

Erin Marcus: And thank you for sharing it out there. I think the the access to information is absolutely imperative for people. So thank you. Thanks for having me.