Financial Strategies
When I unexpectedly lost both my parents I was left with a complicated estate to execute on my own. It was a nightmare that uprooted every part of my life and left little time to grieve. I spent the next six years contending with a mess that not only drained me emotionally, but also financially. What was so frustrating about going through the process was how avoidable it was had there been simple financial strategies and better estate planning in place. This journey eventually led me to partner with Symmetry Financial Group in taking a holistic approach to life planning and fusing it with my decades as a real estate professional.
For starters, assets need to be in a trust. Even if you have a will, if your real estate or any other asset of value is not in a trust then your beneficiaries will need to go through a time-consuming and expensive probate process.
If the majority of your assets are in real estate, it is important to think about what will happen with that real estate. It generally takes many months if not over a year to sell a property. I was left with a sizable mortgage, a shell of a business, countless expenses, and minimal cash liquidity to keep it all afloat. That meant I had to personally finance most of the expenses until the bulk of the estate in real estate was sold.
Proper estate planning including a financial strategy to protect their assets could have avoided this nightmare. Much accumulated wealth is lost unecessarily just by not having a comprehensive financial plan in place. Once I started delving into the intricacies of how to best capitalize on creative financial protection strategies, the more savvy investment approaches I discovered.
There are many simple financial strategies within the life insurance realm that can be used as tax-saving investment tools that build wealth and protect assets. One of my favorite strategies is the Infinite Banking Concept. It can be used not just as a means of financial protection through a policy such as an Indexed Universal Life or IUL, but as a vehicle for accumulating wealth and accessing capital. In contrast to a 401K or IRA, an IUL investment has no contribution limits, tax-free distribution and death benefits plus the cash value can be accessed via tax-free loans – essentially creating your own bank!
For example, a real estate investor could first invest the cash set aside for a downpayment on a property into an income producing policy. Then when ready to purchase take that same cash out against the policy. Leveraging the cash value of a policy allows an investor to put their money to work in two places at one time because the cash value never leaves the policy and continues to earn dividends or interest. This allows the investor to achieve a higher combined growth rate than if they simply used their money to invest directly in real estate. When you pay yourself back with interest you're avoiding paying the bank that interest and paying back into your own banking system - quite the no brainer in my opinion.
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In broadening my professional scope and combining over twenty five years of real estate knowledge with my epiphany within the advanced insurance markets, my ultimate goal is to advise my clients on how these two investment strategies are able to work together in building capital while also protecting assets.
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As a fiduciary with Symmetry Financial Group we advise in the advanced insurance markets of Annuities, Indexed Universal Life, Life Insurance and other Tax-Free Strategies that collectively offer Estate Planning options to protect yourself, family or even your business. This is a unique integration of financial strategies along with real estate advisement and I am eager to share this wealth of knowledge with my trusted network of friends and clients!
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