Episode 367: AMA #8 + Insurance Needs Analysis with Louai Bibi

25:30One type, I don't know if I'd call it a gray area because CRA is pretty clear about it, but in terms of actual enforcement, maybe a gray area. You want to read this one, Cameron? From Anonymous, do you think Canadian regulators will ever accept a fiduciary standard for all professionals that provide financial advice? I think that seems pretty unlikely. Our regulatory system here in Canada is heavily influenced by large, powerful financial institutions, a small handful of them. certain registration categories like portfolio managers are held to that higher standard. I don't know. Would it be good if we had that for everybody?

26:07I have seen that there's one paper that looks at, I think it's the annuity market in the US that shows that adding a fiduciary standard led to lower cost product recommendations. Great for consumers, not so great for financial firms. It's that not so great for financial firms that makes me skeptical that we'll see that type of sweeping reform in Canada. I agree. Well put. Okay, the next one from Andrew K. After more than 300 episodes, you've explored incredible topics and informed countless listeners. What are the top three ideas or concepts that have not only changed your view of finance, but also influenced other areas of your life?

26:44And you and I, Ben, chatted about this earlier, and this is a tough question. Do you want to go first? Sure, I'll go first. I think I wrote four things. Thanks. So did I. So I guess it wasn't that tough. I don't know if I like this question because I've been asked a few times and I think my answer changes every time. There's just so much content. I don't know. Anyway, I'll say what I wrote down this time. I think my conviction in or against any investment strategy has gotten weaker, not stronger over time. After all the people we've talked to and all the research we've done, for every strong conviction that exists, there is an equal and opposite strong conviction from someone equally intelligent and qualified, which just makes it hard to like, oh, everyone agrees that this makes sense.

27:25That doesn't exist in finance. But isn't that the backbone of why the philosophy we espouse makes sense? Because my first response to that question was my conviction and our philosophy has actually increased over time. However, my desire to convince others has decreased. A lot more people agree on something like just own the market than they do on something like trend following, but there's still very strong convictions that you should not be indexing. You know what I mean? Sure. The people that we've spoken to, but if you look at the marketplace, the marketplace, particularly in Canada, has not embraced that.

28:04No. I mean, if you look at the dollars invested in funds, absolutely not, not even close. We get the question about trend following so much. Trend following has come up in AMAs more than I think any other question. It's like you think trend following makes sense. Great. Good for you. Awesome. Enjoy. That's what I mean, but you're not trying to convince people. You put the information out, you interview the people that you found, but you don't have this burning desire to change the world necessarily, but to change people's minds. Help inform is one thing, to help people form their beliefs. When people's beliefs have been formed, it's tough to change.

28:39Yeah. Same thing for gold. You want to invest in gold? I'm happy for you. You want to have factor tilts in your portfolio? Great. I do too. You want to have really aggressive factor tilts? Awesome. I understand what you're getting into, but hey, have fun. You want a market cap weight? Nice. That's great too. You want to be 100 % in stocks after you heard Scott Cederberg? Hey, I'm 100 % in stocks. Awesome. You want to be 60-40? I mean, great. I don't know. I just think that nobody knows. There's a lot of wisdom in what David Booth says, that you have to have an investment strategy that you can stick with.

29:14Nobody knows what the ex ante, like before the fact, nobody knows before the fact what the optimal portfolio looks like. I think that what we do at PWL, I do the exact same thing in my personal portfolio that we do for our clients, just maybe not the same asset allocation as all of our clients, but the same portfolio strategy, the same investment products. I think that makes a lot of sense. It's low cost, it's broadly diversified, it does have some factor tilt, which I think makes sense, but I can't claim that it's ex ante optimal. I can't say that portfolio that I use and that we use is going to be the best performing portfolio for the next 20 or 50 or whatever years.

29:47Then I'm also highly skeptical of anyone claiming that they know what the ex-ante optimal portfolio looks like. My convictions in anything have gotten weaker. My convictions for and against anything. Nobody can predict the future. It's interesting you mentioned the bond question. You listen to Scott Sederberg, you'd go all equity. Listen to Bob Merton, you wouldn't. Yeah. Edward McQuarrie has a paper looking further back in time than Scott. Bonds look a lot better over a lot of that period. There's so many questions there. Do we need to look back that far in time? At what point do the data stop being relevant?

30:18Scott made a pretty good case for why data going back to 1890 are still relevant for today, but what about going back to 1790 or whatever McQuarrie's paper goes to? There's so much good research and so many smart people with strong opinions. It's what David Booth says. You have to have an investment strategy that you can stick with, and you have to stick with it. That's one. Are we alternating or should I just go through all mine? Keep going. I may jump in and interrupt you again. Okay. Market efficiency doesn't really matter. I think market efficiency has become this ridiculous straw man target where people will point to specific events and say like, ah, I knew it.

30:52Markets are not efficient. That couldn't possibly happen in an efficient market. Marco Salmon kind of talked about this the first time he was on his podcast. This is a quote from Marco. I actually think measuring price efficiency, whatever that means, is really hard. and one of the reasons it's really hard is that it kind of assumes you have some way to know what a stock is worth at any given point in time, end of quote. What really matters to investors is whether they can consistently outperform by identifying market inefficiencies, whatever those are, whatever that means, and the answer to that question continues to be no most of the time.

31:25But we used to talk a lot about market efficiency. I don't even think it matters. It's too hard to define. It's too hard to measure. That doesn't mean everyone can beat the market though. That's my point. Even if markets aren't efficient, all these markets are inefficient, look, look, okay. Who's beating the market? Wasn't it Ken French that says it may not be efficient, but why not invest like they are efficient? Right. Which makes sense. Market efficiency is just a model, but that doesn't mean that you can beat the market. Models aren't reality. Models aren't reality. And the reality is that you can't beat the market.

31:54Most people can't. Mean variance optimization is respectfully to anyone using it because I know a lot of financial professionals do, completely useless. Respectfully. Don't get me started, CP. This has come up implicitly and explicitly in different ways across past episodes, but it's still very common in the industry to see people whipping out the sharp ratios of a product or a strategy or whatever. Scott Sederberg and Hank Besseminder both talked about how the normality assumption in the sharp ratio fails at long horizons due to skewness, which really limits its usefulness for long-term investors.

32:31It's a single period model over a single monthly, maybe, period. The distributions of returns do tend to be pretty normal, but over longer horizons, which are more relevant to most people, returns do not tend to be normally distributed. That alone just kills the usefulness of the Sharpe ratio for unless your time horizon is a month. John Cochran's stuff on multi-factor asset pricing suggests that the optimal portfolio for for most people is multi-factor efficient, not mean variance efficient. Mean variance efficiency is kind of what you're looking for when you're looking for the highest sharp ratio.

33:04This means that the portfolio may not be mean variance efficient, which you might say, oh, that's not good. It doesn't have the highest sharp ratio, but it's that way because it hedges some other non-portfolio risk that is relevant to you as an individual. And that's not going to show up in a sharp ratio. That doesn't mean it's a bad portfolio if it's hedging something that matters to you. Paul Coluso talked about his research on complex instruments in mutual funds and how complex instruments like options can transform some of your standard deviation risk into skew or cortosis risks, which are not captured in the Sharpe ratio.

33:39And that results in an artificially inflated risk return trade-off. So he talked about that because in their paper evaluating the use of complex instruments in mutual funds, they use something called the manipulation proof performance measure to get around that problem with the Sharpe ratio. We take all that stuff together. I don't even mention illiquidity. Don't even get me started on volatility laundering through illiquid assets and how that affects Sharpe ratios. Someone says, look how high my Sharpe ratio is. I don't have a whole lot of time for that. My fourth one, I've got to give a mention to the non-financial stuff too.

34:13We've talked so much about, it's been a while actually, I guess, but all the stuff on time versus money, experience versus things, time use, goal setting, Cassie Holmes talking about counting the times left of doing stuff in your life. Like I went swimming at the river with my kids last night. I didn't count the times left, but if I did, like there's not that many times left where I've got all four of my kids swimming at the river together. Commitment devices. Yeah. Commitment device is true. I don't know if I think about it every day, but it's bits and pieces of that definitely have filtered into my everyday life and thinking.

34:46I actually talked about that. It's not a commitment device, but the habit with a client at the gym yesterday morning. He said, I forget who the guest was that told us, instead of deciding which days are the weeks to go to the gym, just decide to go every day. Therefore, you never have to mentally juggle. Okay, if I go on Monday, I can skip Tuesday, go Wednesday, by the way, Thursday. You just go every day, you go every day and it's just so much easier. Like Joe Biden wore the same suit every day. There's no decision to be made, right? You just do it, right? Just easier. All right. So mine, I gave my first one.

35:16Number two, I thought the industry would change in Canada towards indexing much quicker, much like in the US and that has not been the case. When I first heard the merits of indexing back in 1997, yes, 1997 Lou, it just seemed so sensible even without doing all of the learnings we've done over the past eight to 10 years or so. It just made sense. But this week alone, I've spoken to three people at three different brokerages in Canada. And not only is the usage or belief in the power of markets work type philosophy not there and not being used, but the awareness of it is not there, which is just staggering to me.

35:57It's one thing to be aware and choose not to, but to largely, this is what I was told, sample of three, but the awareness is not there. So there's so much data, so much research that you've done, Ben, that so many people just aren't aware of. Another thing I thought is worth mentioning is I have a much greater appreciation just for questioning assumptions. Like our industry is so loaded with throwaway terms and rules of thumb and stuff that's just sad enough just becomes true and that's just not the case, right? And I know this is how you operate, Ben, with your engineering kind of mind and thought process, but kind of question everything, challenge everything, dig into the details and try to get to the bottom of ideas that are out there.

36:36there is so much academic research like SSRN is so full of unbelievable information, right? In the world like in the investment world where you've got this mass amount of information, asymmetry, the clients perceiving that advisors know so much more which they don't necessarily do no more. That's just fertile ground for evidence like that to not come to light and to have status quo in let alone the economic drivers to not change how people are advised. I thought the great democratization of information would lead to better planning and better investment outcomes. The information on Google, the internet, just in general, the books, the publications, the podcasts, and then let alone social media, which I think has just made a complete disastrous storm for many people trying to get a handle on their finances and what's important to them.

37:25What do they want to save for? Where do they get the information? The focus on consumption, this ad-based, algorithm-based force-feeding information that so many people are completely addicted to, I just think that's a nightmare environment to try to figure out, A, what's important to you long-term, B, how do you manage it, your finances in the near term, so that you can do systematic things day in, day out to reach the ability to have the kind of life you want down the road. I just think it's a complete shame that all this information is being completely polluted in a social media driven world.

38:01That's a good one. There's a lot of subpar advice online. That can get accelerated if people pick up on or discuss something catchy, right? There's not that quality filter, let alone the drive for consumption. You have an ad-based, I think it was Scott Galloway talked about that, saying the fundamental flaw of the internet and search is that it's ad-based as opposed to pay-to-play based, which right now, I guess you could say the AI world is more pay-to-play based as opposed to ad-based. I think Canada just did a bit of a, I don't know if it was a crackdown. Canadian regulators started voicing concerns about how online influencers may be affecting people.

38:41I think they were looking at doing some kind of regulatory intervention. Lou, what's yours? I've got three and the themes are actually pretty similar to what both of you mentioned. The first one is the one investment philosophy approach that was like transformative for me coming from the bank where passive index market cap factor tilted, like you name it, that is not what they're doing. So being able to understand why it makes sense for clients, share that message with clients, and then actually realize how much time as a client-facing planner, that frees up for me to go do more meaningful things for clients.

39:22That blew my mind the first time that I really learned that there's a better way to invest. And just to add to that, I've very much become kind of similar to both of you where if a client asks about market cap weighted, fantastic. If a client asks about gold, sure. If somebody asks about whole life insurance and I get a bunch of questions on whole life. I've historically been of the mind where I'm going to send you the white paper that PWL has on why whole life insurance is not an optimal investment for long-term money. And then, you know what, like after a handful of conversations, I was like, you know what, if this is the thing that A, doesn't disrupt any of our clients' financial objectives, and it keeps them in their seat, and maybe there's like a social aspect to it that I'm clearly missing, so be it.

40:11They're going to be fine. That's kind of number one for me. Number two is the idea of smoothing out your consumption over time. And for those that are on video, I've got this book behind me, Die With Zero, and I'm still reading it, but it's totally transformed my view just in terms of conversations with clients on creating memories with their families while they can. And that includes spending money relative to just saving every single penny that they can so that they can retire sooner or whatever this looks like. I'm thinking of one client in specific who's an awesome guy and we built his financial plan and it was like we were looking at all the numbers and he wanted to hard stop retire at age 50.

40:52And then time went on and his family was growing and he was doing more stuff with his family and his spending was going up. And he was like, Louie, like, do you think we were too aggressive with the planning projections, me being able to shut off my income at age 50? And it was like, you know what, maybe. But what I will tell you is that you are just going to build the most fantastic life, spending more time with your family, even if that means spending more money and maybe working an extra couple of years or whatever that looks like. I will tell you right now that you won't regret it. And when Mark retired, I sent him the link to the LinkedIn post.

41:26And I was like, this is what I'm talking about. This is what it's about, spending time with your family. I hope that he didn't interpret that email as me telling him to retire today because that was not the intention, but it's about smoothing out your spending for sure. And the last one, this is a short one for me. You do not need to be a homeowner to be able to build meaningful wealth and live a good life. And I say this as a renter myself. There's so many other variables to homeownership versus renting a place that just makes such a difference on your life. Flexibility, cash flow, mental overhead, you name it.

41:59home ownership is not the only way to build wealth. So that's my third and final. We'll go to your insurance talk in a second. So there was an international crackdown on unlawful influencers from June 2nd to 6th that a bunch of Canadian regulatory bodies participated in. All right. Should we go to Louis on life disability and critical illness insurance? Let's do it. I wanted to come on here, guys, and chat a little bit about how we think about insurance planning for our clients by prefacing first that we do not sell insurance. So this is us just doing the thinking and the solving for clients to help them ultimately make decisions about how much insurance to get, what kinds to get, and why.

42:40I'm going to cover life insurance, disability, and critical illness. And I'm going to give a few examples of cases where we've A, worked on them recently, but B, it's kind of changed my perspective a little bit just in terms of how to approach this with clients. And there are a ton of rules of thumb out there where, you know, like this is the right way to do insurance. This is the wrong way. And I also want to kind of add to that by saying that I don't think that there is necessarily a right or a super wrong way. I think the way we do it is awesome because we do it in the context of our clients' financial plans.

43:16And I don't want to gatekeep that. So if there's other people out there, like insurance advisors who can take something from this and apply it to their clients. Or conversely, somebody thinks they've got a better way that they can show me how to do it. This is all about improving client experience, right? I would love to hear from them. That's a dual offer there. And my final remark before I get started is that we firmly believe that financial planning is a process and not a finished product. So this isn't one of those things where you look at insurance, you solve the problem, and then you never look at it ever again.

43:48Because ultimately, we build a financial plan for somebody based on a set of assumptions about their lives today. Tomorrow, something changes, and that plan is no longer effective. Same concept applies to insurance. So I will start with life insurance. And this is one that really stands out to me, just given this kind of shift and specialization that we've really built, at least with the couple of colleagues that I'm with in terms of working with incorporated professionals and doctors and dentists and you name it. And they are like the prime target for life insurance pitches. So I've had a number of these conversations.

44:23And for those who are less familiar with how life insurance works, in simplest form, it's basically an agreement between an insurance company and some other party where if you pass away during maybe a period of time or some time over your life, that insurance company will pay a lump sum benefit to you or your beneficiary, whatever that looks like, in exchange for these monthly costs or annual costs. And it could be as cheap as like 10 bucks a month, and it could be as expensive as tens of thousands a month. So this is why it's just so important to get this right from the get-go. And there's also going to be, I've kind of simplified what insurance might look like, but there's all these little nuances like, should I get temporary?

45:08Should I get permanent? Should I get insurance with an investment component? How does that change how much it costs me? I'm just going to start by focusing on kind of these four key steps that we follow for every one of our clients. And step one is to build that initial financial plan that looks at all of their objectives, all their values, all their goals, and it really just maps it out for them. This is like the best case version of their plan, where if there's two spouses, they live long lives and they're in good health and they can do everything they want to do. So once we've done that, this is kind of grim to say, but we build survivorship models where each of those spouses aren't around anymore and their portion of income that was going towards saving goes away and CPP gets reduced and old age security disappears.

45:55It's dark to talk about and it's not a fun conversation, but it's important. And I'll give an example of this blended family that we work with where we just went through this process for them and they've got kids from previous relationships. So just in terms of how their estates are set up, the kids inherit the investments and the spouses were working on solving a different approach to that. So what we did is we checked out what can that surviving spouse sustainably afford to spend if they do nothing, whether maybe they have life insurance or they decide not to get any because they don't. What does that look like?

46:32And from there, we step three, have a conversation with the client. Does this look right to you? Do you think your spending would change dramatically? Another example that really stood out to me was this family dynamic where there's a high income earning spouse, there is a stay at home parent, and there's young kids. So we chatted with those clients and like conventional wisdom might tell you to really focus on ensuring the high income earning spouse and worry less about replacing the income of the lower income spouse or the no income spouse. but that is so wrong because we went through that conversation and we started to chat a little bit about that and he was like whoa hang on if my wife isn't in the picture anymore I can't work nearly as much because I have to be present with the kids and not just that but I probably need to hire a nanny and it was baffling how expensive nannies were so he was like we need to make some adjustments here and so that's just an example of how that conversation in real time with clients and not just looking at those projections at face value makes a difference.

47:35You're really doing, it's like a full financial plan, step one, and then you're doing basically a full financial plan in the hypothetical scenario of an unexpected death. Absolutely. We look like if your spouse passes away, do you want to still retire at the same time? Do your objectives about helping your kids change? Do you invest differently? It's a full financial plan for every version and we dive pretty deep. But my favorite part about doing this in the context of somebody's financial plan is it's one thing to look at insurance in isolation and say, this is how much I think you should have.

48:09It's another to do it in somebody's plan because ultimately if a spouse passes away and there's insurance, that's a lump sum benefit that they get today, right? And they invest that money. So it would be kind of crazy to, in my opinion, to figure out or try to tell somebody how much insurance they might need without accounting for volatility if that money's invested. So we get to stress test it in our planning software, understand how market volatility impacts your ability to support yourself with that insurance. So we're taking it one step further that like really puts the bow on this for me, just in terms of knowing that our clients have a well thought out insurance plan.

48:49Those are kind of steps one through four in terms of how do we figure out what or how much insurance you should have. The other consideration here is, do I need cheaper insurance? So that's typically temporary that expires after a period. Or do I need more expensive permanent insurance that is guaranteed to pay out at some point? Maybe it has an investment component. Maybe it doesn't. When I think about the reasons that clients come to us to get insurance, it's usually about paying off debt. It's about replacing somebody's income until they get to retirement. It's about making sure that if there's an expense for education, as an example, that that gets met when the time comes for that.

49:31It is so rare that somebody comes to us and says, I have an insurance problem or I have a need. How do I solve it? And the answer is permanent life insurance. And that's not a diss against permanent life insurance by any stretch. I actually think that it's a fantastic way to transfer wealth to the next generation, do charitable giving at death, create liquidity for an estate if there's a major tax bill to pay and you don't want to sell an asset or maybe can't. I think it's an awesome approach to some types of planning, but it's not really the planning that 99 % of Canadians need. That's life insurance for me.

50:09That's a great way for permanent life insurance. I think you're right that in that 1%, there are some really great use cases and its specific tax properties and legal properties make it a really interesting tool, but it is in like 1%, maybe even less of cases where it does make sense. It's probably sold in 80 % of cases or something. I can't even begin to tell you how many clients we work with who bought insurance, permanent whole life insurance before they came into PWL and they're like, how do I get rid of this thing? This is destroying my cashflow. The investment returns aren't as they're marketed, how do I get rid of it?

50:46And it's kind of tough once you've started to pay for it for a while when you realize that not all that money went to the investment component and you're not leaving money on the table, but you had coverage and you paid for it. But it's a tough thing to stomach after a certain point. It's really cool to hear. I've been out of the frontline financial planning team at PWL for years now. So it's cool to hear how you guys are doing insurance needs. Yeah, I've always believed that. I know you're talking about disability next, Lou, but cost, when I used to sell disability insurance ages ago, cost would always often come up.

51:20It's one of those things where the more it costs, the more you need it, right? Like you can't afford it. You can't afford not to have it definitionally, right? That's especially true with disability insurance. It's so true. And it's such an important coverage that I find so simpler to think about when to get it, how much you need and why. But it's one of those hurdles because it costs sometimes where it doesn't always shake out the way that we'd love to see it happen. But just kind of a quick summary on disability insurance. This is different than life where you get a lump sum payout. This is in the scenario where you become disabled.

51:59There's a monthly benefit that gets paid to you from the insurance company. If you're lucky, you go to age 65, depending on the terms and conditions. Most employers now offer it in their benefit packages, which is great. Sometimes you'll see different definitions for what disabled means to a certain insurance company, and that could mean your coverage being turned off pretty abruptly. And with this kind of coverage, I am less focused on what is the amount that you can get from an insurance company because it's pretty standardized in Canada. It's usually most insurance companies will replace two-thirds of your income and not more than that.

52:37What we're really looking at are the terms and conditions of these kinds of policies. And one scenario that we came up with or came across pretty recently was this client who works in high-tech, young guy, really successful. He's got disability insurance through work. And he sent us over the policy statements and we looked it through and the coverage looked great at face value. And then when we kind of took a look under of the hood a little bit, we found that his insurance would cover his own occupation if he were to become disabled for the first two years. And then after that two-year period lapses, there's like this reassessment where if he can go like serve coffee at Tim Hortons for minimum wage, that benefit shuts off.

53:23I talk about reviewing insurance in the context of somebody's financial plan. Well, it's like, okay, let's go back to your plan and let's look at what happens if your income changes like that. Can you afford to save the same way? Can you afford to maintain your lifestyle? Do you have to change the goalpost for retirement or financial independence? It's shocking how such a minor detail changes the picture completely. The final piece on disability insurance that really stands out to me is because there's a monthly benefit component to this coverage, sometimes we'll have clients, I'll use a nice round number, will suggest that maybe they check out like 10 ,000 a month of disability coverage because that's two thirds of their income.

54:05And they'll come to us and they'll say, you know, Louis, like that's a lot higher than what I actually spend today. And if I'm disabled, I'm probably going to spend even less. And I think that's a valid comment, but disability insurance in my mind is not just needed to replace the portion of your income that goes towards your spending. It's also there to replace the portion of your income that goes towards what you could have otherwise saved. If you think about that best case scenario where that disability policy pays out until you're age 65 and you've gotten just enough to cover your needs and that's it because it was cheap and convenient.

54:38What do you do after 65 when that policy goes away? Maybe CPP starts, but if you haven't been working potentially and paying into it, it doesn't move the needle. I don't want to see it. That's just not a scenario that I can experience with any of the clients that I work with. As you get to 65, that policy turns off and you don't have enough in savings because you can't do that over. And that's one of those really important ones for me. How do clients respond in the case of the own occupation, the two-year own occupation coverage when you take that to them and say, explain it and say, we think you should take this$100 a month or whatever it is, additional private coverage.

55:16Are they receptive to it? Always. It might be one thing if it was just one person and there was no dependence, right? And they were like, you know, if something happens to me, I'll figure it out. And I don't agree with that train of thought, but that might happen. A lot of the clients that we work with, like they've got dependents, they've got kids, they've got spouses that rely on them. And when you kind of paint the picture of here's what your financial plan looks like in the absence of your income, it just, I think shines a bit of a different light when they see how vulnerable of a position, not just them, but their family ends up being in.

55:52Oh man. I don't know if I picked that up from what you're saying just now. So you'll do the same thing as you do with life insurance, where you'll do a hypothetical plan in the case of disability? Sometimes, not always. I know some of our colleagues do a little bit of a deeper dive into building another plan. I have always been of the mind that you just go and get as much disability insurance as you can. And I might catch a little bit of flack from the insurance community, but you just go and you max out that disability coverage, you get those terms right, and you go protect your family. It's that simple for me.

56:21Yeah, I did that. I bought early on in my time at PWL, I bought additional disability coverage that increases over time. I can't remember what it's called. Depot. It's the future earnings protection option, I think. That's right. Yeah. So I've been exercising that option ever since every year. Good man. Last concept on insurance today is critical illness. And this is also a different kind of coverage that pays out a lump sum. If you are diagnosed with a critical illness of some kind that is on an insurance company's predetermined list of health conditions. So you think of cancer, heart attack, stroke, the main ones really.

56:58And this isn't a coverage that from my point of view has been an absolute need for our clients because the list is pretty restrictive. It's not as expensive, like that's less of the concern from my point of view, but it's also one of those things where the clients that approach us and look to work with us have also amassed a pretty considerable amount of wealth where if they were diagnosed with a critical illness and they needed access to capital, they've got their investments, they've got other assets that they could draw on. And there's lots of ideas about what you could do with critical illness when you go through insurance training, especially on this front.

57:35I've heard stuff like the investment protector. It's the insurance that protects your investments so you don't have to touch them if you get sick. I've heard that you can make sure that your spouse can take a year or two off work if you get diagnosed. I have heard somebody tell me that you should go take your kids to Disney with your critical illness benefit if you're diagnosed with an illness like that. And I don't buy those too much. Or at least historically, I haven't. I thought those are kind of interesting reasons to consider that kind of coverage relative to maybe other more appropriate ones.

58:07But I did want to share a really interesting story that I got to be a part of a couple months back. So in my past life, prior to joining PWL, I was insurance licensed. I was at another local firm in Ottawa. And the financial planner that I used to work for reached out to me a couple months ago. And he said, Hey, Louie, can you give me a call? So I did. I gave him a call within 30 seconds because I was terrified of what potentially he wanted to chat about. but what he mentioned was not what I was expecting at all. He said, you helped this family get a suite of insurance coverages when they first joined our practice.

58:44You helped them get life, you helped them get disability, and then you helped them get critical illness. And it wasn't like hundreds of thousands of critical illness. It was from my perspective, and I don't remember off the top of my head, it was probably one of those scenarios where if you were buying term life insurance, insurance the insurance company was going to throw you a nice deal to buy really cheap critical illness and it was kind of like it's there might as well if it's like eight bucks a month kind of thing but what really caught me off guard was the planner then said yeah that client was diagnosed with cancer and that policy is in the process of being paid out and I called to tell you that that benefit just like completely changed their lives during such an emotional and difficult time for them as a family and blew my mind a little bit.

59:30Who cares about taking your kids to Disney? Any of that, that policy, one that I will admit I have never been very bullish on, actually made a serious impact on somebody's life. From my perspective, if that kind of peace of mind resonates with any of the people that are listening here and you want to go buy critical illness as a result, go buy the super cheap stuff. You do not need the big fancy critical illness policy or the big fancy whole life insurance policy with all the bells and whistles to have a lasting impact on your family. It's kind of my spiel on insurance today. That was awesome.

1:00:06Good summary. I canceled my critical illness policy probably 10 years ago, and then I had testicular cancer. It's not clear to me if... I'd have to look at the specific policy, but in many cases like really early stage the thing that i had basically it's not necessarily always going to be covered brutal like this based on the tumor size and the stage and stuff like that so i was kicking myself for a bit like man i would have should have kept that policy but i actually don't know if it would have been covered i'd have to go and dig it up that's so intense right like you're like in this new unknown world where you've got testicular cancer and it's like i've got to figure out the size of the tumor like what like just pay me out or Why didn't I even buy this?

1:00:45It's crazy. Yeah. Well, didn't have to worry about it because I canceled it years ago. I decided it didn't make sense for my situation. So what are the hot topics for the after show today? We didn't have any reviews. We do have a new disclaimer for when we read reviews. I won't spoil it now though, because we don't have any reviews to share. A little bit of a teaser. Yeah. Our One Digital Compliance friends, similar to adding the disclaimer to the end of the show, which listeners have been raving about. That's a real crowd favorite. They gave us a disclaimer for when we read reviews that addresses some SEC regulations.

1:01:20Honestly, I kind of like it. It's like super, super transparent about the content of the review and what we know about who made the review. They're like, I hope you guys don't mind doing this. I was like, you know what? I actually kind of like this disclaimer. We should have been doing this all along. Anyway, I won't spoil it now, but hopefully people give us some reviews between now the next time we record so that we can read the shiny new disclaimer out. So you're watching any crazy great shows lately, Louis? Well, what am I watching right now? My girlfriend and I are hooked on this reality TV show, and I know I'm going to get a lot of judgment.

1:01:55It's called The Challenge, where a bunch of people, pretty self-explanatory, go do challenges for money. That's been kind of interesting. And then I am watching The Sopranos for the first time, and that is just fascinating. That is an interesting show. That's a great show. I watched that beginning to end many years ago. I'm watching Narcos Mexico right now. Good show. Never watched it before. Yeah, we started watching that. We should go back to that. It's good. It's good. We're waiting for more Moblands to come out. Is that like The Sopranos at all? I kind of got on this Mob theme and I love it.

1:02:27Oh yeah, yeah. If you like Mob and a lot of wax, it's quite something. Yeah, and the accents, Pierce Brosnan's in it and Helen Mirren's. Oh, she's so evil. We like it a lot. I like it a lot. I love shows like that. That's your thing. I'm five episodes from finishing The Sopranos. I'll check out Mobland next. Mobland's really good. Or Animal Kingdom. I know, Ben, you watch that too. Animal Kingdom, Lou. So good. If you haven't watched that yet, watch that next. That is so good. I think I got through three seasons. I think three seasons and... You stopped? I did. I did. I know. I was just... I don't know what it was.

1:03:00I was also watching it with my girlfriend and we just... We did not finish it. Oh yeah, we couldn't stop. We were watching that show. It was good. First time we watched that show was when Shanna, our youngest, was just born. And so we'd have the freaking... She had this little, whatever, bassinet thing that rocks for the baby and it plays music. So that'll be gone. And then we'd have Animal Kingdom on, on a really low volume. So I always associate the sound of that little bassinet with the show. Anything else on your minds today? No, I think that's good. It was great to have Louis on. I thought that was good to have someone that's on the ground in front of clients, both for the AMA, but also to cover off how we're doing insurance.

1:03:38I hope we can do this more often. And I hope the listeners like it. They can let us know. It'd be great to have more advisors on. Phil's going to be on in a couple of weeks, which would be great too. Yep. We're pretty far out of the game, Cameron. Well, I mean, Lou talked early on, working in the business versus on the business. I am so out of the game. Thank God people like Lou are here. Yeah. I'm always blown away talking to our team of financial planners and portfolio managers, the stuff that they're working on, the stuff they're learning just through going through client situations. It's a level of knowledge and experience that's hard to replicate when you're just kind of reading about stuff.

1:04:11I think I'm going to call out some of the advisors or just the folks on the advice team for not doing this because this has been an open offer from you guys for forever. I think that from my perspective, we've got tons of folks who reach out to the website and through the podcast and they show up and they're like, we want Ben. And then they get sweet Lou and they're not as excited. So I just think being able to be on the podcast and some people get to hear my thoughts and how we think about planning. Like, I think there's value there. Yeah, we got to get more people on. I mean, it's like Jordan still hears from new clients that he's meeting about his appearance on the podcast.

1:04:42Phil, same thing. Phil, I think, ultimately reached out to us because he heard Jordan on the podcast. The first time he heard Jordan on the podcast, it was like, that's what kicked him to reach out to us. So anyway, yeah, totally agree. Getting more of our team on is good, in my opinion. People should be calling us to want to work with you, sweet Lou. That's without a doubt. So that's high praise. Thank you, CP. All right, guys, you're good for this week. Yeah. Thanks everyone for listening.

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