Nick Fanto featured in RiverX Upstream podcast with Kieran Berry

Transcript

0:00 All right, welcome to Upstream with RiverX. Today we’re joined by a very special guest, Nick Fanto from Orbital Life. Before we get into it, we have to have our standard disclaimer: anything that we say here shouldn’t be considered as personal or specific advice. If you need advice, please sit down with your financial or risk adviser to get a statement of advice to ensure anything you do is appropriate for you. Without further ado, I’ll introduce you to Nick. Nick, just for the benefit of our listeners, can you tell us a little bit about your background, where you came from, and what you’re doing today?

0:34 Yeah, perfect. My name is Nick Fanto. I’m the Director of Orbital Life. We’re a risk-only practice based in Sydney. We’ve been going for about 16 years. With insurance advice, you have to be a registered and qualified financial planner to give advice on life insurances. I guess that’s probably the ‘poor little brother’ at times of financial services. A lot of people want to manage money, not a lot of people want to manage the insurances. Years ago, I was working as a holistic financial planner. Through the GFC, that business became insolvent. I didn’t know what was next. I was 24, young, hungry, and a little bit gung-ho at the time. I decided to start up a risk advisory. In January, we will have been running for 16 years. We’re still kicking goals and we’re still a specialist insurance business. We don’t do anything but life insurance advice.

1:41 Tell me a bit about the firm itself. Who do you typically service? What does your standard client look like? Where do your clients normally come from?

1:53 I’ve never really segmented clients. I’ve always looked at it that if someone needs advice and is willing to give us the information we need, we’re happy to work with them. Our smallest clients pay $300 a year for a small life insurance benefit. My biggest client pays about $385,000, which is a massive premium. We have a service offering for everyone. Our clients could be moms and dads, accumulators, business owners. We do a lot of work with individuals around protecting their personal assets, clearing debt, providing income streams, looking after the kids, all the way to business owners and providing advice around key person insurance, which is injecting money into a business or using insurance to fund the buyout of a deceased or disabled shareholder. It’s really open in terms of who we’ll work with. We get most of our work from other financial advisers because there’s a move towards specialisation. Those financial advisers who don’t want to give risk advice, the fact that we’re a specialist business and we don’t do any wealth means that we get a lot of work from those businesses. We also get work from accounting firms, lawyers, mortgage brokers, general insurance brokers and general word of mouth. 

3:39 That’s how I came across you, actually, from a referral from a well-known accountant in town who we’re both friends with.

One of the reasons why we’ve been talking is for that specialist trend that you’re seeing. We have financial advisers within River X that provide holistic advice. Some of them try to be a bit of a generalist, some of them are quite good at that, and they understand the nuances of life insurance and policies and how that can work. We have other advisers who prefer to be a specialist in a particular vertical. They might be a specialist on investments. I know personally I like to align myself with specialists in each category to make sure that our clients are getting the best outcomes, which is why we’ve engaged and done some work together over the years. Can you tell me a bit about why a financial adviser would engage with you? Why would they pick Orbital Life over any other provider?

4:36 The first thing would be why are they outsourcing it. They’re probably outsourcing it because life insurance can be hard at the moment. There’s been a lot of change from a compliance perspective and a lot of change from a product perspective. I find a lot of advisers are sitting there going, unless we’re doing high volumes, this isn’t necessarily a profitable part of our business. The second part is also just the fact that it’s difficult because you’re trying to navigate contractual changes and premium increases as well as managing money. Why they choose us, I like to think it’s because we lead with advice. When I started the business, I was 24. I was a kid. I look back on that now and I meet other 24-25 year olds in the business and think, geez, I was really young. At the time, I thought, I can’t control what insurance companies do, whether they increase premiums or products change. I can’t control my client’s health. I can’t control a lot of things, but what I can control is service standards. I was always of the opinion that we’re going to win with service. At times, I think there’d be a lot of people listening who don’t feel they get that from their insurance advisers. It’s a little bit of a bugbear for people. For me, I thought, let’s build a practice that leads with advice. We’re not selling a product based on cost and going, well, you’re spending $4,000, we can do it for $3,000. We’re having a conversation with a client going, okay, you’re spending $4,000, let’s park that for a moment and actually have a conversation about what you need this to do. Has your circumstances changed? We come across so many clients who implemented a policy 10 years ago and it just goes up and up in cost and with CPI in terms of the benefit, but I guarantee their needs have changed. Has debt increased or decreased? Have their kids grown up? Where are they at currently? We’re leading with advice and giving clients advice based on what they need. Off the back of that, I like to think we’ve got a decent enough reputation for doing the right thing by our clients and providing ongoing service. While we’re not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, I like to think that our clients that have been with us long term have had multiple touch points along the way and we still maintain a relationship with those people, which I think is important, particularly to financial advisers because they want to work with an outsourced resource that has the same service standards that they have.

7:10 It’s really important to have a referral partner who can provide a service that’s a good reflection of your offering. It has to be an extension of what you’re doing. If you’ve got high standards within your practice, you need to make sure that they’re getting those same standards or the same level of service with their external providers.

7:32 Trust is everything. Our clients trust us. They come to us knowing that if something goes wrong, they trust that Orbital Life is going to come through with the goods when they need it. They trust what we’re saying. I think that’s the same for our referral partners. They trust that if we put our client in front of Orbital Life, Nick and his team are going to come through with the goods when they need it. It’s that trust play. The key is maintaining that trust because once you break it, it’s very hard to get it back.

8:01 Trust is everything in our business. You talked about coming in with the goods. By my definition, it’s probably getting the service but then also getting the outcome. If someone has a claim, making sure that they have the right policy in place to ensure that they get what they need. When you came and presented to my team a little while ago, we went through a few case studies of claims that have gone well and claims that have not gone well. That ties really well to your service offering. Could you explain maybe one or two scenarios on both sides of the fence, the importance of sitting down with a risk adviser to get the right policy, and the pros and cons of not doing that?

8:46 There are two that come to mind that were negative, not because of what we’ve done, but because people didn’t completely understand the products they hold. For every client that we claim, that’s an existing client of ours, we have a fee-for-service claim offering where people engage us to work on their behalf. The two I’m going to talk about, we didn’t write the policies, we were brought in to help them claim at claim time. The first one that comes to mind is around total permanent disablement (TPD). TPD is something that people probably don’t understand that well. I’ll talk about the product first to give a bit of background. With TPD and life insurance, a lot of people rely on their super funds to provide that, but what they don’t realise is when TPD is housed inside the super environment, in order to claim, you need to prove that you can never work again in any occupation that you’re suited to by education and experience. It’s quite a broad definition. The reality is when you claim, the insurance companies will look at your work history and make a judgment call on what they think you could do. We’ve got to get a couple of doctors to agree that you can’t do that ever again. It can be arduous if there’s ambiguity.

10:14 What you can get on the retail market is a TPD benefit called own occupation. Which means Kieran can’t, you know, Kieran’s permanently disabled if he can’t work in the occupation he’s currently gainfully employed in at the time of disability. So it removes the ability for the insurer to suggest you could work in a different occupation, which is a massive difference. So we did have one client who came to us and he had been on an income protection claim for two years and he had his policies inside the super environment. His income protection was about to stop because he was only covered for two years. So he’d come to us and said, “I need to claim on my TPD coverage.” This gentleman was a PE teacher and he’d hurt himself surfing. He wasn’t paraplegic or quadriplegic, but he developed a muscular issue, and with that muscular issue, it really impacted his mobility. So he can’t be a PE teacher. He’s got two young kids, in debt, he’s been on his income protection claim for two years, and he now needs the lump sum. But unfortunately, because he had any occupation TPD and based on his prior experience, the insurance company effectively ruled that he could work in an office-based job, which he didn’t really want to do, and therefore they won’t pay the claim because he wasn’t disabled in any occupation. He was disabled in his own occupation as a PE teacher and he couldn’t claim. That was a big problem, right? He was sitting there going, he might have to sell the house, he might have to do whatever it is he needs to do to get by. But again, that’s just a general misunderstanding of the product definition, which to be fair, actually no one’s in the wrong. He just never sought advice. He was just reliant on something he didn’t understand.

12:03 Another one that really is front of mind at the moment was a claim recently where we had a client who again had policies inside her super fund and they were provided by her employer. She went on maternity leave and took two years off. What happened because of the opt-in rules around your policies inside super funds is that if you’re not contributing, you’ve got to opt in to keep them. She had cover in her super fund, went on maternity leave, the policies lapsed because she didn’t opt in to keep them. She went back to work, same employer, two years later, and when she started contributing again, she was covered again. But through her pregnancy, she developed an illness that worsened to the point where she is so unwell. I think she’s about, you know, the last I spoke to her, which was six months ago, she was going to lose her hand and she was going to be permanently disabled. She’s never working again. But because that policy lapsed and then reinstated after she was diagnosed, there’s a clause in that contract which excludes pre-existing medical conditions, so they won’t pay the claim. Again, it’s no one’s fault because it wasn’t like an adviser set up the policy and advised her wrong. She just never sought advice and she was relying on something she didn’t understand. I think the key with insurance is the devil is in the detail. Contracts are changing often. If you look at it and go, “I can get something 30% cheaper elsewhere,” there might be a reason for that. So I think it’s really important to seek advice on what you’re actually holding to make sure it does what you need it to do if you ever need to claim. With claims, there’s no second shot at it. If you’ve got the wrong product or it’s structured wrong, we can’t unwind it once we get to claim time. That’s where planning is key. That’s why when someone comes to sit down with someone like us, they come to us with a need and generally that need is to plan for the future or they have a particular goal in mind. It’s at that point we’ll bring someone like you into the conversation and be like, “Okay, we can analyze their cash flow and put the investments together and figure out how to get them to that point financially.” Then there are other verticals that need to be considered within their life. You’ve got risk, you’ve got their succession planning. I like to outsource to bring in the best in each category to address those needs early. If you have the right planning, it sounds like you can get ahead of some of those problems.

14:41 Correct, and we do the same thing in reverse. We come in and we work with clients around their insurances, but we’re always speaking to the importance of estate planning. For example, if we set up the insurances and it’s not underpinned by appropriate estate planning, we don’t have the structures right. It can all go wrong at claim time. The key to what you’re saying, Kieran, and I really believe it, is that you need to have all your advisers rowing together in the same direction. Whether that’s your financial planner with your risk guy, with your accountant, with your lawyer, we need to make sure we’re all on the same page. If we ever need to unwind this and we’re not singing from the same hymn sheet, it’s just going to be a mess.

15:22 One thing I would say is there’s a lack of financial literacy generally. I think just in the community, that’s a fairly general statement, but it’s not something that they teach in school. When you’re in school, you can study business or economics, but they don’t sit down and say, “You’ve got a risk policy within your super fund,” for instance. Nine out of ten people you’d speak to who just work a normal 9-to-5 probably don’t even know that they have group policies within their superannuation, their retail superannuation fund, which have differing levels of cover. Maybe you could just talk to how that works. How does that work if you’re with CBUS or Aussie Super? How does that work for a general 9-to-5 worker in terms of those policies?

16:03 Yeah, like what are the, I guess, how do they get their cover? I guess it’s covered through the contributions they make, but what sort of cover is normally in there?

16:09 Yeah, okay. Well, so normally it really depends, right? But inside the super funds, often what will happen is your employer will have a relationship with, let’s call it Australian Super. If that’s your default super provider and you’re paying your contributions into that fund, you’ve got X amount of cover. It’s probably formula-based most of the time. They call it unitised cover. There’s a formula that dictates how much you’re eligible to receive. That can be based on what you do for work, your age, your income, things like that. Generally, you’re going to get a life insurance benefit, and life insurance pays you out if you were to die or become terminally ill. Terminal illness is generally given 24 months or less to live. That’s probably an important point. A lot of people don’t realise that life insurance pays out if you’re terminally ill, which is a really positive thing if you are terminally ill because you can plan for not being around and get the financial plan sorted prior. You tend to get TPD cover as well with the any occupation definition, and often you’ll get income protection, which is often referred to as salary continuance inside super funds. The problem with those policies is they’re often not enough. Your unitised cover, the formula often comes out at quite a small number, and often those policies are decreasing. The cost is fixed, but the level of cover reduces each year as well. Again, it comes back to if you’re looking at your statement going, “I’ve got $200,000 worth of life cover,” great. It might be that in 12 months that’s now $180,000, and then it becomes $160,000. I’d much prefer my clients to have fixed cover with the retail insurers because we can control it. We can make sure they get the best product definitions, and we’re there to guide them and help them understand what they’re actually covered for if something goes wrong.

18:03 Is that where you see the biggest gap, that diminishing level of cover, or is it the type of cover? Because you being at the coal face of it, you would see what are your sort of highest volume of claims or you perhaps have an idea. Where do you think the biggest gap sits between someone with a retail fund? Is it a combination of those things?

18:23 Well, it’s underinsurance, right? There’s a huge underinsurance gap in Australia. Very few people have the level of cover that they need. If you think about those default numbers of $200,000, $300,000, when I’m talking to clients about death, I’m thinking about eradicating debt. I’m thinking about providing school fees for their kids if things like private school are important. I’m thinking about ongoing income for the spouse. Let’s face it, think about Sydney. There’s not a lot of people out there that have $200,000, $300,000 worth of debt. It’s such an expensive city to live in. I think there’s a bit of complacency there. We do get a lot of people who say to us, “I’ve got my cover in my super fund, I’m sorted.” Then I’ll always ask them, “How much are you covered for?” and they go, “Well, I don’t know.” So I do think there is a little bit of complacency. As Australians, we are a little bit, you know, she’ll be right. It’s not going to happen to me, but it does. It does happen. I think outside of that, there’s a big problem because there’s just no access to advisers either. We spoke about it off the top. A lot of advisers don’t want to give insurance advice anymore, so a lot of people aren’t talking to it. If you think about increasing cost of living, insurance premiums going up and up and up, a lot of people don’t want an additional expense. They don’t want to spend more money on insurance. So there probably is a little bit of turning a blind eye to it.

19:53 The cost of not getting that cover is not a consideration because they don’t know there’s a lack.

19:59 Well, that’s exactly it. No one’s sitting around thinking about, “I might die next week.” It’s just not what you think about. It’s not really barbecue conversation. I think it’s funny. I’ve got a lot of friends who are mortgage brokers, and they talk about how they get referrals over the weekend because their friends go to the barbecue and they’re talking about their new house. People start talking about getting a loan and who they’re using and what’s their interest rate. No one’s sitting around going, “How much life insurance do you have?” It’s something we tend to keep to ourselves. The other thing I would say is there’s a real lack of access to specialists in your area and a lack of access to good quality advice generally. That’s getting worse because we’ve seen a massive change in our industry, in both of our sectors, with the change in education standards. We’ve seen a whole bunch of people leave the industry and very few new entrants come into the industry.

21:03 So if you wanted to find a risk adviser who’s a specialist just in your vertical, how many are there roughly that do what you do?

21:09 Well, there’s a lot of talk at the moment that there are about 150 specialist risk advisers left. I don’t know if that number is correct, but there has been a little bit of talk around that. I think the problem stems from the fact that when all the education changes came out, there was no real ability to segregate yourself as an insurance adviser. You have to go through the process of becoming a financial planner, and I think a lot of people that go through that process come out of it not wanting to specialise in insurance. They want to manage wealth and do a little bit of everything, possibly, and be holistic. I found it really hard at times to find staff because we meet really great people who want to join our team, but they don’t want to pigeonhole themselves in insurance. They sit there and go, “I’m not sure if I want to specialise, so I’ll go somewhere else and maybe I’ll circle back.” It’s sort of like the little brother in financial advice. I talk to a lot of other risk advisers, and the consensus is the same. Everyone’s run off their feet because they cannot keep up with the volume of work. The demand for advice in this space is so high at the moment, but there’s just no one giving it. Unless your financial planner is talking to it, or your accountant has a contact, it falls by the wayside a little bit.

22:33 Yeah, and it’s so important though. We talked about the risk of having the right or the wrong inclusions and exclusions, the availability of a claim. There are all these different challenges that clients see day-to-day that they wouldn’t even consider.

22:45 Correct. I had a client recently who I reviewed earlier this year. The premium was getting expensive, but we kept it because the contract was really strong based on his personal circumstances. He came to me two months later and emailed me a quote, saying, “I got this quote. Someone rang me up, knocked on the door, whatever it was. Here’s a quote, it’s way cheaper. What do you think?” I explained that it’s a completely different product. He said, “No, it isn’t. The guy I spoke to on the phone said it’s the same.” I said, “It’s not the same, and here’s why it’s not the same.” That’s part of the problem with insurance as well. The products are so nuanced, and they are changing so rapidly. Unless you’re willing to get deep into it, you just don’t know what you’re moving away from. That’s a big risk. He would have been stepping into something with far lower levels of cover than what he had before.

23:42 Definitely. So in terms of Orbital Life itself now, you’ve been operating for 16 years. You must have had an entrepreneurial mindset or spirit when you started. What have been the biggest challenges that you faced over the years building the business? You’ve mentioned talent acquisition. Is that the number one thing, or have there been other challenges over that journey?

24:01 I think there have been different challenges at different times. When I started the business, I just had no contacts. The first challenge was that I didn’t know anyone. No one’s going to just knock on your door. You’ve got to get out there and make it happen. The first challenge was understanding who I am, what our offering is, and who’s going to refer work to us. It took me a little while to figure that out. I was 24, and I probably had an inferiority complex at the time. I remember there were a lot of times in my younger days where I was looking at people’s incomes and assets and thinking, “What are they talking to me for? I’m just this 25-year-old kid who’s stumbling about.” I’ve always been driven, and my father always drilled into me that if you want to make real money, you work for yourself. That old-school Italian mindset of his. The first thing was figuring out who we were. Once I got over that hump, figuring out our sweet spots, not in terms of clients but in terms of corporate partners. I stumbled into a lot of those wealth advisers and realised that was quite a sweet spot based on the fact that we were a specialist business. So I went down that rabbit hole a little bit. As we grew, the hard part was that every client in that business came via me. Everyone was referred to me, I did the work, and then it went into the pot. Part of the hard part of growth is you get to a point where you need to grow out the other side, but my clients are so used to dealing with me that it’s really hard to transition those relationships. Part of that is finding the right staff in the team that you can trust and transition those relationships to. That’s not easy. We’ve got a great team, but there are always hits and misses. That’s just the way it works. Where we stand today, the biggest issues we’ve got are finding other advisers. We’ve got a really great back office team. We’re currently a team of seven, looking for an eighth, which is a specialist risk adviser to join the team. We’re looking for someone who wants to get out there and make it happen and effectively grow their own business within our business to some extent. It’s hard because they need to be qualified and willing to specialize in insurance. It’s just hard to find people who want to be risk advisers. We will never offer wealth. We get so much work from other professionals that I don’t want to dilute that. 

26:44 I think that’s critical. So in order for you to achieve greater scalability, you need to create another you.

26:50 Correct. The testament to your good work is that the clients are so accustomed to your standard of work that they’re reluctant to be put in the hands of someone else.

It’s the trust. You’ve worked hard to build the trust, and it’s really hard to pass that off to someone else. They have to get in the trenches with them and earn that as well. My team has the trust of my clients, but finding someone else in the team that can advise some of those clients with me is really key to the next step. That’s just hard to find.

27:20 That’s good because it means that you’ve got a niche. You’ve also got some good tailwinds because we’ve seen the lack of new entrants into the market. It also means you’ve got a captive market where it’s a really nice place to be. This whole sector is still ripe for disruption in terms of insurance and investment advice. We’re seeing more and more people come out of the industry as they retire and fewer and fewer come in. Eventually, it’s almost like a last man standing type of thing. The addressable market is growing. You’ve got population growth, new people coming to the country, people growing up and graduating every year who need this advice and who are new business owners as well. We talked about challenges. What about some of the tailwinds? What are some of the real tailwinds that are helping your business flourish at the moment?

28:07 I think specialisation is the big one. We know who we are, and we do one thing really well. Our referral partners like the fact that we just do insurance. I get a lot of people that refer me work and say, “I get a lot of insurance referrals, but the financial planner I work with doesn’t want them because they’re more focused on wealth.” They might do it, but they don’t really want to do it. We’re finding a lot of opportunity with those financial advisers who don’t want to give risk advice.  Because we’re specialists, we’re a safe place that they can refer their clients to, and we can work collaboratively. We’ve had a couple of financial advice businesses that have built insurance books to the point that they’re quite sizable, but they can’t service them because they can’t find a specialist adviser to sit within their business. They want to outsource, and we’ve bought those books off and taken over the management of those clients. That’s been a really big opportunity. I think education as well. While we don’t talk about things like insurance growing up and insurance literacy is low, we’re in that information age where everybody’s got access to everything. People are aware that they need advice and what they don’t understand, and they’re looking for advice. People want to get it right. That works really well for us because if you’re willing to put yourself out there, you’re going to find opportunities. We’re lucky in the insurance space because there aren’t enough advisers to service the demand, so we’re busy.

29:47 And you will continue to be unless that trend changes, correct?

29:53 Yes, and we’re trying to grow. I want to scale the business but maintain our culture and values at a bigger level to take on the demand. We’re a young business, and while we’re 16 years in, I’m 40. I still feel like I’m just getting started. There’s energy there, and I’ve got a really good team that’s young and hungry. They want to grow, and I think our best is yet to come. I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of what we can build.

30:25 Definitely not. I think there’s plenty of potential for your business. Part of doing something like this is to get out there and not only show our direct customers, but we share these podcasts with our clients and team. You’ve come in and presented and articulated the offering. I know why it’s important because we use you, but it’s good to use this as a platform to demonstrate to the market what your capabilities are and why they should consider getting their insurance reviewed as a starting point.

30:56 We work with a lot of licensees who don’t have a risk offering within their network. Some smaller firms might not have someone who gives insurance advice. I know a lot of firms are driving financial advisers to say it’s okay if you don’t want to do it, but it’s not okay if you don’t flag it and refer it out. Insurance is part of the greater financial planning process. If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it, but refer it to someone. Flag it for your clients and make sure they’re getting good advice, whether that’s from me or somebody else. It’s really important because, as I said before, you don’t get a second chance. Once a claim goes in, we can’t unwind it. We don’t get another chance to give advice at that point.

31:44 That’s part of our onboarding process with the risk profile questionnaire. We have a checkbox exercise at the beginning to identify the services clients are seeking. If they say investment advice, superannuation, estate planning, and don’t tick some of the other areas, part of our screening process is to ask if they’ve considered those areas. Is someone currently doing that for them? When was the last time it was reviewed? People’s circumstances change.

32:15 How often should someone get their insurance reviewed? I know the normal answer is when your circumstances change, but how often should it be done?

32:22 Circumstances do change, and that is a driver. If we implement a policy and the strategy is to eradicate debt, provide school fees, or whatever it might be, obviously if you have a significant change like taking on more debt, clearing a significant amount of debt, coming into an inheritance, or your income or job changes, those are triggers to engage. Outside of that, in the general course of life, we touch base with our clients each year, but I don’t think you need to review your insurance each year because circumstances don’t change that much. I think every three or four years is important to pull it apart, blow the cobwebs off, and check it. The way insurance companies price their products, around year four or five, the jumps start to get bigger and bigger. You can tend to find value elsewhere if you want to go down that path. My rule of thumb is to reach out in these circumstances, and we preempt that with our annual touchpoints with clients. Every three or four years, we proactively get on the front foot and say, “Hey, it’s been three or four years, let’s look at this. Let’s get updated assets and liabilities, revisit the scenario and strategy, revisit the market, and make a call on where it sits.”

33:42 You’ve touched on it a few times during this talk, but there are different goals behind taking out a policy, like end-of-life events or protection in different circumstances. Can you give me an example of how you would use a policy to help a client with their planning journey?

34:03 Sure. We get a lot of business owners, and something that is under-advised is key person insurance and buy-sell insurance. If we’re working with a business owner, the first thing I want to understand is what happens to the business if something happens to them. If we don’t understand what happens to the business, we can’t properly advise the family. For example, I had a client yesterday where the husband and wife work in the business together. The husband is the revenue generator, while the wife runs the operations and the team. If something happens to the husband, the revenue dries up, but the business can still operate well. If something happens to the wife, the revenue is still coming in, but we need to find someone to run the back office. We talk about key person risk, whether the business needs an injection of capital, if the business has a sellable value, and what the shareholders’ agreement states. Once we know what the business needs, we can talk about the individual circumstances.

35:22 With individual circumstances, there are interesting things you can do with insurance. People think about debt, school fees, and income, but I also look at split families. I have a client in his 50s with a 19-year-old son from a first marriage and two younger kids from a second marriage. He wanted to leave everything to his second wife, but that exposed him to his adult son potentially contesting the estate. We worked with his estate planning lawyer and implemented an insurance policy to pay his elder son a certain amount if he passed away. The lawyers agreed that would be enough for him to leave his estate to his second wife, which would pass on to the younger kids. We can use insurance as an estate planning piece.

36:30 Buy-sell insurance is another example. If you and I have a business worth a million dollars, what happens if one of us dies? What if you want to buy my estate out and my wife doesn’t want to sell my shares? What if you can’t get the money from the bank? We can take a policy out on both of our lives so if I die, the policy pays my wife, and the legals transfer the shares where they need to go. This buys my estate out of the business at a pre-agreed value, with no recourse for my wife to dispute it because we’ve agreed to it. All these scenarios require appropriate legal documentation and insurances.

37:14 Outside of that, it’s about protecting your income, clearing your debt, and considering the realities of disability. Who’s looking after you? Can you live in the same house? We have clients living in apartments without elevators. How does that work? Every scenario is different. I have a client with a disabled child who will be dependent for life. Most clients’ kids are dependent until about 25, but this child will be dependent forever. What does that look like? The building blocks are the same, but our situations are different. That’s why I don’t like formula-based advice. We need to build a story, figure out the numbers, and consider the asset pool and journey when working with your clients.

38:25 Thank you, everyone, for tuning in. Hopefully, you learned something today from speaking with Nick and me, and more importantly, learned the importance of getting your risk assessed when meeting with your financial adviser and thinking about the future and your goals. It’s important to understand the cost, features, and benefits of everything you do. If you’re thinking about getting your risk assessed, please reach out to Nick from Orbital Life.

38:52 Thanks, Kieran. Cheers.