Investing in Your Financial Future with Sarry Ibrahim | FP 104

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Image of Sarry Ibrahim. On this therapist podcast, Sarry Ibrahim talks about investing in your financial future.

Do you want to start saving for retirement? What are some ways that you can increase the value of your practice before selling it? Why should you have your financial objective first before looking at financial tools?

In this podcast episode, Whitney Owens speaks with Sarry Ibrahim on Investing in Your Financial Future.

Podcast Sponsor: Brighter Vision

An image of Brighter Vision Web Solutions is featured as the sponsor on The Practice of the Practice Podcast, a therapist podcast. Brighter Vision builds all in one websites for therapists.

How would you like to fall into cash this month? Every year, my friends over at Brighter Vision kick off the fall season with a month-long digital conference event they call ‘Fall Into Cash’.

For the entire month of September, they’ll be teaming up with the top brands, consultants, and coaches in the mental health industry to provide you with the best advice, tools, content, podcasts, and giveaways; all centered around one main theme – helping you grow your practice and make more money.

Plus, in celebration of the 5th anniversary of ‘Fall Into Cash’, they’re also offering a very special discount exclusively for Practice of the Practice listeners. From now until the end of the month, they’re offering new websites for only $49/month for your whole first year plus no setup fees – that’s a savings of over $200!

For more information and to take advantage of this great offer, head on over to brightervision.com/joe.

Meet Sarry Ibrahim

A picture of Sarry Ibrahim is captured. Sarry is a financial planner and member of the Bank on Yourself Organization. Sarry is featured on the Faith in Practice Podcast, a therapist podcast.Sarry Ibrahim is a financial planner and member of the Bank On Yourself Organization. He helps real estate investors, business owners, and full-time employees grow safe and predictable wealth regardless of market conditions using a financial strategy that has been around for over 160 years.
Sarry started this journey when he was in grad school completing his MBA. He worked for companies like Allstate, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna Healthspring, and Humana before founding Financial Asset Protection, a financial services firm that with a single focus; the Bank On Yourself Concept, also known as the Infinite Banking Concept.

Listen to his podcast, Thinking Like a Bank, and subscribe to his Youtube channel. Connect on LinkedIn or email him at [email protected] or [email protected].

Visit the Financial Asset Protection website to find out more about the Bank on Yourself Concept.

Freebie: for your free copy of Becoming Your Own Banker by Nelson Nash schedule a free 15-minute intro call with Financial Asset Protection.

In This Podcast

  • First steps to investing
  • Are you thinking of selling your business?
  • Identify your financial objectives first
  • Sarry’s advice to Christian counselors

First steps to investing

When you first enter into the investment world, your financial advisor would try to understand your financial situation and figure out what your short and long-term financial goals are:

  1. At which stage of life are you currently in? Investing will look different depending on whether someone is 40 or 60, because their goals may be different.
  2. What is the top financial goal that you want to achieve in the next five, ten, or thirty years? Why is this goal important to you?
  3. Which financial opportunities do you have available to you thus far, both in your personal life and in your business? Do you have a 401K, savings, and how much access do you have to these funds?

We want to understand the financial components of their life and their business and then from there make a recommendation. (Sarry Ibrahim)

Are you thinking of selling your business?

What is going to make your practice sellable? Some things to think about are:

  • Life insurance can either be own personally or by a business. If a business owns the life insurance policy, they own the cash value and this asset value can be added onto the balance sheet, which will increase the overall value of your business.

This way … the new owner who is going to buy your practice is going to get the life insurance and is still going to be able to ensure you even when you’re no longer in the business. (Sarry Ibrahim)

Identify your financial objectives first

In your financial journey, many financial tools and advisors can help you, but you need to know what your goals and objectives are first.

First knowing where you want to go is key, and that will enable you to find the best system and tools to help you get there and achieve your goal.

Sarry’s advice to Christian counselors

God will never punish you for wanting more out of life. When your intentions are good, God will help you get more out of life because it is what resonates with you.

Useful links mentioned in this episode:

Books mentioned in this episode:

For your free copy of Becoming Your Own Banker by Nelson Nash schedule a free 15-minute intro call with Financial Asset Protection.

Check out these additional resources:

Meet Whitney Owens

Photo of Christian therapist Whitney Owens. Whitney helps other christian counselors grow faith based private practices!Whitney is a licensed professional counselor and owns a growing group practice in Savannah, Georgia. Along with a wealth of experience managing a practice, she also has an extensive history working in a variety of clinical and religious settings, allowing her to specialize in consulting for faith-based practices and those wanting to connect with religious organizations.

Knowing the pains and difficulties surrounding building a private practice, she started this podcast to help clinicians start, grow, and scale a faith-based practice. She has learned how to start and grow a successful practice that adheres to her own faith and values. And as a private practice consultant, she has helped many clinicians do the same.

Visit her website and listen to her podcast here. Connect on Instagram and email her at [email protected]

Thanks For Listening!

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Faith in Practice is part of the Practice of the Practice Podcast Network, a network of podcasts that are changing the world. To hear other podcasts like Empowered and Unapologetic, Bomb Mom, Imperfect Thriving, Marketing a Practice or Beta Male Revolution, go to practiceofthepractice.com/network.

Podcast Transcription

[WHITNEY OWENS]
Welcome to the Faith in Practice podcast. I’m your host Whitney Owens recording live from Savannah, Georgia. I’m a licensed professional counselor, group practice owner, and private practice consultant. Each week through personal story or amazing interviews, I will help you learn how to start, grow and scale your practice from a faith-based perspective. I will show you how to have an awesome faith-based practice without being cheesy or fake. You too can have a successful practice, make lots of money, and be true to yourself.

So I got a question here for you today. How are you thinking about your future financially? I know as therapists we do think a lot about money because we need it to keep our business going, to pay our immediate bills, but I think oftentimes we don’t get a lot of education or feedback on thinking about our future. And I know that thinking about money in the future can be kind of a scary thing, but it’s so important as therapists that we take the time to think through that concept. So today I had a podcast episode I’m going to share with you where I interviewed Sarry Ibrahim. He had reached out to me because he had heard of the podcast and thought that he had some valuable information for business owners.

When I went and searched them out online and read a little bit and watched some YouTube videos, I was like, “Wow, this guy really has got a lot to share for business owners and I think my audience would really benefit from learning.” So just to share a little bit about even my own experience, you know a lot of us don’t want to talk about money, but it’s so important that we do, so I’m going to do it, I did not start saving for retirement until just a few years ago, because really it is living off of every dollar making your business grow, but it’s so important that you start saving for retirement now in whatever way that you can.

Other things that I didn’t think about until more recently was disability policies. If something were to happen to me, how would the business keep going? How would it be able to meet my needs? I mean, I contribute to the family income and so we can only really survive so long if I were to have an accident. So I did start investing in some long-term disability and some other things that I would be taken care of, that my family would be taken care of if something were to happen. So what should you be thinking about that? I know that it’s a hard thing to think about, but it’s an important thing to think about. Even if you can pull it away a little bit at a time, I want you to start putting some away towards either your retirement, your disability, or maybe investing in real estate. I mean, there’s so many ways that you can invest your money, man. I think he says here on the podcast, it was like 450 different ways that he could tell you to invest your money. So anyway, I’m happy to bring in a financial advisor to the show because I think he adds a lot of value and I think you’re going to find a lot of benefit from this interview.

So let me tell you just a little bit about Sarry Ibrahim before we get started. He is a financial planner and member of the Bank On Yourself Organization. So he’s helps real estate agents, investors, bank owners, business owners, full-time employees grow safe and predictable wealth, regardless of marketing conditions using financial strategy that’s been around for over 160 years. So Sarry started his journey when he was in graduate school, completing an MBA and then he worked for companies like Allstate, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna Healthspring, and Humana before he founded the Financial Asset Protection, a financial services firm that focuses on one sole concept, the Bank On Yourself Concept, also known as the Infinite Banking Concept.

He goes into detail here in the show about the Bank On Yourself Concept, which I had never heard of before. So especially if you’re a financial person, you like numbers, you like to think about investing, you’re going to really found this show fascinating. And if you’re not, you’re going to get some good ideas that you can go talk to your accountant about as well. So Sarry also does have his own podcast, Thinking Like A Bank podcast if you want to go check that out. He does have a freebie here at the end for us, a book, so make sure that you listen to the whole episode to be able to get that. So we’re going to go ahead and jump right into this interview with Sarry Ibrahim on helping you with your finances within your practice.
[WHITNEY]
Welcome back to the Faith in Practice podcast. So glad that you’re here with us today and I’m excited for today’s interview is Sarry because we’re going to be talking about some important things for preparing for your future as a practice center. So how are you doing today?
[SARRY IBRAHIM]
Hi Whitney. Thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it.
[WHITNEY]
Really glad to connect with you. Why don’t you first kind of share with the audience a little bit about your background and the work that you do with this business owners.
[SARRY]
Yes, definitely. Thank you for that. So I’m blessed to work with a lot of business owners and real estate investors in helping them plan for the future, helping them take kind of a different look to their money and the money they’re expecting to earn or make in the future. So that’s what I do. I run a company called Financial Asset Protection. We’re a financial services firm. We help clients in all 50 states. We do it over the phone and over Zoom. And really it’s a pleasure to work with a lot of business owners and meeting people and especially kind of identifying their goals and their objectives, and then helping them connect to it. Because we see that kind of as an issue in financial planning, is that’s more of a sales approach and we take one, take more of a problem solving approach. So we’re listening to the therapists, the dentists, the doctors, owners of practices and helping them connect to whatever it is that they want to get to.
[WHITNEY]
Yes, that’s great. I’ve had a lot of people in the show kind of talk more about managing your money as far as your business and like how much do you pay yourself, expenses and stuff. But I would love to talk to you more about that future planning piece because I think a lot of business owners, particularly therapists, like I didn’t even start, just to be honest, didn’t start planning my own retirement till like two years ago and I’ve been in private practice for years before that. So would love to hear what are some things that we need to be thinking about future-wise as business owners?
[SARRY]
Yes, absolutely. So I think you’re right. A lot of people are focused on making money in the moment and like this year, how do I save on taxes, where I’m going to go this year? But as far as planning for the future we’re simply allocating funds for the future, a way for them to grow over time, to earn comp on interest or dividends or a combination of both that can grow over time. And there’s about 450 financial vehicles that can do that, that can grow wealth over time. Obviously all of those are all different as far as risk levels, as far as time periods, as far as other managing fees and things like that are concerned. They’re all entirely different. So it’s important to really understand the client and what their goals are and then to choose one or maybe a couple of those 450 financial vehicles to help them get there.

One problem I see when talking to clients is that, for example, like, let’s say they’re a business owner, they want to have like a million dollars by the time they retire so that way they could use some of that alongside other forms of investments for retirement. They want to have some passive income in retirement. And then they’ll say that the solution looks good, but what the problem is, is that they don’t want to tie up that money. You know, let’s say just use a number of $10,000 a year for the next 20 years. They don’t want to type that money in some sort of retirement plan. They want to be able to keep using that money to reinvest in employees and rent and taxes and other expenses they have. And that’s kind of where we found the Bank On Yourself Concept.

That is the ability to kind of use both. You could save your money and then leverage it and borrow against it and use that for other business expenses or any other expenses that you have and then a kind of a way for you to save money and grow it at the same time and to use it, of course at the same time. So I really wanted to introduce the Bank On Yourself Concept to the audience, to show them how they can do both, how they can give their money different jobs and different duties and kind of repurpose the same dollars over and over again.
[WHITNEY]
Yes, that sounds great. Can you share some examples in a way that the simple minded would understand, like how can I invest that money in a way that doubles like that kind of what you’re sharing?
[SARRY]
Yes. So let’s say, for example one of my clients, he is 70-years-old. He sold one of his properties. He’s a real estate investor, sold one of them for $400,000 in cash and then what he did was he took that $400,000, purchased a single premium whole life insurance policy. So that’s part of the bank on yourself strategies of using cash for your whole life insurance, bought the policy, and then right after he bought the policy, there’s two components to it. There is a life insurance component and then there’s a cash value component. For his age, he pretty much got $570,000 in life insurance and then the cash value was about 375,000. This means that he’s able to now leverage this cash value up to about 90%. So let’s say 360. He’s able to take out of the policy $360,000 and then use this for another property.

So what he did was now he just took an asset, sold it for cash, took that cash, bought another asset, which is life insurance and then from that asset borrowed against it and now is going to buy other assets with that, even more than one single family home now as a real estate investor. So he did a couple of things wrong. He just duplicated that assets and then he missed becoming his own source of financing. So now he, instead of paying interest to a lender or to a private money lender or somebody else, he’s paying interest back to his pocket by internally financing his deals. That, so I guess if you worked, for example, a therapist, how you could translate that is you could, for example, find cash somewhere out in a bank account that you have, or in your business or another retirement account. Use that to fund a whole life policy. From the whole life policy, be able to leverage that to pay back in your business. Now your business could be a borrower from yourself. You could pay the interest back to yourself. There’s some tax deductions there. Talk to your accountant about that whether there’s some tax deductions that you can do there, and then you’re off obviously doing all of this while saving for retirement.
[WHITNEY]
All right. So let me give you an example of like, kind of what my listeners, maybe the situations they’re in and we’d love to hear, like, if they were to come in your door, what would be some of the first tips you’d have for them? Like most people listening have started their own business, they’re probably young, have kids, young kids or teenagers, maybe some of them are off at college. They have a private practice, they probably see 20, 30 clients a week, they’re probably bringing into the business maybe 80, a hundred thousand a year, maybe taking home 50,000. That would be like an example. So if that’s kind of where they’re at, let’s say they haven’t done any investing whatsoever and they don’t know anything about investing, what would be the first thing you would say that they should do?
[SARRY]
Yes. That’s a good question. So before I would make any recommendations, I would want to understand their situation exactly. We do something called a financial analysis. It’s like 60 to 90 minutes long and it’s really understanding where they’re at right now. Like for example, we want to understand how old are they? You know, somebody who is forty is going to have a different retirement situation than somebody who’s 60. So we want to understand their age, understand where they live in the country. So insurance and financial institutions run differently in different states. We want to understand that. We’re also going to want to understand how many kids they have, are the kids teenagers, are they still younger, are they adult children? That’s also going to make a difference. And then to better understand the client, we want to understand how they feel about certain financial terms, like what does the word retirement mean to you?

This is all going to be different to different people. And then from there we ask about, look, what’s your top financial goal that you want to accomplish in the next 10 years or 20 years or 30 years? Why is that important to you? What’s important about that to you? And then let’s see what else, and then they have to have a 401k from a previous job. If they’re married, if their spouse also has a 401k or 403B or some sort of other retirement account, do they both work? Let’s see, what else, annual income, like you mentioned they’re making 80 to hundred thousand, is that going towards the business? And then from there half of that is going to them as a W2, 1099.

So we want to understand the financial components of their life and their business and then from there make a recommendation. So if somebody says, for example, they’re 40 years old, they make a hundred thousand dollars a year through their business, they want to retire at the age of 70. They also want to sell their practice and have passive income outside of their practice. One solution we would do is we look at the Bank On Yourself Concept. Maybe the client could afford to do, like for example, a thousand dollars a month over the next 30 years, just kind of doing some quick math, probably you’ll dump a little bit over a million dollars in cash value and in retirement. And then they will still have their business and then in the meantime, from age 40 to age 70, they’ll have access to that money. So they’re not locking up money over the next 30 years. They’re allocating to the policy and being able to borrow against it and then use for their business.

So let’s say at age 70 now they have this asset that’s worth a million dollars, the life insurance policy, and they have their assets of the practice that they could potentially sell to somebody else. I’m not sure how that works. I mean, if they could sell the client base, they could sell other things like that, but there’s some sort of value behind it that grows over time. So that’s one brief solution that we could do for somebody.
[WHITNEY]
It’s pretty common for therapists to start their business and as they expand over time or they grow group practice, they end up selling it. So that’s very common that we would be thinking about what’s going to make my practice sellable or my business sellable. Is that something that y’all work on with people and what are some things people could be thinking about when they’re thinking about selling a practice or a business?
[SARRY]
Yes, good question. So we do work with clients on that about how to make their businesses more sellable and how to actually increase the value of it. So part of the bank on yourself strategy, they use a whole life insurance. They could either be personally owned or it could be owned by a business. So what this means is let’s say you, Whitney, you have a personally owned life insurance policy. Let’s say that somebody in your family is the beneficiary and you’re the owner of it. So you would pay for the policy, you own it, you have control of the cash value, something happens to you, it can go to a loved one. Whereas in a business situation, let’s say you own a practice, let’s just say it’s called ABC therapy and part of this practice is they have a whole life insurance policy that’s owned by ABC therapy and ABC therapy is also the beneficiary of the policy.

So if you Whitney pass away, then the practice would get, the entity would get the life insurance, the entity would pay for the life insurance and the entity would have control over the cash value. The owners of the entity would have control over the cash value. And then what you could actually do is you could add the value of that asset as like equipment or any other assets that you have in the business onto the balance sheet, increasing the value of your business. So if you have this like policy that you’re adding dollars into, as you’re adding into it, you’re increasing the cash value. So the new owner who’s going to buy this policy by the company is also going to buy the policy from you.

So let’s say, just using the numbers, your practice is worth $500,000. You also have a cash value life insurance policy with a hundred thousand dollars in cash value. You can add that onto the balance sheet. Also, if you were to sell your business, you would sell it for 600,000. You could even, in some situations add the life insurance. So if your cash value is a hundred thousand and your life insurance is 1 million, then you can calculate in some sort of way to add the life insurance amount on to the value of the business. So you go from 500,000, maybe to 700,000 or 800,000. This is where the new owner of your practice is going to get the life insurance and it’s still going to be able to insure you, even when you’re no longer in the business. They could still enjoy it and they’ll buy the death benefit ahead of time with kind of a percentage of that ahead of time. So that’s one way that you can increase your business using the Bank On Yourself Concept.
[WHITNEY]
Yes, I’ve actually never heard of this concept before. So it’s very interesting.
[BRIGHTER VISION PROMO]
How would you like to fall into cash this month? Every year, my friend’s over at Brighter Vision kick off the fall season with a month long digital conference event that they call Fall Into Cash. For the entire month of September, they’ll be teaming up with the top brands, consultants and coaches in the mental health industry to provide you with the best advice, tools, content, podcasts, and giveaways, all centered around one main theme, helping you grow your practice and make more money. Plus in celebration for the fifth anniversary of Fall Into Cash, they’re offering a very special discount exclusively for Practice of the Practice listeners. From now until the end of the month, they’re offering new websites for only $49 a month for your whole first year plus no setup fees. That’s a savings of over $200. For more information and to take advantage of this great offer head on over to brightervision.com/joe. That’s brightervision.com/joe.
[WHITNEY]
Do you ever do work with like disability policies, because that that’s another area where therapists don’t really think about short-term long-term disability? What does that mean and why would those be important for me as a business owner to have?
[SARRY]
Yes, definitely. So disability, in other words, disability insurance covers you in case you will become disabled. So if you have to physically go to work every day, and then something happens to you as some sort of accident happens to you and you can’t go to work, you still need a way to earn income, to make money, even when you’re not able to when you’re disabled. So a disability insurance policy, for example, would be like you pay X amount of dollars in premiums over the years. There’s an event, usually there’s a waiting period, like three months or six months. After that waiting period, then you start, you get a percentage of your income. Usually it’s like half of your, a quarter of, depending on the insurance policy, it could be anything.

A lot of physicians and surgeons have ultra high disability policies. Like if you’re a surgeon, you need both your hands, something happens, you’re at a car accident, you can no longer use your hands for surgery, your disability insurance might be a million dollars a year or whatever the situation is to cover you, to cover your family and your expenses because you’re now disabled. So yes, you could do that. You could do similar things with life insurance, with cash, buy a whole life insurance and in the sense of adding riders onto the policy. So there’s disability riders where let’s say, for example, I make the commitment to the insurance company to pay $10,000 a year. Just use the numbers. I want to pay $10,000 a year into my policy and then I could have a disability rider on there. It’s a few dollars extra a year and then if I become disabled, then the insurance company will pay my premiums for me because I’m disabled. I can’t work.

So that cuts an expense for them. So that’s one way, another way you can use it is let’s say it’s long-term disability, or maybe even long-term care, which is a little bit different. Long-term care is more of you can’t perform two out of six basic activities. Well, let’s say you get to that point where you get long-term care, you could leverage the death benefit of the policy. So typically, generally speaking with whole life insurance, you have two parts of it. You have the cash value part and the life insurance part. The life insurance part is sometimes 10 times greater than the cash value. So if you have a hundred thousand dollars in cash value, it could be a million dollars. That’s not always generally how it works, but for the most part, death benefit is generally higher than the cash value.
[SARRY]
So if you become disabled and you need long-term care, you could leverage the life insurance while you’re still alive through something called the accelerated death benefit rider. So you leverage the life insurance for long-term care expenses. This is a growing problem in the United States because the cost of long-term care is increasing and the need for it is increasing too. People are more likely to become disabled and need long-term care than passing away. So that’s going to be more of a concern you want to address before addressing the concern of passing away prematurely. And then that kind of stretches into a whole other world, that is the need for long-term care insurance. Obviously that’s a need, but at the same time, there’s some problems with long-term care insurance.

That is that it’s too expensive, number one, and number two, what if you are 40 years old, for example, you’re funding a long-term care policy for 20 years, and then you pass away in a car accident? You know, now it’s like all those premiums that you were paying for the long-term care weren’t really any benefit to your family and to you. So there’s kind of a fear of never needing to use the long-term care or a fear of loss of premiums that went towards long-term care policy. So I guess with the use of cash value, whole life insurance, you could do multiple things and cover multiple risk areas of your life with the same policy. So if it’s growing your business, growing the value of it, if it’s finding more liquidity in the short-term, if it’s growing a retirement pool of cash, protection against disability, long-term cure premature death, you could do all those things with one policy in different ways, either owned by your business, either by yourself. But I think you want to work with an advisor who really understands this, knows how it works, knows that intricate parts of it. And that’s exactly what we do for our clients.
[WHITNEY]
So before I kind of talk more about your business, is there any other advice you would want to give to business owners listening today that we haven’t already covered about investments or things to be thinking about?
[SARRY]
Yes. So just to kind of touch on what you asked me earlier about if you were to give tips, you would want the financial analysis first. One advice is you never want to choose the two first or the method first. You want to first identify your objectives. What is it that you want to accomplish for your business, for your personal life, for your family, and then find the tool that could help you connect there. I said, it’s over 452, so there’s never like one, two could be like the best thing for you. Obviously you want to work with an advisor that understands different ways of using these different tools and to help you. And the number one is your objective. So you want to make sure your objective comes first.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. Well, we can understand that as therapists, because it is like that. When clients come into the room, they come in with anxiety, depression, and every one looks different. Like one person can say I have anxiety and their anxiety looks totally different than someone else who comes in and says, I have anxiety. So the tools I choose to use psychodynamic, CBT, ACT, all those letters will change based on the person and what their needs are. So I totally hear what you’re saying. I love that you listen to the person and their needs, and then you create a plan for them that meets their needs instead of here’s a plan. Let me know what you think about it.
[SARRY]
Yes. Actually, that’s exactly the case. I’m glad you mentioned that about you’re listening to your patients, listens to the client and then you’re coming up with a recommendation based off of what you think as a professional is going to be a best fit for them, because think of it this way, what if the client walked into, and you call them patients?
[WHITNEY]
Actually we call them clients usually.
[SARRY]
Okay. So let’s say the client walks into your room and says, “Hey, I need this type of therapy.” It’s not like you’re going to automatically just deliver that to them. You have to first, you’re the one that makes the recommendation. Typically not them. Usually it’s the same thing like when you walk into a doctor’s office and you’re like, yes, I need this prescription. The doctor’s is going to slow down like, “What brought you to that conclusion?” And then we see this all the time in financial services where a client walks into, not walks into the office, but we’re talking over the phone and they’re like, “Yes, I want to do these stocks.” And you’re like, “Let’s slow it down. We just jumped like four or five steps. Let’s start with your financial situation right now and then your goals, and then from there we could see which ones are going to be the best financial situation for you.”
[WHITNEY]
Yes. We have the same thing. Clients will call all the time and go, “I need DBT therapy. Can you do that?” I’m like, “Well, let me find out what’s going on with you first to make sure that’s the best therapy.” Well, someone else is doing it and says, “Well, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be best for you.”
[SARRY]
Exactly. Yes, people have this idea that like services are like commodities. Like these are shelves and then they’re open to everybody so everybody can buy the service and they want to just find the best service that they think is the best in the marketplace from a commodified standpoint, when in reality it doesn’t work at all. It’s more of a service-based professional. You need a professional to make the recommendation and to help you with that.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. Wonderful. Well, I would like to hear a real quick snippet about kind of how you started your business. I see you’ve worked with a lot of different financial companies, Cigna, Allstate, and Blue Cross and we know about some of those in the mental health world too, because people are in insurance., But we’d love to hear kind of those experiences on what made you kind of create this business.
[SARRY]
Yes, definitely. So I guess I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I’ve always wanted to work for myself. I didn’t know in what capacity, what way, I just knew that I wanted to work for myself. And typically insurance is a great way to do that because it’s a self-employed, it’s one of those self-employable industries where you could start your own business, contract different insurance companies. So I was working internally with these insurance companies and I really enjoyed the way they did business, the way they took care of most situations, the way they took care of clients and the way they thought about risks. So these insurance companies are always looking for new customers to grow their portfolios, but they also want to grow efficiently. They want the right customers and the right products and the right fits because also they had to make sure that the risk wasn’t going to be too high for them.

So that kind of started to change the way I started to think. I started to think this way now as a financial professional and dealing with clients and like for example, I have clients who I work with and they’re investing in passive real estate deals. I’ll evaluate the deals and look at it and kind of think like an insurance company. Actually the name of my podcast is called Thinking Like A Bank. So we’re thinking of risk. We’re literally drawing a circle out and then identifying all the risks, what if the house burns down? Well, there’s a homeowner’s insurance policy. What if there’s another market crash? Well, let’s identify market trends. Right now with the wheels are actually going up ridiculously as of today’s date. So let’s look at the tax exposure, let’s look at the legal part. So we’re really identifying all those perspectives. So that’s actually the best thing I got from working with insurance companies and then of course the ability to become self-employed to become an entrepreneur.
[WHITNEY]
So what was it that kind of made you start this business?
[SARRY]
So I was a Medicare consultant actually, speaking of healthcare. So I was working with a lot of people who were 64, 65 years old, they were retiring and they needed help. I saw that kind of as a way that I could help them, I can help them with their Medicare needs and then that led into financial planning. So I guess, to answer your actual question about how did I become self-employed or what brought me to that point is that it’s the ability to kind of live life on my own terms while being able to help people. And I built my practice in a way that’s adaptable in different angles in different ways. So for example, if I see a need to help people in Medicare, I can do so. If I see any couple needing financial literacy and sense of financial planning, I could help that too. If I somehow, some way in the future come across a way to help therapists insure their businesses, I could do that too. So I don’t have any limitations to what I can do as far as helping people.
[WHITNEY]
I love that. And it’s so important. I think money is oftentimes the area where therapists shy away. Even though we want to make the money, we don’t know what to do with it, and we get scared. So this has been a super helpful conversation and it’s important for people to hear. Well, I know that you have a freebie here for us today on Becoming Your Own Banker. Could you tell us a little bit about that and where to get that?
[SARRY]
Yes. It’s a book called Becoming Your Own Banker by Nelson Nash. You can get it if you go to my website, finassetprotection.com, F-I-Nassetprotection.com. You can go to the website, you can schedule a free 15-minute intro call with me and I’ll send you a free copy of the book. If you want to just skip the intro call, you could also just, my email link is in the website, finassetprotection.com, or you can connect to me on LinkedIn through the website or connect to me on YouTube through the website. So it all goes to finassetprotection.com and that’s how you can download the free copy of the book Becoming Your Own Banker by Nelson Nash.
[WHITNEY]
Perfect. Perfect. And I already have that all set up to go in the show notes. So if you are doing something else right now, I want to go back in and look at that. You can get that information. So I want to ask you what I ask everyone that comes on the show. What do you believe that every Christian counselor needs to know?
[SARRY]
So I think every Christian counselor, I would say obviously understand your clients and objectives, but I guess that’s all counselors. As a person of faith one thing that I always kind of remember is that as I became an entrepreneur and wanting to grow my business and grow my practice I believe that you get what you put into this world and you’ll never be, so one problem I see with entrepreneurship is people are afraid to take the leap into entrepreneurship because it’s risky obviously. And I think that one way to overcome that through faith is to understand that God and the world will never punish you for wanting more out of life. So that’s something that I believe in that God will help you get more out of life because of what you want and when your intentions are good you get what you want out of this world. So that’s what I would say.
[WHITNEY]
Oh, I love that. Yes, I think it’s important that we always kind of go back to that importance of taking risks and doing good in the world and that God’s with us when we do it and trusting in that. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show and giving us all this information. And like I said, people check them out and check out his podcast. He said, Thinking Like A Bank, right?
[SARRY]
Yes, Thinking Like A Bank, exactly.
[WHITNEY]
Awesome. Well, thanks so much again, Sarry for coming on the show.

Thanks Whitney. Thanks so much for having me on.
[WHITNEY]
And we want to thank our sponsor, Brighter Vision for this episode. I want to remind you the Fall Into Cash offer. Head on over to brightervision.com/joe, to earn a $49 a month website for a whole year. That’s over $200 in savings on your new website with Brighter Vision. To get that deal, go on over to brightervision.com/joe.

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