529 vs IUL for College: 6 Examples, One Clear Winner

Episode 1 gave you Roccy's opinion on using cash value life insurance for college. This one gives you the math — six worked examples, real illustration numbers, and a head-to-head against the 529 plan.

Roccy DeFrancesco stacks every assumption in favor of the life insurance policy: best health class, non-smoker, and the single best indexed universal life product on the market (he estimates 27 of the roughly 30 IUL products out there aren't worth using). He then gives the IUL the same 6% rate of return as the 529, even though 529s have historically done better. The IUL still loses every single time.

Then he does something most critics won't: he finds the one fact pattern where an IUL genuinely does work for college — and explains why he still doesn't love it.

The examples, run side by side:

• $3,500/year, child age 6–18, withdrawals age 19–23: 529 pays out just over $15,500/year. IUL pays a shade over $12,000. A $3,000+ per year shortfall.
• Same, policy on the child instead of dad: gap narrows to about $2,200/year — still a loss.
• Superfunded $9,100/year over five years: 529 gets to just over $19,000/year, IUL to about $16,500. A $2,600/year shortfall.
• Same superfunding, policy on the child: the IUL closes to roughly $1,000/year behind. Better — still behind.
• Starting at birth instead of age 6: 529 hits about $25,000/year, IUL about $24,500. The closest it ever gets — about $700/year behind.
• The one that works: dad age 40, kids 13 and 10, $50,000/year premium for six years. Roughly $200,000 pulled out for college, and then $73,000/year tax-free from age 66 to 90 — about $1.82 million. Roccy explains why this still isn't his recommendation.

Also covered:

• Why repositioning assets into cash value life to game the financial aid formula usually fails — your income is the number one factor, and some schools now count the policy anyway
• What real college funding specialists actually do differently
• 529 mechanics: tax-free growth, gifting money out of your estate, the $19,000 per beneficiary per spouse limit, and five-year superfunding
• The 10% 529 penalty that hits even after age 59½ — the one real difference from an IRA
• What "self-completing" means, and why cheap term insurance solves it for a fraction of the cost
• How a 9% cap actually performed: about 7.14% over the last 10 years, about 6.1% over 20, with zero downside risk
• Why whole life for college planning is, in Roccy's words, worth burning the illustration over
• Policy lapse risk: why illustrations max out withdrawals, why "don't be a pig," and how the free no-lapse rider at age 70 or 75 protects you
• The tax bomb if a policy lapses after you've borrowed against it
• The scorpion and the frog — Roccy's framework for understanding why an advisor sells you what they sell you

Resources mentioned:

• badadvisors.com — free download of Bad Advisors: How to Identify Them, How to Avoid Them, Roccy's most popular book, with chapters on insurance agents, CPAs, attorneys, financial planners, and fee-only advisors
• The 12-page college planning white paper — now in its fourth revision — with the full detail behind every example in this episode
• Retiring Without Risk — Roccy's book covering cash value life insurance and fixed indexed annuities, available free in electronic format

Full disclosure, as Roccy states on air: he is a co-founder of an insurance marketing organization that works with over 600 independent insurance agents, and he makes money when those agents sell life insurance and annuities. It would be very much in his financial interest for IUL to beat the 529 for college funding. It doesn't, and he says so.

Roccy is an advocate for indexed universal life as one asset class in a retirement plan — never as the asset class. Questions, or a topic you want covered? Reach out.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hello and welcome to another video on my Rocky Nose YouTube channel. This video is going to be on college planning using 529 plans versus cash value life. Now, as I do these videos, I do short videos without PowerPoints, without a ton of details. I like them because people can listen to me or they can read the PowerPoint slides with the details. So I have both. And so that's just how I've chosen to do these. So let's go ahead and get into the presentation. I'll go ahead and bring that up. And again, we're just going to go through a PowerPoint. So college planning using Cash Value Life. And then we're again going to compare that to 529 plans, which is the primary tool people use. So when you're paying for college education, whether it be uh for a child or a grandchild, look, it could be a huge financial burden. Um, and it's also somewhat complicated in what the options are, especially depending on who's pitching you those options. So uh clients are typically gonna have to choose between college planning for their kids and saving for that, or even saving for their own retirement. Now, the more affluent you are, the more you can do both, but uh, by the law of large numbers, many people are gonna have to make that choice. So, this presentation again is gonna compare the two funding vehicles that I see pitched most often out there, which are 529 plans, which most people are fairly familiar with, and then cash value life, which most people are not unless they've been pitched it by a life insurance agent. So at the bottom of this particular screen, you can see uh that you can download a 12-page white paper. So the PowerPoints are great, videos are great, some people uh learn that way, others like to download a very detailed information. And so at the bottom of this video, you're able to click a link and then you'll be able to download my 12-page white paper, which will have more detail than I'm able to give on uh on this presentation today. So if you're talking to a college planning specialist, you may be talking to an insurance agent, touting themselves, having expertise in the subject matter. So, most of the time, what I've seen in in the past is uh insurance agents telling clients to reposition assets. So, what does that mean by repositioning assets so we can obtain financial aid? So they sell you on the fact that if you do what they tell you, they're gonna get your kid financial aid in a way that they otherwise wouldn't. So many of the times they're gonna take money, it could be from a brokerage account, it could be from it could even be from an IRA, which would be truly insane, or it could be money in a savings account, and they're gonna have to uh they're gonna tell you to take that money and reposition it into a cash value life policy. Now, why would you do that? Because cash value life is not an asset that's countable on the financial aid forums for certain colleges and universities. Some have caught on to this and therefore it is, but some have not. Now, in and of itself, that isn't always the worst advice in the world. But the reason I'm not a huge fan of it is because the number one factor that's going to determine whether your where whether your child gets aid is the income of the parent. And so if your income is above the threshold to really get a lot of financial aid, repositioning assets, whether you're positioning repositioning 100 grand, 200 grand, 500 grand, is irrelevant if your income is too high. So just be aware of that. If somebody's pitching you the idea of cash value life to reposition assets to get aid, that's definitely not a cure-all. And if your income is too high, then it's not gonna work at all. Now, traditional college funding advice, the way that I think of it, when I'm with the experts I know in the industry, they're truly gonna go through the financial aid formula, they're gonna talk to you, uh, talk to your kids, they're gonna try to figure out what's important to you, they're gonna talk about different strategies and resources and where you can get the money from. And generally, it's it's a it's a soft-selling lecture to the child about, well, you know, if you go to a community college or a non, you know, elite school, uh, a lot of those schools are giving a lot of financial aid out. When the child says, Well, I want to go to the University of Michigan and I want to go to this university, that's really well thought of. A lot of times they're not giving out aid and there's really not a lot you can do. But if you're willing to go to these smaller schools, these these college funding experts can really help you posture yourself for that. And they're not talking about the use of cash value life as a tool to reposition assets to get aid. Now, today's presentation, again, is going to be about cash value life. And well, we're not gonna make you an expert in it, but we're gonna get you pretty educated on it as a potential option to pay college expenses versus the alternative, which everybody knows, which is a 529 plan. So, why are 529 plans typically the bread and butter tool? Well, you again, many of you already know this. The money is allowed to grow tax-free, and it can be removed tax-free for qualifying uh educational expenses. So, what does that mean? No capital gains taxes, no dividend taxes. So we get really great compounding growth. Now, for those of you who may have estate tax problems or other reasons to gift money out of your state when you're using 529 plans for gifting purposes, that money is deemed out of your estate, even though it may sound odd, but you actually do have access to it at some point, but um, it is deemed out of your estate. So the other issue is look, what happens if you don't go to college and you funded these 529 plans? What happens with the money? Well, generally it acts like a normal IRA. Well, you get tax deferral. Uh, when the money comes out, it is income taxed. If you take it out before age 59 and a half, you get the 10% penalty. The kicker with the 529 plan is you also will get a 10% penalty, even if you're more than age 59.5, because it's it because it's a 529 plan. They're gonna ding you with the 10% penalty no matter what. So that is the one differentiator and difference between uh regular IRA and a 529 plan. All right, so what do they say? And I say they, meaning typically the insurance agency want to sell you on the use of cash value life. What do they say the problems are with 529 plans? Well, the first one that they're gonna talk about generally, and I have it actually with bullet point number two here, is stock market losses. They're gonna say, well, you know, um, if you fund this thing and you have 50 grand, you have 100 grand, and then you go through a 50% stock market crash, all of those gains could be wiped out overnight. And so maybe we should use a tool that um that doesn't have that market risk, which is gonna be the cash value lift. Bullet point number one, I've already talked about, which is uh ultimately the money if you don't use it for college education is gonna be taxable and subject to penalties. Now, they'll also say things like, well, 529 plans are not self-completing. Well, what does that mean before you die? So the self-completing from a life insurance agency perspective is well, when you die, there's no death benefit with a 529 plan. So say your kid's three, uh, you know, five years old, 10 years old, you're three years into funding their college education, and you happen to die. Well, you didn't finish funding their education, you didn't complete it. And that's one of the problems with 529 plans. Now, the obvious and easiest uh way to fix that is just to layer in some term life insurance. And it's really cheap, and you get some 10-year, 15-year, 20-year term, depending on how old your kid is. That's a way to fix that. You can weigh the costs of that term life versus the pro and con benefit of using a 529 versus cash flow life, which we'll get into. Um, the other issue with 529 plans, there are funding limits. Now they've gone up quite a bit over the years. Um, it's $19,000 currently per beneficiary per spouse. So you have three kids, you can times it by three. You have two spouses, you can times it by two. You can also supercharge it by putting in all of the money for five years all at once into the plan to get it growing, but then you can't contribute again until your year six. But there are funding limits where there are no technical funding limits when funding cash value life is a tool. So, what are the benefits of a cash value life policy? As I've already stated, they're not accountable asset on the financial aid formula for certain colleges and certain universities, and they are a self-completing asset. So when you die, obviously with a with a life insurance policy, there's a death benefit. So if you only got three years into funding the cash value life and you died, there could be 100,000, 200,000, 500,000, whatever it is benefit from the policy. So that is that is a unique benefit to the cash value life. The question is, does it still make financial sense to do so? All right, now I'm gonna act like a life insurance salesperson. So I'm gonna I'm gonna give you the sales pitch, and there's nothing per se wrong with the sales pitch. Uh, I'll get into some of my background why I'm both an expert in cash value life, I'm an advocate of cash value life, and I'm a critic of it, which seems kind of weird, but we'll go over all of that. So, what are the benefits of cash value life? The money is allowed to grow tax-free, which is great. The money can be removed tax-free. Now you see some asterisk there. This assumes that the policy and the funding was designed properly. And I'm not necessarily gonna get into that in this presentation, but I'll give you some resources where you can go learn what that means. Uh, the money is allowed to grow at market rates of return. So it sounds like a 529 plan where we're going to use ETFs and mutual funds. So it grows at market rates of return. Now that's up to a cap. And I'll talk about the caps in a bit. The growth is typically pegged to our best measuring stock index, which is the SP 500, although minus dividends. Now, the gains, this is always interesting to people. The gains are locked in annually, can never be lost due to a stock market downturn. So if I go through this really quickly again, grows tax-free, remove tax-free, grows at market rates of return, the gains are locked in annually to never be lost again. It just sounds like almost the perfect retirement tool. Well, I will say this: it is a unique tool and one that I am an advocate of in certain circumstances, just not as you'll see in the college funding scenario. So, and there we go again. And my second bullet point there, I say it is a nice asset class. It's great to hedge market risk, it's great for the tax regrowth and as a retirement cash flow tool. However, it's oversold by many insurance agents. And a lot of insurance agents that don't have a securities license are pitching it as the asset class. This is the one, this is the one you got to fund, forego your 401k, forego real estate, forego a brokerage account, and fund this one asset class. I'm not a fan of that. I'm a fan of using index universal life and cash value life in this example that we're going to be talking about today, as one asset class, if you can afford to do so, but not as the asset class. Now, if you want to get educated on cash value life, whole life, index universal life, universal life, you can read my book, Retiring Without Risk. It actually covers two different topics cash value life as well as fixed annuities. So you can double dip. But for the life insurance stuff, let's talk a little bit about my background. I got a full disclosure slide here. I actually am a founder, actually a co-founder of an insurance marketing organization. Well, what is that? Well, we work with over 600 independent insurance agents to help them sell the best life, fixed life and annuity products to their clients in what I would say is a suitable manner. What does that mean? What it means is I actually make quite a bit of money when hundreds of insurance agents go sell life insurance to clients. And so it's actually in my best interest to have Cash Value Life and Index Universal Life be the greatest college funding tool in the world and have it be much better than a 529 plan. I would love that. We'd have all these agents selling all these policies. I'd make way more money, they'd make way more money, and hopefully the consumer would be better off. However, even though I'm an advocate of cash value life and index universal life specifically, I'm also a critic. And I'm I'm certainly a critic in the context of using Cash Value Life for college planning. I wish it worked. As you'll see further in the presentation, it doesn't. So if you want to learn about Cash Value Life or even fixed index annuities, there's a link at the bottom of this video you can download and read my book in electronic format for free. All right, let's talk a little bit about the historic rates of return of 529 plans versus IULs. Obviously, the rate of return over time is important when we're trying to build an asset to be used for college expenses. And you can see here that whether it's aggressive or moderate or even conservative, the rates of return on the 529 plans over the last five or 10 or 10 or 20 years have done really, really well. Now we've gone through some big market downtrends really back in the 2000, 2007, we had a big dip in 2022. But over time they've done well. And that's part of the problem with 529 plans. You have to remember to be proactive with these assets. You can't just let them sit in aggressive growth till the week before your kid goes to college. You need typically will start out with aggressive growth, then you'll go to moderate growth, then you go to something very conservative in the year or two, right before they go to college, so that you don't risk these big downturns of the market without having time to bounce back. Now with IUL, with Index Universal Life, remember I talked about that cap. I'm going to use an example, a product with a cap of 9%. What does that mean? When the market is up nine, you get nine. When the market's up 15, you get nine. When the market's up 25, you get nine. So the cap is nine on an annual basis. So that's that pain, that's painful a little bit. So you're losing some of the upside growth, right? But guess what? There's no downside risk. So when the market's down 10, market's down 20, market's down 30, you're down zero. Zero's your hero in this example. So you run the numbers on this with locking in the gains every year, the 9% cap, the no risk of loss, and they've done pretty well over time with zero risk of loss. Last 10 years, a 9% cap product would have done about 7.14. And the last 20 years, about 6.1. So nothing wrong with that with a no-risk asset. Now, we do have some expenses in the life insurance that you have to weigh the pros and cons of. And we'll talk a little bit about that. And certainly we'll go through the examples of that will show you why the uh life insurance lags the 529 plan in the overall uh scheme of things. So I think the best way to learn things is through examples. Even if you didn't understand anything I said, um, you're gonna understand the examples and the pros and cons of both the options that we're talking about. So I want to let you know that in the life insurance illustrations that I ran for these examples, I gave the benefit of the doubt to the life insurance policy, meaning what? I made sure that the client was in excellent health, not average health, not poor health. I said they're a non-smoker. So from a health perspective, I gave them the best underwriting status. I also said that we're gonna use the best IUL product, the best cash value life product in the industry. There's over 30 different types of life policies out there in the index universe life space. I would tell you that 27 of the 30 in my example aren't very good, which is amazing because we still have agents using those products. So I think there's about three good products out there. I'm gonna use the best one. So keep that in mind when you look at these numbers. Best for health status, best product in the industry. So we're taking the best of all worlds and comparing it to the 529 plan. And still, as you'll find out, the 529 plan typically looks better. I will say this again: if you're using whole life insurance or somebody's pitching you whole life insurance in the context of college planning, it's an absolute total waste of time. You might as well burn whatever illustration they're giving you. There is no chance that a whole life insurance policy will be able to work for college planning. The expenses are too high early on, and the rate of return is too low. It's just, it's just uh a no-brainer way to say, do not do it. So if you get pitched that, keep that in mind. That Rocky said, Rocky knows, do not use whole life insurance for college planning. All right, so 529 plans versus cash value life. Let's just run through several examples here. And again, uh, I think the light bulb will go on as to when it works and when it doesn't. So I'm gonna take a 30-year-old client, let's say they have a six-year-old child, assume the child's gonna go to college at age 19 and they're gonna be in college for five years. You know, dad is not affluent. He can only say only afford $3,500 a year, but good for him. It's better than some who aren't putting anything away. $3,500 a year to put towards college planning. Now, what are his options? $529 plans or cash away life in my example. And um, we're gonna fund the $3,500 every year from the child's age six to 18. So continue with the example. I'm gonna use the really that 6.1, 5.9, basically a 6% rate of return, both in the IUL and the 529, even though the 529 plan over time has done better than that. Again, I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt to the IUL to get the numbers as good as I can for the IUL to see what they look like. And again, we're gonna take the money out from age 19 to 23. How much could we take out of these two assets? Out of the 529 plan, we could take out a little over 15,500 a year. And from the IUL, a shade over 12,000. That's over a $3,000 per year deficit with the index universal life product. In this case, the index universal life product did not work. Let's go ahead and go to example two. All right, so why don't we why don't we buy life insurance on the child? I mean, the child's a lot younger, the child's expenses should be less. So let's go ahead and buy it on the child who is age six. And again, we're gonna fund it for that $3,500. We're gonna take it off from age 19 to 23. Well, we got a little bit better. The 529 plan is still the same, but the IUL is pumped up a little bit. Now it's a little bit of a $2,200 per year deficit. It's still $2,200 less per year. The IUL did not produce more cash flow. Let's go to example number three. Now, instead of funding $3,500 uh dollars every year from age six to 18, we're gonna supercharge it. We're gonna fund the same amount of money, but we're gonna do it over a five-year period at $9,100. So we're gonna get more money working earlier, and we should get a better outcome with both uh options. And in this case, the example is gonna be on dad's life. So sure enough, the 529 plan got all the way up to a little over 19. The IUL got up to about 16,500. But again, the IUL has a $2,600 per year deficit. The IUL did not produce more cash flow. All right, let's move on to example number four. It's the same as the last one, except that I'm again gonna buy the life insurance on the child with less expenses. 529 plan is the same. Yes, the IUL did better. That's great. However, it's still about $1,000 less per year in cash flow. The IUL did not produce more money. Moving on to number five. All right, let's change it a little bit. Now we're gonna have a child just being born instead of a six-year-old. Okay. So we're gonna fund that same $3,500 a year. We're gonna buy it on the dad's life. And then we're gonna look at the cash flow. Well, we got a lot more money. We had more years to fund that $3,500, more years of growth. And for that five-year funding period for college, we got about a little over $25,000 from the uh $529 and almost $24, uh $500-ish um from the IUL. But again, about a $600,000, uh, six, I'm sorry, a $700 per year deficit. The IUL did not produce more cash flow. Well, we just went through a whole bunch of examples. Like, well, Rocky, this is clearly doesn't work. Well, I'm just telling you, I see this over and over in the insurance industry that insurance agents are pitching this to clients, which is why I did the video. And frankly, there's been a lot of chatter online about consumers doing some research on whether cash value life will work. And that isn't because they came up with it on their own. It's because insurance agents were pitching it. So, when can an IUL work for college planning? Can we find a scenario? Can we find that fact pattern? Here's one that's actually going to work. I'm tipping my hand on what the next slides are gonna bring, but we're gonna overfund the life insurance policy not only for the college planning money, but for the clients, for the parents' retirement planning. So we're gonna assume that the client has extra money, X amount for college planning, and then an additional amount for retirement planning. But the problem with this is unless you're pretty affluent, most clients, most people do not have money to fund three, four, five different buckets for retirement every year. Well, I'm gonna put 5,000 in the um in the IUL for college planning. I'm gonna put 10,000, 15,000 into the IUL for my own. Then I'm also gonna put five or 10 or 15,000 in my 401k plan. I'm gonna buy some real estate that year. Most clients don't have that cash flow. So many times when we see this fact pattern, even though it's going to work with the math, I still don't like it because the IUL becomes the only retirement tool for this client or the primary retirement tool. And I think that becomes dangerous. But let's go ahead and go through the example and see what it looks like. So we've got dad, age 40, instead of 30 in this example. He's got two children, ages 13 and 10. Assume dad has not funded the education yet or is retirement planning, but he's able and willing to put $50,000 a year as a premium into the indexed universal life product. And we're gonna do that for six years before the first child goes to college. How did we do with the college education expenses? And how do we do with the parents' retirement? How did it work? Well, here we go. We were able to take $20,000 out a year every year from year one through three when the first kid went to college. Uh four and five, we've got two kids in college, so we're gonna double it. Then the first kid gets out of college, we have one left. So we've got this, we've paid uh pulled out basically $200,000 from the IUL. And it seemed to work. Well, it should have worked. We've put $250,000 worth of cash in the policy, so we've got less pulled out than what we put in. So it did work for college planning, although again, we could run different spreadsheets on it. But the real number that we're gonna look for is how is dad treated in retirement from his age 66 to 90. Now, these numbers are gonna look outrageous. And again, I'm not here to explain to you specifically why that's happening in the policies. There are reasons for it. I do cover them in my book, but the dad is able to pull out $73,000 every year tax-free for 25 years if he waits until age 66 through 90 to take money out of the policy. That's $1.82 million in cash tax-free. So, this is what the you would say is the power of using Index Universal Life. But remember, remember, best underwriting status, best product, uh highest rate of return that we could assume, uh, the best of all worlds in the example here. It did work for this client, but again, it's not about putting all of your money in one bucket. And so I really still caution you that even when you're looking at this fact pattern, um, please try to figure out a way to fund other. Retirement solutions in addition to the IOL. Don't make it your sole and only retirement asset. So, what are some issues when funding index universal life? With these illustrations, whether it's myself or others, typically we're illustrating the maximum amount of money that can be removed from the policy before it will lapse. Because ultimately, if you take all of the money out of the policy, the policy will lapse. There's no money left in it to pay the death benefit or the expenses for the death benefit till you're age 100 or 105 or 95. So we're taking every single penny we can out. If we change the illustration to take even $100 more or $1,000 more out a year, the policy would lapse. And that may not make a lot of sense to you, but that's ultimately what would happen. And you do not want policies lapsing because that money that you took out that was tax-free then becomes taxable. Now, how do we avoid this scenario of this policy lapsing? Well, the first way to do it is don't be a pig. Don't take every single penny you can take out of that policy. Take a little less and leave a little money in there so you can make sure to leg it out to your age of death. Now, if you happen to get a call from the insurance company saying, hey, you took too much money out, this policy is going to lapse. You can always put money back into the policy to keep it in force so that it doesn't lapse before you die, which is imperative again, because you don't want to get tax bill for all the money that you took out of the policy. All right, so stay enforced until death, that is a big issue. So what do these companies have come up with? They've come up with this no-lapse rider, which it's great. It's free, it's better than not having it. If you can get to age 70 with certain carriers, age 75 with other carriers, even though you've borrowed out hundreds of thousands of dollars out of that policy, if you can get to this no-lapse rider age, the carrier will guarantee that your policy will not lapse. It will stay in force until you die, no matter when you die. Now, that doesn't guarantee that you'll have a high death benefit. It doesn't guarantee that you'll be able to take more money out of it. But it is nice to know that there is this no-lapse guarantee in the product. Again, lapsing isn't a big deal for a 45-year-old who funds it for retirement because usually they're going to treat the policy correctly. But if you're 30 and you're funding it for a kid who's going to college in the near future, that policy's got to stay in place forever. And it's really a big deal to make sure that A, you don't take too much money out, you manage the policy, and it is nice to have that free no-lapse rider. So, what is our summary on college planning using cash value life? Be careful, be careful with insurance agents pitching you repositioning assets into one-time premiums for cash value life because it's going to help with the aid formula. If your income is too high, it's not going to help at all. And again, not all care, not all colleges uh uh wave off on that cash value life. Some have caught on to it and will count it as an asset. So it can work, but many times it doesn't. But the benefits to using cash value life, as we've talked about, they self-complete. If you die, there's a death benefit. Uh the gains are locked in every year. Um the money can be used for any purposes, by the way. It doesn't just have to be used for college planning, unlike a 529 plan, which is going to ding you with the 10% penalty. With a cash value life policy, you can take the money out of it anytime. It's tax-free. And you can also do so before age 59 and a half, and uh not having to use it for college without having that 10% penalty. So, in my opinion, as I've done this for a number of years, now I've run these numbers. My my actually, my white paper that I'm letting you download is my fourth iteration of the white paper. I've I've created it a number of times over the last 15 years, as the laws have changed, as the regulations have changed, as the policies have changed, I've updated it. You're getting my most updated version of it. But basically, in my opinion, using cash value life for college planning is basically a mathematical loser. So, what's my recommendation to pay for college? Well, you're not being a rocket scientist to know that you need to start early. So when your child is born, or even better, before your child is born. So start saving money early. Um, compounding growth is a very powerful thing. Using 529 plans really is the best uh tool in the marketplace, as much as the fear mongers will tell you, watch out for the market crashes and all the other things. You know, if you treat them right and you reposition the assets, you start aggressive, then you go to moderate, then you go to conservative. It should work out as your best tool. I personally would avoid using cash value life. I would especially avoid using whole life as a college funding vehicle. That is a surefire loser. And keep in mind that I am a big advocate of indexing versalize as an asset class. I make a lot of money in one of my companies helping insurance agents sell it in a suitable manner to clients as one asset for clients for their retirement. Not the asset, one asset. So uh make sure you're using good agents and working with good people. Now, I'm gonna end this presentation with a story about the scorpion and the frog. Um, maybe you've heard it, maybe you haven't. It's one of my favorite stories. At some level, we are all a scorpion. At some level, uh when I'm if I'm a used car salesman or I'm a car salesman, it's my job to sell cars. If I'm a lawyer, which I am, it's my job to sell the person sitting across me on my services. I want you to hire me. So we all have our biases and what we're trying to do. But the scorpion and the frog, I think, is a great story uh to use in a lot of uh different uh uh parts of your life. So how does the story go? We have a scorpion and a frog sitting on the side of a river, and the scorpion looks at the frog and says, Hey, um, you know I can't swim, right? Yeah, I know you can't swim. Um, but I need to get to the other side of the river today. Um, and because I can't swim, I'm really in a pickle. And so would you mind? Uh, because I know you're a great swimmer, frog. I've seen you do it. Um, do you mind if I jump on your back and you give me a ride to the other side of the river? And the frog says, Yeah, you know, I get it. I understand what you're saying, but uh we're gonna get halfway across the river and then you're gonna sting me. And then I'm gonna die and you're gonna die, but I'm I'm mainly concerned about that. I'm gonna die, and I I don't want to die today. And the scorpion says, Did you just hear what you said? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. You're basically saying that I'm gonna kill myself before I get to the other side of the river. Now, why would I do that? That doesn't make any logical sense, doesn't it? The frog's like, Yeah, you're right. You know, that doesn't make any sense. Why would you do that? So the scorpion uh jumps on the frog's back and they get halfway across the river. Guess what happens? The scorpion stings the frog. And as they're going down to their death, the frog looks up at the scorpion and says, Scorpion, why did you do that? Now we're both gonna die. And the scorpion says, I'm a scorpion. That's what I do. Now that story I tell all the time. And in the context of bad advisors, which is the book you're seeing here on the screen. It's a book, it's actually my most popular book, Bad Advisors, How to Identify Them, How to How to Avoid Them. I have a chapter on insurance agents, CPAs, attorneys, financial planners, fee-only advisors. I cut I throw everybody under the bus with specificity so a consumer will know where when they're working with a good or a bad advisor. If you want to download it for free, it's really simple. Just go to badadvisors.com. But I tell that story because certainly in the college planning space, with a college planning specialist who is a life insurance agent who has not done his or her due diligence, who doesn't really understand the math, I see them as a scorpion. What they know is that they must sell life insurance. And they almost will do it, many of them will do it at all costs. And they're selling it in the context of an alternative to a 529 plan, when I think it's a tremendous mistake. They are scorpions in that regard. So try to avoid the scorpions that are out there. Try to work with good advisors, not bad advisors. So we're coming to the end of the presentation. I appreciate you watching my YouTube video. If you have questions about anything I've talked about, or if you have questions about any of my other videos, or if you'd like me to do a video on a topic I haven't done yet, feel free to reach out to me. There's my email. You also have my direct phone number. And then finally, you can download that 12 page college planning white paper. It has the details that go along with this presentation. So again, I thank you for your time and I hope that you found this presentation helpful.