In episode 78 of The Kitchen Table, Ken Baden interviews Dustin Wylie of Viking Financial Group to discuss the ins and outs of the finance industry. Dustin shares his journey into entrepreneurship and sheds light on the dark side of the financial advising world.
Tune in to learn more about the pitfalls to avoid in the financial world and how to protect your hard-earned money.
TIMESTAMPS
[00:02:29] Entrepreneurial journey into finance.
[00:04:38] Financial advising challenges and growth.
[00:08:36] Unethical practices in finance.
[00:10:33] Scandal in the insurance industry.
[00:13:23] Empowering People to Do Research.
[00:17:42] Life insurance and financial planning.
[00:22:17] Schemiest insurance sales tactics.
[00:24:35] Ponzi scheme in MLMs.
[00:28:12] Life insurance commission pitfalls.
[00:32:24] Growth and Exit Plans.
[00:36:28] Financial space retirement advice.
[00:37:15] Mismanagement of money and taxes.
QUOTES
SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS
Ken Baden
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/officialkenbaden/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/officialkenbaden
Dustin Wylie
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vikingfinancialgroup/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=672855973
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/dustinwylievfspg/
WEBSITES:
The Kitchen Table Podcast: https://thekitchentablepodcast.net/
Blue Collar Ballers Union: https://bluecollarballersunion.com/
Welcome to the Kitchen Table, a podcast about where business is done. So pull up a chair and join your host, Ken Baden.
All right, welcome back to another episode of the Kitchen Table podcast, where business gets done. I'm your host, Ken Baden. I have with me today Dustin Wiley of Viking Financial. Is a group We're just Viking Financial Group. OK, Viking Financial Group, which is a super bad ass name, by the way. And I guess that's why we got the the beer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All plays it all plays. See, I can't grow one. Unfortunately, I was in like all. I guess I probably could, but it would look real white trashy. You know, I've got the little spots, so I just start somewhere. Does it? I've never given it long enough to try and get past. Is it one of those things where if I just gave it enough time, I might actually get it?
Ken Baden
Oh, yeah, you got the awkward hair stage. It's the same thing with the beard.
Dustin Wylie
Yeah, I don't know, man. I just I got like it's a little thin here and here. I'm like, I can't do it, but I just have to stay with that. I do the five o'clock shadow. That's the most I give. I got a little scruff. And every once in a while, but you can start seeing how pathetic it is when it gets a little longer. So I just got to cut it back. But at any rate, your beard looks fantastic. How are you doing today, my friend?
Doing good Friday. It's the best day.
We were just talking about how I mean, TGIF, but you know, you're a business owner, I'm a business owner, that doesn't really mean much. But we'll celebrate anyways, right?
That's it. The kids get to be home.
Oh, yeah. Well, that's then that's something I guess my wife, same thing dogs, but for us, we'll be right back in tomorrow morning. So Dustin and I met through the Elliot group. Andy, I've had the pleasure of being on his podcast. He's had, he's had the pleasure of being online. I wonder if he'd think about it that way. And he's come online. And, you know, I'm really excited to have Dustin in here because A, as Andy would say, he's an absolute badass, but done some really cool stuff in business. We haven't had a chance to really discuss anything with anybody in that whole finance world in a while, especially with everything, the state of things currently. I'd be curious to dive into that. First and foremost, how did you find yourself, Dustin, in this entrepreneur space in the Viking Financial Group? Take us a little bit back through your story, I guess, of how this all came to be.
Yeah, so I try to shorten this because it can go 20 minutes long. Long and short of it, I worked outside my whole life. If you can't tell, that's just what I look like, somebody that'd be outside with a shovel digging a ditch. And that's exactly what I did up until about 2019 when COVID hit. The last job I had was a plumber. You know, I got laid off through an oil company back in 2015. They sent me to college for free, basically paid me about $7 an hour to go to college. I just scraped pennies, made it work, uh, got my degree, did nothing with it, of course. And, uh, I decided, you know, I want to be a business owner. I want to do something where I make the money. I call my shots. If I want to work 20 hours in a day, I can do it. If I want to not work at all, I can do it. Well, we all know that's a facade. So, uh, I actually bought a $20,000 sewer. camera machine and I told myself I'm going to go out since I'm plumbing and I know what I'm doing I'll go out and I'll you know review people's pipes send them footage and be like hey it's what it looks like under your house. Did that for about four months had two jobs didn't even come close to breaking even and I thought okay this isn't for me so went back to work as a plumber and then I had my second heat stroke and I was like man my first heat stroke I stopped sweating I couldn't sweat I just dumped water on my body all day long And I'd get, you know, I'd smell because whenever you're pouring water on yourself, you just start to get raunchy. And I, the second one, I just sweat all the time. So it's just, it's nonstop. So I thought if I have a third one, you know, who knows what's going to happen. I got to do this for my kids. You know, I went to college. I had straight A's. I had hundreds in almost all my classes. I know how to do things. I just don't know what to do. So my wife always told me, she's like, you need to get into something with numbers. You know, um, you're really good with numbers, engineering, financial advising, something. So the funny thing is the reason why I became a financial advising company is I was on Tik TOK and I was like, Hey, uh, what is the top 10 paying jobs without a college degree? Even though I had one. And the number one was financial services. And I thought, you know what? I don't really care about making a ton of money, but I sure do want to make enough money to where my my days are a little smoother because stress is just an all time high. So I got into the financial advising area, did not make much money. I actually made like negative nine thousand dollars my first year. Um, but I told my wife, I was like, Hey, I'm going all in, you know, this is something where I can stay indoors. I'm not outside killing myself. This could be something huge for us. So I'm going to stick it out. I took out a two EIDL loans from the SBA. If you know what that is, it's just like a development loan that they were giving out during COVID. I spent every dollar, but 300 bucks. And then one day I had been doing social media for that whole nine months and it popped off. I just woke up and I had hundreds of messages. Um, I spent the next 40 something days on zoom calls all day long, 12, 14 hours a day. And I went from negative nine grand to making about 40 grand a month. Got upwards to about 100 grand a month. And that's where I kind of peaked and decided that, you know, I just can't do this on my own anymore. I can and I can make a ton of money, but I'll be busy. So the only way that you can make more money, as you know, is you can print more of yourself or you can take on more business at a higher ticket. So what I did is I just printed more of myself, hired a couple of people that kind of had the integrity that I had, that if you know anything about financial advising, it is probably, no, it is, it's the slimiest place you could be in the world. So I found a couple people that had my ideologies. I brought them in. Um, they also kind of had the same story as me started super broke cause they went to the wrong place, um, was with the wrong people. And now they're flourishing and, uh, I get to do what I like to do most, which is just sit in front of a camera. Like I don't like it when I first started, couldn't get me in front of a camera I'd make. hundreds of hours in content, and it would never see the light of day. But finally got to the point where I'll just, hey, I'll post it. So what I do all day long is I make reels for Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, all that. And then I just sit back and, you know, answer all the hateful comments all day long. So that's basically my story.
You said financial advising was one of, and then you corrected yourself, said, no, it is the slimmiest industry. Can you elaborate for those of us that aren't as privy to what that really means?
Yeah, so I can just tell you in the last two months. So last two months, I had a client come to me. I said, client was a prospect. They said, hey, you know, my cousin put me into this product. OK, what is this product? I look it over long and short of it. If you don't know what an annuity is, an annuity is basically just an account that pays you annually for the rest of your life, whether it's guaranteed, whether it's not guaranteed, whether it's locked in future proof, all the above. So the worst type of annuity you can put a young person into is an income annuity, to where you give them a million bucks, they guarantee you 5% income for the rest of your life. When you die, they keep the money. That's the worst kind, but the reason why people do it is it pays the most commission. If I told you you can make 10% commission, which is a hundred grand, and you could do it from your cousin's million dollar 401k, or you could make 7% commission and do right, people choose the 10% because they make 30 grand extra. So they'll literally bury their family just to make enough money to go buy that Ferrari. Um, I actually had another client, actual client two weeks ago who said, Hey, person put me into this account. Can you look it over? I looked at it. It was the absolute worst decision for that person. Um, and the reason why they gave the reason in an email, they said, Hey, I just want to live like my mentor. They live in a high rise, um, Um, penthouse in New York. And that's what I want to do. So literally said, I set this up for you because I want to make a bunch of money. Didn't care. And that client was so afraid to say something. We called the insurance commissioner and filed a report, but they were just afraid to say something. And I'm thinking your whole life, you saved up all this money and this is supposed to be your nest egg. You're supposed to pass it on to your family, but this person screwed you. They literally took all your money, all your hard work, all your savings, and put it somewhere that you didn't need it to be. So. That's what I mean by slime. And it's, in my experience, 95 out of a hundred advisors and insurance agents are just like that.
Wow. That one that with the, that just flat out, that just flat out told the homeowner that or the person that like the, the, the customer, like, yeah, sorry. I really told the client. So I just put you in what I thought was going to make me the most money. Basically. Yep. Wow. The balls. So you guys, you, I mean, you did something, right? Whatever you could do, whatever recourse.
Right. That'll probably take two or three weeks for us to get anything back. But I hope those type of people get so much chargebacks and go through so much litigation that they have to work five jobs for the rest of their life. So somebody asked me, I don't know if you know, Rob Bailey is you should, if you know, Andy Elliott, but Rob Bailey, I'm in his mentor group. And he said, what do you stand for? Like, what do you want to accomplish in your life? And I thought about it, and I think I want to put a major financial firm out of business. So whether that's Northwestern Mutual, whether that's Primerica, whether it's something I want to put a major financial institution out of business, and that's my whole prerogative in life.
And they're all the Primerica's, Northwestern's, they're all scummy, scum, scum.
Most of them. I could tell you a story about Northwestern Mutual. They are the biggest firm in the U.S. They have the most assets under management, the most life insurance by far of anyone else, kind of like State Farm in the insurance industry. The number one producer about five years ago went to a seminar where they had a thousand of the top producers. He went up to the podium and he was mad because after I think it's 15 years of advising, he finally was taught how to set up a policy perfectly, a life insurance policy for cash value. He was just taught, go, like if a guy makes $100,000, you want a million dollars of death benefit in their life insurance policy. Well, if you know anything about structuring life insurance policies, that's not the way you do it. But that's how all of Northwestern Mutual is taught to do it, because it makes the most commission for the company. So commission at Northwestern Mutual is like 50%. And the company gets paid about 150%. So Northwestern Mutual overrides 100% or double the commission of what you make. So of course, they're going to teach you to make the most commission. But he went up on stage and he's like, hey, I can write a policy better than anyone here. And what's bad is you're all looking at each other like, what do you mean? What do you mean you can write a policy better than me? So all of you are frauds, and I'm going to show you how. He went on a whiteboard and showed people how to do it. And like half of the people in that room quit that day. So 15 years, number one producer quit because he found out he was scamming people for 15 years.
Wow. Good for him though. Yeah. Called it out. And he showed the whole room like you're all scammers. I've been called him out. That's awesome. I almost want to know who this guy is and kudos to him. Yup. That's amazing. Well, that makes me happy, but man, I did not, this is a turn I wasn't expecting, but honestly now I'm way more invested in this whole conversation, man. I mean, God, that reminds me a little bit of our industry with the insurance carriers. We just get, oh, this is a scam. If we get to the door, and don't get me wrong, we belong to a group called RSRA. It just exists to stomp out the solar and roofing scammers and scumbags. That's all there is to it, to put it eloquently. We want to make sure we completely distance ourselves, but it's also a bunch of really crappy sales guys that don't know how to sell anything, but they have no problem going and tearing someone's roof up and then saying the storm did it, or selling somebody a solar system they don't need. I get it in that sense, but man, taking somebody else because we're taking it from the insurance carrier. And it's like, well, I mean, not to say that I would ever condone because believe me, I absolutely like we belong to that group for a reason. Like you're still a complete scumbag if you tear someone's roof up and get the insurance cover or try to get because the first one, I may not pay for it. And now you've just torn someone's roof up for the sake for your own on only your benefit. Right? And second of all, it's dishonest to sell and the insurance didn't need to pay for it, which makes it harder for them to pay for the customers that do have legitimate damage. But in this case, these people, like you said, saving up all their money, and then they go to a firm or a person to invest it for them, they have no idea what they're doing. And they just, like, what's their recourse? If somebody is watching this or listening to this or knows somebody, what can they do about it?
Number one thing is just actually know if you've been screwed over, if you've been put into something wrong. On my Instagram page, I'm not trying to promote my page, but if you go there, I have one out of every four videos I put up is how to kind of like look at your policies, look at your accounts, kind of do your own research, because most people want to say, hey, come in, pay me 300 bucks an hour. I'll look over your stuff, tell you if it's a scam or not. Of course, they're going to say, hey, yeah, everything you have is a scam. You should do this. And then they get paid an hourly wage plus a commission. Um, I would just say, I like to empower people to do their own thinking. Um, last year alone, I think I turned down 96% of people that came to me and wanted to do business. And I still almost made seven figures. So, uh, of the people out there that think that I have been scamming people, that there's a lot of people out there that push the right thing that on their social media platform. And I've seen the accounts to where they do the complete opposite just to make money. They think I'm doing that as well. I'm not. You could go back. I actually have a stack right over here of all the policies that I have, the life insurance policies, cash value that I set up to where in the first year someone has growth in their policy. I would also say that about 30% of my content on social media is showing you how people set up life insurance policies for life insurance, even though for the last three or four years, all of social media is pushing cash value life insurance. How do you grow like a 401k within life insurance? But they're saying this, this like talking points. So I don't really want to talk about certain organizations because Patrick Bet David owned probably one of the worst organizations that he sold recently. But they are taught, hey, here's five talking points. Go talk on your social media. Tell these people these things. They're going to believe you. They're going to DM you. They're going to show up. Sell them whatever you want to sell them. And that's honestly what happens in their trainings. Hey, tell them that you can put all this money into an annuity and they'll never run out of money for the rest of their life. They put them into something completely opposite. I mean, it is super, super rampant.
A day. So what? So, all right. That's disgusting. And I know another, um, big figure in our industry that, uh, well, he, I'm pretty sure he got his whole start with the life insurance, or I'm sure like a prime American might've been, but, uh, you probably know what I'm talking about, but.
We got about six or seven people on top of my head for me just saying that. So we'll just go along with it.
Anyhow, but. I don't know, I like to think that hopefully they, it's a hard thing that, you know what I mean? Cause some of these folks are folks that, you know, until you realize that we make, oh man, I want to be like this guy. Even in terms of just like the way they speak their message, but then you realize like how they got to the platform that they're at, like what they used to do. Cause you had to have done something worthwhile because why are we, why are, why are all of us in the entrepreneur space, watching you or listening to you. And there's a lot of folks with a lot of past and some own it, some don't. I didn't know this particular one. And I heard stuff, so I don't know for a fact. That's why I'm not repeating it. I just heard that his was a similar story. I was very disappointed to hear it. But at any rate, let's talk about what you do, what you do right. And specifically, if a listener is listening to this intentively, because dude, right now, we could use all the financial advice we can get, I've heard what you're talking about a million times, like, oh, man, you can go in and get this type of life insurance policy, and it's a great way to make money. Hell, I think Waka Flocka was pushing that for a bit, dude. A, is that a real thing? B, what are some tidbits without giving away the farm that you could give us like, hey, if you really want to do that, here's some things I might consider, or this is a real way to do that outside of if you really want to sit with somebody and do things the right way. Look, Viking Financial is right here. I suggest you go talk to them if you really want to do that and do it in a real serious, and I don't normally plug people. Everybody who listens to this show, you know that. If you want to talk to the person who I have on, by all means, but already, man, I'm loving what you're about. I respect the hell out of that because I think that so disappointing to hear, but do tell some things that folks could, specifically, let's talk about first that whole life insurance deal. Is that real? What's up with that?
Yep. And just to, I mean, I don't want to say give myself some legitimacy, but I do own Viking Financial Group. That's my group, just me, 100% owner. We do financial planning, estate planning, life insurance, all that. And then I'm also 50% owner of Spectrum Planning Group, which is a full planning firm. We do Uh, tax tax strategy. We own a CPA firm. We own an estate planning firm, like anything that has to do with money, like crypto CPA, we do. So like, I am not just a one trick pony, like 90% of these gurus online that they only sell life insurance. They only sell infinite banking policies, stuff like that. Um, with that being said, if you're talking about cash value life insurance, um cash value life insurance if you break it down in terms of cash value and life insurance so cash value means it's cash equivalent cash value it's not An investment account, it's not a balance because technically, if you have a balance, it has to be a taxable account. That's why all the wordplay of cash value instead of balance or whatever. It's a way to grow money tax free within life insurance. So there's a lot of IRS codes that say you can put in so much money into life insurance and the rest of your money can go towards cash value. So once again, cash value is just a term saying that you're growing like a Roth IRA. You're growing cash value within your policy. 100% doable. We do it all the time. The negative is the IRS code 7702 says that you can put about 10% of what you put in every month, every year into insurance, and the other 90% can go into cash value and grow tax-free. So the problem is People don't know that they think it's some random magical number. It's actually 10 percent. So if you told me, hey, I want to put in ten thousand dollars a month into my cash value policy, I would say, hey, at least a thousand dollars has to go to insurance. Nine grand will go to cash value. You call that. Here's the illustration. This is what it looks like over your lifetime. And as long as you understand that, that's the best policy you could ever get. It cannot be set up any better. So one, I do that because you can't replace my business. If you come in and you try to make any kind of argument that you have a better policy than me, you can't. So like that's job security. Two is I like to sleep at night. And then three, I love referrals. So whenever I put up a bunch of videos that show people how some people set up policies incorrectly. And then they show their policy that they got to their mom, uncle, aunt, best friend. And they call me, hey, I want that because I've been hearing about it on social media for two, three, four, five years. So if you're looking for cash value life insurance, there's really only three types. So you have whole life, whole life is kind of like grandpa's life insurance. It's guaranteed. It's one of those things where you're like, Hey, you put in money, I'll guarantee you 4% growth forever. Really slow. It's like a high yield savings account, but it grows non-taxable. So it meets the high yield savings account. Um, universal life. There's two different types of universal life. So you have indexed universal life, which is, a cash value life insurance policy that tracks a index. So like, let's say S&P 500, everyone knows what that is. It tracks the S&P 500, but it's not in the S&P 500. So if the S&P loses 20%, you get zero, you lose nothing, you get nothing. But on the flip side, if the S&P goes up 40%, you're capped at 10 or 12%. So you'd never get the downside, but you also only get a certain part of the participation on the upside. So to me, that's my favorite account. I don't sell it to everyone. There's too many people out there that just sell it to everyone because they believe in it. It's the panacea. It's the silver bullet. It's the best thing there is. And then there's a variable universal life. It's kind of like it's in the middle. It's really volatile. It's just like being in the stock market. So whenever you invest into a VUL, variable universal life, your money is actually in the market. So if the market crashes 20 percent, you lose all 20 percent. The negative part about that is infinite banking. If you've ever heard of infinite banking, it's you put money into your cash value policy, you borrow it out, use it to invest somewhere else. When you make money back, you pay back your loan. Just in a nutshell, that's what it is. With a VUL, let's say you have $100,000 of cash value. You borrow $100,000. Well, now your account goes down 20%. Technically, you only have $80,000 in your account, so you owe $20,000 to break even. So it's really, really tricky. A lot of people also don't know if you overfund your policy. So let's say you want to put in $10,000 a month. you can only put in 120 grand a year, that's it. So if you come in and you put 121,000 in, your policy's ruined. It's what's called a modified endowment contract. Now it's all taxable. So every dollar you put in there is taxable. So it's like a really crappy high yield savings account. But once again, life insurance agents don't know this. So they don't care. They just want that commission. Let's put you in the policy. Let's not tell you everything you need to know about the policy. And, oh, go ahead.
I didn't say anything, I'm just laughing.
Okay. And to kind of tie in with that, one of the schemiest things I've ever heard was from one of my mentors. I hate the word mentor, but his mentor, the guy who got him into the business, would sell a policy, get off the Zoom call, change everything in the system, send out the signature for you to sign it. And then when I got this policy packet in my hand over here, which I got one somewhere, they pull everything out of it that shows the figures. So where we showed you the figures were perfect, We actually trashed the policy to make as much commission as possible, pulled all the details out so you can't figure it out. Ten years later, you look up and you have no money in your account. You put 500 grand into it. There's zero in that account. That's another thing that people are doing to make money, to go live in Cabo forever, to go a Dominican Republic. I don't know why people go there, but they go and they live in these nice places. They teach all of their agents to screw people. Well, now they get to wash their hands of it all because they make all the overrides off of the trashy business. So I can go down a rabbit hole. I can cuss, scream, fight about it, but I'll just quit.
Oh, if I want you to quit, man, I mean, that sounds like something this is like good. This is good. This is good. Good content, man. I mean, this is disgusting. I can't believe I had no idea it was this bad, man. I mean, you really got to be careful investing your money. Oh, my God, dude. Wow. It makes me I'm just the whole time you're thinking I'm like, that's somebody 500. That could be somebody's whole everything. You know what I mean? The retirement plan. Joe Porsche or Ferraris, you know, and like you said, there's then, is it like an MLM deal or they're just like, I would say 90% of the people doing this are MLMs.
They're the three letter agencies out there. The PFA is the WFGs, the, all those people that they just, they recruit people cold. They'll call a Walmart employee on their day off and be like, Hey, would you like to make five extra income and stay at home? Yeah, of course. Do this, go call everybody that you know, tell them that we can set them up. We can make them a ton of money. We can, you know, fix their retirement planning, blah, blah. Next thing you know, they're screwing everybody. Well, now you ran out of contacts. Everybody hates you because they found out that you screwed them. But your upline doesn't care because they made a ton of money. And now they're like, hey, go recruit people. And then you go recruit those people that you screwed over. And you're like, hey, you know, remember that policy we set up for you? I made a hundred grand. Oh, do you want to make a hundred grand? Yeah, sure. So like it is a big disgusting Ponzi scheme.
Take it back by screwing someone else over.
Exactly. Exactly.
Yeah. Lee Day, man. We're getting some good insight into this, dude. And you know, like, you know, Viking. Well, I mean, you know, Dustin at Viking is telling the truth and that like you're giving us all the skinny so you're be a fool to be doing it. You know what I mean? So, man, that's so disappointing that that's something like that can still happen in today's day. And how is that not everywhere? Oh, I guess the same way anything else, everything else is just covered up these days. You know what I mean? Or some of it's like, hey, look at what we're going through currently. You know what I mean? Like, really? It's all right out in our face. People are still lining up to vote for more of it. No, I'm not going to get on here. But anyhow, Uh, well, this is, I had no idea it was this bad. I'm still like, like blown away, but you've been living this for how long now?
Honestly, it's only been three years. Um, I'll tell you my first year. I can't tell you two hours of the day that I was not doing some YouTube university, reading a book on a mentor call, doing something. I know people in the industry for 15, 20 years that they ask me questions all the time, like every day my phone blows up saying, hey, I got this client doing this. What would you do? So I'm not trying to brag saying, hey, I've only got three years, but I'm really smart. I'm a hyper obsessed person. I do not stop learning something until I fully know it. Because if I have somebody's entire life savings in my hands, I want to make sure I'm doing right by them. I want to sleep at night. Um, I set up one person's account wrong whenever I first started and it haunts my dreams every day. The person knows and they're like, Hey, I get it. You started, I trusted you, but we're going to go ahead and move forward. So like that one time I lost sleep. So how people can do it thousands and thousands of times makes no sense to me. Um, and to kind of piggyback on that, I was in Irvine, California about six months ago and we went to this, uh, I won't say the carrier, but it was like a carrier training. Um, at this five-star restaurant, you know, they're eating like lobster tail and caviar and all that. And these guys, they're like 70 years old financial advisors been doing it since they were out of college. And like, yeah, I didn't know you could do that. You know, I've been doing this for my clients for 25 years and I could not believe some of the things they were saying. So whenever we talk about commission and a policy, this is kind of like what I want to harp on the most. If you set up a life insurance policy for cash value, you can choose your commission. You can choose the least amount, which is 10% because you get paid off the life insurance. If you put in $10,000 a month, the commission on that's going to be like $12,000. It's a lot of money for most people. That's a lot of money for one person. Or you can set that as high as possible and make $120,000. So you can replace every dollar that they put into that policy and stick it back in your pocket. So you're shifting money from the left pocket of you to the right pocket of me. And that's what's going on. So what I would say, anybody who has a policy or is looking at a policy or like has no clue what I'm talking about, if you do look at an illustration where you do have a policy, go to your calculation page. It's very obvious. It shows I put in this much, this is how much it's worth. 10 years later, this is how much it's worth. If you see any zeros in your accumulation column, the first, just first year, Someone went and took your money and put it into their pocket. They're going to give all the excuses in the world. You can call them and say, Hey, why'd you do this? It doesn't matter. If you have a zero in that first column, you got messed over. I posted a video about 20 minutes ago or now 30 minutes ago, uh, where guy had 11 zeros. So basically what that means is his first $70,000 over 11 years went straight to commission. So he did not make a single dime for 11 years. So, um, that's all I really want to do in life. Like I thought I wanted to do. The full planning, which I still do, you know, I have clients that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars of one client. It's close to a billion. We do is full planning, tax planning, all that good stuff. But I feel like the everyday person getting screwed on social media through these gurus, these life insurance guys, that's what I want to go after. I want to clean up the industry, send them all back to Walmart, let them be greeters.
Do that. I applaud you and I hope If any way I can help, I'm invested now, man. I'm looking at the time, I'm like, dude, I can't believe it's all we've talked about this whole show. I apologize. I was trying to get more into giving some advice. You know what, though? I think you've given great insight into the real reality of what this is, and that you better be really, really careful. A, B, as he said, if you look at your, what page was that again? Your Dex page?
My Instagram page?
No, the page that they need to look at.
Oh, sorry. That's your illustration. That would be your tabular detail or your calculation page, whatever you want to call it. Normally it's about page five to page 15. So just go flipping through your policy. If you see zeros, call me, do whatever. I'll try to do anything I can to fix it.
Where can we find you? Cause that's what we need to know. Where can we, where can we find you? If we see that, we want to talk to you about, you know, look, look for your parents, your mom, your dad, your grandma, like, Where can people find you so they can see, A, more of this content, and B, reach out if they did get scammed?
So I'm basically on all social media platforms, but I spend 90% of my efforts on Instagram. So if you go to Instagram, vikingfinancialgroup.com, I'm verified, blue check mark, don't get scammed by somebody else. I've had that happen a lot, probably like half a million dollars of people giving to crypto, giving money for me to invest in crypto, which is some person over in India. Go to my page. I run it all day long. No one touches my page. So if you send me a DM, I see it. There's a contact in there that says call or email. That's me. So if you have anything, just text me and say, hey, I saw you on the podcast or like this happened or, you know, my grandma's looking at this. What do you think? I don't charge. I don't charge for the first couple of consultations. So if you want me to look something over, send it over. I'll do it for free. Wow. And you said your Instagram. is vikingfinancialgroup.com or vikingfinancialgroup on Instagram.
Okay. Yeah. Viking financial group on Instagram. That's first consultations are free, man. That's amazing. And in today's world with all these, all this nonsense going on, I mean, honestly, man, I really do love your mission because I mean, wanting to just put one of those big guys, that's not going to make you very popular in that, in that industry, but who never does fuck them. Right. I mean, really, you're doing the right thing. I love it, dude. And that just tells me that our core values line up and I can go to war with you, man. I love it, dude. I really do. I mean, honestly, this call just went 100 times better than I thought it would. I really do. I mean, I don't know. There's a lot more we can talk about, Dustin, just because now I know our core values line up, integrity. I mean, that is so sad that in that space, You're a 1%er. It's terrifying, man. It's crazy. But like anything else, it's about the money, the commission. So you need to be very, very careful. Insurance, life insurance, all these investments, man, you just gotta be careful. Do your research, talk to people like Dustin. I hope you take one of them down. If I can help you, I'd be happy to. What's next for you other than that? Just continue to grow?
Yeah, I think a five year plan would be to get to the point where we're doing, you know, $10 million a month of gross profit. I would love to in 10 years, I have an exit plan for my spectrum planning group. Hopefully, I think we're looking at 500 million. Um, once that happens, you'll probably never see me again. I might still post on social media. So if you want to talk to me in the next 10 years, get it done because I'm a loner because of this. I used to be a happy go lucky person. I used to love hanging out people. Um, but seeing all this scummy stuff out there from people, I thought were good people. I don't want to be associated with anyone anymore. You know, I was really hesitant to be associated with Andy. Um, first time I met Andy, we shook hands and he stopped me for a second and he walked behind me and he said, Hey, you in the white shirt, come here. Hey, why are your eyes loose? Why are you this? Why are you here? Did you, how much money did you pay? 1500 bucks. I'll refund you your money. You don't want to be here. So like he skipped me, went and called someone out in the middle of the room, came back. I loved it. I mean, I played semi-pro football for 15 years and I blew my ankle out, but, uh, that football, ingrained a mentality in me of like, don't go for the praise. If you ever get praise, act like it didn't happen. You want the negative. Like, hey, why'd you miss that tackle? Why'd you miss that pass? You know, you missed that field goal and no one was in front of you. Like all this negative reinforcement is what I live for. And that's why I like Alex Ramosi. He's like, the negative reinforcement is what I thrive off of. And most high performers, that's what they do. They're like, hey, I didn't do enough. They never go like, oh, look at me. I'm so good. I'll make another business. It's like, OK, I have to. I have to. Um, yeah, I'll go off on a tangent. So I'll just, I'll stop right there.
I love that, man. I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, uh, and I did it. I mean, and Andy's pretty honest about, you know, a lot of people always keep bringing that up. Like, Oh, he used to do it. And it's like, well, yeah, dude, he talks about it all the time. I mean, I've got to pass myself, but you know, I'm not necessarily professionally, but just the same. We all have Roger's laugh. I own mine. I mean, it's a big part of my story. But anyway, why is that so funny? Talked about a million times.
Somehow it always ends up there.
He said somehow it always ends up there. We always go back to the old heroin edition Ken, I guess, right? At any rate, I totally get what you mean, man. I do. And I love Hermes too. But I get it. I get it. It's so disappointing, man, to see these people that we We put her on a pedestal, you know what I mean? And then find out like that, like what we were talking about in the beginning of the episode. He's one of the big guys. In fact, he's one that I've wanted to emulate around this whole, like he speaks a ton. He's got his own show. But I don't know how much truth there is to it, but I heard he's done a lot of what you were just talking about. I don't know specifically if that's how, but I could imagine. I heard some bones being thrown in the direction of unsavory life policy type stuff. But I had no idea what that even really meant until now. And that's just really a bummer. So man, look, I'd like to end this with one, Dustin, I absolutely think that you are an amazing human being, man. I love that you're in the professional space that you're in because we need more integrity in all of these spaces. There's just not enough. I hope you blow the freaking hell up. because there needs to be more of you and way less of those turds that are out there just ripping people apart. If you're a business owner, or a salesperson, or just anybody who listens to this show, and you're looking to smartly and appropriately and adequately invest your money, look, if you go to Dustin and you find out anything that what we said is the truth, come to me and tell me directly, but I don't think that's going to be the case. I encourage you go check my man out. Talk to him. It's free. be really careful if you don't. If you don't, just learn from this and be really, really careful who you spend your money with. That's all I got to say. Any parting words of wisdom, Dustin, before we sign off?
I kind of like to give people some nuggets to think about. Just in the financial space, the average person runs out of money in retirement in 14 years because their money's in the wrong place and they emotionally invest. So if you don't know what that means, by 79, most people are back at work. So that's why you're seeing more old crippled people working at Walmart, a gas station, stuff like that, because people mismanage their money and they allow people to be emotional investors. 95% of business owners overpay taxes every year, and that average number is about 12 grand. So what that means is you need to find, like, you just ask yourself, if you're paying $12,000 more than you need to every year, and it costs you $1,000 a year to find a good CPA, you're losing $11,000 by not finding a good CPA. And one last thing, a lot of people don't know that 401ks, there's nothing wrong with 401ks. The reason why a 401k was created was because people were paying astronomical taxes and they were like, hey, if I can put some money away pre-tax now and take it in the future when taxes are lower, I'm going to do that. Well, right now we have the lowest taxes we're probably gonna see in our lifetime because of the whole Medicare thing, social security thing. So like, if you're putting all your money into a 401k or an IRA to get a tax deduction now, you are just asking for it. Taxes are supposed to double by 2035. So if you're putting money away pre-tax now to pay double the taxes in the future, you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot. You're growing your money at half the speed that it should because of taxes. But that being said, if you didn't know 1950, the highest tax bracket was 91%, meaning that you made 9% or 9 cents per dollar. Ronald Reagan quit working in the middle of the year because he's like, dude, why would I keep working when I'm going to make 9 cents per dollar? In the 70s, the highest tax bracket was 70%. So right now the highest tax bracket is 37%. So that's half of what it was in the 70s. So if you think you're being taxed out the wazoo now, you just wait. If you're in California, the highest tax bracket totals like 55%. So if you're in that communist state and you wanna get out, that's probably a good reason.
Yeah, it'd be a great reason. It sounds like we're on the same political spectrum. Good to know. But you know, shocker, because A, we vibe at B, men of integrity, which is crazy, but anyhow. Crazy these days, guys, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what to say, but that's actually a really cool point. I didn't know that. Actually, I have a 401k more or less just because, I don't know, I don't think I was even supposed to. I had like a, we got to talk, we got to talk, but that was a really interesting tidbit on the 401k thing. I didn't know that, that it was all created just because taxes were so high. It was like, low now and they're gonna be really high later kind of screwing yourself awesome tidbits dude that's that's amazing so great stuff for us to chew on Dustin we're gonna have to less of the, I just can't believe how scummy that is, but I'm going to leave that alone. We might have to have two more episodes, I guess, to encompass all of that. Dustin, I love that you took the time out to meet with us. Guys, check him out, Viking Financial on Instagram. Check out all his content, hit him up for any of your financial needs. We love you guys, and we will see you next time.
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