For many Americans, debt is inevitable. Whether you’re getting a new car, buying a home or racking up credit card balances, carrying debt is hard to avoid. Of all the types of debts that Americans are struggling with, student loans are a significant and common financial burden.
As an insurance agent, there are solutions you can offer your clients to help them deal with their student loans and achieve a debt-free life. Here we will break down five ways you can help your clients gain financial freedom.
By the end of 2021, one in 8 Americans carried student loan debt , which amounts to roughly forty-three million people. That number translated to $1.75 trillion in student loans. Most Americans who are carrying student loan debt are dealing with historically high balances.
As a life insurance agent, this means that most of your clients are likely struggling with student loans. Instead of buying homes or investing in retirement, they are worrying about how to pay off their high balances.
One way to help your clients is to consider discussing the debt snowball method with them. The snowball method is one of two popular tactics for dealing with debt. Through this strategy, your clients would first organize their debts from smallest to largest. The idea would be to take any excess money they have after their regular bills are paid and invest it into paying off their smallest loans first and working toward the biggest loan.
For many of your clients, their biggest loan might be their student loan debt. With the snowball method, they would systematically tackle all their smaller loans to focus and build momentum with every debt that’s taken care of. Your clients will appreciate the sense of progress that comes from eliminating the smaller debts fast. That progression will push them to tackle larger debts until they become free of any outstanding balances.
In contrast to the snowball, you can also help your clients with the debt avalanche method. It takes a similar tactic of arranging your clients’ debts in order of smallest to largest, but instead of starting with the smallest debt, they’d be tackling their loans with the highest interest rate.
Same as the snowball method, your clients will need to continue making minimum payments on all outstanding debt. Any remaining money will be spent toward the bill with the highest interest rate. By trickling down, your clients will save hundreds in interest and time spent paying it off.
The avalanche method is ideal for clients who have more debt that might take longer for them to eliminate using traditional means. What’s more, clients who have several of the same types of debts (like multiple student loans) will benefit more from an avalanche method over the snowball tactic.
A third way to help your clients who are straddled with student loan debt is with budgeting apps. As a life insurance agent, it’s a good idea to be up to date on the latest tech that allows people to keep a closer eye on their spending habits.
Apps like Mint can help your clients track everything from credit card spending and loan payments to how much they’re spending on entertainment every week. With Mint, they can categorize their spending so that they’re maximizing their efforts to pay off loans with heavy interest rates.
If your clients are newlyweds, you might suggest Honeydue , an app like Mint, which allows couples to group their loans, bank accounts and budgets to get a big picture of what their combined financials look like.
With an outstanding debt like student loans, many of your clients might worry about passing that financial burden onto their loved ones. Helping them find a term life insurance policy is a great solution. To start, term life insurance is cheaper than a whole life policy, but still offers them enough protection to cover any outstanding debt they might have when they die.
By helping your client secure a term life policy, you can give them the peace of mind that comes with knowing their debt won’t pass onto their family when they die. A term life policy can cover any length of time they choose, so they might decide to cover themselves until their loans are taken care of.
Finally, you can help your clients with Symmetry’s Debt Free Life plan. Debt Free Life (DFL) is a modern way to pay off debts. It harnesses the power of a term life insurance policy to help clients eliminate their loans in less time without spending more money than they already are.
Selling this product does require certification for our agents . Once that is taken care of, you can put together a personalized debt elimination report for your clients. This will show them the exact month they can expect to be debt-free.
DFL is a valuable product to have in your wheelhouse. With it, you can give your clients the tools to make their money work for them and get out of debt fast so that they can focus on more important things than paying off student loans.
At Symmetry, we understand that every client has unique needs. That’s why we make sure our agents have the tools and products to meet their specific needs. Being able to offer your clients Debt Free Life will help them eliminate their debts and get back to the things that matter most.
Symmetry Financial Group agents have access to high-quality life insurance, disability income insurance, critical illness insurance, and annuity products from more than 30 well-known insurance companies. This gives you the flexibility and reach you need to tailor plans to meet clients' individual coverage needs.
To learn more about how to begin a fulfilling career as a life insurance agent, contact us today .
