Lawrence Holzberg, LUTCF, LACP, President of the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors (NAIFA) will be a featured speaker on Thursday, March 1, in St. Louis at the 2022 NAIFA-Missouri State Meeting. His remarks at the event will review the State of NAIFA and challenge insurance and financial professionals to be the best they can be as producers and as advocates for their businesses, association, and Main Street clients. 

A Medicare Savings Account (MSA) is a type of Medicare Advantage plan with several unique attributes that financial advisors might find quite suitable for some clients. Like any other kind of health insurance, it is not for everybody, and there are certain people who are specifically excluded from these plans. If you have a client who is comfortable with investing and handling money, the MSA provides flexibility options unique in the Medicare market. There is both complexity and nuance to MSA’s. As always, this is a general overview and not designed to promote one company’s MSA plan over another.  Always contact the MSA plan or a broker knowledgeable about them to ensure it is available in your area and appropriate for your client.

Yuka Nakahara-Goven traveled 7,000 miles to pursue her dream. Now, she uses her experience and compassion to help empower other women to pursue theirs.

Perseverance in the Face of Adversity

Nakahara-Goven¹ grew up in Japan and Taiwan and dreamed of becoming a diplomat. Bilingual in Japanese and Chinese, she had everything she needed to succeed. She worked hard, studied harder, and passed the first exam needed to enter government service. Her hopes were dashed, however, when a professor revealed that it would be difficult for her to be hired as a diplomat because she was a woman.

Jacqueline (Jacquie) Proffit is a financial advisor and marketing expert dedicated to making a difference in her community.

Getting Started

Proffit built her early career in marketing but decided after a decade that it was time for a change. That’s when she found her calling in financial services. She knew she needed to get her finances in order, so she attended a financial literacy seminar that taught financial skills from budgeting to planning for retirement. The experience made her realize the need for more financial education. “If more people only knew how to do money, the world would be such a different place,” she says.

If you take a look around, you will notice all of the noise in the Medicare space. Whether it be the technology platforms for quote and apply, the renewable income stream, or a plethora of prospects, you may think to yourself, where do I start?

Let’s start with the technology platforms. Being able to quote, save, and compare Medicare choices for your clients is imperative. When CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) removed your ability to save drug plans, this opened up innovation in the independent distribution. Now you have the ability and convenience with Search & Save options that allow you to load your clients' medications and then recall that list and simply update it instead of recreating it every year.

For Bob Kelly, insurance runs in the family. Kelly’s father was an insurance salesman and a family man through and through. He instilled in Kelly the importance of using your talents to help others. “He'd bring various instances where he’d sold policies, and something happened a short time afterward and the family was taken care of,” Kelly says. “They didn’t have to worry about anything."

Lawrence Holzberg, LUTCF, LACP, President of the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors (NAIFA) was a featured speaker Thursday, February 24, in Houston at the 2022 Annual State Conference of NAIFA’s Texas chapter. His remarks at the event reviewed the State of NAIFA and challenged insurance and financial professionals to be the best they can be as producers and as advocates for their businesses, association, and Main Street clients.

Not every successful financial professional was a two-time All-Conference quarterback at North Dakota State University. But Steve Walker, LUTCF, a loyal NAIFA member since 2009, believes some of the traits that made him a standout for the Bison on the football field have contributed to his success as Vice President and Senior Insurance Consultant with Gate City Insurance Agency in Fargo, ND. They also make him a worthy recipient of Advisor Today’s Four Under 40 award.

American National’s Jarod Morgan has dedicated his career to protecting families and businesses in his community in Henderson, Nevada.

Morgan decided he wanted to work in sales in the financial services industry while studying business administration and marketing in college, but it didn’t hit home for him until his parents set him up with an appointment with their insurance agent to get life insurance. He was young and healthy and didn’t see a need for life insurance, but he went anyway, and the conversation helped shape his career for the next two decades and counting.

The economic, physical, and emotional disruption the pandemic has caused will have transformative and lasting effects on each of us individually, and our industry. Many people have realized the value of being financially secure when the unexpected happens, and others have felt the effects of not having a financial plan in place, experiencing a loss of income or even losing a loved one without life insurance. These events have served as a reminder to individuals of the importance of planning for the future. Whether filing a claim or using their cash value for a critical need, customers have found they could leverage insurance products to weather the storm.