Is New York Life Insurance Company A Scam? (My Reaction)

So is a career with the New York Life Insurance Company a scam? In today's video, I'm going to be reviewing Mark Christensen's overview video on his time as a New York Life Insurance agent where he provides his experiences to help you decide if a career with the New York Life Insurance Company is a scam or not. So let's begin. After I submitted my application and that was done online and it was for a position for for a financial advisor, actually. And a lot of these companies will do that. They'll have job positions open for a financial advisor, even though you're not going to be a financial advisor for probably two or three years. Yeah, great point. So you'll see this a lot with not just New York Life, but a lot of different companies out there. They don't want to put out there, in my opinion, insurance agent because, look, there's just no sex appeal to it. Why do you want to tell all your friends that you sell life insurance? How boring of a position it could be? It's actually a lot of fun. There's a lot of money to be made. But from a marketing standpoint to appeal to potential applicants, the idea of a financial advisor, like moving a lot of money, seems to be a bit more appealing. So you might see this not just with this company, but with others, this kind of job posting where it's not straight forward. You're probably going to be selling insurance for a couple of years. Just be aware if you're applying to New York Life, you're going to be selling insurance predominantly to begin with. Later on, they'll get your credential to sell other financial products. I will say that these companies are not multi-level marketing companies, though there are a lot of companies out there that are multi-level marketing companies in the insurance industry. And if you see one of these multi-level marketing companies, just run as fast as you can in the other direction. Yeah, this is one thing that I personally like about New York Life, differentiated from a lot of the other organizations that recruit agents. They seem to be predominantly focused on recruiting agents to sell insurance. Now, I'm sure there's some people with axes to grind that say, well, they want you to recruit as well. So a lot of this stuff does depend on the local agency affiliated with New York Life that you join, what their emphases are on. Is it selling? Is it recruiting? But to me, the New York Life business and culture seems to be more focused on selling life insurance and helping people and their agents sell life insurance than it is to recruit people to recruit. So again, the multi-level marketing business model is a thing that is just so common in the life insurance business. Be aware of that if you're looking elsewhere other than New York Life. And ways that you can figure it out if they're an MLM or not is ask them where your focus is at. Is it on sales or is it recruiting? How can you get advances or increases in your commission rate? Does it depend on production or does it depend on recruiting volume? A lot of the agencies out there, you look at their comp schedule, that's going to tell you where the incentive lies. The incentive is going to be on building a team to get a higher commission level as opposed to selling. And in those cases, it's likely if your real focus is on learning how to sell insurance, which 90% plus of agents should be focused on that, as a new agent, you're going to find it's a very difficult field to be in. And you're probably not going to be at the best agency or company to work with. I mentioned the turnover rate. I would say that it's probably about 95% of people make it to the end of their second year. And that's probably being generous. So why do people fail? Well, there's a lot of reasons, but I'd say one of the big ones is that people just don't manage their own time well. In this job, you're not going to be hanging out of the office and doing work like you would at a regular job. They actually tell you not to be in the office. They just tell you, you know, go off on your own, sell insurance. If you sell insurance, we'll give you a paycheck. If not, then you don't get a paycheck. Yeah, so that's how the life insurance sales business is, guys. It is a straight commission opportunity. I believe New York Life is set up the same way. You come in on a straight commission. They may have a draw for a period of time, but ultimately your earnings is dependent upon you closing, meaning selling new policies to new clients. And if that stops, you stop making money. And look, in a lot of straight commission opportunities, this is the case. This is not necessarily out of the norm when it comes to being your own business person, which essentially is very close to what this is. So 90% plus failing out is to be expected, not just with New York Life, but with many other sales opportunities that are straight commission in the life insurance business and outside of it. So what's the takeaways from this? You know, don't get into this business model unless you know what you're getting into, which is you got to go find people. You got to have prospects to see. You got to have a product that you can sell, a lead system, something to keep you busy in front of prospects to sell more policies to. If you don't have that, even with a company as great as New York Life is, you're toast. When you, people will often sell a policy to their family, sell some to their friends. But after that, they don't know what to do. They're not comfortable going up to random houses and knocking on the door. And they're not comfortable going into businesses and knocking on the businesses and asking to sell insurance to those people. So there's only so much you can do. And oftentimes those people will fail out pretty fast. Yeah, so what a lot of these companies do, like New York Life, is they teach you what's called a Project 100 or Project 200 strategy. And essentially the idea behind it is list all of your associates, friends, family, anybody that you have even like a base level of connection with. And those people become your prospects that you get in front of to sit down and talk about what products you have with New York Life. The methodology works fine. It works well. A lot of companies do it because it works. The problem is that I've seen, and this would be my biggest complaint with it, is there's not a lot of training to get the agent beyond what happens when they're done with that 100 to 200 group of people. And so this would be like a critique. Like if you're going to go and do this, you got to learn how to do referrals really well. After you close the deal, you got to get more names, other people that those people know in order to continue the process of talking to people who are referred, thus staying busy. Otherwise, what happens with a lot of people is they exhaust this list and now they're just thrown to the wolves. Who are they going to talk to? It works very well to go business to business. It works very well to hold prospect in some way. But if you aren't comfortable with that process, then you're likely not going to last long. And every agent comes to that point. Their list of people who are referrals is exhausted and you might as well count on that. So again, think long-term. If you're entering a business model like this, are you comfortable prospecting businesses? If you're not, this may not be a good fit for you. This is the most cutthroat industry I've ever been part of or even seen in real life. It was hard for me to adjust. There are people who are just the worst people that you'll ever meet and they do quite well because they know how to work the system. They know how to take advantage of the new people, how to do very little work of your commissions. Yeah, so what Mark is talking about here is that if you work with a senior rep at the company, it's likely if you want to leverage their time and their knowledge, they're going to ask for some sort of commission cut. If you're going to make $1,000 on a deal, but you're new and you don't know what you're doing, a top guy may come and say, hey, I'll do it for 50-50 or 70-30 or whatever the split is. If you do this, just make sure that you actually learn about what's going on in that process so you don't have to split the business anymore. I definitely agree with what Mark is saying here. If that's all these guys do and they leverage you guys and your assets without exchanging knowledge and training, it's not good for you ultimately. It does get a sale for you, but you don't learn the skills to pay the bills. So something also to worry about. So wrapping this up, New York Life Insurance Company definitely is not a scam and it certainly isn't for everybody. A couple of things I think you need to know going into this. Can you and are you comfortable prospecting friends and family? And then once that's exhausted, are you comfortable going business to business or coming up with some other prospecting strategies to stay busy? Look, if you don't have that, you're just not going to be successful long run. So if you don't have the comfort level to prospect like that, why would you take a position with this company in order to do that? Also, make sure that you're comfortable selling predominantly insurance as opposed to financial products as a beginner. It's likely that that's where your emphasis is going to be on selling So embrace the fact that you're going to be more of an insurance person as opposed to a financial advisor. I hope you enjoyed this overview and reaction to what it's like to sell insurance with the New York Life Insurance Company. What did you think? Please comment below. And if you'd like to learn more about what it is that we do at The Dig Agency, go ahead and subscribe to this YouTube channel. We put out lots of great content in the life insurance sales space to help you guys out there better understand the business and find a place to call home. And make sure to go to davidduford.com if you'd like to learn more about how our business model works, where we train agents to sell what's called final expense remotely over the phone or in person while providing free leads, great mentorship, and great commission levels.