Business Innovators Radio - Interview With Shawn Milton Founder of S&S Life and Financial Services Discussing Debt Elimination

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

I was a missionary for 10 years after which I got married and felt led to start serving people in their finances. I have always had a knack for money talk and helping people. As far back as I can recall, I have always strategized when it comes to Finances. I love helping families get out of Debt with my program and helping them to plan a robust retirement plan. I have run tons of debt-elimination illustrations and designed a lot of retirement income plans.Learn More: https://sandslifeandfinancialservices.com/ or https://debtfree4lifemaryland.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-shawn-milton-founder-of-ss-life-and-financial-services-discussing-debt-elimination

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of influential entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us, Sean Milton, who's the founder of S&S Life and Financial Services, and we'll be talking about debt elimination. Sean, welcome to the program.

Hey, Mike. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. I think that we can spend about a four and a half hours on debt elimination and still be scratching the surface. So I'm excited to hear your perspectives on that. But before we dive into it, give us a little bit of your story and your background. And how did you get into the financial services industry? So I was ever since high school, I have always been, always just had.

a knack for finances. And throughout my years, always been helping people with budgeting and helping them kind of figure out their finances and sometimes even investments. And then I went to do missions, volunteer missions for 10 years. And right after I finish the missions, well, two years before ending missions, I came across Dave Ramsey's. Oh, yeah. program and I took took his program.

I wanted to be part of his movement and then then when I got married, um, you know, I started the dead snowballing with Dave Ram's a program, but it just scared me seeing so much money, getting like so much money and then that money just going out. And, um,

that's when I came across the program that I want to talk about today and just how it kind of shape my, my perspective on giving your dollar two jobs to help you eliminate that and also build wealth. So that's a quick background. Yeah. Well, obviously, if this resonated with you back at that point, you probably had some debt to eliminate. So that probably was like really personal to you to go, I'm in this pickle. And Dave Ramsey gave me some great tips. And I'm starting to get out and now I want to help other people. So tell us a little bit about your way of debt elimination. How is that different? So first, when a client comes in, I kind of try to help the client to see how much, what's the effective interest costs. That's not a word you hear every day, but the effective interest

cost of there of carrying that debt, which is pretty much just how much. of their dollar is going into paying the lenders and not them and not in their favor. And we know that Albert Einstein says compounding interest is the eighth wonders of the world. And I could just imagine, like, right after he says that, he says, like, he who understands it, earns it, and he who doesn't pays it, right? And most times we're carrying a debt, we are definitely paying that interest to somebody else. Well, also, isn't Benjamin Franklin known for saying a penny saved is a penny earned? And you might not think, you know, like if you think about that hard enough, it's like, okay, whether these days it should be like $100 saved is like $100 earned. Because in reality, it's hard to earn money, but it's even harder to save it, right?

Yes. And that is what makes my debt elimination program kind of different because we are utilizing. a compounding vehicle. So you're in a compounding vehicle and you're also leveraging that dollar in the form of barring against it to pay off debt at the same time. So you're building future wealth and positioning yourself for future big ticket purchases because let's be honest, Mike, we're always buying stuff. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

I mean, you think about, yeah, from a car, you need a car to drive around. now how big of a car, how much money, but there's that kind of thing. And then you get into what about a house. And then you get into how about furniture of the house. And then we have kids. And then they're going to head off to maybe private school, maybe college. There's always something. And it's not frivolous.

Sometimes it's necessary. And sometimes you do not have the cash set aside to buy that. So why not just look at your amount of debt. And what if you had a big chunk of that debt set aside in cash? Why not just take that cash and boom, pay off as much as you can. with the cash that you currently have. Yeah, and I think that's, I think with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, we have in mind where we're not only snowballing your debt and then at the end of that program, you're, you're, you're debt free and you don't have any cash because we know we want to position you to where you have that cash at the end of the program because you're using leverage. So we're using leverage to get rid of your debts by the time.

time you're done on the back end of, okay, I'm free and clear, now you're in the position to continue using that leverage for bigger purchases. So if the car dies, which cars have these things off of the, I'm just up to fine, you know. It's almost like, don't say that out loud because my car might be listening. I know, right? So if, so if you're done paying off the car and the car dies or something happens, then instead of going back to your lenders right the way you can now kind of self-finance that car and use your cash to pay that car off while kind of structuring the payment back to yourself. And after you're done with that car payment, then you're in a position to buy another car. If you so desire, you know,

so it's pretty much using your money a bit smarter and making your money work for you as well. You know, I listen for certain words and things that trigger me to go, ooh, that sounds interesting. And one of the things you said a couple times is leverage. Talk a little bit about what this leverage is. What does that look like and how does that work? All right. So the most popular way I see here in the debt elimination space using leverage is that most financial industry, People, they use a specially designed life insurance policy. Right. So it's the same debt snowballing method, but we're using a modified approach. So instead of using our freed up cash to just pay our lenders, what we do is to redirect that free up cash in this specially designed life insurance policy.

And as the cash value builds up in the policy, then we are actually taking a loan out against the cash of value in the policy to pay off for a debt. Right. So the money that you have in the policy continues to compound while you are borrowing against it to eliminate those debts. And then once you are done with the debts and you're done paying back the loan you take from the policy, then you'd have money at the end of your journey. So with my program, and the cute thing about my program is, you know, you know, the month, unless something change in your financial situation, you know the month and the year that you'll be paying off each debt.

So let's say that this person comes. They have, let's say that they have four credit cards, two cards and a house payment. Right. So at each timeline, you're going to know when credit card number one will be taken care of, how much cash. value you're going to add in the policy. You're redirecting the minimum payments, just as you do in a snowballing situation. You're redirecting that minimum payment to repay the loan that you just took from the policy. And once the policy has enough cash in it, we go ahead.

We snowball it to debt number two, debt number three, debt number four. So you see that we're always redirecting that minimum payment to repay the loan, while our cash that's actually in the policy continues to compound. And usually we're using companies that also pays out dividends. So you have the dividends working for you. So you're getting money while you're paying off your debt. And you have the rate of return that the insurance company would also give you. So you're actually getting the dividends on your cash value.

and also that rate of that yearly rate of return on your that interest on your your your policy while you're paying off debt right so i know that we don't want to get into the weeds but from what i'm hearing this is a specially constructed product i want people to realize that because you can't just go google set me up this thing so you've got to do it the right way but it's it's something that you are now um earning cash value and these dividends like you're talking about while you have a loan against that policy and paying off debt. So now you're getting out of debt while your money's growing. And that really is putting $1 to use in two different ways. And I think that is spectacular once people can wrap their head around that because we know that what the average credit card of $4,000 takes a billion years to pay off. We've heard those examples. So now if you can access this and do it wisely and all of this, understand it well, boy, it's, it's, at the end of paying off your consumer debt, you've got some cash value that is built up. I think that is a spectacular opportunity.

It is. I know that I had a client that came in a couple of years ago. And she was so relieved. She was a new mortgage. And she had a few lines of credit cards. And I think it was at the time two cars. and she was absolutely she was elated to know that

at the end of paying off that house in year 12 she would have $91,000 liquidity that she could actually use so can you imagine that? So you still have the cash value to pay back but that same year you're paying off the house you have $91,000 that you can now say,

all right, I've paid off my house $12, that would be what? Was a 30 year more? she's spending off at 12, 12 years. So a few years. 18 years. Yeah. Earlier, right?

And besides paying off the house 18 years earlier, she would have in a savings account $91,000 that she could now use to go invest or do whatever she wants to do to kind of help with her, to help with building our wealth even more, you know? Well, traditionally, if someone wants to pay off their house and they start paying extra on their mortgage out of their monthly cash flow, that might see, that's wonderful because we want people to be debt free. But the scary thing is if you start doing that month after month, year after year, and all of a sudden you need money, you might have paid 20 or 30,000 extra on that mortgage, but you cannot reaccess it easily. You've got to go, you know, get a loan against it. And that's a mess. that's expensive time consuming you might not qualify but in your scenario while she is doing all

of this she's got liquidity along the way and then like you said at the you're shaving off many many years and then you have cash left over so it protects you eat all the every step along the way yes we i i really encourage my clients not to lock up their free money that's what that's what happens you you lock your free money up into your into your mortgage And if something happens, as you alluded to just now, then they'd have to go qualify to get that free money out. And that sometimes you find that people put their free money into their mortgage because they want to be done with it faster. But is that the best use of your money? Yeah.

Yeah, question mark, because it might be if you have other factors that, you know, that are working. working for you. So here's here's something that is coming to my mind. If someone says, this sounds wonderful. I've got, you know, two cars, four credit cards and a house. So let's set this thing up. And then I'm going to start doing this right away. You, you might need to take a how. So my question is, how long does it take to build up enough, whatever you want to call it, cash or opportunity to borrow against this policy to start doing these things? You can't just set it up one day and the next day start doing this, right? Well, It depends on the clients.

Some clients comes in and they have some cash. They can see how the program would work. So they move. And I'm not recommending this for everybody. This is not a one size fit all. It's just a few clients that they come. They see how this can work. And they're like, hey, I have extra cash.

I have cash sitting in a savings account doing nothing. Let me dump it into the policy as a lump sum. And then I'm going to have my regular. a monthly payment. So sometimes you have people who will come in and do a lump sum and they're able to clear those first smaller account in 20 days. Wow. With that lump sum.

And some clients, Mike, I've seen where clients come to me and they're like, okay, I don't have the lump sum right now, but I'm going to have, I'm expecting some money by the end of this year or even some tax return by the end of this year. And then next year, I'm going to have some more money. Could you design the policy where I can do these two lump sums and contribute it to my debt elimination program? Because what they're seeing the value in is I'm going to be getting that rate of return on my money. And also, I'm going to be getting also the dividends pay back into my policy. So it's a really great setup.

So you could have. And you get started now. And then you build momentum along as you go. And then you put a little chunk in later and then drop back to the rate. So I think that again, I'm going to come back to what I said a minute ago because I think this is important for people to understand. You can't just hear this and go Google, set up this thing and click, set it up and have this done. This takes a lot of planning because it's a specialized product and it's a specialized strategy to accomplish the outcome you want. So you've got to sit down, you know, with Sean and say,

here's what I've got. What should I do? And here's, and I'm sure you would show them, here's what I recommend. And then they feel comfortable or not. But I think that's the big thing is so many times people hear something, go to Google, and it's like, okay, let me set it up. You just can't do this on your own. That's true.

And we have a specialized calculator as well that you put your information in. And that's, that calculator is going to show us to, most efficient way of paying off each debt along the way. Nice. Well, I tell you, this has been super exciting because I know that so many people struggle with debt. And I know for me personally, when I, this is many, many, many years ago, 25, 28 years ago, but I woke up one day and go, oh, I guess I've got 35,000 on credit cards.

Huh. That crept up on me awful fast. And it was very constricting feeling. And, you know, it's just really freeing to. not have any debt. And I know that if that is a passion of yours and a vision that you're able to help one new family get out of debt, another new family, that just becomes really rewarding for you. So I really applaud what you're doing, Sean. And I would wonder if people are interested in learning more, what's the best way that they can learn more and then also reach out and connect with you?

So my website, S&S Life and Financial Services, is one way that anyone, can get a whole of me. If you want to learn more about the program, you could go directly to debt-free, the number four, life, Maryland.com as well. And that's going to have a review of the debt elimination program.

System. Awesome. That's really awesome. Sean. you so much for coming on today. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. You're welcome, Matt. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past

episodes, visit www. www. influential entrepreneursradio.com.