TAXES involved with selling insurance

[MW Agent]

Agreed Greg, I am an experienced accountant. There is pressure for DIY when you are starting out to control expenses, I was the same way. That being said, the business people in general I see do the best out of the gate focus all their energy on generating new business and value professional advice on the rest.

 

[theinsuranceman]

Agreed Greg, I am an experienced accountant. There is pressure for DIY when you are starting out to control expenses, I was the same way. That being said, the business people in general I see do the best out of the gate focus all their energy on generating new business and value professional advice on the rest.

My sentiments exactly!

 

[LostDollar]

Being self employed, the amount of your sales wont be the main item triggering what you will send in as estimated taxes. you really wont have a great idea until you know both your revenues(commissions) from sales & your expenses. until then, you will have to be good at budgeting such as having 25-40% of your gross deposited in a different bank account so you have it when you have to pay quarterly taxes. Federal rate for household income + your state rate + the 15+% self employment/FICA payroll tax.

However, as important as taxes, formal businesses plans, getting more educated, etc none of them matter until you are licensed & you start seeing dozens of people weekly. without becoming an expert on activity, you wont have any need for any of the knowledge, the license or a workflow on best practices for taxes

(Caveat, not an agent)

Very interesting comments.

They relate well to a sample of two that I have observed over in the senior insurance forum.

(Agent A) I think it was back in 2017 a person showed up asking lots of questions (wasn't me) focused toward the concept of understanding the costs of selling medicare products.

sometime later he popped up asking about training. He got a good recommendation from an experienced agent in his state. Later on he made a post about how that training was not suitable or useful for him.

I have seen a subsequent post, maybe in 2019, indicating he did finally get a license, but I have not seen any posts indicating any significant sales effort or success by Agent A.

(Agent B) I think he was younger. He just decided to sell insurance. I forget, I think he was experimenting with both Medicare and FE. This may have been in 2018. He had lots of trouble. The post I empathized with was when he talked about spending an hour (on a callback) watching TV with an elderly lady.

Agent B popped up from time to time with posts talking about difficulties and asking questions, and then didn't post much for awhile.

Then, out of the blue in some thread I saw a comment by Agent C about or to Agent B. Agent C is an experienced agent and regular poster on the forums. the post indicated that Agent B was now doing quite well (and perhaps had just received some kind of effort based award from someone).

This Paragraph is just assumption on my part, no facts. Subsequent to Agent C's comment I have seen posts that suggest to me Agent B has learned telephone sales and scripts and is now doing FE Telesales for someone.

Comparing what I know about those two agents from just observing posts here, matches well with your mentoring comments.

 

[Rob Lion]

(Caveat, not an agent)

Very interesting comments.

They relate well to a sample of two that I have observed over in the senior insurance forum.

(Agent A) I think it was back in 2017 a person showed up asking lots of questions (wasn't me) focused toward the concept of understanding the costs of selling medicare products.

sometime later he popped up asking about training. He got a good recommendation from an experienced agent in his state. Later on he made a post about how that training was not suitable or useful for him.

I have seen a subsequent post, maybe in 2019, indicating he did finally get a license, but I have not seen any posts indicating any significant sales effort or success by Agent A.

(Agent B) I think he was younger. He just decided to sell insurance. I forget, I think he was experimenting with both Medicare and FE. This may have been in 2018. He had lots of trouble. The post I empathized with was when he talked about spending an hour (on a callback) watching TV with an elderly lady.

Agent B popped up from time to time with posts talking about difficulties and asking questions, and then didn't post much for awhile.

Then, out of the blue in some thread I saw a comment by Agent C about or to Agent B. Agent C is an experienced agent and regular poster on the forums. the post indicated that Agent B was now doing quite well (and perhaps had just received some kind of effort based award from someone).

This Paragraph is just assumption on my part, no facts. Subsequent to Agent C's comment I have seen posts that suggest to me Agent B has learned telephone sales and scripts and is now doing FE Telesales for someone.

Comparing what I know about those two agents from just observing posts here, matches well with your mentoring comments.

That lady was a really good client, until she went to a nursing home and her distant kids came and convinced her she didn't need life insurance.