What does it really mean to be financially ready, and where does insurance fit into that picture?
In this episode, Dr. Sev talks with Tony Steuer, financial fluency advocate and insurance expert, about how to approach insurance decisions with clarity and confidence.
They discuss:
- Financial fluency vs. financial literacy
- The role of insurance in financial readiness
- Term vs. whole life insurance
- Red flags in popular insurance marketing strategies
- Why liquidity and long-term costs matter
- The often-overlooked importance of disability insurance
If you’ve ever felt unsure about insurance or overwhelmed by your options, this episode will help you slow down, ask better questions, and make more intentional decisions.
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The Dr. Sev Talks Money podcast’s mission is to empower women to approach money confidently, reframe their financial habits, and build a future where their money is a tool for opportunity and security.
Through Dr. Sev Talks Money YouTube channel and Podcast, I provide actionable advice and inspiration to help you achieve financial freedom. Join me for one-on-one coaching, group sessions, workshops, or speaking engagements as we journey to financial empowerment together. It’s never too late to begin again—let’s make it happen!
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Tony’s links
Website: http://www.tonysteuer.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tonysteuer
The Get Ready Money Podcast: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-get-ready-money-podcast/id1480046083
YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/tonysteuer
Books:
Get Ready! (Financial document organizer)
Questions and Answers on Life Insurance
Insurance Made Easy
Tony’s Bio:
Tony Steuer, CLU, LA, CPFFE is an internationally recognized financial fluency advocate, award-winning author, and host of The Get Ready Money Podcast. As the founder of The Get Ready Movement, Tony is leading a shift in how we think about money—not just as numbers, but as a tool for living a more intentional and empowered life. Through his books, podcast, curated recommendations, and expert insights, Tony helps financial professionals, educators, and individuals ask better questions, foster meaningful money conversations, and take purposeful action. He serves as an advisor to Insurance Nerds and Dingo Technologies.
Tony’s thought leadership has earned recognition as a Finalist in ThinkAdvisor’s LUMINARIES Class of 2022 for Thought Leadership & Education. He has served as a Judge for the Plutus Awards, the MAIA Awards and the 2023 Finder Innovation Awards, and as a longtime member of the California Department of Insurance Curriculum Board. A trusted voice in the media, Tony contributes as an expert content reviewer for Nerdwallet, Bankrate, and Forbes Advisor, and has been featured by ABC’s Seven on Your Side, CNBC, Cheddar TV, The New York Times, Washington Post, Fast Company, Chicago Tribune, and Fox Business News.
Transcript
Hey, hey, hey, Savvy Squad. Welcome to another episode of the Dr. Sev Talks Money, YouTube and podcast, where we empower women to manage money confidently. Today’s episode is about financial fluency and readiness. What it really means to be prepared for life, how insurance fits into that picture, and how to spot marketing.
That sounds good. but may not serve you? This is a practical conversation designed to help you ask better questions and make more intentional decisions with your money. My guest today is Tony Steuer an internationally recognized financial fluency advocate, author, and host of the Get Ready Money podcast.
His work focuses on asking better questions, improving financial communication, and making more informed decisions. Especially around insurance and readiness. Tony, welcome to the Dr.
Sev Talks Money podcast.
Hi, Sev. Great to be here with you today.
It is great to have you. So before we jump into the money stuff and insurance and all that, I like to do icebreakers to kind of set the stage.
All
right. What’s something people would be surprised to learn about you? That has nothing to do with finance,
uh, that I used to do improv comedy.
Oh, okay. That sounds interesting. So what made you stop?
Uh, or it was just
something, or are you still doing it?
Oh, I’m, I’m not doing it, but I, I use the principles today, you know, speaking and my podcast. It was just kinda one of those things that it was a phase.
Ah, okay. And I like that you said that about using the principles that you learn through the standup comedy or improv to, and you apply that to speaking in your podcasting because every skill that we learn, we can use them in other areas.
So let’s jump right into it. For those who may not be familiar with your work, tell us who you are, what you do, and what led you to focus so deeply on financial fluency.
So I started off years ago as a life insurance agent, and I found that I, I didn’t really like the selling aspect of it, but I was really.
Uh, into the analytical end of it. So I got, uh, a life and the analysts, uh, life and disability insurance analyst license from the state of California that allowed me to do fee-based insurance consulting. And I spent the next part, uh, next 30 years, uh, reviewing and consulting on existing life insurance policies for financial planners, uh, trust officers, litigation attorneys, and really doing more of that background work.
Examining what was enforced and what I found, that’s what led me to financial literacy is I found that people didn’t really understand the insurance policies that they were buying. And when I got further on is it wasn’t only that they didn’t understand what they were buying, they didn’t even know what questions to ask, and that there was much more tied into it than just the numbers that people were also struggling with.
The psychological. Emotions tied up, especially with insurances, thinking they needed to do something. Uh, making decisions that defied all logic. And I’m sure we’ve all had that with our money, where you sit there and go, why did I do that? And so I really became intrigued by that. Um. I guess psychological aspect of the money world, and that’s what led me to what I’m doing today.
Yeah. And, and we really need that, right? Because, uh, there are, unfortunately, there are people out there who will take advantage of lack of education in our clients or in our, uh, in consumers and will sell them products that doesn’t serve them. And we, we will talk about that a little bit later.
So when you talk about. Um, financial fluency rather than just financial literacy. Let’s define the terms for our listeners. What does financial fluency mean compared to financial literacy?
Well, financial literacy is, you know, we all know the term literacy, and that’s like, are you literate or are you illiterate?
And that carries a lot of shame and judgment, and it’s very flat. Where financial fluency takes the aspect that it’s, if you don’t know how to speak money, it’s just like you don’t know how to speak a language. Like there’s no shame in not knowing how to speak German, for example. I don’t know how to speak German and you know, I don’t feel any shame about it if somebody asked me if I didn’t know how to speak, if I knew how to speak German.
But we do feel a lot of shame and judgment if we don’t know how to speak money. So it’s a change in the lens in that, you know, you can become fluent in a different language. You just have to get started and learn how to speak that language. But there’s no shame or judgment in it, where I think telling somebody they’re illiterate carries a lot of judgment.
Yeah, that is so true. Um, and, and we certainly want to remove the barriers to people understanding what money is and what it does, can, what it can do for them, um, and. If we are hung up on those, those language barriers, then we are, we’re not going to be open to learning about money and learning about what it can do for us.
So let’s kind of pivot to financial readiness. What that, what does that mean in, uh, practical terms? Because yes, we wanna make sure that people are, are understanding financial fluency, but let’s take it a little bit further and help them get ready. But what does that mean?
So the Get Ready is, the actual action part is, that’s the other thing that I’ve struggled with, with the concept of financial literacy is it’s great to learn about something and to have that education, but it’s a whole other thing to put it into action.
And that’s what we have to help people do is to show them, you know, here’s what. We can help you learn. However, here’s how you can put it into context and how you can put it into action. And it’s when you can put that knowledge into action that good things happen and people get empowered.
Yeah. Um, I know we’ve.
Evolved as an industry. We’ve started with financial education. So we’ll go and we say this is a budget and this is what you need to do with a budget, and this is you need to invest and this is what investing means. And then now we’ve evolved to financial, uh, readiness and financial fluency. So why is financial fluency the next evolution of financial literacy?
Well, it, it, it’s because it takes it from that place of shame and judgment to a place where we’re empowered and we feel that it’s okay to learn. But we also recognize with fluency is you recognize that there are many different languages out there is, you know, financial literacy is a pass fail type thing where fluency is like.
There’s lots of different languages to learn. There’s lots of different dialects to learn, so you can go in many different directions. So that’s where I like the term fluency a lot too, is because it opens that up to say, well, you need to learn how to speak insurance. You need to learn how to speak investing.
You need to learn how to speak banking. But you’re not piling all those up on somebody in one day. You’re saying, you know, like, let’s work on this one thing at a time and learn how to speak that one thing.
Yeah. And to me, fluency in, in infers, um, fluidity. You know, um, just, where are you right now and what do you need?
Not, these are the rigid steps that you need to take to get to a certain place, but where are you as the person and what do you need and how can we help you get what you need? Not you need to learn savings first. You need to learn budgeting. You need to, you know, those, I think were where we started from.
If you didn’t get past a certain level, uh, you were not encouraged in certain circles, you were not invited to certain, um, you know, certain practices because you didn’t have this much money or you didn’t know this thing, or you, you know, there are just so many barriers. So I like the concept of financial fluency because somebody listening right now.
May say, I don’t know anything about insurance. I don’t know anything about budgeting. I know I’m supposed to budget. What does that mean? What is that gonna do for me? So we can kind of like meet them where they are and, and, and share with them practices that will help them where they are. It’s not, well, this is what you should do, but here is what may help you based on where you are.
So. Let’s kind of touch on insurance before we do our, our quick break. How does insurance fit into financial readiness and and why do people often misunderstand insurance’s role?
Well, the reason we misunderstand insurance is role is where were we supposed to have learned about insurance. Is, you know, we, we get our first car, we need to get auto insurance.
We buy a home. We’re told to buy, buy homeowners insurance. You get married, you get life insurance, but there’s nowhere along the way where you actually learn what insurance is and what it does. And the people that are selling it quite often don’t know much more than you do. And so you end up with products that don’t really fit.
And the bottom line is that the insurance industry is built around selling particular products rather than solving people’s problems. And that’s the thing is, you know, you look at something as a binary, should I buy this policy or not? Rather than, this is where I’m going, what’s right policy to help me get there.
Yeah. This is a good place to insert or add. Because we’re going to get deeper into insurance because you said something that’s so key in your earlier conversation, and we’ll get back to that. Hey friends, quick pause. If you’re enjoying today’s episode, the best way to support the show is to share it and leave a rating on your favorite podcast platform, and you know it.
Five is our favorite number, and if you’re watching on YouTube. Don’t forget to like, subscribe and share. Thank you. So when it comes to insurance, you mentioned before it’s not just I need insurance, but what problem is that insurance product. Solving. It’s not about the commission.
It’s what problem is it solving. So what should people be thinking about first before choosing products or policies?
Well, they should be thinking about what they’re trying to actually insure what their actual risk is. At its core, insurance is a risk protection vehicle, so what it does is it protects you against a risk of something happening.
So with auto insurance, it protects you against a risk. Of getting in an auto. I mean, it doesn’t protect you against the risk of getting in an auto accident itself, but it protects you if you get into an auto accident. Our health insurance pays our healthcare costs if they’re high. So when we look at these things is we have to take a look at first is like, do we have a risk that we’re actually trying to protect?
And if we do have a risk that we’re trying to protect, what is the best way to protect that risk? How much are we at risk for if we have a house? You know, we know that if the house burns down and the house is worth a hundred thousand dollars, we want a hundred thousand dollars of homeowner’s insurance.
Now that’s a simplification for anybody out there listening. That’s not advice to go out there and get exactly the same amount of insurance for your home. But it’s to put it into perspective, to think about what you’re actually trying to protect, and then to find the protection. That matches that risk, and that’s where people really can go astray.
It’s easy.
Yeah. Yeah. It really is. Because I know when I was looking at. Term life and whole life, for example, um, I wasn’t sure what the pros and cons are were, and which one to decide. In fact, for 19 plus years I worked at a company and I took their insurance, whatever plan they offered, and I did eight times my salary.
But when I was getting ready to leave, I realized that that’s probably not the insurance I should have gotten, but it sounded good because I didn’t know differently. So talk to us about the differences between term life and whole life and what somebody should probably be looking at when deciding those things.
Well, the, the, the bottom line difference is term life insurance is pure insurance coverage. The most common type of term life insurance, uh, available in the marketplace is level, premium term life insurance, which means you buy a set amount of coverage for a specific term of year. So that’s. Let’s say 10 years, 20 years, or 30 years, premium is guaranteed for that full time.
If you pass away during that time, the death benefit is paid out. If you outlive the policy, there’s no coverage. Whole life insurance. Provides coverage for your whole life in the opt if it’s well managed. And that’s a whole other discussion. Policies that are not well managed, uh, with a whole life insurance.
Your premium is gonna be anywhere from 15 to 20 times higher than it is with term life insurance. And the reason is that you’re gonna get a cash value. However, keep in mind that you don’t get access to the cash value right away is you’re dealing with an insurance company, and insurance companies have been around for hundreds of years, and so when they put together these policies.
They do know what they’re thinking. Uh, they do know what they’re doing. Now, the difference is when somebody’s thinking between term and whole life insurance is again, it’s to think about what you’re trying to accomplish. How long do you need coverage for? So usually the two most common reasons why people buy life insurance, period.
Is to protect their children and to protect their significant other, their spouse, domestic partner. And so those are usually finite numbers. A years. So for example, for your kids, you may think, well, I want coverage for 20 to 25 years because hopefully. By that time, the kids are gonna be financially independent and off on their own.
So you don’t need coverage for a longer period, which means you just need term insurance. Now, the most common thing that I hear from people is, well, you know, with term life insurance, if I die, I don’t get anything from it. And I would say, look at other types of insurance like auto insurance. Are you happy that you didn’t have an auto insurance claim?
You’re usually pretty happy. You don’t get anything at all from your auto insurance policy or your homeowner’s insurance policy. It’s just life insurance company marketing where you think you should be getting something back from your life insurance policy instead of thinking about, um, protecting the risk with term life insurance.
And that’s what I need.
Yes, I like that statement. I’m protecting the risk. Because what if you know, if something were to happen, then you are protected. And I’m one of those who don’t like paying that, that life insurance. Um, every six months. I don’t like paying that auto insurance, home insurance. I don’t like paying all of that.
But at least I know if I go out there and someone is driving crazy and, and causes an accident, I’m covered. If, God forbid, fire, were to, you know, my house were to burn or be flooded. I’m covered. So we, we are protecting the risk. If that those catastrophes were to happen, then we are protected. So I like the way you put that, Tony.
So there are some people who have asked to come on my podcast and they’ve had. Some things that they are promoting that I’m a bit wary off because I am a meat and potatoes person when it comes to personal finance. I do not want to introduce my, my audience to some obscure thing. I want to them to get the basics.
I don’t want them to be confused by all the, the new and fandangle things that are coming along. So there are things like be your own banker and infinite infinite banking and all of that, which. I, I am saying right now, I am against all of those things. I will not have anybody on my podcast talking about those things.
Somebody else can do that. Um, but I am against that. So what concerns should consumers watch? What, what are some things that consumers should watch out for regarding these types of things, and especially regarding liquidity, surrender charges, those kinds of things. L long-term costs, those things that may be.
The person promoting these things may not talk about,
well, you hit on the biggest one. The biggest one is liquidity. I would advise anybody and everybody to not get involved with a B or a banker, infinite banking concept, missing money concept, you know, whatever. There’s endless names. But they’re all the same, is they all promise you that you can buy a whole life insurance policy and get all these benefits from it.
What they don’t tell you is that there are surrender charges for up to the first 16 years of the policy and the surrender charge for the first five years is. A hundred percent in year one to maybe 90% in year five. So for the first five years, you have almost no access to your money. The other thing that they tell you is you’re gonna be your own banker so you can borrow your own money.
Well, guess what? If you borrow money from an insurance policy, the insurance company is going to charge you interest on the money that you’ve borrowed on your policy. You are not your own banker. You’ve bought an insurance policy. An insurance company is charging you interest. If you were your own banker, you wouldn’t charge yourself interest or you most likely wouldn’t charge yourself interest.
The other thing that you’re doing is you’re paying a really high cost for. Your insurance. So with a whole life insurance policy, as I mentioned earlier, it goes for the duration of your life. So the insurance, so if you’re 30 years old and you purchase one of these policies, the company is gonna say, well, you know, this policy’s gonna go to age 100.
They have to price the age 100. Now you may not live to 100, and that may not be your life expectancy, but from the insurance company’s perspective, that’s the end date of the policy. So they have to assume you’re gonna live to age 100 or. Pretty close to your maximum life expectancy, so they’re diviv up that mortality cost.
And bringing it back in. So you’re paying a lot more for that pure cost of insurance. Where with a term policy, you’re 30 years old. The odds of you dying in 30 years, let’s say you buy a 30 year guaranteed term policy are pretty low. Most people who are 30 years old are going to live to age 60, especially if they’re healthy enough to buy the life insurance policy in the first place.
So those are the three big things, the lack of liquidity. The interest on the loans. And then, um, you know, the high cost of insurance and the bottom line is that it can take you 15 to 20 years on those policies before your cash value even starts to get close to the amount of premiums you paid in, which means during that time, you’ve lost all the force that your money could have had invested elsewhere.
Yeah. Thank you so much. You put that so well, and, and I hope that for those who are listening, um, I’m gonna be sharing Tony’s website and you can get in touch with him because he knows a lot more about insurance than I do, which is why he’s on the podcast. So you can get in touch with him. So let’s talk a little bit about disability insurance.
That’s one insurance that I had all through my working life and, um, I think when I, when I turned a certain age. I decided and I walked away from corporate America. I decided not to continue to be covered by disability insurance. So talk about it. Why is it such a critical and sometimes a missing piece?
Or financial plan.
Actually, I have a podcast episode coming out called disability insurance. The missing piece. Ah, right on time. So we’re all the same. Yeah. So disability insurance is the most overlooked, uh, insurance policy in financial portfolios, or people have not enough coverage. So what disability insurance does is it protects your income.
So if you think about your financial plan. Everything is dependent upon your income. Unless you are financially independent, your future savings is dependent upon your income, being able to pay your expenses. Everything is dependent upon your income. You don’t have a financial plan if you don’t have disability insurance.
That’s why I call the missing piece. Now, the big thing for people to think about is, so you’re, you have an employee, you’re at a big employer, you have a group disability insurance, and most people go, okay. I’m good. I have disability insurance. What you don’t know is that there’s usually a, a maximum on the amount of monthly benefit.
It only pays a certain percentage of your income. Uh, most plans pay 50 to 60% of your income pre-tax. So that’s the other thing is that it’s a pre-tax benefit. So that means that you get 50% of your income and then that’s gonna be taxed. So think about it, could you live on the equivalent of about 35 to 40% of your current income?
If you can’t, then you need some individual disability insurance coverage in addition to your group LTD coverage. That’s the tricky thing is a lot of people think they have sufficient disability coverage, but they really don’t.
Right, because those workplaces don’t usually give you the details. Um, they’re, you’re just like, this is disability.
And it, because it’s pennies for us, sometimes it’s free. The company covers it, that we don’t really go into the details. And I know one thing that I had with my disability, which is outside of my company, I did take the companies, but it was outside. Is that it? There was a cola adjustment, not cola, whatever it’s called.
There was adjustment over, you know, each, each year they would give me an adjustment and I had the option to take it up to five times. I could, you know, say no. Um, but if I did the fifth time, then it would be go, go away. But I had the option to take it to where it’s adjusting for inflation and other things.
And I know I’m probably not. Saying it the right way, you could probably explain it better, but I did have that option and I made sure I took that. So that is an option that people could have too. And it’s not that it wasn’t very expensive at all, you know, even after paying for it over, uh, like nearly 19 years or 20 years, uh, I think I was paying like a thousand something per year.
Yeah, e, especially if you buy it when you’re young, is that premium is pretty much locked in on most disability insurance policies, so it’s relatively inexpensive if you get started early on it. And it covers the things that’s also difference between the group disability insurances, that it pays for a partial disability.
So you have something where you’re maybe only able to work three days a week for a year. It pays you two days a week of disability insurance, so you get a lot of riders, you get a rehabilitation rider, like you said, you get the option to purchase more coverage depending on the policy you buy. It has a bunch of different names, but you can gross up the coverage so you know it’s really important because your most important asset during your working years.
Is your income. Yeah. There is nothing more important during your working years than your income and you lose your income, you lose everything.
Yes. Yes. Protect that income and your ability to earn. So what’s one question? Somebody is listening to us, to us right now and they are, they, a lot of things are going through their mind.
What’s one question you wish people would ask more often before buying financial products or insurance?
I wish you would ask, what, what do I actually want? What, what matches my goals and what matches my values and who I am? So I, I, that’s the thing that I wish people would do, is they would, they would stop and say, what’s going to help me reach my goals and align with my values and who I am as a person?
Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good one. Because then that drives the purchase. Not just somebody telling you you need X, Y, Z, but you deciding based on your values and your goals. I love that. So let’s talk to that listener right now who is overwhelmed. They don’t know where to start. What’s one action that they could probably look at?
We’ve talked about life insurance, uh, we’ve talked about disability insurance, we’ve talked about, you know, uh, term maybe whole life. Um, in, in some things that we are concerned about, like the be your own banker. Um, somebody who’s listening right now. What is the main takeaway that you want him to have from this conversation that we’re having?
One to take a deep breath is, you know, that’s, that’s the first thing is make a deep breath to center yourself and then to think about, you know, maybe what are your big goals is to tune out all the noise and then to think about what questions you need to ask. I think asking questions is the most valuable tool.
That you have as a consumer. And if you don’t ask questions, you’re not gonna get answers. And if you don’t ask the right questions, you’re not gonna get the right answers. So take the time to figure out what questions you wanna ask and make sure you’re getting the answers that make sense and that you understand.
So remember, and you said it very well, Sev, is that it’s your money. You’re in control of it. Take take that power.
Yes, and, and as Tony said, if you ask a question and you don’t like the answer or you feel like the person is not giving you the answer straight, because we have some out there who will kind of talk over the answer around the answer, um, ask somebody else.
Because you have choices. I don’t want anyone listening to feel like you have no choice. You have choices. There are a plethora of insurance agents out there, um, and I’m sure that Tony, Tony has some books which we’ll talk about in a little bit that can give you some additional guidance as to how to make the choice.
And I know sometimes we get overwhelmed by life and we’re like, oh, this is another thing for me to research. Tony is a resource, you know, uh, again, and right now I’ll just go ahead and share his, his website as we talk about that. Um, Tony, talk to us about, um, the best place to, for them to connect with you and what you have going on that the listeners can probably support you with.
Um, so you can connect with me through my website. Um, I’m also very active on LinkedIn, which is how I think we met. Yeah. And uh, really my podcast is where I try to have on a very diverse group of guests with from very diverse backgrounds and viewpoints where we talk about. The things that I think are the most important.
We don’t talk about specific products and services. We talk about behavior, we talk about communication, we talk about life transitions. You’re gonna be a guest fairly soon and you know, so we try to, I try to help people. Feel empowered when they listen to my podcast by finding people that they identify with philosophically maybe where they’re coming from.
You know, whatever, you know, meets their, meets them as who they are, that they find somebody who resonates with them. Because if they find somebody who resonates with them, then that’s hopefully somebody that they’ll be able to find. Information from. And then on my website I have a bunch of free resources, uh, checklists and things like that.
And you can subscribe to my newsletter and I have weekly action items. But the whole thing that I try to do is to break it down into one simple idea at a time that hopefully people can easily implement.
Yeah, because talking the plain language, it always helps because even for me, when I go to, uh, do my life insurance or any of that, there, there are language in there that I don’t understand.
Um, for me, I’ve been going to chat GPT to define those, those words, you know, whatever works. Um, as long as you can maybe go get. One or two, uh, different opinions, three opinions, whatever it is. Um, talk to people who have those products. What, what were their experiences, um, whatever it is to get you the right thing.
And here’s the thing too. We talk about getting the right thing and asking the right questions. It is okay if you don’t know the right questions. What we term the right questions. The way to get to the right question is, as Tony said, identify your values. Identify the thing that you are wanting to, the problem you are wanting to solve, the thing that you are wanting to resolve.
Identifying those things and asking questions about those things. Those are the right questions. So when we say the right question, it’s not, there’s a certain question that is the right question. It’s the question that’s going to get you the answer to the problem that you are trying to solve. So Tony, thank you again for being on the podcast and sharing your wisdom with us.
Any final words that you’d like to share?
Yeah, I just encourage people to be curious and to ask questions, and as you pointed out, so well Sev it when I say the term right. Questions. As you point out, it’s the right questions that are gonna get you the answers that you want. There is no right or wrong question.
It’s just the questions that get you the answers you want.
Yes. Thank you so much. And this is a reminder as we wrap up, that money is layered and personal and insurance is one important part of that larger picture. Financial fluency helps us slow down. Ask better questions and make decisions with clarity and intention.
That kind of readiness supports choices that serve our lives, not just today, but over time. As always, please take care of yourself and your money.
