I have recently assigned the following tasks to myself.
Passing the SIE Exam
I want to get the SIE exam behind me any time when I am allowed to take it by the third party exam entity Prometric. They will sort out their mistakes for failing to launch my online exam in July and allow me to reschedule for an on-site exam instead.
Should have done the on-site exam in the first place, as online exam has too much uncertainty.
I make SIE exam my priority because the securities industry is more challenging than other finance fields like insurance. As one article puts it, insurance is not the sexiest financial branch or products. On the other hand, my impression from when I was teaching corporate finance told me that some (undergraduate or MBA) students may never get their heads around complicated issues like option trading (e.g., calls vs puts, long vs short, buy vs write).
I put SIE first also because I am trying to turn a negative event into something positive, taking advantage of the extra time waiting for the newly scheduled test, I have been reading the SIE course materials (provided by the license training entity ExamFX) to help understand the contents better than before, even though I am pretty sure I would have passed the SIE in July had I taken the exam back then online.
It’s almost like I went through the first time just in order to pass the exam, but the second time is for myself to keep the key knowledge points in my head.
Study Tips
I have not been studying for exam for so long that I took this opportunity to refresh my memories and learn new and efficient ways of test preparation.
The first tip is to read from multiple sources on the same topic. Sticking to one book or one source is inefficient compared with different sources. At the minimum, you need to get things from two authors or two sources. The first is the official learning materials from ExamFX, and the second from your own digging mostly from online. During my study it sometimes happened that I thought I had learned something completely new only from my own “second author” or second source, only later to find that the same thing has been said by the “first author” — it’s just that I did not pay enough attention to leave some trace of memory.
Of course, oftentimes the second source did add something new that was missed or poorly stated by the first source. To the extent the second author/source is from my own digging, this is the beauty of active learning.
Similarly, you are better off to memorize things from reading different sources than going over the stuff from the same single source again and again. I do believe going over twice is good, because the second time you may find something new that you missed for the first time, but anything more than twice will have lower efficiency.
Studying different topics also helps. If nothing else, switching topics is a good way to rest your brain and to raise the learning efficiency. So, while I read the SIE stuff, I mixed it with Medicare training stuff and have found this pattern refreshing.
The third tip to myself is to try best to internalize knowledge points, like putting down your own thoughts along the way of reading others. At the end of day, learning is a very private and personal process, and you always remember your own learning notes better than what others have written.
I have drafted several Word files named “One Thousand Questions on SIE,” or “One Thousand Questions on Medicare” and “One Thousand Medicines & Medical Terms” to help myself understand and memorize things. Those files become your accomplishments and will be yours forever.
Finishing the AHIP Certificate Training
AHIP = America’s Health Insurance Plans, which provides online training courses for any insurance agents to receive certificate that most insurance carriers will want you to have before allowing you to sell their policies and Medicare Plans.
The certification requires two courses: Medicare and Fraud, Waste & Abuse (FWA), which are designed to protect seniors from agents’ fraud and abuse. I must pass two final exams. The first on Medicare is made of 50 questions from 5 modules, and we must get 90% right to be certified (each of us is allowed three attempts in a year). The second final exam on FWA has 10 questions and we are required to get at least 7 right.
The AHIP certificate allows me to sell Medicare Advantage plans during the annual enrollment period. But each insurance carrier also has its own training materials and exam.
Finishing Training and Pass Exam for Partnership LTC Insurance Policies
This is required for selling partnership long term care insurance LTCi policies, which according to this website, is “an innovative program of the State of California, Department of Health Care Services in cooperation with a select number of private insurance companies. These companies have agreed to offer high-quality policies that must meet stringent requirements set by the Partnership and the State of California. These special policies are commonly called “Partnership policies”. Partnership policies take the guesswork out of ensuring you purchased a quality policy. In addition to many other consumer protection features, Partnership policies offer the special benefit of Medi-Cal Asset Protection.”
According to this website, to qualify for selling these partnership policies, an insurance agent is “required to complete eight (8) hours of general long-term care continuing education (CE) and 8 hours of classroom only CE specifically on the Partnership prior to the marketing of any Partnership certified policies/certificates. After the initial education requirement has been met, agents are required to repeat eight hours of classroom training on the Partnership each two-year license approval period.”
Developing a Website for My Home Care Organization
This will focus on my Home Care Organization (HCO) license and build a home for matching families in needs of long term care with caregivers. My goal is to develop an image intensive, modern looking “post slider” style on Word Press using the comprehensive Plugin of Smart Slider 3 that I just found recently. Much learning is needed there, as I am completely new to this. The hope is that having slideshows makes a website dynamic and lively.
My own private WP site of thought diary is full of text and hardly any image, which is fine because those blogs are for myself. A Home Care Organization website will however need to capture more public attention, and a text only website is too boring to be appealing to a wide audience.
My sense is that if one can choose, everyone would prefer a PowerPoint file to a MS Word file. A slider mixed with images (downloaded from Pixabay.com for free, both royalty free and dollar free) and headline-type texts will work well.
Selling Life Insurance Policies
Once my contracts with insurance carriers go through, I will start selling life insurance contracts (mostly on the line of “final expenses”). The income generated from this line of business will act as the “Cash cow” to support other endeavors.
Preparing for A Berkeley Senior Welfare Team
In the back of my mind, I never stopped thinking about having a Berkeley team of senior welfares, both insurance, investment and long term home cares. This means I will recruit two types of talents: senior caregivers and senior financial advisors.
The quality of a team is mostly shaped by team leaders. Preparing and investing in myself thus will help the team in the future.
I want to establish a unique team (or teams if we separate caregivers and financial advisors) to do three things better than others: (1) Delivering heartfelt tender loving cares to seniors; (2) Possessing knowledge in the laws, rules and regulations related to senior welfares, and (3) Utilizing technologies to raise the efficiency in providing senior welfare.
Regarding the last goal, one good example is to use Excel to check or screen health and financial conditions of insurance applicants. Right now, insurance agents are using papers and pens to write down medical and health information, but that should be done using the predesigned Excel sheet listing all the conditions and medicines, and the agent would only need to check the corresponding cells based on the particular conditions of each particular applicant. This way we leave a permanent electronic record for quick reference and retrieval. The whole field underwriting should leave no trace of paper filled with handwriting.
In addition to a applicant screening sheet with predetermined rows and columns for financial and medical conditions, another sheet will list all major insurance carriers and their particular insurance products (including the latest promotion on a policy for a particular health condition, such as stroke). Therefore, once the cells are checked on the application screening sheet, the Excel will automatically jump to this sheet with the best policy offered by insurance carriers. This way, we leave no question out as whether the applicant gets the best insurance product for his/her condition.
Alternatively, we can use just one sheet for one applicant. For each prelisted condition and medication, we add a comment to the cell showing which carrier has the best or most lenient policy for the condition, combining the age, sex and other demography. When you move the mouse to that cell, the best matching policy and its carrier will be seen on the screen.
The idea is to do the screening or field underwriting together with the potential offering.
An even more important advantage is to use Excel to calculate and to demonstrate the best insurance policy fitting client’s unique need. Almost every author and commentator recommended talking to a licensed insurance agent for picking up the best insurance product. But the truth is that not all agents were born equal. Just because he/she has a license does not mean the person is knowledgeable and best qualified for making insurance decision on behalf of the client.
We have seen other industries like tax professionals, doctors and nurses, who are supposed to provide the first and last line assistances for clients but they themselves ended up using and relying on TurboTax (for tax accountants) and WebMD (for medical doctors). The naked truth is that technologies help everyone, including the professionals.
Now with Excel, each agent can get the (health and financial) info of the applicant and then use that to search — and more importantly, to compare policies from different carriers right in front of the client. We will show the monthly premium, accumulated premium, and total costs for different policies by different carriers. Right there we will make a fact-based convincing impression, not so much by empty words but by real numbers.
This Berkeley team will know the relevant laws, rules & regulations and is able to explain them to the applicants. The best way knowing whether one knows something really well is not through exams but whether one can put it in one’s own words that are understandable by a lay person. One teammate may barely pass the license exam by getting only 60% right, yet he/she could be the star communicator with clients. And he/she will be ten times more likely to be a MVP than the presumably perfect test taker.
Toward that goal, I will encourage team members to contribute to a website by writing blogs to explain financial and health issues as if they are talking to (potential) clients. Writing is the best way to learn.
We can also collect and share case stories from my future team members so that we not only know the rules on paper but also how to apply them to real people, real situation and real preferences.
Went to two soccer games this semester already, one for men and another for women. The results are two ties (2:2 for men against USF and 1:1 for women against SCU). The Bears were a bit weak in terms of controlling the ball, but the girls were surprisingly good yesterday playing the 2001 NCAA Women’s Soccer Championship and again the 2020 NCAA Championship.