Whether you're new to the world of insurance or just looking for practical tips to safeguard your family's legacy, this episode is packed with relatable stories and expert insights.

Brett Johnson and Katie Ellis sit down with Leah Jennings, an insurance advisor with years of experience in helping families secure their futures. Leah shares her journey from starting in a captive agency to becoming an independent insurance advisor at Synergy Financial, where she specializes in personalized life insurance and financial planning—especially for middle America.

In this conversation, you'll learn why the personal touch matters so much in the insurance industry, the key differences between insurance advisors and financial advisors, and why face-to-face meetings are essential. Leah also breaks down common misunderstandings about life insurance, highlights the importance of living benefits and long-term care, and offers actionable advice for people just starting to think about financial protection—including what college grads should know about student loan debt and insurance.

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Key Takeaways:

1. Face-to-face matters: Sitting down in person with a life insurance advisor helps ensure you fully understand your policy, ask the right questions, and avoid missing critical details.
2. Protection is more than you think: Life insurance isn’t just about what happens when you’re gone—it can include living benefits like long-term care that support you and your loved ones while you’re alive.
3. Start early—especially if you have debt: Even recent grads with student loans should strongly consider life insurance to protect their family from unexpected financial burdens.

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Let's Get Back To The Interview 1

We'll be back right after this 1

Welcome to Business Inspires, where our goal is to inspire you to create the business you envision. I'm Brett Johnson, Tri Village Chamber Partnership board member and the owner of Circle 270 Media Podcast Consultants.

Thank you for following and subscribing to the podcast with Ms. Katie Ellis, President and CEO of the TRI Village Chamber Partnership and co host of the podcast. It's great to be here with you, Katie.

So good to be back as always, Brett. And today we are joined by Leah Jennings. Leah, thank you so much for taking the time today.

Yeah, it's great to be here.

So you have years of experience and a passion for helping families secure their futures, to ensure their peace of mind by offering that personalized life insurance and financial planning support. Can you share with us what inspired you to become an insurance agent?

So I wanted them independent. And so I applied to a lot of places and my recent firm, they're housed under Synergy Financial.

And we just focus on helping people and really in middle America, prepare or and grow their wealth in a way that makes them feel ready for retirement. And they have that knowledge so that if something happens, they probably know what to do or they can contact us.

You know, all of us. It seems like the insurance term is like, oh, gotta have it, but hate to deal with it. You know, it seems complex and sometimes intimidating.

How do you make the process approachable and comfortable for your clients?

I deal with life insurance. It's not health insurance. Health insurance is just much more complicated.

Okay.

To think about for a lot of people.

Yeah.

And the people who do that is they are really knowledgeable.

But the way that we help our clients is we really ask them to sit down with us because it's really much better if where in front of them rather than just talking to them over the phone.

It's, it's more personable and most importantly, it creates less questions because we go through everything and we show an illustration like, of what this could do for them and make sure they understand almost anything or almost everything they should understand, like what the policy is, how it works, the ins and outs. Right.

Yeah. I think there's still some services and products and such that we're still going to need that face to face.

You need to really understand where your potential or your current client is coming from and where they're going. That makes sense that you know you're having success in doing that because there's just certain things we don't want to buy without talking it out.

A lot of people don't realize that in the insurance industry or mainly on the life side, you really should sit down face to face with the life agent because you don't want to do it completely over the phone because there could be things that the agent might miss. And so when they go to look to see what's available, they might pull something that sounds right but doesn't look right to you.

So that's why it's very important for us to be face to face. And it's a compliance issue.

Oh, that's. Yeah, that's definitely key too.

I just was reminded of the idea of driving down the road with somebody in having a conversation, you're both in the car, you see something happen in traffic in front of you and you stop talking. Right. But if you're on the phone with someone, they don't know what's, they can't see it as well. And so then they just keep talking.

It's more of a distraction. So it's amazing just having this world of zoom and being able to get back to being in person.

There's so many things that can kind of slip through those cracks, you know, not being in the same room with someone and sharing the same space. In looking through your services, Leah, your business tagline is reliable safeguard partner.

Can you share a story where you were able to tailor a plan to fit a family's unique well being and legacy goals?

I started off with this firm meeting with people I know so I could spread it out and expand because I do. I am licensed in multiple states, well, mostly on the east coast with like two or three out in the west.

So I met with this family, my cousin to be specific, and we had a sit down with her and we just went through what we do, how we do it and most importantly why we do it. So once she heard that and we went over some financial topics like for instance, compound and simple interest.

The difference is one needs the assistance of a financial advisor or which is who my colleagues are affiliate with. I'm working on my security license. So officially I'm not a financial advisor, I'm an insurance advisor. It's very important to note the difference.

We basically sat down with her, looked at a few things and we found that they needed some type of protection, which is what I, what I could do right now and we got her protected.

And so say something like they got in an accident or they got something happened to them and they died, they would be okay because they had something which is better than nothing, right?

Yeah. Well. And you know that kind of leads me to my next question. You, you, you touched upon it.

What is something most people misunderstand about life insurance or financial protection?

Well that's what we go over when we meet with a client. So it's about protecting people. So lots, lots of people think life insurance is about what happens when you die.

Right.

But sometimes it's more about what happens if you live. A lot of the carriers we work with, they have this thing called living benefits which is like long term care which is popping up more and more now.

Now that the. I don't want to get political but the bill has.

It's really much a bigger question would happen if people need long term care and a lot of families don't have like, don't have any like or much money to put into that for like themselves without like some type of policy. It's important to sit down with an advisor, a financial advisor or an insurance advisor and talk about a long term care solution.

I, I'm also likely to do that and actually I do have my life and health license. The only reason why I have my health license is for long term care.

Yeah, that's that definitely a topic that has been, you know long term care has been around, the insurance has been around for a long time but it's talk about one aspect of a product line.

It's kind of misunderstood or just kind of put to the side it seems like, I mean I'm guilty of it too because it's just one of those oh that'll never happen to me, you know, that sort of thing. But it's that not understand it's evolved over time.

I get too but I can imagine there are a lot of questions, a lot of concerns when you bring that up kind of going well how does that apply to me?

And a lot of people, especially older people do need, will need it eventually. I unfortunately had some personal experience of when my family had to do the unthinkable and put my grandparents in a nursing home.

So Leah, if you can step on the other side of the table for a moment and be the person in need of choosing life insurance. What are some questions that we always need to ask when choosing an insurance policy?

So it depends on the type of policy of course but the biggest thing is I know the agent should Ask do you have any chronic or critical illnesses in your history? Because that affects whether you can have a writer which is like the long term care and critical illness and chronic illness.

Because it affects whether we could put it on your policy or we use a living benefit options. It depends on the carrier that we would think.

For example, one question I think you should always ask is what's this rider really going to benefit me from? So we always try to put the living benefits on there if you we know you could qualify.

So it's really more of like just thinking about if the unthinkable happens, like say you had a stroke and you had that critical or yeah, it's critical illness, right. Or something. You could probably ask the company or the carrier if they could help. And it's mostly like it's most likely for like 90 consecutive days.

And that's majority of caries are like that. So that's always something you want to ask them the agent about.

Like if we put this critical or chronic illness protection rider, are there any specifics that we should know?

I'm going to fold a couple of questions in my next question and being, you know, giving a piece of advice to someone, just starting to think about insurance, what would it be? But at the same time, can you talk a little bit with that advice to someone? At what age should you think about a life insurance policy?

Or is it really once you start really kind of maybe having an income.

Should consider requires a little bit of thinking because a lot of times parents do get their kids life insurance policies and you know, it depends on what you want the policy for your kids to look like. So if you just want them to have something, we would usually probably recommend like the minimum which is probably funeral rates.

So like 10 to 15,000.

Because like sometimes when you have a very big policy on your kid, you usually imply that you have a bigger policy because insurance carriers do look at that and they determine if you can have the policy for your kid because they don't want you to usually have a policy bigger than yours or a policy in general for your kid unless you had one.

Is there any other advice that you would give someone, you know their first foray into this are kind of thinking, yeah, I keep hearing I should look into life insurance. Is there any other advice you would give to someone that is just beginning this adventure?

I know college grads don't want to think about it, but they should definitely look into it if they have student loan debt. Because if you have student loan debt and something happens to you it falls on.

Probably will fall on your next of kin because especially if it's your parents. If your parents co. Signed a student loan, then it probably would fall on your parents. So having a sure. Policy. Policy for those kinds of things.

So if you're a student and you have student loan debt, I would go talk to an insurance advisor. Especially since you're over 18 and your parents can't do it for you, but you have to sit through it and talk with them because you're over 18.

Yeah. And you know, what you just brought up, there are lots of those little things.

You just don't realize that once you've passed away, it just doesn't go away. This has to, you know, it could be, like you said, an education loan, car loan, whatever it might be anything you owe somebody.

People start lining up and raising their hand going, my turn. I get some of that money. I get money. You know, this person owed me money. Yeah. To, you know, bank or whatever the case might be.

That's a really good point. I'm glad you brought that up because you forget about those things.

Absolutely the same.

I was having the same thought, Brett, that, you know, you could maybe sell a car and help pay down that loan, but you can't sell a student loan, student loan, anyone. It's not something that you can navigate. Leah, what would you wish more people knew about working with an insurance advisor?

Mostly that you need to meet face to face with them, especially if they're not a resident agent. So a lot of times you could be talking to a resident or an agent that's licensed in the state, but not a resident of the state.

We've talked about what you're doing now and how you got into this. I mean, what are your goals for the next few years for your career with. With this new, new adventure?

So the goal is obviously to get securities license because a lot of people would be interested in looking at something in the stock, stock market. So like offers me a little bit more leeway.

Like if someone wanted to roll over security to an insurance product, then I could do that without doing a whole bunch of paperwork.

Do you have some mentors or some guidance from other people to kind of help you see the light, I guess you could say, or seeing the opportunities out there.

Yes. And she is actually in California. Her name is Monica Carter. All of her clients speak highly of her, so she's been helping me.

I actually just got back from a conference for our firm out in Vegas.

That's wonderful. We all need those mentors, role models People that keep us grounded and also inspired and energized.

Well, Leah, thank you so much for joining us today. How can people find you? They want to reach out.

So I am on social media, so I have a Facebook page and I do have an Instagram page. So the link in my Instagram page is also a link to my calendar.

And that way you get to set up a meeting with me so that we could just go over and discuss some things to get us started so I can start looking and see what I could do. I'm licensed to all parts of the US or not all parts. All parts of the eastern side of the US and one of them actually includes New York.

So if you're in New York and you need some assistance, know that while there's not that many people you could call, we will always try to find, figure out something because there are some things we can do in New York. So New York is very, very difficult. It's not the person, it's the state they're in.

They have so many laws, especially when it comes to telemarketing for people in New York. Just know that if you reach out, we just need to know a few things to know if we can help you.

Well, listeners, thank you for joining us. And don't forget to check out our podcast page on the Tri Village Chamber Partnership website.

Look for the podcast tab at the top of the homepage and be sure to tell us what you think about this or any of our other episodes. You can do that at this email address, infohamberpartnership.org.