Get all the inside secrets and tools you need to help you develop your intuitive and leadership skills so you are on the path to the highest level of success with ease. Jacob Guidi shares how understanding employee benefits and making strategic choices can create long-term financial advantages for both employees and employers.

In this episode you will learn:

• Employee benefits can be a powerful tool for reducing taxes and increasing financial leverage.
• Asking the right questions about portability and guaranteed issue coverage can protect your future options.
• Long-term planning and informed decision-making help maximize the value of workplace benefits.

About Jacob:

Jacob Guidi, Director, Thrive Benefits Group

Jacob works with business owners to uncover financial opportunities within their existing systems, helping them improve cash flow, optimize payroll strategies, and build stronger financial foundations. He simplifies complex financial concepts into practical, actionable insights that business owners can immediately apply.

Website: https://thrivebg.com

If you are ready to start reaching your goals instead of simply dreaming about it, start today with 12minutegift.com!

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Are you ready to tiptoe into your intuition and tap into your soul’s message? Let’s talk

Listen in as Jennifer Takagi, founder of Takagi Consulting, Certified High Performance Coach, 5X time Amazon.Com Best Selling-Author, Certified Soul Care Coach, Certified Jack Canfield Success Principle Trainer, Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst and Facilitator of the DISC Behavioral Profiles, Certified Change Style Indicator Facilitator, Law of Attraction Practitioner, and Certified Coaching Specialist - leadership entrepreneur, speaker and trainer, shares the lessons she’s learned along the way. Each episode is designed to give you the tools, ideas, and inspiration to lead with integrity. Humor is a big part of Jennifer’s life, so expect a few puns and possibly some sarcasm. Tune in for a motivational guest, a story or tips to take you even closer to that success you’ve been coveting. Please share the episodes that inspired you the most and be sure to leave a comment.

Official Website: http://www.jennifertakagi.com

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I look forward to connecting with you soon,

Jennifer Takagi

Speaker, Trainer, Author, Energy Healer

PS: We would love to hear from you! For questions, coaching, or to book interviews, please email my team at [email protected]

Welcome to Destin for Success. I'm your

host, Jennifer Takagi. And today we have the honor of talking

with Jacob Gweey. I got it right, didn't I?

Yeah, you got that right.

Oh, I love people's names right. I don't

get offended when Takagi isn't quite right, but I like to get

other people's names right as best I can. Today we're going to

talk about financial leverage, turning employee care into

profit. And before we like dive deep into this, because I'm very

interested in this topic, you're a cellist and educator, proud

father, account director at Thrive Benefits Group. I want to

talk about this cellist business, and the only reason

I'm really curious is, in fifth grade, major integration

happening in Oklahoma, and I was bussed to the other side of

town, and to get parents to allow their children to be

bussed, they gave all kinds of activities you wouldn't have had

normally in school, and one of them was a strings class, and I

played the bass for like part of a semester, and then I got

switched to the violin, because just because I thought a bass

was awfully big, but then there was that beautiful cello that

was next to me for however long, so I'm just curious, how did you

end up getting into playing the cello?

So music does kind of run in the family. My mom was

an orchestra teacher, so I did. I was nursed in an orchestra

room in between her classes, so I ran around there after school

I started playing my first instrument was guitar,

self-taught by ear, but then you know school came along and we

were doing the string class, right, and I decided I don't

know why I did this, I knew I wanted to play the cello, but I

was like, no, I'm gonna play the bass, Mom, and I tried out to do

the bass and Mister Billup said, "No, your hand, just play the

cello. So, yeah, long story short, I went to college and

decided to, you know, pursue that more seriously, because

everyone in the world plays guitar, and three degrees later,

I have a Doctorate of Musical Arts in and cello performance.

Oh my gosh, and when I was in school, they had

us put our hand out, and we had to spread our fingers as far as

we could. It was like as far as you can, and because I had a big

gap between my index figure and middle figure, that's why I

could play the bass, because you could make that next leap for

the chords, but I took piano and played in the orchestra, you

know, I didn't, I went to class, I was terrible, so, but I love

it, so you made a big pivot too, I've got a degree in French and

Spanish, and I've never used it? I mean, I sound great at a

Mexican restaurant. I sound really good, and I went to

school in Mexico, Spain, and France. So, I had a lot of cool

adventures that other people didn't, and and then I made a

hard right turn, and you know, got a real job in housing for

many years, so you actually went way far and got a PhD, and then

made a hard right turn, left turn, whatever, into financial.

So, tell me about that little pivot, and about this financial

leverage.

Yeah, so it wasn't hard pivot or not, like I

internally debate that, like it's not like I've abandoned it,

my instruments right there. The case is open, I'm practicing. We

have a concert this weekend, but it, when I was finishing my

degree, we're in the middle of it, you know, I had a daughter

on the way, and so responsibility hit, like I could

do it as a, you know, bachelor, where I could freelance or I

could teach, and I'm driving around doing my thing, and you

know, making money that way, but when you start to have a family,

you know, things need to be reprioritized, and so I had

already kind of began working in insurance at that time, and so I

saw the capabilities of working from home and what that provided

with me for me, so I just slowly transitioned into it as a more

stable form of work and income that didn't require the same

energy from me in terms of just going places and then filling up

my time with rehearsals and practice, and you know, I still,

I still really do make an effort to practice, but the pivot was

more out of the necessity, so I could also be present as a

father and as a partner, so I. Um, you know, because I could

still just be that musician rolling around, just not here at

all, and you know, that'd be fine too, but I do enjoy, I do

enjoy my family and being able to spend time with them, so

yeah, I, you know, as I said in the middle of that, I kind of

was getting into individual insurance sales, and my friend,

who brought me on in there, they had a company, they work in

employee benefits, I had began marketing and doing sales on the

individual side, and I said, "Hey, let me do some marketing

for you, let me generate some more lead and appointments for

y'all, because began running cold email campaigns. I kind of

worked for nine months, basically for free, until some

business started to land, and then they're like, all right, we

want you on, and yeah, we've been here for the last three

years or so. We, we focus a lot on helping nonprofits and

assisted living facilities by giving them more power to not

only save internally but to give more benefits back to their

employees, so it doesn't, you know, feel like, feel like a

financial pressure on them, because insurance at the end of

the day is kind of a luxury, it's one of those, at least you

know, outside your health insurance, it's one of those

first things that'll go, you know, I'll have this life

insurance policy that it's kind of like a subscription, you

don't need anymore, let's cut it, and so we want to be able to

empower people so that that pressure is is removed and so

that they can have a more holistic view of their finances,

to where if something does go wrong, like keep that in place,

because it's not really a financial pressure for you right

now, you know. So, yeah,

insurance is one of those things that you

know it seems like a wasted expense until you need it, and

then you're like, oh, thank goodness I have that, and I love

the idea that you know, you just kind of, I'm going to say, eased

into this different chapter of your life, because mine was, I

wanted a steady paycheck and benefits, and I didn't want to

be a school teacher, and those were kind of my buy options,

right? Like this makes a lot more sense for me now. So, how

do we turn employee care into profit? That's just an

interesting title there. That was it, intrigued me a bit.

Yeah, so when you offer employee benefits, there's

a good way to do it, there's a bad way to do it, and there

they're different levels to the good and the bad ways you can do

it, but you know the first thing that you can do, and this is

just kind of like fit into structure in general, so beyond

a certain point, it is legally required that an employer, I

believe, like beyond 50 employees, the ACA guidelines

require an employer to provide at least minimal essential

coverage to employees, match 50% of that, if there are any kind

of lawyers out there, please don't come scolding me, because

I cited that wrong, but so you at a certain threshold, you have

to start providing benefits, even if, like, you're not at

that threshold, and you want to start providing benefits,

because it gives you a retention angle or leverage on your

competitors, you know, how do you do that the smart way? Well,

the first thing that you can do is create or have an ERISA

attorney draft a section 125 cafeteria plan. So, in a

nutshell, what that does is it allows employees to pre-tax

their benefits. Now, that might be something that you're just

like, oh yeah, have benefits, oh yeah, it comes out pre tax, but

like nobody really like, like, why does that happen? Can you

tell me, Jennifer, like, why people pre-tax or benefits?

Um, because that way they don't have to pay

taxes on it, unless they use it,

yeah, kind of, sort of, you're in the right

field. It

helps you. It creates tax savings, so regardless of if you

use it or not, and it's also for the employer's advantage. So,

regardless of if you use it or not, if I'm going to make this

purchase, I can make the purchase pre-tax or I can make

it post-tax, right, by making the purchase pre-tax, an

employee, if it's health insurance, based on the average

premium, you end up saving between two to $3,000 every year

in taxes by pre-taxing it, because your taxable wages go

down, and that means you're paying less in federal, state,

unless you don't have state taxes, I. Texas Medicare and

Social Security, right. And so when you have less taxable

wages, all three of those taxes go down because you pre-tax

something, right. And then for you as the employer, you have to

match a part of those taxes, right, specifically the Medicare

and the Social Security. So you're always responsible for

that, that's that's FICA, that's just how it is. If you have W-2

employees, and so when you start providing benefits, hey, when

you use a plan like this, a 125 you're allowing the employee to

create tax savings, but you're also creating tax savings for

yourself, right? Because when your employees are paying less

in taxes, when they're paying less in social security and

medicare, you have to match less in social security and medicare,

and so that's how you start creating that financial

leverage, is by reducing your FICA exposure, and this is

normally way more technical than I normally get into, but like,

if you want the like details, like, yeah, that's like kind of

like step one, like basic assumption, if you want to do

it, turning it into financial leverage, that that would be the

first place I would go.

Okay, so I'm I'm an employee, because I think

many of my listeners are employees or entrepreneurs,

that's kind of like the two bases that I, that I attract for

the most part. So, I'm an employee. Are there certain

things I need to ask or request of my employer or HR when I go

in to talk about what my best options are, because to be

really honest, a lot of things, a lot of decisions I made, and I

had options were what other people in the office were doing,

and for example, they came in and offered long term care

disability, and I had personal things happening in my within my

family, and it was like, oh my gosh, my husband and I need

this, and a friend at work did an immense amount of research,

I'm not the research girl in this equation, he did a lot of

research and said, you know, most people are in a nursing

home or need a lot of skilled care, roughly three years, and

so I'm only going to get three years of long-term care, and I

was like, okay, me too, me too. So I have three years. Do I need

more? I don't know. Thank God I'm not at that point yet. I

don't know what I need, but so I'm an employee, and if I had

been, some might say more responsible. I don't know. So

far things have worked out okay for me, but if I had wanted to

take more of an active role in this, are there some, some

questions, some things I need to know or ask about, so that I

make the best, best choice for me and for my family?

Yeah, I will speak specifically to what I can, you

know, provide the most value in, and that will be the

supplementals, so like your long-term care, short-term

accident expense, hospital indemnities, the major medical,

which is like one of those benefits that are, is probably

the most confusing, and while I, I know about it, you know. I'm

not going to sit here and pretend like I can lead you down

the straight and narrow path, because in any of these

situations it's very like case dependent. I

think clear, let's be clear, this is just a

conversation, you're not any advice, so we'll just put that

little caveat.

Okay,

I know that, but let's make sure all the

listeners know that you're just sharing in general information.

I think in general, I'll just get that one out of

the way. If, when your HR department releases a benefit

summary, benefits package, and it goes over the different

healthcare, like medical insurance options, give that to

an AI, and then request it to ask you questions about what

your most utilized prescriptions are. How many times you go to

the doctor a year? What kind of services you need, like what

your family looks like, who all is going to be on the plan, how

accident prone they are, and then that will do the best job,

honestly, in terms of pointing you to the plan that you need,

without you needing to become a professional. I do believe that,

and so, like, with that one out of the way, as the employee, and

wanting to take a more active, like, role in your benefits, I

think one of the first things you can ask your employer is,

are these portable, and so what does portability mean?

Portability means you have the option to take this coverage

with you, whether you remain with this employer or not. And

so, why is that important? So you said you're. Employee, are

you an employee at the place that still provides the

long-term disability, or is that at an old job

that's an old job? So, I guess it was

portable, because I'm still paying the premiums, and I still

have the benefits.

Great, is that

portable? I didn't even know that was a

thing. Look at me, I made a good choice there, Jacob.

Yeah, so that's, and I would say it's kind of

silly if you got long-term care. If you need, if you're not still

paying for it, sometimes you sign up for something and you

take it into, like, your bigger insurance, like strategy, and

you're like, oh, well, I have this critical illness policy,

and you know when something happens to you after you've

changed jobs and you didn't like elect that benefit because you

thought, oh, well, I, you know, got this insurance elsewhere,

you know, it's not there. And so, what portability means is

that you are the owner of the policy. A lot of the benefits

are employer specific, right? So, like your health insurance,

you don't keep the health insurance from Employer A when

you go to Employer B, you don't keep the same 401 k from

Employer A to Employer B, but it is in, like, your account, so

you can transfer that money. That's kind of the same nature

with those accident critical illness life insurance plans,

you have the option to take it with you, or you might need to

just repurchase it at the new employer, right. And so the

other thing to consider with that, another question I would

ask, you know, are these plans guaranteed to issue? It doesn't

matter, you know which way, if they are or they aren't, but

what guaranteed issue means, and what you especially find to

someone, or as you're getting older, and you know you start

experiencing more health problems, is when you have to

get something approved and they have to go through your medical

records. Well, if you have to go through my medical records, and

saw that I had a stroke last year, or that I have, you know,

diabetic neuropathy. Then you can get declined,

and

so that's where, hey, I actually have this policy from my old

employer that was issued to me when I was healthy, or was

guaranteed issue. If it's portable, I can carry it with

me. I don't have to worry about the policies at my new employer,

and so this is the other thing, you know, it's kind of that

long-term thinking that you know most people don't really care

about, because you know it's it's only important when you

need it, but

so guaranteed issue, would that be like

pre-existing is that is would that fall under that

it overlooks anything, any pre-existing

conditions, it doesn't care, you're getting issued, you're

approved for coverage.

Well, and just side note, in the US, we've made

lots of changes in the last 10 years to all of this, and I have

a friend who all of a sudden couldn't get health care at all

because the preexisting conditions - oh, what's the word

I'm looking for - requirement that you had to allow

preexisting conditions was taken away, and so all of a sudden he

was uninsurable, 100% He had zero health insurance, and then

it kind of came back. So those are the kind of nuances. You,

it's not an issue when you're healthy, but you have a heart

attack, and all of a sudden it matters, or you get cancer, and

all of a sudden it matters. Whereas, man, when I was 30,

none of this mattered, right? And now it's like,

yeah, that would be the other, that, that would be

my last bit of advice, is if you're young and you're healthy,

or you're relatively young and healthy, and you've kind of, I

think of them like baseball cards, or like collectibles, if

you have a handful of good collectible cards, the benefit

of getting them through an employer and on a group plan is

that they're generally cheaper, and if they're portable and

guaranteed issue, then you got those cards, those are valuable

cards, just hold on to them. It's kind of like real estate,

you know, it's it's not gonna hurt you, you know, $50 a month,

60, $70 a month, all combined for what could be hundreds of

1000s of dollars in potential relief in the future, so you

know, while it might seem like a, you know, a quick budget fix,

I will, this will pay for my Netflix in a extra big mac a

month, like seriously, like it's the financial stress you'll be

in later is not worth it, for like what you could just like

save and plan for today,

so you, you said several things that were,

you know, big key thing. For me, and one is, you have to look

towards the end. My parents were very financially well, they were

dirt poor for many years, but as they started accumulating a

little bit, and they, they were very wise with their money, and

they made choices very specifically, and I can

remember, as I don't know, I was in my 20s, early 30s, and they

were hitting that retirement age, and some of their friends

had the exact same opportunities, literally job

offers at the same place, and turned it down because they

could not see the value of the benefits, it was just like, oh

no, I don't want that, paychecks not good enough, and my dad kept

saying, but the benefits, like, but the, and they couldn't see

that, so if you're in that planning stage in life, look at

the long-term benefits, look at these things, because at one day

you're going to look up and you're going to be 65 and you're

going to be going, wow, I could have done a few little things,

you don't have to do everything perfectly, but I could have done

a few things differently or better, and the other piece I

love about this, I was at an event recently, and one of the

major topics was AI and leveraging AI and what it can do

for you, and fast forward a week, I met a woman online who

had been at the same event, and she literally said, after the

first day of talking about AI, I went back to my hotel room and

cried, and I thought, holy crap, bully, I went back to my hotel

room and whipped out my laptop, and I was like, what can I

create? So, this fear around AI, what it can do for you, is

somewhat unfounded as far as the amount of information you could

get, and I love that your recommendation of look up what

the benefits are, drop it into AI, and have it, you know, break

it out for you, and you can actually have it talk to you.

You can have a conversation. I'm like, "Hey, I'm Jennifer, I've

got this.. blah blah blah. The more you talk to yours, the more

it knows you. Now, I just dropped stuff in, and it was

like, "Hey, Jennifer, what do you want to do today? Um, I do

have a paid, you know, disclaimer, I have a paid Open

AI Chat GPT account. I have other ones that are free, and I

bounce between them, depending on what I'm doing. But it's been

very eye-opening, the amount of information you can get very

quickly on what's available to you, and so, like, my friend

looked up some prescription stuff, and it was like, yeah,

this one's just as good, you know? You don't have to pay blah

blah blah, you can get it here. So, like, those are two really

big key takeaways for me personally, is don't be scared

of AI, and it's never too early to start planning.

Yeah, yeah. yeah, no, I mean, it's truly, there's

so much available to you, I think, you know, the more you

interact with it, you can start to, there is still a, I think

there will always be a layer of like responsibility you should

bring to the conversation, absolutely, you know, there's

there's so much available to you, and it's the best way I can

put it. If no one has ever, like, used it at this point, you

know, when you want to, like, look up something on Google, but

then you look at it, and then you get, like, 15 different

pages, you're like, I don't care about this, these are blog posts

or things, and then I have to sift through the things to find

the thing, or it's a YouTube video, and you have to sift to

find the thing. The AI is just a straight shot to basically your,

your request, so it is. It is a very powerful tool that you

should start leveraging, most definitely.

Well, and I love the fact that it tells you

where all it went, and it starts with Google, like it went to

Google, it went to Wikipedia, it went to here, it went to there,

I mean, like it hits the newspaper, so it's kind of fun,

because if you ask a very complicated question, you'll see

all these little circles pop up, and those are all the different

places it's going to grab the information, and as you say,

sift it down into a somewhat comprehensible answer, but I

love that we can use it for something so important as our

health care, like, or well, any kind of insurance, actually, and

financial planning, like, is this the best plan, what works

for me, for what works for my family, years ago, many years

ago, you could choose as a woman or as a man, I guess, for a

family plan if you wanted maternity insurance, health

insurance, and you could choose, do I want maternity or not, and

my sister had a friend who opted. Not to get the maternity,

she was like, "No, she had two kids remarried, and she was

like, "No, we're not going to have any more kids, and lo and

behold, she ended up pregnant, and so, yeah, it was a cash out

of pocket hospital for her, but like, you could pick and choose

what you need, what's your family dynamic, and what are you

going to need, what are you going to use. So,

yeah,

super important to know to know your dynamics

for your audience. I do have a bonus, I know I

talked about, I talked about the, you know, basic, you know,

okay, if you wanted to start turning it into financial

leverage, and then in the conversation, like, wow, you

know, all I talk about, I guess, is financial leverage, because

it's insurance, but for real, besides that, like layer one

setup, there's a second layer setup that you can provide. That

second layer setup is going to create additional tax savings

without what feels to be that burden on the employee, like you

said with your dad and his friends, you know, same

position, they just couldn't see the value of the benefits. What

people dislike about benefits or insurance in general is that it

feels like an out-of-pocket expense. You, as an employer or

as an employee, your employer has the option to provide you

with a setup where you can get additional money back into your

paycheck that can either pay for your benefits or be a pay bump,

a monthly pay bump by utilizing a specific strategy, and that's

what we, what we help all of our clients with. So, if you'd like

to learn more about that, you can go to Never Ending

fundraiser.com you'll be able to drop in your email, take a quick

quiz, and then if you'd like to hop on a on a call with us, we

can walk you through how you can set that up for your

organization, but in general, it's creating about $250 per

month per person in net tax savings, so you know, for a 10

employee, for a 10 employee group, you could be looking at,

you know, close to $30,000 in tax savings in a year alone.

Wow, and that was Never Ending Fund raiser.com

Yep,

and that will be in the show notes. So, those

of you who are listening on your phone, just look at the show

notes and click the link, it'll be, it'll be clickable, so we'll

have that, that in there for you. So this has been really a

great conversation as we wrap up our talk. Do you have any final

words for the audience? I

Don't be afraid to live your life how you want it.

Don't be afraid to take the risk, even if you feel like it's

late in life, or you know there are no more risks left to take.

Just take one, even if it's a tiny one, maybe take another

one, and just enjoy, enjoy what you have while you can.

Perfect last words. Thank you so much, Jacob.

It was a pleasure getting to know you, and I look forward to

connecting with you soon.

You too. Thank you so much, Jennifer.

All right, thank you.

Bye.