By Dr. Jim Dahle, WCI FounderThe White Coat Investor was sold this week to insurance giant SouthEastern Mutual (SEM) for the sum of $132,712.87. The motivation to sell mostly came from a recent WCICON (The Physician Wellness and Financial Literacy Conference). After three days of pickleball, laps around the lazy river, great food, top-notch presentations, and people endlessly thanking me for changing their lives and making me sign their books, I thought maybe a big change in our lives was in order.
Alignment
The alignment between the two companies seemed obvious. The CEOs of both companies breathe oxygen. Both companies have a presence in Utah. We both want you to reduce the amount of tax paid in retirement: WCI via intelligent tax management and SEM via low returns and making you pay interest instead. We both want you to buy junk from us: 18-ounce Yetis from WCI and $40,000 per year whole life policies from SEM.
Changes at the Company
However, there have been a few consequences to this merger. For example, the lineup of talks at WCICON26 has been changed. It now looks like this:
- Keynote: What You Need to Know About Whole Life Insurance
- Keynote: Appropriate Uses of Whole Life Insurance
- Bank on Yourself
- Infinite Banking
- Lifetime Economic Acceleration Process (LEAP)
- How to Pay for College Using Whole Life Insurance
- How to Avoid Estate Taxes Via Low Returns
- Why You Should Pay Interest to Use Your Own Money
- Why Whole Life Insurance Is Just Like Your Roth IRA
- Why You Shouldn't Care How Much That Guy Is Making in Commissions
- Why Commissioned Salespeople Make the Best Financial Advisors
- Lunch and Learn: How to Get a Policy for Everyone in the Family, Even If They Haven't Been Born Yet
- Lunch and Learn: How to Exchange One Whole Life Policy for Another and Generate a Completely Different Commission Without Paying Any Taxes
- How to Pay Long-Term Care Expenses with Whole Life Insurance
- MEC, 7-Pay, 10-Pay, and Forever-Pay: 4 Different Options for Buying Your Policy
- A Whole Life Insurance Success Story
- The Other Whole Life Insurance Success Story (Yes, There Are Only Two)
- Whole Life vs. Annuities: Which One Is Better Designed to Be Sold?
- Why the Guy Who Sold You a Whole Life Policy Now Sells Used Cars
It should be a really great conference!
There were a few other consequences to the merger as well. For example, the entire WCI staff quit overnight. The podcast has also gone from tens of thousands of downloads per episode to zero. And there were a few death threats judged to be “somewhat credible” by local police and the FBI, but since the bullet holes were relatively small caliber, we didn't worry about them too much.
More information here:
How Shorting Ethereum Helped Us Make Payroll (April Fools')
Why (And How) We're Disinheriting Our Kids (April Fools')
What We're Doing Now
We've gone ahead and taken the $132,712.87 we received from selling the company, divided it four ways, and purchased whole life policies for each of our children. Now, when they turn 18 and we ask them to start making the premium payments, they'll have to decide whether to keep them or secretly dump them while complaining to friends about how financially inept their parents were.
Fun and Games
OK, you can quit emailing me questions about Tesla features. Yes, I'm sorry that 2024 post about PSLF now feels way too prescient. Yes, we'll probably keep doing these even though a few of you don't like them according to this poll taken at WCICON25:
Yes, this is an April Fools' Day post. Yes, I'm trying to make them even more obvious every year. No, we did not sell the company. And no, we'll never sell it to an insurance company that inappropriately sells doctors whole life insurance policies. But yes, I am sorry if you spit your coffee all over the table this morning when you saw the title of this post in your email inbox. It won't take long to clean up.
What do you think? What was your favorite part of the post? Which of our April Fools' posts has gotten you the best? Should we keep doing these April Fools' posts?
Every year you do a good one. But I can tell this is one you’ve waited your whole life for…
Very punny.
Sloof Lirpa!
I was fooled until the second paragraph – then realized it was April 1. Please continue the tradition each year.
Same. Was confused, but as soon as I saw “whole life” I remembered the date.
I’m in California and it’s time to go bed…
Thanks for the fun.
CA, AK, HI are all at a bit of a disadvantage if they read on 3/31.
😉
I figured you would eventually decide to do this. Now seems like as good a time as any for you to make the announcement.
Congratulations! I know you’ve been planning this Post for a while. I expect it takes a lot of time and effort to explain things “just the right way” so that your readers will get the point and not have any hard feelings about what you did!
Seriously, my heart skipped a couple of beats when I saw this in my In Box. Mission Accomplished!
I definitely try to make it more obvious every year.
Some other folks will obviously disagree with this statement, and I don’t mean any offense by making it, but actually I wish you did NOT have to make these April Fool’s Day Posts more obvious each year.
I LOVED it when you were freer to be wildly creative with the content on this day, and where your readers had to scratch their heads and wonder if what you had written was fact or fiction. And then think, with some of the Posts – like the one on PSLF – “My goodness, if this IS TRUE, how might this impact me and what am I going to need to do to try to deal with these new circumstances?”
Critical thinking like that plays an important role in financial planning, investing, and medicine.
IMO, it’s unfortunate you have to ‘dumb these Posts down’ to minimize the likelihood anyone will actually be fooled and get upset because they thought the Post was ‘for real’.
But I understand why you feel you need to do that. Nevertheless, IMO, this should be the ONE Post during the year where your creativity has no limits!
Great work, as always. I always look forward to your 4/1 post
I happen to believe WCI is worth a few pennies more than $140K so I recalled today’s date a little quicker than in prior years, Whole Life riff quickly confirming my suspicion. Keep on but this year’s is better than the fearsome too realistic and too close to home (not for this retiree who paid off student loans last century) of last year’s. I almost skipped reading that one as not applicable to us.
If it said $60M, I might have believed it!
Your list of talks at the conference are epic. I laughed out loud… multiple times. So clever.
Ha I’m definitely gonna come to WCICON 26!
Jim, let me know if you need speakers my former financial advisor would make a great one!
Seriously though, you really should come. I think there’s at least another columnist panel planned. I bet a lot of readers would love meeting YOU in person.
Love these posts (including the one from 2024)!
Had me for half a second! Good one and very entertaining post.
But also reminded me…I’m still waiting for the ‘April Fools!’ from Physician on Fire 🙁
Via email:
#1 Yes keep doing them. But I love when they were not so obvious… The PSLF one I sent to my Son in Law was by far the best.
# 2 That was NOT Funny 😆
# 3 Wow !!!! Great post this morning. I almost pissed myself and puked up my blueberry muffin. It was like being told that Index funds are a poor investment and all I needed to do was to buy more whole life. Great fun. Thanks for reminding me about April Fool. Now I will scare my wife when she gets up with “ There’s an armadillo running around the house !!”
# 4 Good one
# 5 lol this was awesome. I’m so happy you haven’t sold, you have the best insights and somehow the personal finance landscape KEEPS EVOLVING even though I’ve been at this 20 years now, I’m 45! Thank you for staying in the game. Happy April Fools Day!
# 6 Best one yet. Must have been fun to write.
# 7 Funny – Thx!
# 8 You got me good… Thanks 😉 Keep up the good work and the April fools 😉
# 9 Gets me every flipping year.
# 10 Got me.
# 11 Keep up the April Fool’s Day posts. They are very enjoyable!
# 12 Hilarious…
# 13 lol love this!
# 14 Happy April Fools Day!
# 15 You got me for about 5 seconds. Happy April fools
# 16 you got me so bad……. I gasped…… haha, thanks for that.
# 17 Omg! I BELIEVED THIS!!!
# 18 April fool again. You can’t sell the same joke again. 🤣
# 19 Money talks for WVI
# 20 Ha ha you had me there for a min!!
# 21 Good one👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼😆
# 22 I enjoyed it! Keep up the good work
# 23 You got me! Caused me some chest pain actually 😂
# 24 that was so good. I read 50% before I clued in. The stuff that comes out of WCI is so advanced that I know at the end I’ll earn something.
# 25 Wow, you got me good. I was truly very sad as I thought this was for real and didn’t know where else I would be able to get trustworthy info unique to doctors/dentists. I was bummed for 3 days as didn’t get to read the bottom until today.
My vote: No to April Fools Day pranks. That was such a feeling of loss (though I was going to tell you that I was happy for you…if that’s what you wanted to do) it was almost too much.
Forgive me for not responding to all of you individually! Not sure exactly what #s 18 and 19 are referring to either. I always feel bad reading ones like # 25.
I like them. I’m just wondering what happened to the top tier 401k
Maybe you find out next April.
who figured out the 4/1 part by the whole life insurance thingy 🙂
Wait, you can pay for college with a Whole Life policy?!? Game Changer, maybe. : O)
I knew it wasn’t real, but a fun read. $132MM may have been more believable and a Term Insurance company. I think you could have strung us along a bit. : O)
I fell for this!! Until the more I kept reading and then remembered what today is.
I LOVE it
YOU HAD ME FOOLED!!!
This was quite good, Jim!
What is the significance of the sale price number?
I’m assuming there is a story behind this precise of a number: $132,712.87.
Nope. I just picked a random number out of my brain.
$132,712.87
Seems like they over paid.
it is actually interesting, how much would WCI be worth?
If you don’t have Jim involved how much revenue can you squeeze out of it ?
I feel like probably quite little.
I’m flattered that you think I’m worth so much. I’d rather not be of course. The more it’s worth without me the more it’s worth.
The business did just fine last Fall when I was busy falling off mountains and laying around in ICUs. Not sure I’m as important as you think I am.
And once we finally get that AI version of Jim Dahle up and running, the real Jim Dahle will become pretty obsolete, I’d say.
sure but how many of your customers, erm readers, knew you were MIA? also you had a fair amount of prewritten material.
I dont think the issue is keeping the site running or maintaining the site, it’s about how much traffic would still come in
I pretty much told everybody 2 weeks into my 12 weekish sabbatical.
At any rate, there’s a lot going on here at WCI besides my writing. Four huge online communities, social media channels I basically never touch, a dozen or more other writers etc. The podcast hosting would be the trickiest part to replace. The rest….not so much.
There’s 15 year of prewritten material at this point that can be rerun ad nauseum. We already re run something old once a week. So do that twice a week and have a columnist post or two and the blog rolls on fine. Most “customers” aren’t the regular readers that read everything I write anyway. I mean, how much stuff have you bought from us or one of our advertisers in the last year? See my point?
yea I mean I figure y’all know how you make money and who you make it from more than I do.
>. Most “customers” aren’t the regular readers that read everything I write anyway. I mean, how much stuff have you bought from us or one of our advertisers in the last year?
Actually got a physician mortage this year and everyone I emailed when appling I mentioned I’d found them through yall
If you go back two years I got disability insurance from one the people who advertises with you which I assume is a high commission product and hopefully you all got a cut
if you go back THREE years then 2 of your book books as well as trying to buy books on amazon from your referral link.
so hopefully you made some money on that.
Although probably not as much as if someone buys one course which is interesting to think about.
Awesome! Glad to hear it. My assumption is most people use one or two referrals over the course of ten years and maybe buy a book. Only a small percentage buy courses or come to the conference etc. We couldn’t have everyone come to the conference anyway. That would be one crazy conference. The fun thing about the monetization model is that we don’t actually need EVERYONE to be a customer for this to work. The vast majority of WCIers can never pay us a dime and we can still make payroll and keep this thing going well enough to fulfill its mission.
Oops, I guess I should have read this in more detail. After reading a portion of this blog, I sold all my holdings and purchased an indexed annuity…and while talking to my insurance guy, slapped down some bank on some whole life.
Ya, I had a hunch by the “selling price,” but still had to read down to the second paragraph, before jumping to the punchline.
Well done!
Love your April Fools posts. This one is good but my favorite will always be the one from last year about PSLF being canceled. I believed it until at least 3/4 of the way through!