Today, I want to talk about the “Glass Bull”. This statue is actually a hand-blown bull that I purchased in the village of Murano, Italy years ago. I think it was in the early 1990s. You can go to my YouTube channel by searching ‘Mark Bertrang’ to get a better picture of what this looks like. This bull is actually engraved by the artisan who made it in Murano. Murano is one of the islands which is part of Venice, Italy. There are several islands in Venice that require an additional boat to get to. Another one is Burano, Italy where they make homemade lace and have been doing so for generations. Murano is where they make glass and I remember it by the M which reminds me of melting and melting reminds me of melting glass. Murano is basically a very colorful village, and there are glass blowing factories. When I purchased this bull, my wife thought I was insane because it’s glass and how were we supposed to carry this glass bull all over Italy in a backpack and make sure it would not fall and break? For all these decades, it has been on my bookcase now as kind of a reminder of a wonderful trip that I took years ago.
I decided that I was going to buy this because we know about the bulls and bears that are symbols of Wall Street. I think especially right now with the market and the way that it’s been going up and down crazily from one extreme to another that it’s important to look at a glass bull and think of the old saying ‘that person had a glass jaw’. If you were a boxer and someone said you had a glass jaw, if you were hit in the jaw it was going to break like glass. This is a bull made of glass and it would not take much for it to break in to pieces. Isn’t that the way it feels with the stock market sometimes?
I’m not speaking negatively about the stock market. It is a necessary part of ownership into companies in the United States of America and also companies all over the world. It’s a part of our economic process, but a lot of people are trying to live (and sometimes die) on what happens in the stock market. You need to have something more than just a bull made out of glass.
I’m a contract guy. I love contracts. I love to know exactly what the values are going to be today, tomorrow, and in to the future. I like stipulations in contracts. The unfortunate thing when it comes to ownership in companies is that they go up and down in value depending on what the market is like on that particular day. It is important then to have a part of your portfolio in something that will last during the good times and during the bad times as well.
It seems like half the times are good and half the times are bad. People are happy, joyful, exuberant, and sometimes greedy when times are good. When times are bad, people are fearful. They wonder how bad it will get, what will happen with their money, what will happen with their security, what will happen with their savings, what will happen with their family, what will happen with their job, what will happen with the economy, and question after question. That’s why it’s not supposed to be all this or all that in a portfolio.
You need to make sure that you have the proper portfolio in place. One of the portfolios that I have in place, I have seven of them in fact, seven elements as part of my life insurance portfolio because, again, I like contracts. I like to know what my guarantees are. Yes, there will be death benefits. Not If I die, but When I die. Though, I am planning on being around for a long, long time. But if I’m not, I’ve got it setup where the longer I live, the living benefits of my portfolio can actually enhance my life. Money will accumulate tax-deferred and tax-free that will allow me the opportunities that if there is an emergency in my life, I’ve got some place to run to so my life does not change. I’ve got ‘oops’ money. I’ve got money for any problematic times in my life.
I’ve also got money for opportunities. The saying goes, “Opportunities will come your way if you have money.” If you have the money, all you have to do is listen and wait, and they will come to you. If you don’t have money, don’t bother. You will watch the opportunities go marching by as if it were a parade. Unfortunately, you will only be able to see the back end of the parade when everyone is cleaning up after the horses have gone through.
Instead of experiencing a parade after the horses have gone through and what’s left afterwards…and clowns and clown cars, perhaps you could take advantage of some of these opportunities in the parade and march in the band of Prosperity. That’s what we’re really talking about here. We’re talking about the Prosperity Movement in your life as opposed to things always in disarray or things always fearfully at risk because right now it appears that the bull is really made of glass.
Now, obviously, the market goes up and down. It’ll be back up again. It always has and it probably always will. This is not investment advice; this is just asking you what are you doing for your base-line security so you can take that risk on without having the fear of everything else going south. What do you have that is not going to be going south?
Inside of a whole life insurance contract, the life insurance asset, there are guaranteed values that go up each and every year, contractually. The clients that I have had for decades are the ones that typically never ever want to touch their money because they look at it and think “I never would have had this amount of liquid money had Mark not set me up with a plan decades ago.” Money can grow over time or money can grow very quickly. We can construct a plan nowadays that you can force feed money in to it just like you would force feed a goose to create liver pâté. It might be a really poor example, sorry about the visual, but it works the same way. You take a contract and push in as much cash as possible to get it to do something that it was maybe not originally intended to do; push cash in earlier to build cash value earlier so you’re that much more ahead of the curve.
You might also be the type of person who wants to put money in on a methodical basis. Oftentimes, you’ll end up in the same spot down the road, but the curve of the money is going to look slightly different. But by having money in this safe, sound, and secure place, it allows you to be able to live through these times that feel like a glass bull when things are questionable and uncertain in the economy. It’s about having money ear-marked in a safe place to store your cash.
Life insurance is not an investment. It’s a place where you can store your safe money, but it is an overall part of a strategy to be able to get to where you want to go. You are then able to leverage those benefits later on in life to live the life that you want to live without fear or concern about what happens if the glass bull breaks.
If you want to learn more about the life insurance asset and how it could help your life, I would ask you to do one of two things. Either ready my book which is available at Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, Audible, or iTunes. I ask that you start at the beginning and go all the way through. There are stories of love and there are small educational sections piece by piece that will teach you how the life insurance asset works and can work in your life. Or if you would like to know more about me or my team, arrange a time that we can meet in person or via Zoom. We can work with clients all over the United States. Simply explore my website at www.investmentsdonthug.com and decide today to protect yourself from the worries of the glass bull.
