They say that if you do what you love you will succeed.  Helping families invest for their children’s future became a passion I discovered after having my third child and which led me to earning $3.3Million selling insurance for children, advising parents how to give their children the secure financial future they can be proud of and training over 300 advisors how to educate their clients on this incredible plan.

I started Insurance For Children and created Child Plan after having my third child and facing the same dilemma every parent faced when planning for her education and future.

Was the RESP my only option for my daughter’s education and future?

As a stockbroker at RBC Dominion Securities, I managed money for a living and always advised my clients of the two golden rules when it came to building wealth in Canada.

Rule number 1. Don’t get into business with the Government of Canada and Rule

Rule 2. See rule number 1.

I would tell them the Government of Canada is good at giving you a 10¢ benefit today and taking $1 back later.

Since my other children were older, I never did an RESP for them and when I had my last child I was told repeatedly that my only option for her education and future was the RESP.

However, As I learned more how the RESP worked, I remembered my two golden rules.

How much RESP grants Will She actually get for her future?

While every bank advisor preached the free money of the 20% RESP grant. I read the fine print and learned that she’d only receive from the Government of Canada for her future education would be $7,200 by the time she turned 17, if I deposited $36,000. That’s it. Nothing more! The rest would be up to the risk of the stock market, and I can do that from TFSA account or my non registered investment account.

I quickly realized that the RESP wasn’t an actual investment but a Government program for her education with Government rules on where she can go to school, what she studied and how the money I saved can be used.

The 20% RESP Penalty

Then came the big surprise banks didn’t want to tell parents. If my daughter who is now 9 months old at this point has a scholarship or chooses a different path than what the Government wants, I would not be able to use the RESP grants we received, shut down the RESP account and have to return the grants they gave. While I can take my $36,000 back without any taxes, any growth in the RESP would be taxed as income to me PLUS another 20% of the growth as penalty because she didn’t do what the Government of Canada wanted her to do.

RESP Vs Participating Whole Life

That’s when I learned about Participating Whole Life and that it was a tax-free investment parents opened for their children in Canada since 1847, until the RESP came along and every advisor stopped telling parents about this incredible plan.

Being an economist by education and a money manager for a career, I researched what parents in Canada were being offered for their children’s future and learned they were only offered the RESP.

My research showed that parents were investing $10 Billion a year for their children’s future, there were 380,000 children born in Canada every year and there were 1.9 million children in Canada under the age of 4, every year! and the only competing product to a Participating Whole Life was a brandless no name product called RESP offered by banks and group RESP companies.

Good luck is opportunity meets action.

I fell in love with the product, left RBC, created insurance for children and set up insuranceforchildren.ca. I then created Child Plan. It’s a child, it’s a plan. It’s a Child Plan, and began educating parents across Canada about this incredible tax-free plan for their children’s futures.

Easiest Sale I Ever Made

I was told by industry experts and professionals over and over again, this won’t work. They kept saying you should sell it as a way for parents to buy cheap life insurance for their children’s futures with some cash values and not as an investment.  While my whole career was sales and I thought selling life insurance for a baby would be tough. It turned out to be the easiest sale I ever made because the way I educated parents they realized the benefits of the plan and that it wasn’t life insurance on their child’s life but an investment for their child’s life.

We launched the website in 2014 and began digitally marketing Child Plan direct to parents. The response was incredible. We sold a plan every two sales meetings and then I realized since I was speaking to parents who just had a baby, I was the first advisor to speak with them and so without even trying, parents would ask is this only for children? To which I would say no, you can also use the same plan as a tax-free insured retirement plan.

I’d then present them an Insured Retirement Plan, they’d open a Participating Whole Life plan for themselves as well and my sale quickly went from $2500 premium for the child to an average of $12,500 per family.

Child Plan Is Now The Fastest Growing Alternative To RESP

Child Plan is now the fastest growing alternative to RESP and every advisor that went through my Child Plan sales training program kept saying. It can’t be that easy? My reply was always. You just showed them how you can make their child wealthy in life. Why wouldn’t they like it and do they have another option?

Since launching Child Plan, I’ve trained  over 300 hundred independent insurance advisors to become Child Plan Advisors.

While I love working with families, I decided in 2023 to open up Child Plan to all advisors and going forward I will train the next generation of insurance advisors to bring Child Plan to every family across Canada with a young child to help them build that child’s financial future.

Child Plan is now a platform available to all insurance advisors across Canada, who want to learn to educate parents on how to invest for their children’s futures, become their trusted family advisor and manage all their insurance and investments.

Insurance Brands is now the parent company of Child Plan and Insurance For Children. Our cloud based platform provides advisors with a digital platform that connects them with pre-qualified ready to buy Child Plan clients and a powerful client management system to manage their sales and applications, from anywhere in the world.

Since launching Insurance Brands, we’re growing rapidly with advisors and agencies who want to learn how to sell Child Plan and connect with parents. While I made an incredible income from selling insurance for children, and have a great personal satisfaction of how I changed the lives of thousands of children, I’ll really enjoy watching all the insurance advisors I’ll be training succeed in the future.

If you’d like to learn more about becoming a Child Plan advisor or  want to join of of our Child Plan training sessions, feel free to register below and we’ll email you with more information.

Thanks toe everyone who’s been with me on this journey.

Michael Lampel