I got into this industry
by getting swindled by it.

How I actually got here

My path into insurance wasn't exactly planned. I was working for a local nonprofit — we raised money for high school football and handed out a college football award for the best defensive player in the region. Good work, good people. Through that work I was introduced to a small insurance operation and offered an opportunity.

They also walked off with 75% of my life insurance commissions because I didn't know enough about the industry to know what was happening until it already had. I was uneducated. They were predatory. That combination is more common in insurance than anyone in the industry likes to admit.

After that, I found my way to Medicare through an online forum, a stranger who became a mentor, and a regional training director who made a mistake by leaving me off an email list and made it right by sitting down with me one-on-one. That meeting introduced me to a colleague who was building a Medicare agency from scratch. Four years later, I'm still working alongside both of them.

Two sales. That's what I made in my entire first Annual Enrollment Period — six weeks after getting my license. I tell people that because I want them to know I didn't walk into this with natural talent or a family connection or a book of business handed to me. I built it by showing up and being honest with people about what they were looking at.

Why Medicare — and why I stayed

After everything with that first agency, I was drawn to Medicare for a specific reason: there's no upsell.

In life insurance sales — especially the IUL and FUL products that operation was pushing — the job is to convince someone they need something they may not, maximize the premium, and employ whatever persuasion techniques work best. I wasn't built for it. I don't enjoy it. And I watched people get steered wrong constantly.

That's it. That's the whole job. Nobody leaves a Medicare consultation having been sold something they didn't need. They leave with a plan that fits their life — or they leave with better information than they came in with, and that's good enough too.

Over 500 clients across North Carolina and South Carolina later, that part hasn't changed.

The thing that bothers me most about this industry

I spend a meaningful amount of my time fixing Medicare plans that shouldn't have been sold the way they were. Not because the plan was wrong for the person — because the person was scared into the wrong plan by someone who didn't bother to explain what they were actually looking at.

Medicare Advantage plans get a bad reputation that most of them don't deserve. You've probably seen the articles — someone couldn't see their doctor, a medication wasn't covered, a claim was denied. The stories are real. The problem isn't the plans.

The problem is that the person in that story talked to a call center rep reading from a script instead of a local agent who knew the local networks. Or they got scared by a headline and chose a Supplement plan they can't actually afford long-term. Or they Googled "Medicare Advantage bad" and found the loudest voice instead of an accurate one.

I'm not here to sell you a plan. I'm not even here to convince you of anything. I'm here because the information available to most people approaching Medicare is either sanitized to the point of uselessness, or sensationalized to the point of being actively misleading — and you deserve better than both.

The part where I tell you I'm a real person

I went to NC State. I'm married, I have a son, and we have another child on the way — which means my household is currently operating at a level of organized chaos that would make most project managers quit on the spot.

I garden. I golf. I am, by any objective standard, extremely bad at golf — genuinely embarrassing, if we're being honest — but I keep showing up because that's kind of what I do. I also know enough about gardening to tell you that patience and good soil matter more than anything else, which is maybe also true of Medicare decisions but that feels like a stretch of a metaphor so I'll leave it there.

I grew up in a time when people left their doors unlocked and neighbors looked out for each other without being asked. That's not nostalgia — it's the standard I hold myself to in this work. The kind of person who offers to help before you need to ask. The kind you'd actually be glad to see if they just walked through your front door.

That's who I want to be for the people who read this site. Nothing more complicated than that.