Meet Mark Cassara of Legacy Wealth Academy

0:03Richelle DeliaHello everyone and welcome back. This is Richelle Delia and I am from Local Business Spotlight and really excited to have Mark Cassara here today. We're going to be chatting all things insurance, infinite banking, all sorts of fun stuff.

0:18Richelle DeliaMark, thank you so much for joining me today.

0:20Mark Cassaraabsolutely. My pleasure. Looking forward to talking.

0:23Richelle DeliaAbsolutely. Well, tell us a little bit about your story. What's your story morning, Glory? How'd you get to where you are today?

0:28Mark CassaraWow, we'd be here for quite a while if I went into it. Started in the East Coast, was born and raised in Connecticut, found my wife in New York, settled down at 22, got married, had a whole batch of couple batches of kids.

0:44Mark CassaraI say batches because we had, well, she had a daughter when I married her, so I have a stepdaughter who's older, but then we had a set of twin boys, and they're 14 now, and then a few years after the boys, we had a set of triplet girls, and so we had a

1:02Mark Cassaracouple batches. That's why I say batches.

1:07Richelle DeliaFun fact, not to use up your story, but I have a family friend. She already had four children. Her husband and her husband had four children, and they had an oops baby.

1:16Richelle DeliaThat oops baby was triplets.

1:17Mark CassaraOh my gosh.

1:22Richelle DeliaIt's

1:22Mark Cassaraa lot. It's a lot. But besides the point, we moved to Dallas about four years ago, so we're in Dallas, North Dallas, Celina, Texas right now, and just growing our family and building a business.

1:37Mark CassaraExcellent,

1:37Richelle Deliaand Salina's one of the most fastest growing cities in the DFW Metroplex, which is how we met in one of the Facebook groups. So very excited about that.

1:44Richelle DeliaSo tell us a little bit about Legacy Wealth Academy.

1:48Mark Cassaraso Legacy Wealth Academy was established about six years ago, really as an educational consultation type of company to educate people on the benefits of life insurance and retirement planning, estate planning, and all things in between.

2:07Mark CassaraWe really focused on life insurance for a large batch of those years, and we gravitated towards the pre-retirees and retirees to really focus on retirement planning. One of the biggest things right now is this huge wealth transfer that's taking place from the baby boomer generation to the millennials and kids that are younger

2:30Mark Cassarabecause people are retiring or they're just passing away maybe. So there's a lot of money going somewhere, and a lot of people don't know where it goes.

2:39Mark CassaraThey don't know how to protect it. They don't know what to do with it, and so we're kind of helping people navigate those murky waters right now, especially with the instability in the market.

2:49Mark CassaraWe're not securities advisors or anything like that, but we help with retirement. We found that financial advisors are really good at helping people make money and accumulate money for all those years, but some advisors aren't good at...

3:05Mark CassaraWe call it on the way down from Everest. That's kind of what we specialize in, and we found a niche there that people really need help with that.

3:13Richelle DeliaThat's amazing, and the silver tsunami is huge. Like you mentioned, that wealth transfer from the elder adults, so your boomers, and there's some greater generations hanging around here as well, coming down to us millennials.

3:25Richelle DeliaApparently, I'm an elder millennial, according to the internet, according to TikTok.

3:31Mark CassaraMe too, actually. My wife is a little older than me. She's Gen X, and I always grew up thinking I was Gen X, and then we looked at the numbers.

3:42Mark CassaraI was an 82 baby. Oh, right by my cusp. Right there at the cusp, so unfortunately... Well, not unfortunately, but she calls me a millennial and she's Gen X, so that's like a riding joke in our marriage right now.

3:54Mark CassaraThat's beautiful. That's beautiful.

3:56Richelle DeliaWhen someone's looking you online, how would they tell you different from all the other retirement planners out in the ether sphere or even in Celina?

4:05Mark CassaraGreat question. I started my business on social media, and I was very successful for many years because of social media, and social media was the only way that I was getting out there and generating traffic to my offer or my service.

4:21Mark CassaraI have about a million plus followers across a couple different social media channels. TikTok was big for me, and there wasn't a lot of finance advisors or insurance people on TikTok back in 2000, 2001, 2002, right after COVID.

4:39Mark CassaraI started generating views. I got 100,000, 200,000, 600,000, all the way up to... Right now, my TikTok's close to 700,000, and then I transferred over to Facebook, and Facebook was another boom.

4:52Mark CassaraThere was nobody really doing educational content for insurance and retirement planning on those platforms. So Facebook, a couple of my videos got 10 million, 20 million, 40 million views.

5:05Mark CassaraMe just kind of sharing breaking news and talking about the economy. Before I knew it, I had 800,000 followers on my Facebook page, and that translated into...

5:16Mark CassaraWe did it with Instagram and then we did it with YouTube. That's kind of what sets me apart. I'm kind of like the face on social media that just talks about insurance and retirement planning and stuff like that.

5:29Mark CassaraSo you'll find a lot of my content there, and that's how I've gotten a lot of my clients over the years.

5:34Richelle DeliaWell, that's incredible. Thank you so much for sharing that, and congrats, I think I may need some social media tips from you. For sure, for sure. So if someone is interested and they're like, oh my goodness, I love what Mark Cassara, I'm picking up what he's putting down.

5:46Richelle DeliaHow can they find out more about you? What is your website, your social, what are all the things?

5:51Mark Cassaralike I said, Mark Cassara and most platforms, a big kind of snafu that we had a year and a half ago was Facebook took my 800,000 follower account down.

6:04Mark CassaraThey just banned me. And so I lost that Facebook account. And that was where like 90% of my traffic for my business was coming from. And so that was like, that was like this big like, come to Jesus moment, this wake up moment.

6:17Mark CassaraYou know, do I have to put, you know, it's not good to put your trust all in one lead source, one platform, right? Unfortunately, I did for a very long time.

6:25Mark CassaraAnd so when that went down, business kind of fell. And so I'm like, at this point in my life where like, I'm really kind of figuring out which direction I want to go kind of like this midlife moment.

6:36Mark CassaraAnd you know, it's a good place to be. So I can do a lot of different things. But you can find me on social media, Mark Cassara, most places, YouTube, tik tok, Instagram, LinkedIn, some Mark Cassara, just my name, my website's legacy wealth, Academy, llc.com.

6:54Mark CassaraAnd that's also a place where you can find me, I have a school community and stuff like that, where we teach financial literacy and all things retirement planning.

7:04Mark CassaraSo yeah,

7:05Richelle Deliaexcellent. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. And we really appreciate the time to chat for a little bit and make the world a little bit smaller.

7:12Mark CassaraAppreciate you too.

7:12Mark CassaraThanks for having me.

7:14Richelle DeliaAwesome. See y'all next time.