No matter what they try and tell you, all this means is that Primerica can sell these products for commission. This is how financial planning works, you get licensed, and you sell financial products. Any financial planner with similar licensing can give you the same service.

The video goes on to tell us about how great the opportunity is, but we saw nothing new with Primerica. We did find it interesting that they referred to themselves as the fastest growing ‘financial services marketing company’. It’s interesting wording because they are creating a category which probably doesn’t exist outside of themselves, WFG and a couple of other MLMs who promote financial services. If I moved to New York and got a brokers license, I could call myself ‘the most successful West Australian broker in New York’. The title might be true, but it also doesn’t mean anything.

The video goes on to tell us a bit about the MLM ranks and has a collection of people, who tell us how great their lives are because of Primerica. Their stories might be true, but that doesn’t mean that the results will be the same for you. We want to know more about how Primerica is going to help us from day one.

The best document we could find for new Primericans is the 2015 Primerica New Recruit Manual, which outlines how the business works. This has not been supplied directly by Primerica, it is from people in their MLM, so we can not confirm if it is still valid or if it's an original unedited Primerica document. we do like the line on the bottom of each page which says ‘for internal use only, not to be used with, or distributed to the public’. We downloaded it from the internet, so it appears that these Primericans perhaps didn’t follow that rule too well.

The manual starts of will some very basic stuff, such as how to dress for meetings, and when to attend training. It then shows you all the licenses you will need to obtain before moving on to the important part… recruiting. Their is a whole page for you to fill in with names and details of potential Primierica recruits. After that we get to the interesting part.

Page 6 of the New Recruit Manual is a script to be used when calling potential leads. The opening part of the script reads ‘I am currently getting my state license, and part of my requirement is to take my trainer to 10 presentations in the next week’. We found this particularly interesting because even though we don’t know which state they are in, we believe this statement is not true.

The real goal here, is to get your upline in front of your warm leads before you are licensed. What this means to you, is that your leads become clients for your sponsor. If you aren’t licensed, you can’t sell products, so there is no point calling your leads until you are ready to make sales yourself.

It looks like they are trying to leverage your relationships with friends and family to get clients for themselves. They may say things to you like ‘why wouldn’t you want to share this’. Or something similar, but we strongly suggest you resist calling your warm market until after you fully understand the products are are licensed to sell them yourself.

We read through the rest of the manual and there is a lot about overcoming objections, and asking your leads for more referrals. There is no mention of studying for your license, or setting aside time for proper product training.

Spending time learning and watching your ‘trainer’, work with their clients would be much more effective to your own future. Feeding leads to your trainer is better for their financial future. You can call us cynical, but this opinion is based on close to 20 years experience in financial services.

It was nice to see that on page 13, they offer some stand responses to standard objections. Our favourite was the one where they purport that your regular job is a pyramid scheme. It’s very interesting that Primerica does not deny being a Pyramid themselves.

You can make money with Primerica by selling a combination of term life insurance, mutual funds, and debt management products. How much you can earn will depend on how well you generate sales. Don't worry if you're not a sales person because Primerica has 'a time-tested method of building a business and earning a potentially unlimited income'. They confirm that you will need insurance and securities licensing to reach maximum income levels.

For more information about the opportunity, we looked at a document called 2017 Introduction to Primerica. This document also contains information which is ‘not available to the public’, which didn’t stop an agent from posting a copy online. We accessed the information and no NDAs have been signed, so we’re going to go ahead and share our findings.

We can now confirm that Primerica’s target market, is ‘middle income earners’. It’s a sector they believe is currently being ‘under-served’. They don’t provide any actual market data, so we can’t confirm how they came to this conclusion. We can however confirm that we have seen several clients from this sector while working with major companies in the traditional financial services market.

As we plod along we find that they also talk about the Millennial generation. There are 93 million of them in the US alone, according to the Primerica, it’s the largest generation (by population size), the US has ever seen. This strategy may sound clever, but we’ve heard it before, except 20 years ago, people were talking that way about Baby-boomers.

We believe that the Millennials represent more people than the Baby Boomers, but we’re not convinced that they have the same statistical significance. For example, do they control a similar portion of wealth? Do they make up a similar % of total population? Many more questions which we could spend days researching. If you’d like to find the answers and share them in the comments section, that would be great.

The unsubstantiated claims continue with references to how more than 50% of financial decisions are made by women. The gig economy is expected to explode over the coming years. Primerica represents a high proportion of Non-Caucasian clients.

Then it gets real interesting. Once of the strengths Primerica lists is their ‘independent contractor sales force’. This confirms our previous assertion that they are not making you a business owner. They are making you part of the ‘Gig Economy’. Like an Uber driver, you are welcome to work for them and earn a commission from any sales you make. They’ll take a cut, but there is no benefits, and no hourly rate.

If you keep reading, you’ll find that the bulk or Primerica’s income comes from sales of term life products. Then on page 11, we see that ‘sales force growth drives Term Life Sales’. There is no mention of customer acquisition, just recruitment. Then again, ‘we get you protected’, was step 2 in the Primerica opportunity video.

This recurring recruitment theme is a serious concern. It appears that most of Primerica’s profits come from existing agents. This suggests that if you join Primerica, then you are the primary source of income for people in your upline! If you want to make money then according to the system, you need to recruit!

We scroll on and find that Primerica are proud to be ‘Not a Traditional Life Insurance Company’. They then show us a table breaking down their income from insurance premiums, investments and other income sources. This is all well and good until we pay attention to the fact that Primerica is not an Insurance Company. They have chosen to compare themselves to insurance companies rather than financial services providers. This could be an oversight, or it could be an attempt by Primerica to make themselves look better than they really are.

Primerica goes on to provide a break down of their licensed sales force. We used their data to create the table below:



