Episode 372: 06-09-16
On this week’s show, Thomas Handler discusses the virtual family office and what a “regular millionaire” is, Sandi Abbott of Xpresso Marketing talks email marketing content and Vivian’s kidney transplant email, Jim talks the residential mortgage business, and we get an update on Vivian’s transplant journey.
Family Office Legal Trends
Thomas Handler of Handler Thayer, LLP, chairs the firm’s Advanced Planning & Family Office Practice Group. He has extensive experience in the analysis, design and implementation of domestic and international business planning, financial and estate planning, asset protection, family office compliance and advanced tax planning strategies. Handler is an advanced planning attorney focused on the analysis and structuring of sophisticated estate plans and family offices.
We discuss the virtual family office, what is a “regular millionaire,” and mid-year tax strategies.
Email Marketing
Sandi Abbott is owner of Xpresso Content Cafe. She helps brands and small businesses CAFFEINATE their sales!
Xpresso Content Cafe is a digital marketing agency specializing in developing interactive online and onsite marketing campaigns for brands and small business clients.
We will talk about our recent email campaign for Vivian Fried’s kidney transplant and how it helped us get the word out with double the open rates. Sandi will also share how to find good content for your emails.
Residential Mortgage Availability
Jim just started originating large home loans and he wants to help YOU! Jim discusses what he is learning and how he can help YOU as he expands his practice into the jumbo and super jumbo residential mortgage business. Who can get a loan? Who cannot? How fast can a loan get closed? Just how hard is it today to get a home loan? Do you need a home loan? Jim wants to help you!
Vivian Fried Kidney Transplant Update
An update on Vivian Fried’s kidney transplant. You can donate to her kidney transplant fund by clicking here: http://bit.ly/Donate2Vivian
To become a member of the Vivian Fried Fundraising Team click here: http://bit.ly/BeAVIVIANFundraiser
To register and be tested as a kidney donor, contact the Miami Transplant Institute at 305-355-5433.
THANK YOU!
Episode 372: 06-09-16
Transcription:
Jim Fried: We have got a great Thursday show for you today. We’re going to talk some family office with Tom Handler, the lead attorney chairman of Handler Thayer. They’re a leading asset protection law firm up in Chicago. They have an international practice. We’re going to talk some Panama Papers and a lot of other cool stuff. Then in the next segment, we’re going to have Sandi Abbott on. Sandi is working with me to socialize through content marketing of Vivian’s Fundly page so we had a really big day yesterday with fundraising for Vivian. Sandi is going to talk about how all that happened and how it compares to our regular show and what all that means. And then in the second half of the show we’ll talk residential mortgage lending and we’ll give it up data on exactly where we are in helping Vivian with her transplant. So stick with us, great information you can put to use today to make your life better right now. So take it away Wanda, let’s rock the house.
[commercial break]
Jim Fried: We are back and we are here with our regular family office asset protection guru Tom Handler. Tom, welcome back to the show. Wanda, where is Tom?
Thomas Handler: I’m here.
Jim Fried: Good. Now we can actually hear you. Wanda is just learning her new toy here as we are in our new studio.
Wanda: I got this.
Jim Fried: All right. Tom, welcome back to the show. I know that you do, your firm is an international law firm, you win awards every year for family office work and the majority of that is protecting the assets of some very big families here in the world today. So what do you see out there? There’s been a lot of stuff that’s happened since we talked last, Panama Papers came out, all kids of interesting articles. It’s all yours, tell me what’s going on.
Thomas Handler: There’s a lot of activity in a few sectors in particular, international planning being one and that covers a lot of asset protection liability global business issues. A state planning focused on income taxes. Income tax planning itself and then a host of various structures driven by regulatory and compliance requirements. So first, backtracking to international planning, this has been a fun year, the Panama Papers has gotten very wide coverage and what few of the articles discuss is just why are people doing this. And the assumption is these are all bunch of tax cheats and people committing fraud and I’m sure that there are more than affair share of those people involved in the Panama situation with in particular a law firm. Whether the law firm did anything in proper or not remains to be seen. It doesn’t look good but there’ve been no indictments or prosecutions at this point so it’s probably to early to say. But in the States, whenever someone does anything international, only lawyer or accountant or financial person, you have to know your customer rule and you have some minimum customer due diligence rules that comply with it so it’s imprudent not to know exactly who you’re dealing with and to do background checks for those people and get references and be very careful that you’re not helping the wrong people or someone who’s an enemy of our country and it occurs that a lot of that diligence was not done, in fact there’s a number of convicted felon in the US that had asked that down in Panama. But the driver really is global phenomenon, the world is getting flatter and flatter. So global business is increasing dramatically even relatively small mom and pop institutions doing business off-shore, families are globalizing. You have relatives living in five different countries is not unusual and probably the biggest driver from a psychological stand point is just the fear of your own government, the fear of the governments expropriating your assets. I attended the Latin American lawyers conference last year which is basically North and South America and these are leaders of major firms and very prominent attorneys and the pervasive reason that people are moving money out of their own country is that nobody trusts their own government. And in many countries the fear of expropriation is very high because it happens on a regular and ongoing basis so there’s good reason for people moving money out of the country and in fact, many of the US people that put money in Panama have disclosed in the Panama Papers, did so because of great distress for the US government and that came out in the recent New York Times article discussing the subject focusing on a particular family. But that’s true overall. As we sit here, pretty quick that judge would say ”Look at the things that these people did” but the reality is, the United States are the number one tax haven in the world. We have 66% of the world’s capital parked here because now we’re seeing the fact that Obama took the bonds from General Motors owners and took it to third shares from the Chrysler owners and awarded them to the United Auto Workers so in fact caused many other problems for the car companies. That would be a completely unconstitutional act that violated 200 years of common law, yet it happened even here in the United States. These things happen routinely in other jurisdictions. So people are very afraid of having their assets taken away. And the idea is that by having assets somewhere else that are hidden or private, and hidden is not the right word, not hidden from the tax stand point or hidden from the regulatory stand point but difficult to find for a third party. So criminals, cyber hackers, terrorists, people that want to take your grandchildren hostage and kidnap, those are very real concerns even here in the United States. It happens much more than people are aware of. It doesn’t end in the newspapers, in effect, the kidnappers are bought out. Security firms specialize in this. It happens fairly often. But in other countries, South America and Latin America in particular it’s like a sport. It’s so common it’s frightening. So families are very concerned about this. Anything you can do to keep your name off of a document or not let the people know what the wealth you have or the companies you control, this is a step in the right direction. And many American families do the exactly the same thing. There are reasons why Wyoming and Delaware and Nevada are our tax havens. In Delaware, I can form an LLC for a client not connect their name to it, when someone searched that LLC the only name they see is me as the person or the law firm that’s organized it and they can’t see what the underlined family is. And that’s purposeful. If you’re a celebrity, an executive, professional athlete, wealthy individual, you have any incentive to keep as low profile as possible, want to avoid all this criminality. And these things are becoming so common now, wire fraud, cyber theft, identity theft, hacking accounts, the list goes on and on, that everyone has incentive to remain as private as they can to avoid those kinds of issues. These are very legitimate concerns. This fear of government and globalization due the business and globalization of families is driving all kinds of international planning, forming of international companies, joined ventures and of course, the typical asset preservation moves which tend to limited liability companies or corporation type entities and those are often owned in asset protection trusts. And some of those, if they’re well done are really designed to be start over funds so that even your own government including US cannot take money out of those funds if they’re in an independent legitimate government jurisdiction that is not on the OECD black list, that’s not on the wrong side of treasury or CIA or FBI. So those jurisdictions have treaties with the US and they’re great places to park assets. All of this international planning is moving in a fast and furious pace, money is flying in here largely from South America, Central America and China and money is flying out of the US as almost 10,000, I don’t have the exact number for 2015 yet, but approximately 10,000 people have left the country and renounced their citizenships since Obama got elected. That’s more people that have left the country since the country was founded. And these aren’t people worth $10 million, these are very affluent people, in many cases multibillionaires who’ve left and taken their businesses, their jobs and their assets with them and they have no intention of coming back. So it’s a very serious matter. Though we’re losing people, we’re probably the biggest beneficiary of this globalization of assets and people and businesses.
Jim Fried: We only have about a minute left in this segment. Can you stay and do another segment?
Thomas Handler: Absolutely.
Jim Fried: Great. We’ll be right back after this. We got more Tom Handler, I’m not talking because Tom has great solid information that people need to hear and take action on immediately. So we’ll be back. We’ll hear more about how to protect your assets if you’re a family office or high net worth individual with Tom Handler. We’ll be back after this, more great information you can use right away. Wanda, it’s yours.
[commercial break]
Jim Fried: We have got our favorite asset protection lawyer on. We’ve got Tom Handler, he’s with Handler Thayer up in Chicago. Tom’s firm is an internationally recognized firm for family office legal work. Tom, welcome back to the show.
Thomas Handler: Thank you, Jim, it’s good to be back.
Jim Fried: Before we continue, I do want to say that we’ve been talking about international tax havens and high net worth individuals and the Panama Papers, what are some things people can do right now to mitigate their risks as we head into the end of the year and a lot of the people are on extension with taxes, to thinking about taxes, you’re a tax man. What’s some things that are going on right now?
Thomas Handler: Absolutely. There’s actually a lot of income tax focus on the part of the client base driven largely by the fact that we got this 39.6 top federal rate. The capital gain rate has gone up to 23.8% because of the Obamacare tax tossed on top of it. And although those rates don’t sound that high relative to 70% rates of the country, the reality is that it’s effectively, the US rates are effectively higher rates because we tax so much larger basket of income with far a few deductions and a lot more limitations in phaseouts that other countries have. So in fact, we are the highest tax paying country on the planet, both individually and corporate-wise. As people look at the landscape, it motivates you to realize that sometimes these taxes get confiscatory, particularly as you move up in the brackets and you get into the high brackets relatively quickly. You don’t get to the top bracket so you’re at 450,000 and change but at 91,000 you’re at 25% out of the box and of course you add on your Medicare tax, you social security tax, your Obamacare tax and for employers, federal taxes so the motivation is to focus on meaningful things that can have an impact. So the simple things that people focus on are maximizing any type of executive comp and benefit planning that they can have. So you almost go by category and say if you don’t have an IRA, if you don’t have a pension plan, if you don’t have a Roth IRA, you want to make sure that you put chips in those pockets every chance you get or whenever you’re below the limits and have people that just do so because that tax free growth is very valuable and in the event of a loss it comes out tax free, so it’s an extraordinary opportunity to take advantage of that. There aren’t that many charities left in the US tax code. They’re few and far between, so when the government says ”We want to encourage savings” and a lot of people pay for their retirement, you want to take that seriously, it’s not an audited item. It’s a very simple move so you want to fill those kinds of buckets. The planning that people are doing also involves controlling their investments, harvesting a loss since they take the advantage of the losses to capture them in a given year if they come back and by backing their position the following year. A lot of acceleration is in deferrals. Anybody on a cash basis try to push the income off to the following year and maximize the deductions in this year or perhaps there’s a particular year with higher income bunching deduction into that year so that you can overcome limitations and get a higher percent of your deduction actually realized. And in fact, much of a state planning has become income tax planning focused, it’s always been focused at the high end of the market and the high net worth individuals. But even for more regular millionaires it’s become a focus because now the basis adjustments become very important. Nobody under $10 million are going a state tax at least federally, you may be paying in a number of states but you’re be paying federal state tax. So the idea is to try to maximize the income tax basis of various assets by getting the write up in the estate and keeping those low basis assets in a position where they won’t be subject to a estate tax but will be written up to their full fair market value. That can generate a tremendous amount of either capital gain or ordinary income depending on how long those assets have been around. So that’s a very common play. And then, structural planning has become important. Having entities that aren’t subject to the different levels of tax. So you have C corporations subject to both corporate taxes and then individual taxes when paid out to the shareholders. That’s a problem. If you’re going to avoid that, if you don’t need to be in the public market, if you don’t need to be a C corporation, you may want to get out of that structure and perhaps become an S corporation. S corporations still have potential built in gain tax. So if you’re going to avoid the S corporation which also is a difficult entity to plan with for state and financial planning purposes, you’re better off in LLC environment. A limited liability company, there’re various variations of that, there’s limited liability partnerships, limited liability professional for corporations, serious limited liability companies, all of them function essentially the same from tax stand point, is that if you make the appropriate election their conduit entities and they don’t face federal tax at their level. So they may face state tax at their level. So in effect, that business earning drills down to the owners and only the owners are taxed on it with the exception of states. So that’s a very effective way to build a business, have more money to invest in this business, build your net worth without running at risk of having these large built up gains built in the S corporation or the problem in the C corporation where you pay out retained earnings and suddenly you’ve got a dividend and the corporate tax. A lot of it has to do with restructuring, reorganizing, terminating S corporations if you can do so without a tremendous tax detriment, forming new entities that are conduit using holding company structures so that you may leave the existing enterprises they are because the tax will be too high to get rid of them and to focus on new entities as LLCs or conduits so they aren’t subject to those taxes and over time achieve greater efficiency. So a lot of that planning is going on. And the virtual family office concept has picked up a lot of steam and this would be for people with a high net worth, typically $25 million on up. But that entity provides the same benefit that the Rockefellers, the Kennedys or the Pritzkers or any major family would have except you do it at smaller level and outsource the various services but you have a control enterprise, a place where you can pay benefits and legitimately deduct expenses, you can have succession planning outside boards, full corporate governance so it gives you all kids of advantages along with the typical income tax benefits that any business enjoys provided that it’s ordinary necessary and it all makes sense. So that’s pretty much what people are focusing on at this point in time other than using investments with built in tax goodies. And they’ll be having investing in real estate and making a conservation easement to get a deduction or investing in oil and gas because there’re significant write-offs upfront in that particular industry. Agribusiness also has some unique rules in and a permanent five-year net operating loss carryback you can stay on a cash basis where in other businesses it would be on an accrual basis. All of those avenues are available to the people and that’s exactly what people are focused on.
Jim Fried: We’re really working hard. I’m getting into that whole little world myself as I’m trying to raise some money for Vivian and her kidney transplant and raise awareness for organ donation. And I really learned that the best way to do it is try to find a 501(c)3 that you can team up with and generate funds for the 501(c)3. We’re working on doing that. There’re some really innovative stuff coming out that’ll allow for some good charitable contributions in that regard. So as those things come up, we’ll be talking to some of our family office contacts to help them raise money for kidney awareness and indigent kidney people so I know you and Andrew will be down on that and help us with that. Tom, there’s really something going on in Chicago that I need you to comment on. Are the Cubs for real? What’s going on up there? Is there something in the water?
Thomas Handler: It’s still early in the season but suffice it to say that people are pretty happy with the Rickets family, the new owners. The amount of money that is spent on regulating and renovating it building hotel and a large outdoor plaza across the street, expanding with tax, putting in absolutely huge billboards. They’ve done some things as well to build a hell of a farm organization. So I’ve read a number of articles that said that in the opinion of professionals in the major league, the Cubs have the best farm system. I’ve heard that for several years and that’s where we just brought somebody up yesterday for the first time as a pinch batter. So as we’re bringing up young players, it appears that what the industry buzz had predicted is in fact the case that we’ve got the real solid town here and team has a commitment for winning and I just read that we’re on pace to catch or surpass the 2002 Seattle Mariners team had the best record in history of baseball and that’d be pretty exciting but they are fun to watch. I had my Cubs playing yesterday and people just stopped me and give ma a thumbs up and they’re kind of chuckling but we’ve been long suffering fans and it’s just too much fun that they might actually be for real and if not this year, the talent is such that this could happen any time in the next few years. So it’s very exciting for long suffering Cub fans.
Jim Fried: We appreciate having you on, we appreciate your sports up States as always, the tax information and the family office stuff is just absolutely gold. If people want to find you or talk to you about working on their virtual family office or some of the other functions you can help them with, how do they find you?
Thomas Handler: You can reach us through a main number which is the Chicago office 312 641 2100 and our web is handlerthayer.com. And you can find out information about us. We’re watching the DC, Palm Beach, Chicago and then Oakbrook, Illinois.
Jim Fried: We’ll get together on the side. I’ll send you an email, we’ll have Lauren set up a time for us to talk off the air. But thank you so much to you and Andrew for supporting the show and being part of our regular cast or guest. We can’t thank you enough for bringing this great information here to our audience.
Thomas Handler: Great. Be well and thanks again for having me.
Jim Fried: It’s my pleasure. Take care. We’ll be right back with some great information. We’re going to have Sandi Abbott on. She’s going to talk about the Constant Contact marketing campaign we’re run for Vivian. It’s an awesome thing. There’s stuff that you can apply to your content marketing to make money today. So stick with us, we’ll be back with Sandi Abbott and information you can use to make money today here on Fried on Business. Wanda, it’s yours.
[commercial break]
Jim Fried: We’re back and we always say we’re going to bring you information you can use right away to make money today. Well we’re going to do that right now with Sandi Abbott. Sandi’s the top Constant Contact person here in town as far as I’m concerned and probably as far as Constant Contact is concerned. Sandi, welcome back to the show.
Sandi Abbott: Thank you. Glad to be here. Love your new digs.
Jim Fried: Thank you so much. Wanda likes it too. She really loves the board. Wanda, how are we doing out here?
Wanda: So far excellent.
Jim Fried: That’s my girl. Now listen Sandi, we put out an email, we have an email list, it’s pretty clean, we really don’t get people to drop out. Once they’re on, they typically stay on so I’d say it’s good. It’s about 5500 people now from what I recall.
Sandi Abbott: Little more.
Jim Fried: Okay. We sent out an email, we’ve been clean. We’ve never sent an email except for the show email, until I switched jobs and now we sent another email to that list this last week because people wanted to be able to learn about what’s going on with Vivian and they wanted to contribute either positive energy, some people wanted to contribute some money, some people are still looking for donors to contribute a kidney. We’ll give out the living donor number all through out the next half hour at the University of Miami. But what did you notice with the results from this campaign versus our average usual campaign?
Sandi Abbott: You doubled your open rate with this one.
Jim Fried: That’s Vivian, not me. She’s the best. What would make something like that happen?
Sandi Abbott: Like you said, people wanted to know about it, we put it in the subject line and the email was pretty definite, it was not a promotional email, it was a personal appeal from you and people react to that. It’s different.
Jim Fried: It was really terrific. I heard from people I haven’t heard from for years. In fact, Vivian and I gave.. maybe I don’t want to tell that story, that’s too personal and private. I almost got too personal and private on open radio, I didn’t want to do that. But we’ve had donors that have come out of the woodwork – friends that I’ve known for years that have come out and by the way, we’re not really looking for cash donations. What we’re really looking for is to you to raise money to help us offset some of the costs we’re facing or we’re going to start raising money, you heard me alluded to Tom Handler a little while before for indigent kidney care, but right now we’re still trying to raise money to help Vivian defray the cost of her kidney transplant but more than that, we need a donor. Donor does not have to be a perfect match, we’ll talk more about that in the next segment. But Sandi, what is it that that means when I get an open rate that’s bigger and click-throughs? Explain to me what really happened yesterday because the email is really like a machine?
Sandi Abbott: Like I said before, it all starts with the subject line. What you put in the subject line is very important and we are very direct. It was really an appeal from you and then when you open the email-
Jim Fried: What was the target? What was the subject list?
Sandi Abbott: The subject line that we used was ”Vivian’s battle to find a kidney donor – our story’.
Jim Fried: That’s perfect because that’s what it is. It’s about finding a donor for us. Everything else is to just help people feel good.
Sandi Abbott: Yes, and when you see the email on a mobile device you actually get a little bit more copy so first line of copy talked about help my wife find a donor please. Yes, check it out on the phone, it’s a second one down, I think.
Jim Fried: That is, that renders just great. That says it all right there. Who doesn’t click on that?
Sandi Abbott: And when you do click on it, it’s very very mobile-friendly. We did not make it promotional, it was really what you wanted to say and some photos of Vivian with the links back to the site which I understand was very effective.
Jim Fried: It was extraordinarily effective. In fact, the site crashed, I don’t think it was necessarily us that crashed the site, but it does make for good copy that we say that, but yes, the site crashed, it’s back up now, crashed for a little bit of time on, like it’s Wednesday morning, the day after we sent out the email. I woke up to my phone being full of text ”Jim, how come I can’t get on the site? Jim, the site is broken. Jim, I want to donate. What can I do? Jim, I have information on the kidney”. I went nuts. But the site is up now. Here’s a question I have for you. Usually I wouldn’t send a follow-up email so fast after sending out that appeal email but since people couldn’t take action the next day because the site went down, is it legitimate to send that email?
Sandi Abbott: Absolutely. And we can even do where we send it to people that opened or we can send it just to the people who clicked because those are the ones that know for a fact that site was down because they clicked over to the website. So if we send an email like that and we put in the subject line something, the effect of the site is back up now, that is totally legitimate. This is funny because sometimes we send an email and for whatever reason there’s something that’s wrong with it, we send out a correction, people usually don’t mind that there’s a correction or new information that is necessary. It’s not considered spamming.
Jim Fried: That’s good because I really am very considerate of the audience, of the co-politic community that we’ve created, I don’t want to fatigue them. And I got to believe that you can fatigue people real fast if you keep pounding on them.
Sandi Abbott: Yes, and that’s the beauty about using a service like Constant Contact because you can tell exactly who was interested so you don’t have to send it to everybody on the list. You can send it to the ones that did click through to go to the website and were not able to because now those people are interested and you’re not fatiguing them. So having that information, being able to see not only how many people clicked, what they clicked on but who exactly clicked. I can actually go in now, save that list and send to just that list. It’s very surgical.
Jim Fried: We’re definitely going to do that. I want to see that list too. That’s people who really love us, who really love Vivian. That’s another thing, that this is really an outpouring of love that the people have been giving us through this email. I want to thank you so much. Now, I’m easy to create content. It’s easy for me to create content. I got great guests, I got this Vivian thing that I’m dealing with, I just changed my jobs, I talk about that all the time. But maybe it’s not so easy for other people to create content. What can people do to come up with some good content?
Sandi Abbott: There’s a couple of things. First and foremost, you need to know that people are in the data with a lot of information so you don’t have to write a lot. The less you write, the better. About 20 lines of text is really all you need. Now as far as what kind of content, there’s a lot of ways to find it. First of all, people tell me all the time ”I have nothing”. Look through your website and see what you have. If you have a frequently asked questions page, that is perfect farther for content because you can take the questions that people are normally asking which obviously is high interest and you can convert that into an email very easily. Also, there’s a lot of great content already available. If you are shy about writing, you’re not a good writer, you can find very good content and actually curate it. It’s sort of what you do with the show. You find really good people and then you give them the voice. So people can go online, they can find content that they know as an expert is really good and then they can share that content. They can add a couple of sentences of their own to say why they think this is so good and then click through to the content. So you got other people’s content, you’ve got your frequently asked questions and it doesn’t always have to be something you write. You could actually do a quick video. I have a client who is a yard broker. So what he does when he has a new listing? He goes on the yard and he takes a picture or actually he takes a quick video of the yard and then we put the listing information along with the video and that’s the content that we send. So there’s different ways that you can approach it.
Jim Fried: It’s really very cool. I’m going to do a video, if you stay and you tape it, I’ll do a video of what’s going on with Vivian and we can put that in the follow-up email maybe [crosstalk] That’s what we’re going to do then. Wanda, how much more time do we have in this segment? This is a great segment.
Wanda: Take another two, three minutes.
Jim Fried: Okay. Sandi, why don’t you talk about how people get a hold of you. You put all these workshops out. Talk a little bit about what you do for people and how people can get in touch with you and how they can get help to improve their business right now by getting in contact with you.
Sandi Abbott: The first thing that I do is I do a lot of workshops. I love teaching, I love encouraging small business owners. So I always have a workshop going on. You can find out about my workshops by visiting my website which is xpressocc.com and go over to the workshops. I have one coming up at the end of the month which I’ll be putting on the site today. And then, what I do is what people don’t want to do. They don’t have the time to come up with the content, to write the email, to put everything together. So they give it to me and the beauty of it is that it’s very turn-key. Once they give it to me, they don’t have to worry about it, they don’t have to think about it, I meet with them once a month, figure out what they need and then like magic, the email appears for them to approve, the sign off on it and it goes off. And they can tell when it’s gone out because they get phone calls and they get that little optic in the website especially if they’re in online retail.
Jim Fried: That’s very important. There’s all kinds of things I just learn from Constant Contact and Facebook because I’ve got the radio show, I learn from that, but there’s all kinds of things that people need. People need your help. You can help them make money. You can do that today. You can start their sales increasing today. Again, give them how you get a hold of them because we’re almost done, I want them to hear you.
Sandi Abbott: They can call me directly at 305 507 7199 or they can find me online, on Facebook, on Twitter, at xpressocc.com and LinkedIn, Sandi Abbott.
Jim Fried: You’re all over the place. You’re constantly contacting people. I know you. We’ll be right back after this. I’ve given a little preview. We’re going to give a little update on what’s been going on with Vivian and I want to thank Sandi for being here today helping us out and helping us show Viv love. Thank you so much.
Sandi Abbott: Thank you for letting me be a part of the process.
Jim Fried: All right. We’ll be back after this. We’ve got great information that you can use and obviously, people want to hear it because Sandi says when I talk about Vivian, people open and double the rate. So we’ll be back after this.
[commercial break]
Jim Fried: We’re back and I want to talk a little bit about what we’ve been talking about here with Sandi. Sandi maybe want to come back on the line there just a little in case I got a little technical question for you there. Now, Vivian’s been struggling with end-stage kidney disease, she hasn’t gone number one for going on 11 months now. Originally, we found her on the floor non compos mentis January 3rd 2014 and since then she’s been on dialysis. Dialysis is not easy, it’s not pretty and Sandi worked with me to put together a Constant Contact email to ever 5,500 people yesterday and basically we crashed the site at Fundly. So Sandi I want to thank you so much for putting together such an effective email piece. What do you think was the most effective part of that email?
Sandi Abbott: I think it was your appeal. Because it was very personal.
Jim Fried: Yes, it’s all personal at this point. My wife has been suffering and we need to find a kidney transplant for her. A person does not to be a match. All you need to do is volunteer to be a donor. You don’t need to match. I wrote down to Miami Transplant Institute phone number then, where did I put it? Here it is. It’s 305 355 5433. Call the Miami Transplant Institute today and give the gift of life. Even if you don’t match my wife. If you’re willing to commit to donate your kidney to her cause we can go into the National Kidney Register and get an equally qualified kidney out. They rate the kidneys, there’re all different kinds, my old kidney that no one really wants, I’m 55 and all kinds of bad back and take medicines, that’s a D- I guess. They don’t want to use my kidney. They want a kidney that’s from a person that’s healthy, strong and you don’t have to match Vivian, you just have to be willing to donate and give the gift of life. For goodness sakes, I work with a woman who only has one kidney and she has two kids. Woman has a zumba class she teaches, it’s amazing. So you really need to call 305 355 5433, The Miami Transplant Institute. Tell them you want to get tested for Vivian Fried. We’ve got a number of people that have gotten tested. We even got two people that were perfect matches. One of the people that was a match decided they didn’t want to go through with it. The next person, it was God’s will, that person got really sick a few months after they got matched and approved for Vivian but got delayed but the Transplant Institute. And now they’re not a viable transplant donor either. So we need a donor. Please call the Miami Transplant Institute at 305 355 5433 and again, Sandi put together a great email, we’re going to send out another email to people that may have clicked through and tried to donate on the site but weren’t able to get through the site. It’s again up and running. It was a little glitch that happened on Wednesday but now everything’s up and running again. So please, we work with the Fundly people, fundly.com and we’ll have the people on from Fundly, we’ll talk about their website and what they do, we’re going to have the head of the Miami Transplant Institute on at the end of the month. It takes a while to coordinate that kind of stuff. But the most important thing you need to know is that if you want to give the gift of life, you can do it. You can give that gift of life to my wife or even somebody else. You just call the Miami Transplant Institute at 305 355 5433 and just say you want to get tested to see if you’re a match or if you can donate to Vivian Fried. Wanda, how much more time do I have left today?
Wanda: Four minutes.
Jim Fried: That’s a whole lot of time. I want to thank everybody that’s been involved in the kidney transplant cause and quest. We have over a 145 people that have donated cash, another group of people that are supporters and we’re still trying to find an active person to donate the kidney. We’ve got a number of people that we’ve been talking to but they just get denied. Some people are pre-diabetic, some people are too old like me, some people had very bad health issues, one person even had a life changing event while they were in the process of getting tested. The young lady had a personal issue that came up, I don’t want to talk about that any further than that. It’s private to her. But the point is that things happen. You need to be almost perfect to donate. So please donate to Vivian Fried, go online to her Fundly page at fundly.com Vivian Fried Transplant. Call the Miami Transplant Institute at 305 355 5433 and tell them that you want to be a donor for Vivian Fried or just call me on my cell phone 305 773 6300. Because I want to help you self-actualize and give the gift of life to my beautiful wife and let her and her beautiful spirit be free of that diabolical dialysis machine. I want to thank her sponsors. Before I do that, I want to thank the people that really make this place go, you our listeners. I want to thank you for listening, thank you for being part of our community, join our community, give us feedback and comments, tell me who you want to hear from @JimFried @FriedonBusiness, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, the website you heard, we’re getting lots and lots of hits on that. I want to thank our sponsors South Florida Business and Wealth Magazine, The CCIMs, the Related Group, Spectrum Mortgage, Warren Henry Automotive, Magnum Energy Solutions, KIND Snacks, the NFL Alumni, the Bergstrom Center for Real Estate Studies, the Miami Marlins, I still sing their song, Xpresso Marketing, give me a high five Sandi.
Sandi Abbott: High five.
Jim Fried: Sandi is the greatest, I love her. Social Media 305, we love Johnny and of course Lauren’s Kids, we love Ron and Lauren Book. If you missed today’s show, it’s going to be up on our website www.friedonbusiness.com probably by Friday night or Saturday morning. This is Jim Fried for Fried on Business. Look for us next week on 880 AM on Thursday at 6:00. Why? Because I just love doing this. Remember, this is not a rehearsal, this is your life. The person that wants to do something finds a way, the other finds an excuse. Now, join me, I’m going to go out there, you go out there too. Let’s make it happen.
