by J3 Patino

IMG’s Mission

The International Marketing Group’s (IMG) mission is simple,   No family left behind.

IMG seeks to make each and every Filipino family financially literate, financially stable and of course help them achieve their financial goals. And this mission is seen in their education focused marketing.

When you were invited to the seminar, it was a FREE Financial Literacy seminar. Whether or not you buy the products, you learned about:

• the X-Curve Concept of Responsibility
• The Rule of 72 in Investing,
• the 6 Steps to Financial Freedom and
• many others.

After that, you also probably received the personal coaching – depending on the skill of your coach and your willingness to participate then you could get a lot of financial insights out of this session. Again, you get all of these regardless if you choose to buy any product or not.

This is one unique aspect I’ve observed with IMG as a broker – IMG’s priority is focused on education, not sales. I think it has this luxury because most of its agents DO NOT HAVE QUOTAS. And when agents do not have quota’s they can really take their time in teaching the customer.

For instance, there was a case wherein during the coaching, the participant said that she was still buried in personal debt amounting to about P300,000. Now here’s what a typical sales agent would try to do, try to sell the person insurance or investment to cover for the debt payment in case of death… Then when the person can’t buy, then the typical agent would already move on to the next customer.

In IMG, the person was told NOT to buy anything. Instead, she was taught to focus on repaying her debts FIRST! She was also educated on tools on how to budget and coached over the long-run. (All for FREE!) It took the person 3 years to become debt-free. And all this time, the IMG coach was helping her and giving her motivation that she could do it. When she was already debt free and had an emergency fund, that was the only time when she was given advice to buy insurance and start investing. This is just one in many instances wherein it is clear that IMG is focused on helping families build a solid financial foundation, rather than making a sale.

IMG as a Brokerage

IMG is a financial brokerage. It is a distributor of financial instruments from healthcare plans, insurance, mutual funds to real estate and many others. So as a broker, take note that IMG is not the manager of any of the products, rather they act as distributors.

Meaning, if you decide to invest in IMG, you’re not really investing in IMG but with it’s product partners. If you bought PhilamLife life insurance, then you technically invested in PhilamLife, not IMG. If you bought real estate at Ayala Land or Vista Land, then you technically invested in Ayala or perhaps Vista Land, it is not IMG.

Why is this distinction important? It’s because we frequently ask, the question:

“Is my investment money safe with <where you placed the investment>?”

So we have to realize that in all this, you should not be asking “Is my money safe with IMG?” IMG is just the broker, it just gets a commission from the sale. It is not where your majority of your money is going to. Rather you should ask… “Is my money safe with the <product provider>?“:

Ask instead: “Is it safe with PhilamLife?”  Or perhaps Ayala? Or maybe First Metro? Or PhilEquity?

Half of being a good investor is knowing the right questions to ask. Because if you ask the wrong question, then the answer is actually quite irrelevant. With that cleared up, let’s move forward.

IMG’s Stability and Credibility

It is because of this focus on education that IMG has gained several reputable endorsements. For instance, Bo Sanchez, an international motivational speaker and preacher has repeatedly endorsed IMG publicly in his seminars. Rex Mendoza, the former CEO of PhilamLife is one of IMG’s solid partners. Fitz Villafuerte, a very prominent financial blogger, is a financial advocate of IMG. There are countless many others that will gladly and proudly say that they are partnered with IMG.

We will discuss Kaiser and the Kaiser Ultimate Health Plan  in the next articles.

About J3 Patino

J3 PATIÑO is a personal finance consultant dedicated to teaching Filipinos around the world, how to achieve financial freedom and financial abundance by understanding the world of money, in a simple, practical and very-easy to understand way.

J3 is the founder of StockMarketforPinoys.com, the remarkable online website that teaches Filipino’s how to invest in the stock market in the fastest and simplest way possible. His E-book, “The Stock Market Jumpstarter” has been shared all over the world because it has made the complicated stock market world, very easy to understand, even a grade-schooler would get it.