Straight answers.

No. We're an insurance agency, structured the way insurance agencies across the industry are: agents earn commission on policies sold to real clients, and managers earn an override on the policies their team sells. Here's what that means in practice:

• You're never paid for recruiting. Nobody at Momentous earns a dollar for signing someone up. Our administrative staff are paid for their work, not per recruit.
• You never pay us to join. Some companies in this industry charge new recruits a fee to join. We think that's wrong, and we don't do it. Your only startup costs are your license and your E&O insurance, paid to the state, the course provider and the insurer, not to us.
• There's nothing to stock or resell. Every dollar you earn comes from a policy a real family chose to buy.
• Recruiting is optional. More than 90% of our agents never do it.
• No sale, no override. Leaders are paid only when their team's clients are protected.

No. You can build a full career on personal sales alone, and more than 90% of our agents do exactly that. You can promote all the way to our top contract level on your own production.

No ceiling, and no politics. At many traditional agencies, your next promotion depends on someone above you leaving. Our founder worked at one where the person ahead of him had held the role for 25 years, and there was no next step until they retired, no matter how hard he worked. Here, every promotion is a published number, and you earn it with your production. Nobody can hand it to you as a favor, and nobody can deny it once you've hit it. If you miss, you try again next month, and we work on it with you as a team. You're never demoted, either: we've had agents take a full year of maternity leave and come back at the same level.

Your manager wins only when you do. Managers here earn an override on the policies you sell, so the people coaching you are paid to see you succeed. That's the opposite of a corporate setup where your manager's paycheck arrives whether you grow or not.

There are two promotion tracks: one based on your own production, and one that also counts your team's. You can move between them until the 110 level, when you choose one.

The median full-time producer at Momentous earned more than $152,000 in 2025, after lead costs.*
Pay is commission only. There's no salary, and income isn't guaranteed. Many agents work part-time or are in their first year and earn less. Income tracks activity closely: agents who run fewer appointments earn proportionally less.

*Median, not average, from our records for agents who scheduled at least 15 client appointments a week in 2025. Past results don't guarantee future results; yours depend on your effort, your skill and the leads you work.

Honestly, most people who try this business don't stay. Research from LIMRA and Finseca found that only about half of new financial professionals are still with their company after their first year.

We don't take the approach of hiring everyone and seeing who sticks. That's not how we treat people or their careers. Instead:

• We build your ramp-up plan with you before you spend a dollar on leads.
• You have more than 30 carriers to work with, so you can find the right fit for every client.
• Our marketing, lead programs and technology are built to get new agents to their first clients faster.
• Your leaders are paid only when you succeed.

Our first-year retention is above that industry benchmark. We track new-agent results closely. Because that data is shared with our brokerage partner, we don't publish it, but we'll walk you through what a typical first year looks like in your interview.

You're paid when a policy is approved and issued, not when you submit the application. New agents start at an 80% contract level: on our core carriers and products, your first-year commission is 80% of the policy's annual premium. Some products pay less; each carrier's comp grid sets the exact rate.

When a policy issues, nine months of that commission is advanced to you, which is 75% of the first-year commission. On the instant-decision policies most of our agents write, that advance typically lands about two business days after the client's application; policies that need full underwriting take longer. Almost every product we write pays this way; the one exception is a final expense product we rarely use. The remaining three months are paid monthly, in months 10 through 12, as the client pays. An advance isn't fully earned until the client has paid for the months it covers. (See "What happens if a policy cancels?")

Illustration only: a policy with $1,200 in annual premium at an 80% contract pays $960 in first-year commission: $720 advanced at issue, then $80 a month in months 10–12.

Contract levels rise in five-point steps, from 80% to 130%, based on the premium you place in consecutive months. It's black and white: hit the number and you move up. Miss it and you try again; you never move backward. New agents can use Slingshot to climb from 80 to 95 one month at a time instead of two, as long as they write business in three of the four weeks each month. As you move into leadership, your team's production can count toward your level too. Symmetry sets the thresholds and updates them each quarter; we walk you through the current sheet in your second interview.

Yes. On the policy anniversary, most products we broker pay a renewal of roughly 2% to 5% of the annual premium, depending on the carrier and product. Renewals vest once a policy has been in force for a year: as long as the client keeps the policy, you keep getting paid, even if you've left Momentous. One agent who spent a single summer with us before law school still gets small renewal deposits five or six years later. It's a real benefit, but it's small, and we'll never pitch it as the reason to join.

The insurance carriers pay your commissions directly to you, and nobody handles your commissions in between. That keeps every relationship clean. Carrier bonuses and incentives, like incentive trips, also come straight from the carriers, and Symmetry pays its own bonuses directly to you. Your tax documents come from the companies that pay you, mostly the carriers.

No. You can work referrals and your own market, run your own compliance-approved social media marketing, buy leads, or combine them. Our most consistent agents usually do all three.

Think of leads as an investment in your business. Like any investment, the return depends on how well you work them, and it isn't guaranteed.

• Leads through Quility come from mortgage-protection mailers, call-ins and digital campaigns, and they're TCPA-compliant (the federal rules for calling and texting consumers).
• Quility absorbs 70% to 87% of what it costs to generate each lead, depending on the type, so agents pay a fraction of the true cost.
• Quility prices its leads from documented results. The standard average for most agents is a return of about four times what the leads cost, and about three times on some lead types. Some agents outperform this. Those are averages, not promises: your results depend on your skill, your activity and the leads you choose. Quility publishes a fact sheet for each lead type, and we'll give you the current ones in your second interview.
• Each lead's price scales with your contract level, so it stays in proportion to what you earn per policy. Specialized leads, like retirement and annuity leads, cost more and typically pay more per sale.
• New agents are encouraged, though not required, to start with lower-cost aged leads in small one-time orders. After your first six applications, you can set up a weekly standing order. Experienced agents can start with fresh leads.
• We also partner with outside lead vendors such as Razor Ridge Leads, whose leads are TCPA-compliant and aren't sold to multiple agents, and we've negotiated discounts for our agents. We don't own any part of these companies. Some agencies call a vendor "third party" when they own it; we don't do that.

Full-time producers average around $600 a week. Nobody is expected to start there. How fast you ramp up depends on your experience and the income you're aiming for, and we build that plan with you before you buy anything. We'll walk you through the current price sheet in your second interview.

If you're not licensed yet, you'll take a pre-licensing course from one of our preferred providers. They have high pass rates, and we've negotiated a discount, so the course runs about $100 to $149 depending on the provider; we send you the link when you join. State exam, license and fingerprint fees (the background check is included) vary by state but average around $200, and your course provider shows the exact fees for your state. All in, most people spend roughly $300 to $350 to get licensed, more in states with higher fees.

Once you're licensed, plan on about $15 a month for errors and omissions insurance, which our carriers require, and about $10 a month if you choose to use our automation tools. There are no carrier contracting or appointment fees.

If you join newly licensed and hit Slingshot, meaning your first three contract promotions in your first three months, we reimburse $250, which covers most licensing costs.

An advance pays you before the client has paid for those months, so if a policy cancels early, the carrier takes back the part you haven't earned yet. That's a chargeback. It applies when a policy cancels in its first six months (nine with some carriers).

Chargebacks are uncommon here: our cancellation rate runs around 5%. When they happen, it's usually because a policy didn't fit the client's needs or budget, and that's exactly what we coach: listen first, and fit the coverage to what the family can keep paying.

A chargeback becomes a balance you owe that carrier. It isn't pulled from your bank account; instead, the carrier keeps your future commissions with that carrier until the balance is paid off. You agree to it in your independent contractor agreement when you accept advanced commissions, so yes, it stays with you if you leave Momentous. Here's how it works in practice:

• Call the carrier within 90 days. Most will set up a payment plan so you can pay it back over time. Carriers that don't hear from you will likely end your appointment.
• One chargeback doesn't end your career. We're a brokerage with access to more than 30 carriers, and most agents write with 10 to 15 in a year, so you keep working with the others while you resolve it.
• Unpaid balances follow you. They're reported to Vector One, an industry database carriers check before appointing an agent or paying advances. A listing can get you dropped by other carriers and keep you from being appointed or advanced at any agency. Paying it down protects your career.

It depends on where the client came from.

• Clients you found yourself, through referrals, your own marketing or your own market, are yours. You're free to keep working with them wherever you go.
• Clients from our lead program stay with the agency. Quility covers most of the cost of generating those leads, so you can't contact those clients to move their coverage to another agency or carrier. That's standard across the industry, and replacing a policy just to earn a new commission can cross into practices regulators prohibit, known as twisting and churning.
• Either way, you keep your vested renewals on the policies you wrote.

Momentous Financial Partners is an independently owned and operated agency. We've chosen to partner with Symmetry Financial Group and are contracted directly under it.

• Quility is a financial technology holding company with three parts: retail distribution, wholesale distribution and technology.
• Symmetry Financial Group is Quility's retail distribution arm. Symmetry negotiates the contracts with the insurance carriers and runs the lead program.
• Momentous recruits, trains and leads our agents. We work closely with Symmetry, and our leaders serve on its advisory boards and councils.

Every Symmetry agency builds on the same strong foundation: the same carriers, contracts, lead program and technology. What we add is the standard we hold ourselves to, in coaching, accountability and professionalism. It shows: our agents write about 30% more premium, on average, than the Symmetry-wide average. That's a credit to the platform we share, and to the people who choose to hold themselves to more.

Many agents who reach the upper contract levels choose to move into management and, eventually, agency ownership. Agency ownership is a business asset you own under your contract, and it can keep supporting your family after you're gone. We've seen it happen. In our research, we haven't found another contract in our industry built this way.