Praise the Lord and Pass the Credit Card: The Dark Reality of Life Surge
It turns out Tim Tebow, the Chosen One, the Mile High Messiah, may have wandered into some very un-Christlike territory.
Life Surge is a wealth-building seminar company that brings in Christian celebrities like Tebow to preach about faith, purpose, and doing more “for the Kingdom.”
And then, somewhere between the worship music and salvation, somebody wheels out the credit-card machine.
According to a Mother Jones investigation by Kiera Butler, Life Surge events can funnel attendees from $97 investing seminars to financial courses costing up to $40,000.
Because apparently Jesus accepts Visa.
Some attendees told Butler they trusted the program partly because of the Christian messaging and Christian celebs blessing the stage.
One couple bought a $20,000 package of investment courses. Then, after meeting with a financial counselor, they were upsold to borrow $40,000 on credit cards to buy a more expensive course.
The counselor reassured them: “Once you get into this stock trading, you can have this paid off in a year.”
Yeah, nothing says sound financial planning like entering the stock market forty grand in the hole.
Then there’s Champa.
Champa gets onstage with a PowerPoint and explains that the secret to trading is buying in the “demand zone” and selling in the “supply zone.”
Buy low. Sell high.
Holy shit, Somebody alert Stockholm, we got a Nobel Prize on our hands.
That leaves me with one question for Champa and every other financial guru selling expensive investing courses: If you are this good at making money from investing, why are you spending Saturday afternoons in an arena hawking PDFs to desperate people for vast sums of money?
Shouldn’t you be on a yacht somewhere, snorting that sweet pearl dust, selling in the “supply zone” until you own Portugal?
That’d be like if I said I cured cancer and then, instead of spending my time curing cancer, I traveled around the country selling cancer patients my $10,000-a-month oncology master class: Remission U.
At some point you’d probably raise your hand and go: “Zach, quick question. If you can cure cancer... why the fuck do you need ten grand?”
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