Skip to main content

Rochelle “Cheng” Macapagal is a part-time actress and entrepreneur, promoting health and beauty products. She joined Spark Amber at the invitation of her cousin who told her that at Pru, she will not only be promoting to her clients how to look beautiful but how to make their life beautiful and meaningful as well. She took this lightly and as per her own admission, she was a so-so life insurance agent at the start. 

But two life insurance claims from her clients made her appreciate her role as a financial advisor. 

Joining Spark Amber in March 2016, Cheng took on the duties of a part-time financial advisor in between takes as an actress and selling opportunities as a health and beauty product marketer. 

Early this year, one of her clients, her husband’s best friend and the best man during their wedding, was driving home on a motorcycle late one night with his 12-year-old son when disaster struck. The door of a parked vehicle just ahead of them suddenly swung open. He tried to avoid hitting the door but it was too late. 

The son suffered bruises from the accident. His dad unfortunately was in critical condition, losing a lot of blood and breaking some bones. He was rushed to the nearest public hospital. Because of the lack of suitable facilities, the wife asked for her husband to be taken to a nearby, more expensive private hospital instead for it had better facilities. As a firm believer of insurance, she and her husband not only had a life insurance plan each, they were also covered with HMO benefits. 

While being transferred to another hospital, however, the husband expired. 

The wife and their three kids lost him but from the life insurance plan that he got from Cheng, he left behind a substantial amount that can help tide them over for some time as they come to grips with this terrible loss. 

“The wife was very thankful because she knows how tedious our work can be as financial advisors, especially in her case when it took us some time to secure the needed documents, exacerbated by our inability to move about due to the quarantine,” Cheng revealed. 

“Emotionally, this feels different, a lot more fulfilling, because this is a close friend of my husband,” she said. 

Cheng felt the same deep sense of fulfillment from the experience of her own best friend from school. 

Working as a successful operations manager in the BPO industry, Cheng’s best friend has climbed the proverbial corporate ladder due to his talent and hard work. He was enjoying the perks of being a young, senior manager in his late 30s, with its attendant high income and other benefits, when the unexpected happened. 

Due to the stress at work, Cheng’s best friend suffered a stroke and was confined in the ICU for 14 days. Good thing that with the two life insurance plans that he got from Cheng, he was able to claim for critical illness benefit and hospital confinement expenses. 

Cheng’s best friend was able to overcome the financial burden of his hospitalization and is now focused on getting himself to full recovery. 

Looking back at these two client claims, Cheng muses how fortunate she is to be used as an instrument to provide help to her clients when they needed it the most. All her life, Cheng has enjoyed playing a variety of roles — as a wife, a mother, an actress, an entrepreneur, a friend. But she gets a different emotional high with her role as a financial advisor, securing one precious life after another. 

Dominic Mendoza
Dominic Mendoza

As an author and host, Dominic’s transition from IT into financial services was easy. “I use stories to educate Filipinos about life insurance,” he said. “Stories effectively communicate the importance of life insurance and its tremendous positive impact on clients and their families.”
Email