Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Adam Blain, Wealth and Retirement Advisor with AAA Life Solutions -The Retirement Mountain

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Adam Blain is a Wealth and Retirement Advisor based in Germantown, Tennessee, dedicated to helping individuals plan for retirement—whether they’re building their savings or already enjoying retirement life. With over eight years of experience, Adam is Series 65 licensed and also holds life and health insurance licenses. He provides personalized strategies for income planning, investment management, annuities, tax-efficient withdrawals, estate coordination, and Medicare guidance.Adam serves as a fiduciary under AAA Life Solutions and believes in offering clear, honest advice that’s easy to understand. His approach is faith-driven, educational, and tailored to each client’s goals. Outside of work, Adam is a husband, a proud father of three, and is actively involved in his church and community.Learn more: aaalifesolutions.comThe opinions expressed by Adam Blain and guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of this radio station. All Statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable, although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice. Investments involve risk and unless otherwise stated are not guaranteed. Past performance cannot be used as an indicator to determine future results. Any strategies mentioned may not be suitable for everyone, information expressed does not take into account your specific situation or objectives and is not intended as recommendations appropriate for you. Before acting on any information mentioned, please consult with a qualified tax or investment advisor to determine if it is suitable for your specific situation. This program is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to subject covered.BWA Disclosure: Investment advisory services offered through Brookstone Wealth Advisors, LLC (BWA), a registered investment advisor and an affiliate of Brookstone Capital Management, LLC. BWA and AAA Life Solutions are independent of each other. Insurance products and services are not offered through BWA but are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed agents.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-adam-blain-wealth-and-retirement-advisor-with-aaa-life-solutions-the-retirement-mountain

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us, Adam Blaine, who's a wealth and retirement advisor with AAA Life Solutions, and we'll be talking about the retirement mountain. Adam, welcome to the program. Hey, Mike, thanks for having me on. You know, I'm excited to talk to you about this series of topics because they're so relevant

and retirement and, you know, yeah, yeah, I'll get to that later, but later needs to be a lot sooner than many people think. So I want to get your thoughts on how you're serving your clients in this realm. But before we dive into that, give us a little bit of your background and story and how did you get into the industry? Yeah, so I've always had a desire to help. people. Growing up, I wanted to jump from careers to careers that I thought I wanted to do, but it was mostly in the gear of trying to help people. First, I wanted to be a doctor,

and then I got to college and decided science wasn't my forte. Exactly. I mean, can't pass chemistry. Why be a doctor? Why keep struggling that way? So, and then I really fell in love with law enforcement. Wanted to be a federal agent and do all that. It was really fun. I got married, found the love of my life, and she wasn't too thrilled about me pursuing that passion or pursuing that career. And so I found something else and fell in love with financial services, more specifically helping people in the retirement space in distribution. A lot of people think about, oh, financial services is all about how can I grow my accounts and make me money. but really they don't think about retirement, living on what you had saved. That space really isn't served very well.

And I found that my services can really help those people and really make an impact on their lives and making sure that they live the lifestyle that they've created over the many years of living and making sure that continues throughout retirement. So that's what I find a passion in right now. So that's what I love to do. You know, it's always fun when something comes clear to you. And then it's so unclear to other people. And when you can bring that together and teach and educate and help, you know, you didn't say, oh, I wanted to get out of law enforcement to make a billion gazillion dollars.

You said, I want to help people. And that's so huge. And I know today we're talking about the retirement mountain. Why do you say that saving is only half the climb? Why is retirement kind of like climbing a mountain? Yeah, so I like this analogy of a picture. So picture this. You've trained for years.

You've packed your gear. And finally, you're going to reach the summit of the mountain. Retirement, right? Most people think that's the end. I'm going to kick back, live my life. But if you ask any mountaineer,

that is only half the problem. I mean, they've got to get back down the mountain, right? That's the hardest part. Retirement works the same way. The climb up, the working years. It's all about accumulation. You're saving, investing and building momentum.

But when you retire, everything changes. Now you have to come down the mountain, and that's when things get a little risky. In real life, retirees face different dangers on the descent down, like inflation right now. I mean, that seems to be the topic. At least it was last year running into this year. Market volatility, big time right now with all the tariffs,

rising health care costs and longevity risks. It just takes different tools in a mindset then when you are going up in order to get you back down safely. You need a distribution strategy. You need to control your pace, watch your footings, avoid hazards as you come down. Or financial gravity will eventually just pull your retirement plan all apart. I mean, just like gravity, if you make that wrong slip on coming down a mound, you're just falling right down in. So, yeah, exact same way that can happen with retirement.

It almost gives me the word picture of like, you know, the struggle and striving, getting up the mountain is like accumulating, like building and growing your money. You know, at the top is retirement. A lot of people view the top is retirement, but you're saying the top is just one part of it. But then you've got to figure out, okay, well, now I've accumulated this. Is it enough? Will it last to and through retirement? because these days, one of the risks, I know that you mentioned, you know, inflation and things like that, but I would even say that one of the risk factors would be living a great life.

We're taking better care of ourselves. We're living longer these days. Back in the 50s and 60s, let's say, you know, the life expectancy was a lot less than now. So your retirement money didn't need to last as long. Today, that's a big risk, right? That needs to be planned for. Exactly. I mean, retirement back then was probably what, 15 years?

maybe, 20 years max. Now it's going 30 almost. I mean, people, I've talked to a number of people who are still taking care of parents who are 100 plus. I mean, that's, that's retirement of 40 years, roughly. I mean, that that's a while. And making that million, two million dollars, maybe even less than a million, last the rest of your life. How do you do that during that amount of time? Yeah. And I think that there are some things and decisions that you can make to plug up some of those holes you can never eliminate. You know, you think about, you know, oh, well, inflation, we don't have control over that. Market volatility. We can't control that. We can put some things in place to mitigate and just make sure there is as little impact to our retirement portfolio as

possible. But talk a little bit about some of the ways you guide your clients to kind of shore up some protection against the things we cannot control, like inflation, market volatility, medical cost, things like that. We don't control the cost of, you know, medicines, prescriptions, health plans, things like that. Basically, you've got to segregate your money. Keep it in different, I like to call buckets, okay?

For instance, the first bucket, we usually make it very short. It's very liquid. Liquid meaning I can get my hand on that cash fast. This bucket is for immediate income. It's conservative. Might have it in CDs, money market, cash.

And then the next bucket is more midterm, where we make it last three to ten years with moderate growth, where we are taking a little bit more risk, but still possibly also preserving our principal or capital we put in those investments. And then we have longer term growth where we take a little bit more risk and we make that money last for down the road. We're trying to aggressively kind of grow that money. So each of these buckets serves a purpose and kind of think of them like ropes or anchors on your descent down the mountain. We also build guardrails such as income floors. So when retirees are retired, we're not changing their lifestyle. So with these income floors, we're able to guarantee that they'll have that income for that or that lifestyle on that amount of income for the rest of the lives. So it doesn't impact their lifestyle going forward.

You know, I think that the lifestyle is a huge aspect that people get wrong. You know, and you as an advisor tend to almost be like a life coach of sorts. You know, you're sitting down going, tell me what retirement looks like to you. And maybe if you ask 10 people, you'll get 10 different answers like, oh, well, I want to, whatever. Maybe it's like the idea of retirement and sitting back and playing golf all day long would just bore the daylights out of me. Maybe, you know, maybe someone would go, I just want to start that business. that I've always wanted to start. Or maybe I want to get more into philanthropy or working with a nonprofit or a charity or whatever

that looks like. And I would say to or ask you, when you sit down with some clients and they start talking about their future and whatever time it looks like and, you know, then you're layering in what we just mentioned about the, um, the timeframe. Is this going to be 10 years, 15, 20, whatever the time frame is. Well, all of a sudden now, the money they think they need per month to maintain the, um, maintain their lifestyle might be too little because it's like you know what you've retired from your job you're not working the 40 hours a week or more now you have more time to spend and travel

and so you might think you need X but in reality you just mentioned you want to do this and do this and do this that might take a whole lot more what are some of the things that you're doing to help really bring that to light for people so they realize that you really want to zero in on the right lifestyle to make sure that that income is there guaranteed Yeah. So, I mean, just like you had mentioned, we are kind of like a life coach in ways for retirement. Because people think that when we retire, I'm going to play golf, fish, do XYZ. But, I mean, you can only play so much golf. You can only fish so much, right? Before it gets boring. I mean, if I go ahead and play golf every day for a month straight, I'm probably pretty bored of it to tell you the truth.

So, I mean, a lot of times with people, I try to tell them, I'm like, hey, for the next 30 years, what are you going to do? What do you want to do for these next five to ten years? Do you have you ever thought of a business? Because one of the things that we're going to need, and we'll talk about this later, is with taxes. I mean, you've lost a lot of your deductions by the time you become retirement. So maybe starting a business and finding that love that you're going to be. and that passions you've never been able to follow before, how can you turn that into a business?

And that could also save your retirement with tax deductions out of that business. So different strategies like that could also help them in retirement as well, especially finding that. And I find that also when someone has a passion or a drive to wake up every morning, besides just golf or whatever, they last longer. They live longer. they have better health in general during that retirement. I think that there's actually statistics to support that.

You know, like, you know, I've heard even statistics like the most amount of heart attacks happen on Sunday night or Monday morning because they're like dreading going to work. And also there's a lot of lifespan, a negative lifespan that happens after someone retires because you get up and go to work and you're part of a team or doing whatever you're doing. And all of a sudden that's gone and you're going, what should I do? So if you don't plan the right way, you will experience things that aren't necessarily financial. But I think that this is a great point to bring up related to the life coach aspect. What are some things you prepare your clients for, for that descent down, so to speak,

related to the emotional side of retirement that, you know, yeah, yeah, we got the money there. But here's some things that you might not have thought about. that is a good question I mean thinking about life I mean what do you want to do with the rest of your life

I mean a lot of people think especially when they're going up that descent it looks magical looks great and they're looking for it to that day when they don't necessarily have to work but really work is what also kind of drives us as a nation a little bit as well

that just kind of keeps us in our blood flowing through us, I guess you can say. Yeah. It gives us sense of purpose. I just see so many retirees early. I mean, everybody wants to retire early. It seems like the retirement age was 67, 65. I've talking to a lot of people, they're 62, 60. They want to retire now. Yeah. And a lot of times it's like, what are you going to do? and putting that in their head in their mind, okay, start getting them thinking, what is my life going to look like? What do I need to do after I quit this job? I know you're unhappy in this job right now.

Maybe that's why it's driving you wanting to retire now. But what is something that you have a passion for that you could probably take less income for because you don't need anymore because you saved and amassed all this stuff? What can you do to give you purpose? of life. So yeah, huge. Yeah. So what do you think and how do you advise your clients that are, you know, really getting closer to the retirement age to plan for health care costs and long-term care, things like that? Because when we think about, you know, the analogy of the bucket, you know, you've got your money in the bucket. But when holes are there, money's flowing out.

And health care costs, money can flow out. Long-term care, money can flow out. What are some ways that people should be approaching those two risks. Yeah, there's a lot of things out there. Long-term care insurance. Not a huge fan of it, but there's a lot of different ways you can get it with no additional costs where you can double your income in the event of any of those things that come up that would take you out, where if you can't perform any two of the six assisted day living activities like feeding yourself or mobility or bathing and stuff like that, where you can

double your income for five years or so and it will help pay for someone to come into your house to help you take care of those things. And then there's making sure that you have the decent health insurance plan as well to help kind of plug those. A lot of people, when you talk about Medicare, think about only a supplement versus maybe a, Medicare Advantage plan, which is always going to be a little bit cheaper than probably the supplement. But cheaper doesn't always mean down the road that it's always the best for you as well. So it's just kind of weighing your options on some of those things when it comes to health care.

But man, it's expensive. I think health care costs, I read a statistic. The other day that a couple in retirement would spend for health care alone, about $250,000 over the course of that 20 to 30 years of retirement. I mean, that's expensive. Wow. That could be a big chuck of your retirement if you don't plan it correctly on that. And that's not including long-term care.

On top of that, what is that, what, $15,000, $20,000 a month? I've heard those four stories. And mentioning statistics, isn't it a very, very high statistical chance that people will need some type of long-term care. Oh, yeah. Was it a couple living, it's about 70% chance, I think. One of the two? I think I've heard that number.

Yeah, that literal numbers somewhere in the 70s. And if that's accurate, which, you know, even if it's not accurate, anything about 50, that's a pretty big chance. And if the numbers are 5, 10, 15, whatever, 1,000 per month, that's a big hole in that bucket to plug up that can, if you're thinking about the how much money do I need to retire, well, if you're focused on that number, if there's money flowing out the backside of that, you're not getting to that number any sooner. So making sure that you are preparing for that, given those costs, that's huge.

Yeah, exactly. So what happens when people don't have a guide for their quote unquote descent down the mountain because like we've said, you know, getting to the top is not retirement. Getting to the top is just a stopping point. You still got to get down it, which is the making sure that your money lasts through retirement, making sure your money goes to the right, you know, airs for that legacy planning in the right tax-favored way. What if someone just tries to Google it or do it on their own or yeah, yeah, yeah, I've got this? What are some of those things to keep in mind? And then can you share an example of a client that you've worked with is kind of now?

navigate their way up and down the mountain and what were some of the key points that we can take away from that. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, frankly, just like you mentioned it, I mean, they're winging it. Peacemealing it together, trying to do it through YouTube or, I mean, you can practically do anything off YouTube, right? Or they're Googling it, and it rarely ends well. I mean, rarely some people are overspending early thinking I've worked hard. I deserve this and that. I'm buying this lakeside house and buying this RV.

Others are paralyzed by fear and anxiety, and they underspent, which could be detrimental in the future with taxes and not planning correctly with that. So they're living like they're broke or even when they've saved well. I see people work extra years, they didn't need to, or those who were tired too early without knowing the risks. So without a guy, you can't really see the clips ahead. tax taxes market downturns health care expenses or even the death of a spouse can really what are you going to do when that comes up or what is that going to do my portfolio or even how

is retirement going to look differently at that point and unfortunately many financial professionals when we focus on the accumulation side yeah they help to get their clients get up the mountain but they kind of leave them at the top because they think they've arrived or they don't know as a guy how to get them back down and how to go to get them up there, but they can't get them down the mountain. So that's why the advisor choppers gets the chopper to pick them up off the top of the mountain and waves to the client, you know, figuratively. Yeah. Good luck. Wow. Yeah. Really interesting. Really a good analogy because once you've accumulated, you need to decumulate to live, to survive through retirement,

and to pass on to that legacy. So there's a whole other side of that equation. So have you, can you think of an example of a client without mentioning details or names, but, you know, scenarios? Yeah. So, for instance, I had a lady come in a couple months ago. Single lady. She's 70. She has $1.4 million.

Mostly in retirement, IRA 401K accounts. But living on kind of the porn site because she's got fear. She doesn't necessarily need all that income, but she's amassed quite a bit. Her husband died pretty young at 45. So she's been a widow for some time. And she had a mask this much. She kind of lives on little, but showing her what is going to happen around the corner at age 73. If she doesn't start spending some, start living, start taking some of that income.

I mean, taxes are going to get astronomical for her when those required minimum distributions come about. I was able to show her that she would be paying an effective tax rate of anywhere from 20 to almost 30% towards later on in life. And she's got great genes. I mean, her parents are still living at 97, 96, 98. She's going to live probably for a while. She's fit, active. So she has a good chance that where she's going to be paying a lot in effective taxes. And when I talk about effective taxes, that's the total tax you pay, not just your tax bracket.

So I like looking at effective tax rates versus what kind of tax bracket someone is in. Because I want to know overall how much taxes is someone going to pay. And that's a big chunk of someone's money if you're paying 20 to 30%. So I was able to show her that if you start spending some money now, start taking that out while also still having a little bit of growth that we can stabilize for retirement into the future and not let taxes eat up everything that she has worked hard to amass and still be able to live her retirement comfortably and have a little more fun along the way instead of just penny pinching out of fear and anxiety.

And probably when you ran that scenario and analysis, it was eye-opening because as you were describing it, it made me think, okay, if I was her and just kind of pinched the pennies and living, you know, meager and being told, okay, if you keep doing this, you're going to potentially have to pay more taxes. So lighten up a little, live a little, enjoy a little, and it's going to either be the same as you were expecting or even better. But yet right now today, you're living better and enjoying things. You don't need to constrict and feel that. And to me, that would feel like a big relief off of your shoulders, right? Yeah, most definitely. And the interesting thing was, is that she had brought up taxes to our current advisor last year or two years ago, she said,

And he kind of blew her off saying, oh, you're fine, not really giving her a detailed picture of what that would look like into the future. It's kind of like the classic scenario of what I just pointed out was that he got her to the top. He choppered off the top of the mountain. Yeah, and he's just kind of letting her go and not addressing those questions and how to get back down. And what's that going to look like coming down where she's already got the anxiety because she's a single lady. She has no one to rely on besides him. So, I mean, that's a classic, and it happens all the time. So scenarios like that, or I've come across scenarios as well where someone's spending too much, way too much in retirement because they think they deserve it.

Yeah. I've had a lady come in where she's bought a lake house. She had a million dollars. I'm rich. I got a million dollars. I'm in retirement. She went and bought a lake house. She paid cash for that.

She laid down $250,000. She bought an RV. She's bought trucks for her grandchildren. After about six, seven years, she was down to like, $250,000. Ooh. After that, after the million dollars, I'm like, what's you been doing? Yeah.

So is that mentality as well. You got to change it. Both ways. Yeah. You've got to keep that end in mind to either tap the brakes or to lighten up, like we said, in both of those scenarios. Those are really great. Well, Adam, it's been really great chatting with you about this.

If someone is interested and maybe getting a second opinion and seeing what it looks like for them to get up and down that mountain, what's the best way they can learn more and reach out and connect with you? Yeah, you can definitely reach us at our phone number. It's 901-508-2433. Always can look us up at AAAlif Solutions.com. There you'll be able to find me, along with my partner, Renee Kennedy, and we're able to learn more about us.

We have a few bucks up there as well, which you can download or request, and we can mail them to you as well to learn more about different techniques and retirements and stuff like that. Excellent. Well, Adam, thank you so much for coming on. It's a great pleasure talking with you. No problem. Thanks, Mike. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www.com.