Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Cameron Bryant of Found Revenue Solutions & Retirement Specialist at Federal Employee Advocates

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

Cameron has over 33 years of experience in working with Business Owners, Seniors, Federal employees, and Franchisees in the planning and development of Tax Favored Retirement plans, Living Trusts, Buy/Sell Agreements, Executive Bonus Plans, Marketing and Wellness Benefit programs. I was able to work exclusively with the Franchisee of 7-11, Mobil, Shell, Hallmark, and Yamaha to create personal as well as business Retirement Plans. Working now exclusively with Federal Employees and retirees in helping them understand their benefits and helping them to retire with a sound and stable plan .Learn More:https://federalemployeeadvocates.com/Cameron/https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameron-bryant-48b51014/949-412-3534Cameron@ FederalEmployeeAdvocates.netPlease be advised that any information provided in this correspondence shall not be construed by any person as legal, tax, investment, or accounting advice. This message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential, legal, and/or privileged information.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-cameron-bryant-of-found-revenue-solutions-retirement-specialist-at-federal-employee-advocates

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 Cameron Bryant, who's the founder of Found Revenue Solutions and Retirement Specialist at Federal Employees Advocates. Cameron, welcome to the program.

Thank you. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me. Hey, so I know your focus on working with federal employees is really, really important these days, given all of the questions that seem to come up with federal employees in the news. So bring us up to speed on what you're working with your clients on. They're hearing all kinds of things. They've got a lot of options.

They're asking, now what? They're losing jobs. They're being asked to retire early. But what are some of the key points in the news that people are facing and what are some of the things that they should be considering? Well, what's happening with the federal employees is they're getting offers, right, for an early retirement. And they have gotten multiple different offers, different changes on those. So we're trying to navigate and help them through that by helping them figure out, can they retire now? and so that the big issue on that is going to be what we call an income gap

because we know that they can qualify for their furs pension and they can probably qualify for Social Security. But then after that, is that enough income? So we need to figure out how can we get them retired so that number one, they stay retired, right? We don't want them to go back to work or be forced to go back to work. So the conversation has been about, about can they retire now, we need to take into consideration the income gap. What is that income

gap? And how can we solve that issue? You know, that's a really interesting point you bring up about stay retired. Most of the time people think about, I'm going to retire at this age. I've run the numbers and everything looks good. I'm retiring. But how prevalent is the possibility of staying retired, changing? Well, that's what I've noticed. That's alarming to me the last, say, four to five years is the number of people, the federal employees that are being forced to go back to work because they do not have enough income in retirement.

All they had was Social Security and their first pension. And then that was okay, maybe four or five years ago. although it might have been tight, now with inflation and then depleting some of their assets, they're going back to work. They're trying to find part-time work. They're forced to go back to work. And that's a difference because I do have some federal employees that they want part-time work just to be busy and have something to do. It's their choice, right?

But when you're being forced to go back work because you need that extra $5, $600 a month or whatever, that's not good. I'm seeing too much of that. So it's all about doing the proper planning ahead of time before retirement to make sure that we can solve that issue. You know, and some of those decisions and factors that you just described really could have been planned for and really properly planned for ahead of time so that you didn't have to go back to works. Because you can't do anything about inflation. but if you make a plan and say here's where this potential gap is, let's factor in for an inflation rate of X. Well, at that point, now that's a known factor.

So do you think that some of these people that have retired and gone back to have been forced to go back to work just didn't do any sort of planning at all? Yeah, it's a combination of not doing any planning at all. Okay, that's probably the number one issue that I see. A close second, though, is something that we really can't control. And that would be if they just don't have enough assets to work with, maybe their TSP account is only $25 or $30,000 or $40,000. There's nothing that we can really do to help them build security or make up that income gap or have enough income in retirement if that's all they have.

But largely, it is just. not planning properly or waiting until the very last second to plan. And that's, that's an issue too. I always remind people, when you're, you know, if you look at the professional athletes when they're getting ready for a game, they're planning ahead of time, right? They're planning ahead of time for the game. They're not waiting the morning of to, oh, we better put a plan together for our game. No, you need to plan well in advance to make sure you can carry out the plan and make adjustments along the way. So pre-planning for retirement is very important. And also what goes along with that, I would suspect, is when you plan enough ahead of time, you're doing it in the right frame of mind.

You're not scrambling. You're not feeling the pressure. You're kind of making all the right decisions in the right frame of mind versus we have a catastrophe. How could we fix it? That's correct. Yeah. You don't want chaos going on. around you as you're trying to plan, you know, kind of being in the middle of it, right? You want to plan far enough in advance where you're in a calm state and everything is better situated for planning, right? You don't want everything being chaotic and disruptive. You want things to be planned well in advance when it's calm and everybody's on the same

page. So talk a little bit about that TSP. You mentioned what if it's, you know, not, you know, not. large enough. That's an obvious one. But what are some of the considerations for people to think about regarding their TSP? Well, some of the considerations would include the protection, what I call the protection phase, what most all the retirement gurus experts talk about the protection phase. When you're three to five years from retirement and you have a TSP account, you do need to look strongly into protecting a portion of it.

They recommend 75%. Okay. So the only protection, though, that is in the TSP is what they call the G fund. It's the government bond fund. It's a temporary parking place because you're not going to lose 25, 30% or 34% like back in 2008. But that is part of the planning and living. looking at the Thrift Savings Plan is how much do you want to protect now before retirement?

And then that's where we come in. We say, okay, let's look at some alternatives for you where we can upgrade from TSP that will give you everything that's important. It's a volatility buffer. You're not going to have volatility. You're going to have a good interest rate. You're going to have growth. But you can't lose the money.

and you're not going to be stuck at getting 2%, which is the chief fund is average, as of today, it's averaged 2.6% over the last 10 years. Wow. So that's really not even keeping up with inflation. No, exactly. Exactly right. I took the words out of my mouth. Yeah.

Well, here's a thought on that, volatility and risk. I mean, I don't know percentage-wise how many people would say, I love volatility in risk. I'll risk, you know, large, not many people, especially when they're talking about the money that they must have for retirement to make sure there's no income gap. So nobody knows, you know, oh, well, we've come through whatever time, so the markets are going to be smooth.

Nobody knows that. There's always going to be something. And if we look back over time, there's always these big pops of catastrophes or economic crisis or COVID or 9-11 or whatever that it is, fill in the gap. It doesn't even need to be. what we're seeing today tomorrow, the next day. There always will be the chance for volatility.

How important is it to make sure that, like you're talking about here, that percentage to protect it. Isn't that a huge, huge need for federal employees? It's a, yeah, very huge need because they want and we want that money to be there for them in their retirement, right? That's the most important thing. And one of the roughest parts of my career was back in 2008 when I was meeting with the folks, the federal employees. And those people were getting ready to retire that year or within the next two, say, three years.

But, you know, hey, we all know what happened. The market crashed. Everything crashed. And so these people that were hoping to retire lost an average of over, I think, 32 or 34 percent of their portfolio. because all their money was at risk at that time. And so they were, that's when it woke everybody up that says, wait a minute, what did I do? What mistakes did I have? And then people were telling me and I was telling them like, well, you can't retire this year.

You can't even retire next year. You know, they had to work an extra three, four, five years to get back to where they were to try to get some type of retirement money back or the retirement funds back. So it is very important to make sure that you have a good portion. of those funds set aside and protected because that's money that you're going to need in retirement. And I know we're talking about some percentage of federal employees being asked to leave or retiring or all of those variables, but can you take a percentage of the TSP to do this protection that you're talking about even while you're still employed or is it only once

you've separated and now that's a consideration? No, that's a great question. want to tap into helping them with the protection as early as possible. So most of the people that I talk to are, I would say, between 62 and 64. So at that stage, you know, we're looking at if we follow the guidelines from the retirement experts at 75% of that money being protected. So, and some people are already way ahead of the game. They're like, Cameron, I already, I want 100% of my money protected. You know, I want, I don't want to take any risk whatsoever.

And some people are like, well, I'm going to go 50, 50. But it's important, you know, when you're over, you know, or in your 60s to take a look at a pretty good percentage of getting that money protected and getting that set up properly for your retirement. So it's while you're working is the answer. Yeah, exactly. It's both and I'm sure you would agree. Oh, yeah, because some people are just all of a sudden find. out right now that they got, you know, 60 days and it's like, okay, we need to get to work. We need to do our thing.

So. Yep. So I know that one of the factors of that income gap, like we were talking about poor planning or lack of planning or inflation, all of those kinds of things or, you know, you use more money than you should have. But taxes is another factor that comes into play. How does tax planning with respect to the TSP withdrawal factor into your recommendations? So when we are helping the federal employee with the TSP, if they do a rollover to the protected IRA account, there's no tax consequences.

It's a like-for-like transfer. So there's no fees. There's no tax consequences. It just goes into the new IRA. So they don't have to deal with that. The only time that they're going to have to pay taxes is if and when they actually take the funds. out of the IRA account. And that's just going to be normal, whatever normal tax bracket they're in.

That makes sense. Yeah. So that then still is a whole conversation in and of itself, but there's nothing specifically indicative to that TSP. So that's good. You also mention Social Security. That's a whole different animal, but there's factors that come into play because the security is a big part of most retirement plans.

What are some of those things that federal? employees should consider before they decide to start taking some of those benefits? For Social Security, yeah, it depends if they're single. It depends if they're married. It depends on who is the major breadwinner if they are married. Do we stagger the Social Security? In other words, do we have one take Social Security earlier than the other spouse? So we take a look at all those factors, it's important to take a look at that because there's so many different ways to go on what I call basically social security planning. A lot of people do want to hold off on taking social security and we can implement some strategies to, for example, have them hold off on taking

social security for maybe an extra two or three years that will then beef up or build up that Social Security income. So that's been pretty popular with a lot of the federal employees, and they bring it up. They'll say, yeah, I don't want to take Social Security at 65. I want to take it 67. Or they're 67. I don't want to take it at 67. I want to take it at 70. Okay, here's a strategy that we can employ that can work for you where we can put this in place and that will hold off taking Social Security for an extra two or three years. That's going to build up. So, yeah, that's a great, great planning to do for them. Yeah. And let's talk a little bit about that delay.

There are going to be maybe some circumstances where people must take it right now, for whatever the reason is. We need the money. We have health insurance. But delaying could be a benefit. And that takes some of that planning, getting back to that planning. How do you balance the fact that if you delay it, you get that added whatever is at 8% per year added in? So that looks good. but if you delayed it for two or three years, you also did not get the monthly amount for those two to three years.

So how do you balance that? Well, that's the puzzle. And that's what we have to go to on a case-by-case basis. So when you mentioned the 8%, if there's 67, which is called the FRA, the full retirement age, every year that they wait after age 67, they will have an increase of 8%. So if they waited three years, they're going to have a 24% increase in what their Social Security benefit payout will be. So, you know, there's ways to offset that they can get income from another source. In other words, from the protected IRA account that was rolled over from TSP, that will provide them that income for that, for the two or three years until they turn on the Social Security.

So it's a case-by-case planning to go through that and go through, how we set that up for each client. You know, I'm glad you brought that up because there's so many times that people say, here's the solution, and this is the cookie cutter solution for every single person, come one, come all. But that's never the case. And whether it's even the bullet point item we're talking about here, so security, it's always going to be this factor affects that factor.

Same with, should I do something with the TSP now? What percentage, 75? All of that, you've got to take it into the full picture of, what does this client need? What are their desires? What are their fears, expectations? What does retirement look like for them? So talk a little bit about how someone can bridge the gap between maybe taking that

retirement or Social Security disbursement a little earlier without depleting their other savings too quickly. Well, how they can do that. Social security, the planning on Social Security, we're taking a look at the total income that they will need in retirement. That's what it all comes down to. And one of those factors is called the R80, the retirement 80 factor, where we want them to retire with 80% of their normal annual income.

So for easy numbers, if they're making $100 grand a year, we want them to retire out as close to $80,000 per year as possible. So we're going to take a look at the assets. Do they have an IRA? Do they have an old 401K? they have a thrift savings plan. What's that built? What's built up in the TSP?

Then calculate what their first payment is supposed to be and then get the numbers for Social Security. What's it going to be at 65 versus 67 versus age 70? And then again, that's part of the puzzle and we have to put everything together on a case-by-case basis to figure out how are we going to set this person up for success so that they have a bullet- retirement the rest of their life and that they do not have to go back to work. Yeah, like we mentioned, there's such a big difference between feeling forced to do something or feeling pulled towards something, you know, like, hey, I've retired and two months in, I've done all the fun, relaxing stuff I want to do, but, you know, I've always wanted to fill in the blank, right?

So what are some of the mindset shifts that you see clients facing when they transition from that steady government job to either a part-time job or retirement, because there's some changes that they need to be aware of. Yeah, it all comes down to budget, right? I mean, because they're going to be having less income. In most cases, in most cases, they're going to have less income in retirement. So it does come down to making sure the budget is set. We're taking a look at the mortgage.

There's a lot of federal employees that tell me that, hey, Cameron, I'm going to have my home paid off in four years or five years or six years. Okay, well, that comes into play because that's a large monthly expense. And if when that's paid off, you just gave yourself a nice pay raise, right, by doing that. So we take a look at all the factors when it comes to income, but also liabilities. And what are your short term and long term liabilities currently? Will any of those be paid off in the short term? Will any of those be paid off after five, six, seven, eight years? So we take a look at all all that, and take all that in consideration. But it's going to come down to budget, lifestyle. You know, I ask them, okay, what do you need? What are the numbers you need to live on in retirement?

And then the other number I ask is, what is the number that you would want to have in retirement? Those are going to be two different numbers. People say, Cameron, I need $6,500 a month to have, you know, somewhat comfortable retirement. Okay. What would you like to have? What was the other number that that you want that you would like to have in an ideal retirement. Oh, if I could have $7,500, an extra thousand a month or $1,500 a month, that would be outstanding. So a lot of times we can meet that goal. Again, it just depends on what we have to work with. But that's a... Yeah, shoot for the want, but settle on the need. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And too many times, I would suspect you see this. Too many times people don't really put that pin to

paper and calculate properly because that 6,500 example you mentioned, what if that was off base and they really need, need, needed 7,500? And now all of a sudden it's like, oh, yeah, we didn't think of the fact that whatever, you know, we're not working 40 hours a week, so we've got more time to spend or travel or whatever. And just naturally, they find themselves spending more frequently. So keeping tamping down that budget and keeping those expenses in line is super important. I would think. That's important and that's part and that's my job. That's important for me. That's important for

for me to dial down into that and really ask all the questions. And in doing this now, what, 35 years, you know, you learn what questions to ask and you make sure that you fill in the holes and don't have any gaps when you're going through in planning. So that's important because you don't want to miss something. And I think with the way we have things designed, how we have set up that nothing's going to fall through the cracks. Well, I tell you, Cameron, this has been really eye-opening and helpful for the times that we live in change. And so for a federal employee wondering what their options could be, what's the best way that they can reach out and connect with you to see what that plan could look like for them? Well, they can reach me directly, which is the phone number here,

949-4-1-2-3534. And then you have my email address, which is Cameron at Federal Employee Advocates.net. So Cameron at Federal Employee Advocates.com.net is my email. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It was a real pleasure chatting with you today. Thanks, Mike. Hey, I really appreciate your time. Thanks. Thanks very much. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders.

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