Business Innovators Radio - Interview with John Badalamenti Founder & CEO of Safe Estate Discussing Running Out of Income- the Domino Effect

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

John has lived in this business for a while, 30 years fighting the Wall Street battle! Born and raised in beautiful Michigan with a close family that he loves and cherishes. They spend a great deal of time together travelling and love visiting their family cottage in up north of Michigan. One of his truly favorite spots is mystical Mackinaw Island. Being an avid animal lover and protector, he will soon provide a sanctuary for animals that need love and a safe home. This will be in memory of my “ex-partner” and beloved friend Bambi, whom he rescued and went everywhere with me in my travels. In my business model, John works in many states but primarily the Michigan and Ohio areas fighting for his students and clients from the stock market insanity.“Emotions run the market” and I have learned from all those emotions from all my students through the years!Learn More: https://www.safeestate.net/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-john-badalamenti-founder-ceo-of-safe-estate-discussing-running-out-of-income-the-domino-effect

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 back with us, John Bata Lamenti, who's the founder and CEO of Safe Estate, and we'll be talking about running out of any. income the domino effect. John, welcome back to the program. Thanks so much, Mike. I appreciate you having me back. You know, I think that if you were to run a survey to people, some of the biggest fears in life is fear of speaking in public and fear of heights and things. But one of the

biggest fears, too, is running out of money in retirement. And I think that's not just a, you know, a funny statement. It's actually a documented research stat. So talk. a little bit about the concept of why it's so important for your clients to really dial into the concept of you need to make sure you will not run out of money in retirement. You know, absolutely. Absolutely. We just actually believe that subject just came up. I teach many classes at a lot of the colleges through several states. And that subject always comes up. And I actually presented to the class and asked the question and say, you know, what is it your biggest concern or worry as you enter, you know, as a retire as you enter into retirement.

And I always hear it about four or five different ways. And it just happened in the class I just taught in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as I asked that very question, right away, it's running out of money, outliving my income. You hear it puts so many different ways, but it means the same thing. And it is a legitimate fear because, you know, people are living longer today, baby boomers especially. People are much healthier. And they're very, very concerned about that as I is what we speak in our class is all about. You know, that's a really big point and we'll start unpacking that. But I know that for decades, that's been a big concern.

But then when you factor in the realization that we as humans are actually taking better care of herself and eating better and health care and prescription medications are better, the tables are showing that life expectancy is longer than it used to be back in the 50s and 60s and 70s. So that becomes now an even more amplified fear because if you didn't think that you would have enough money back when the life expectancy was whatever age, well, now it really could be a thing. So you talk about the domino effect. What's that first domino that typically falls when someone's retirement plan isn't properly structured? Well, the funny thing is if they don't plan ahead of time, as we always like to help everybody prep before retirement, as you enter retirement, you should already have that set up. Now that people are in retirement, and they start to draw their funds out of whatever resources they may have, IRAs, 401K, old 401K, things like that, this domino effect can come swooping in, we call it. I like to spell that out sometimes and actually draw it out on the board in a lot of my presentations, whereas you're drawing money out. There are a lot of other factors that you can't control.

You can control what you draw out. Let's say your Social Security as one of your main staples of retirement that you turn on, somebody turns out. on it's 62 and they're getting $2,000 a month and that's something that they hope is going to last forever. That's another subject that we always talk about running out of Social Security. But that's one bucket of money that's producing income. And if they go to the retirement plans to start drawing out, let's say, another $2,000, which gives them $4,000 a month, they're not, they have to be very concerned about what factors they can't control that are hitting that bucket. It starts the dominoes to fall. Because as you draw the money out of your retirement bucket to supplement your

Social Security, you have to think about what's happening with the market and the investments inside. What is happening when the taxman comes for his piece? You've got that silent partner, as we've talked about before. You've got inflation factored in there. All these things hammer away at that number as you're pulling it out of there. And it causes this problem so that then the effect of running out of money can, I mean, just exacerbate. You can be saying, am I going to make it to 95 years old with this money or am I going to run out when I'm 85? So it's legitimate.

Yeah, that really is. And I think that too many times we as humans tend to ignore, you know, and, well, it won't happen to me until it does. So that's never, you know, like if you have a cut on your finger, you better get it addressed because it could get worse. So how does ignoring this small mistake? stake, right, cascade into even a bigger potential financial crisis? Well, here, as we said, setting up ahead of time, right?

It depends on where your investment buckets are at and your investments inside each of your accounts. Wall Street being a funny character that just likes to take whenever it wants to take and give when it wants to. We can't control that. So if that person is getting their Social Security, as I just stated, and they're drawing money out of that retirement account, if the markets start to tumble, let's use a realistic scenario.

Let's go to 2008. We had the crumble in the fall of 2008. Let's say you were drawing that money out at that time, and your accounts were getting hit 30, 40%, 50, some of them or more. While you're drawing that money out, if your account is dropping in value at such a large amount, and then you also have to draw out a larger amount or a gross because the tax man also is coming and taking his piece,

all of a sudden you can look at that bucket and say, you know, I had $300,000 in there, but I drew out $24,000 this year. I lost another $100, that's $124,000, and I had a, you know, cough up another, you know, $5,000,000 to the tax man. All of a sudden those buckets are getting hit exponentially, and you can certainly run short quickly. And that's the concern. You know, and I think that there's, I think a lot of times mindset plays a really, really treacherous game because you start amplifying things that aren't there or minimizing things that should be there, that kind of thing.

But what you just described is like, oops, I'm kind of behind the eight balls, so let me catch up. And then you start getting tempted to make decisions that could put you at higher risk and then have bigger losses and then they start compounding the wrong direction, right? Absolutely. Well, it's funny. We hear a lot of that in class. People put up their hands a lot and say, you know, yeah, and that starts to happen.

That's happened many times in the last, you know, 20 years. we've had a couple really bad spells in the market. And I lost a lot of money. And I was, you know, thinking to myself, what happens when I start to draw? And this happens during the process of me drawing. I'm actually in retirement. So you hear a lot of these other, I don't want to, I don't want to label anybody that just call the players out there, the advisors out there, whomever they may be, telling them, well, now we're going to have to do this to catch up. Or you're going to have to maybe get a little riskier, as you just said, Mike, right? Or, you know, put off your retirement by three or four years because we're down so much.

We're going to have to have time to catch up as like any of us would know how long it's going to take to come back. Right. I mean, come on. I mean, you lose, you lose 20% you're having to make back 30 or so. You lose 40. You got to make back 80. And I'm sure I can talk a lot on that subject, the numbers itself. You know, so it's tough. Because there's no guarantee of where you're going to put it, you know, and it's almost like you're throwing darts at a dartboard blindfolded. So that that becomes. a zero-sum game of just don't just kind of stay steady plotting. And I think that, too, the older we get, the more memory we have about the negative things

like the market crashing. And whether it's a full-on crash or just big, big dips, a lot of retirees tend to fear market crashing, but isn't the real danger of running out of money while they're still active, what are some of those mindset shifts that people should be? keeping in mind to really move their thinking from accumulation to reliable income. Because there really is a shift between I got to grow, grow, grow my money to now I got to protect, preserve, and have a income stream, right? Right. Well, there's this moment you have to figure out of, okay, I'm planning to retire, let's say, at 62 and I'm 60. A lot of people aren't thinking,

well, let me start the process now. I'll just wait until I'm 62 and I'm quitting and then I'll do my rollovers or my movement and I'll start to put the plan into effect then. it's better to put it in, as I'm sure most people have heard in many ways, put it in early, have it started ahead of time, because there's that shift when you have to pull the trigger at that moment and start saying, okay, I'm starting to take it now. What other factors, as I just said earlier, can affect me as I'm pulling it out. Will things come at me from under every rock? Yes, here comes the tax man. I'm being redundant saying it. Here comes inflation. You have to worry about hedging for that. that. Here comes losses in the market, which I have no idea when they'll happen. Maybe you're in a rally. We've been in a rally mode like a maniac since about 2013-14 as we came out of the bad spell of 08. And other than COVID, we've been rallying and we've been spoiled again. So people get spoiled and say, well, this thing will just go forever, right? Well, that's what a lot of people were saying back when 2001 and 2008 finally hit, right? You've got to prep yourself for those things

by taking some things off the table and shifting the risk so that you're prepared for it as you pull the trigger on retirement income. You know, I'm certain that, you know, protecting your income and shifting risk, those, you know, air quotes, you can ask 10 advisors and get 14 opinions. I know that there's different approaches. But I think that the main thing that people need to realize is at some point, we got to take our wins off the table because we don't know what the future holds. And secondly, we don't have enough runway at, you know, if you wait till age 62 and you're going to retire in a handful of

years, we don't have the runway if you take some losses to catch back up. When do you recommend that kind of, you know, not just the mindset change, but when should you realize that a change needs to be made to go more protected? And then when do you start making those changes? Yeah, it's It's a mindset. I mean, we have a shorter time horizon, as you just said, as we get closer to that time where we're going to click that retirement on or age 62 or whatever it is. And I always recommend to start planning well ahead of time. I mean, as you know, I mean, I have a book coming out several months up the road that's

going to speak very much about what we're talking about now, and there's going to be a lot of great ideas in there. But it's hard. There was a book that came out many years ago called Who Move My Cheese. I'm sure you've heard of it. I know many people in my classes say, oh, I read that. It's the toughest thing in the world to actually institute change. You know you have to make a change just before retiring, but it's hard to pull the trigger

and actually do it, just like in that book we just spoke about. So you have to set down some goals, and it's best to sit down with somebody because they can remove the emotions of it and help you lay a plan out effectively just before you retire. So I always say maybe at least within a couple of years before you pull that trigger, you should have your game plan going into effect, so you're ahead of the game. Yep, 100%. And then you feel like you're not making rash decisions. It's like the old saying, you know, don't go grocery shopping when you haven't eaten all day

because you're just going to grab anything off the shelf because it looks really good. You're hungry. So you don't want to make rash decisions. You want to make these calculated decisions well ahead of time to go, okay, when the time comes, here's this move I'm going to put into place. And you mentioned a few things that I think raise a really flag of frustration, I'll call it, because there are things that we cannot control. Taxes, inflation, health care costs.

We just sit back and watch it happening to us. What are some of those kind of dominoes that you call them? And how can we address them when we have nothing to do about how they are going to change? well the first thing that you can do is realize that they're real and they're going to happen at some moment and believe it if you believe that they're real and they've hit and if you can just look back in time and say well look it hit here it hit here so there's going to be inevitable that those are going to come inflation is always there we saw it spike up several years ago around COVID up to as high as 9% now it has been coming back down things are getting better but we have no idea what can happen with our purchasing power also we have zero control on if the market is going to fall apart tomorrow or four more years from now and we'll continue to rally for the next four years. So you prep ahead of time. You start to do what we called shifting. We're like a series of colors like Crayola Cranes. And we say you just need to start shifting now a couple of years before retirement and removing some of the risk and making

things more tax efficient ahead of the game. And that just requires actually just making subtle changes. It isn't, it doesn't take, I guess moving, moving out of risk is a lot easier than moving out of the taxman's way. That has to be carefully planned in stages. But if you can do it ahead of time, that will be, there will be a lot less, a lot more, I should say, excuse me, left in your pocket when you start to take it out rather than inflation, taxes, and market risk taking it away from you so that you do run out in a shorter amount of time. You know, and I, I think, I, I, I, I, I'm a big reader, personal development person, so I love that you're weaving in mindset into all of this because it's not just only the numbers, right? But the thing that I, and you mentioned a book that, you know, who moved my cheese, I'll mention this book, the compound effect.

Have you ever read that one with Darren Hardy? So it reminds me the concept of that book is just do these little changes, 1% change here, 1% change there, because the compound effect is astronomical. So you don't need to make massive moves and massive changes. If you can just put this thing into place that adjusted just a little bit and the cumulative effect is that you've got this tight, protected approach. Is that kind of some of the recommendations that you're making to your clients? They don't have to feel like, oh, my word, I'm making 180 degree shift. No.

And you can do it in stages. You can take your time and do it over the couple of years before you retire or just as you're coming toward the retirement. you're not doing this one hole jumping into a big hole all at one time you're doing it slowly and you can see each piece being done so that you can slowly get to the plan that's laid out

and that's why it's good to sit down with somebody and take the emotions out of it so that you don't have that compounding effect because as I said earlier I speak about this a lot of my classes I always say take $100 and now you're ready to start drawing out of it you're going to draw two bucks out of it to retire

on and let's say the market falls apart and we get to that spell where it collapses on you right at, right at retirement. And that $100 goes down 20%. Well, now you're down to $80. And I look at the class and say, just make that 20% back and you'll be okay. And a few people smile and go, wait a minute. I go, aha, right? And we all start laughing. You make that 20% back on that $80. Oh, the 80. You're only at 96. Really? Okay. So you're not at, you went from 80 to 96, not all the way back to 100. You need to make back a heck of a lot more than what you lost. And it only compounds if you're

losing 30 or 40 or God forbid 50% which then you got to make back a hundred percent which is quite a mountain to get over you're going to run out of time and your your you're outliving your income is going to become real quickly yeah you know and I think that anyone would nod their head and go yep that makes sense to plan it well ahead but there are always going to be a certain percentage of people that already get retired and realize that some of the these dominoes are starting to wobble and topple, what are some of the steps that they can take to stabilize things if they don't have that runway well ahead of retirement because they've already retired?

Well, I always go back to emotions. The old trader, you quoted a couple of, a book, I quoted a book. The old trader, Jesse Livermore, said the emotions runs Wall Street. It's a market opinion is what matters, not ours. And so it's hard to control your emotions. When things are on a terror like they've been, everybody just, keeps thinking, well, I won't pull the trigger yet because I'm going to get a little bit more this week by Friday. It's hard to say, and you need to do this and say, when will I take the

poker chips off the table? And when will I cash out some of these profits? Because you can't lose what's not on the table, right? So you have to set up a happy medium. We usually do it with percentages. And we go to what amount do you want to protect or what amount do you not want to lose? And it's funny how so many people come up with a 50-50 effect right before they retire. They feel happy starting out with building up to making 50% safe and whatever instruments you use that are completely safe. And 50 that is still sitting and lingering in other investments like Wall Street investments that bear that risk. So that you're eliminating a lot of the risk and balancing it out. You're taking money off the table and putting that aside.

So that's your sure money for retirement. and it's often been said you can never go broke taking a profit so you might move a little money out of a certain you know sector in the market and put it into a safe place and then look backwards on the market and go oh it moved up a little bit i'm i guess i missed out on money but it could have very easily moved down dramatically and you'll never go broke locking in that profit and moving it to that safer sector or safer type of product yeah you know numbers have changed through the years with a lot of things we're hearing a lot now we talk in my classes about the cross the crossing effect of when should you take social

security people you're hearing a lot now that people should take it actually earlier which goes against what they said before and a lot of things have changed out there and people are realizing they have this silent partner and they start they need to start balancing buckets now to get to the zero zero tax buckets as quick as they can so they're keeping more of what they earned and the market is very much that way too um we've learned and a lot of i got a lot of engineers and people that show up my classes that want to bat a lot with me and i welcome it i say bring the numbers next time we'll laugh and talk about it and you know prove me wrong but we're now hearing a lot about the s&p and about how if you look at the s&p for the through over like

the last 25 years or a 25 year period and you look at how it's performed just a couple main big hits can greatly affect the balance of your account and your income, whereas if you would have had your money in, let's say, a 5% CD, which we can't really get now, but we could get around COVID time, and you would have gotten your 5% 25 times, it actually bested the S&P for the last 25 years because of those couple of hits that destroyed the numbers in the actual real return of the S&P 500. the stable fixed interest rate beat it out it's almost hard to believe but you can actually look at it and see what happening and you know our wives probably roll that our eyes when you

and I or men start doing analogies but what you just described as like the tortoise and the hair you know that steady plotting tends to win over the attempt to make those big you know grand slam wins yeah and I'm not saying to run out and buy CDs I'm in no way of touting touting certificates of deposit because now they're already down with a couple interest rate drops. But that should be a stable of your portfolio. I mean, a staple of your portfolio, excuse me, a piece of it should be your, of course, your cash, your money markets, some portions in CDs paying a steady income for a year, year and a half. And then you're breaking it up against amongst other fixed and stable buckets that are safe. And then the other percentage that you're leaving in Wall Street, you're leaving in Wall Street.

That's more, that's the risk of your bucket. Yeah. So I think when you can take the concept of success leaves clues, and when you go and look at people that are literally retired confidently, they're not worried about their money running out, they're not worried about, ooh, volatility. These are people that have a calm demeanor regarding their retirement because they put the work in well ahead of time. And I love how you say, is it math, mindset, or management? Talk a little bit. bit about that that you know trifecta as it relates to people who are actually just calm about the retirement because they've made the right moves yeah once you've it's tough to pull the trigger and make that move to find the cheese right as we talk but once they do it they start to see it starts to it starts to show them they actually can look at and the paper starts to talk to them and say i understand why i did this now because whenever there's any case of volatility for even a little blip. Like recently, even last week, we had another little blip at the end of the week,

and we call it the volatility index or the VIX kind of shot up real quick. It shows that emotions are getting a little nervous with the market. But these people that have already made the moves can actually look at that and say, oh, I notice how those stable buckets didn't get whacked or hit in any way. They stayed kind of like a flat line, right? They're doing good. But the other part of my retirement, the other buckets are doing like their little, it's almost like a little um when you're in a hospital room and you're on to you're hooked to the machines and you got the little blips going up at your heartbeat right okay that's what the market does whereas the flat line um and not that we're claiming anything with uh with death or anything like that but

what i'm saying is that more that flat stable line is more of your fixed end of it that protects you yeah for sure because there's always going to be some type of movement we just don't want massive swings and we don't want the swings downward so i think that is so huge in having this mindset of never running out of income in retirement or money in retirement and recognizing that certain dominoes, air quotes, can start toppling and really impact that negatively. So know what they are and address them well ahead of time. And if someone is interested, John, in having you look at what that could look like for

them just to provide some options, what's the best way that they can learn more and then also reach out and connect with you? Anytime we'd love to, we'd love you to come to one of our classes and learn all about it and talk with us, you know, afterwards, of course. But the best way to do it is you can type in or look up meetjohnB.com. That's M-E-E-E-T, John, J-O-H-N, B as in Boy.com. Meetjohn-B.com. And that'll take you to everything about me and where you can find where we're going to be, where we're teaching, and we'd love to see you. Absolutely.

Excellent. Well, John, thank you so much for coming back on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you again today. Thanks so much, Mike. Appreciate you having me. 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.