Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Leslie Hammock, Founder of Retire By Design Discussing The 5 Risks of Retirement

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

Leslie Hammock was born in Perry, Georgia, graduated from Stratford Academy, and later graduated from Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. He began his career with Mass Mutual. After a number of successful years, Leslie founded his own firm. Leslie has extensive personal and professional experience with an emphasis on Retirement and Estate planning strategies for professionals, business owners, and individuals working in both private and government sectors.Leslie has been the recipient of the National Quality Award. He is also a long-time member of the International Association of Registered Financial Consultants (RFC), a member of the National Ethics Association, and an Independent Fiduciary Investment Advisor.Leslie is an approved adult financial education instructor and holds classes at numerous local colleges on the subjects of Investment Planning, Retirement Planning, Social Security Maximization, Estate Planning, and many other topics.Leslie is dedicated to developing lasting relationships with all his clients in their wealth accumulation and preservation objectives. He takes pride in his ability to provide clear, easily understood strategies using various financial products, services, and cutting-edge analytical technology.Learn more: http://www.retirebydesign.com/Disclosure:Securities and investment advisory services offered through Integrity Alliance, LLC, Member SIPC. Integrity Wealth is a marketing name for Integrity Alliance, LLC. Retire By Design is not affiliated with Integrity Wealth.IUL Disclosure:Indexed Universal Life Insurance is an insurance contract that, depending on the contract, may offer a guaranteed annual interest rate and some participation growth, if any, of a stock market index. Such contracts have substantial variation in terms, costs of guarantees and features and may cap participation or returns in significant ways. Any guarantees offered are backed by the financial strength of the insurance company, not an outside entity. Investors are cautioned to carefully review an indexed universal life insurance for its features, costs, risks, and how the variables are calculated.SSA & SSA Max Disclosures:Not associated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration, Medicare or any other government agency.Maximizing your Social Security Benefits assumes foreknowledge of your date of death. If as an example you wait to claim a higher monthly benefit amount but predecease your average life expectancy, it would have been better to claim your benefits at an earlier age with reduced benefits.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-leslie-hammock-founder-of-retire-by-design-discussing-the-5-risks-of-retirement

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 Leslie Hammack, who's the founder of Retire by Design, and we'll be talking about the risks of retirement. Leslie, welcome to the program. Thank you. Glad to be here. Hey, I'm looking forward to talking with you because I know that sometimes people don't like to hear negative things like risks in anything.

But if we know some of the risk of retirement, then we can be prepared and put some things in place. So I know that I want to learn from what your years of experience have provided that you provide to your clients. But before we dive into that, give us a little bit of your background and story and how did you get into the financial service? industry? Well, it started on a sad note. My father at age 50 was killed by a drunk driver when I was in college. But we were fortunate enough that he had had a good advisor, especially on the estate planning side of the equation and life insurance side of the equation. And it made a big impression on me. And I felt like it was a noble, noble business to go into. So I started my career on the insurance side of the equation with mass mutual right out of college and spent about 13 years with them before I broke off and went independent and spread out and went back to school, so to speak, and got additional licenses for fee-based planning and assets under management as well as my insurance and estate planning background.

And then how long have you been in the industry? A little over 40 years, as I said, started right to college. Wow. That's been a minute or two. And I know you've seen a lot of trends and changes. I think it's really neat that you got into the industry because you saw something that happened and your parents were protected. And so you got into that side of the business, the insurance side. And then as time went by, you thought, you know, insurance is just one small piece of a full, you know, finance.

financial plan or planning for retirement and then you got into more. So I know today we want to talk about risks in retirement. Talk a little bit about some of these risks. I know that, you know, when you think about retirement, you people typically think, I put my money in the market. Well, that could be risky, right? Oh, exactly. I talk about the four colors of money with new clients or new prospective clients all the time.

and I refer to the money in the market as red money, meaning that it's, you know, people invest in it for the primary reason that hope they make better returns than anywhere else, but they have to be aware and willing to accept risk on the other side of the equation. I like to talk about five risks over time. There's market risk, which you're referring to now. There's tax risks.

There's longevity risk. interest rate and inflation risk. And one more big risk is the lack of planning for long-term care. Yeah. Yeah, I want to touch on all of those because obviously you can probably do a weekend seminar on this and still not be going past scratching the surface. But let's talk just a little bit more about that market risk because it sounds to me like when money is in the market, you said it's red money because it's kind of like almost stop

or be careful or, you know, because that volatility. You know, you turn the news on every day and you see the stock market's just up down and all around. How do you advise your clients to address that risk of volatility in the market? Well, first of all, the proper diversification is really critical. Sometimes having investments in things that are non-correlated to the market on the downside. I refer to retirement planning is in three phases. The accumulation phase, the preservation phase, which is right at retirement,

and the distribution phase, which is the most critical part. And without proper planning with diversification and having some different type of asset classes in your portfolio, you could suffer some severe damage to your retirement income if it happens. if the downside happens at the wrong time. Yeah, I'll get into a little later talking about sequence of returns and the risk of sequence of returns a little bit. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, I know that it would be nice if we all had a crystal ball and knew when

the market's going up and down because then we'd get in and out, but we don't. So you have to take some precautionary measures. I know the other risk you were talking about is tax risk. And, you know, some of these things we're talking about, these risks like market and tax and long-term care and inflation, these are things we cannot control. You know, if we were talking about the risk of our exercise routine, well, we can just control that. We can eat better and we can exercise more. But these other risks like taxes, we don't control those.

How do you advise your clients in addressing tax risk? Well, first of all, everyone needs to be aware and realize that tax laws change frequently. We've seen dramatic changes in the estate tax laws over the years. And right now, the hold-up on the big beautiful bill, as they talk about it, is some provisions in there about the debt, as well as the desire by one party to renew the tax cuts that happened back in 2017. Otherwise, if that doesn't happen, we're going to see probably the largest tax increase in history. And clients have no control over that.

So I think it's important to understand that you can't ignore taxes in your retirement. You've got to plan, try to plan for it as best you can. One example that I give of that is something called Irma. It has to do with Medicare. And people don't realize, a lot of people don't realize, don't know what Irma is all about. It's spelled I-R-M-A, but it has to do with the amount of income that you have in retirement versus what your Social Security benefits are going to be and the cost of Medicare. This is a problem that if you have excess income over certain limits,

you could literally lose your entire Social Security benefits by being eaten up by the cost of Medicare. But we talk about that a good debt as well. And that's a really good point. That's part of the taxes question there. Because I having to pay more, no more Medicare, it's like another tax, more tax on your Social Security. You know, and it kind of brings to my mind, you know, I like that you use word pictures. Like we call that red money, you know. You've been listening to influential entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders.

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