Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Mark Dierolf Discussing From Retirement Savings to a Retirement Paycheck

Episode Date: October 13, 2026

Mark Dierolf has been helping individuals, families, and business owners with insurance and retirement-related decisions since 1983. With more than four decades of experience, Mark focuses on helping people age 50 and older prepare for one of life’s biggest financial transitions: moving from earning a regular paycheck to relying on the resources they’ve accumulated for retirement.His approach begins with understanding the individual—their goals, concerns, income needs, existing retirement resources, and the risks they want to address. Mark helps clients better understand retirement income and insurance options, with particular attention to dependable retirement income, protection from unnecessary risk, and the important decisions that arise as retirement approaches.Mark provides insurance and insurance-related services and works with a variety of insurance and financial companies. He does not provide securities or investment-advisory services.After more than four decades in the business, helping people understand their choices and approach retirement with greater clarity and confidence remains the most important part of Mark’s work.Learn More: https://markdierolf.com/This discussion is for general educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as individualized financial, investment, tax, legal, or securities advice. No specific insurance or financial product is being recommended. Mark Dierolf provides insurance and insurance-related services and does not provide securities or investment-advisory services.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-mark-dierolf-discussing-from-retirement-savings-to-a-retirement-paycheck

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, Mark D. Rolf, who is focusing on retirement income services and we'll be talking about from retirement savings to a retirement paycheck. Mark, welcome to the program.

It's my pleasure. Hey, you know, I think that's an interesting point that we are going to talk about today because there's a lot of people that view retirement as just save, save, build up, grow. And then when you get to retirement, it's like how do you shift that mindset from saving and growing to now I'd need to start taking some money out and drawing that hypothetical paycheck. So before we dive into that, give us a little bit of your story and background and how long have you been in the industry? I've been in the industry for over 40 years.

Started off working with my family. My father basically did the same thing. And he did that up until the day he retired. and then I pretty much learned from him and continued on. Nate. Yeah, I mean, you continue the family tradition, and that's awesome to kind of learn it from the ground up. So talk a little bit about how when people spend all of their lives accumulating,

why is having a large amount of savings not quite enough? Because you look at this dollar figure on a statement and go, have accumulated X, why is that not enough? You need to now take the next step, which is creating that paycheck or that cash flow, right? Right, right. You first of all, got to, so you have the accumulation. The next thing you need to know is how are you going to use it and what do you need and start planning how much you need now and how much you need in the future and also be mindful that you're got to be mindful of market volatility, you know, especially if you're invested in market securities. Because if there's a sudden downturn in the market, you don't have

time to wait to make that up. And so it's important that once you have that accumulation and you're doing all this planning, that everything is predictable. Yeah, that, you know, that's an interesting word and certain words jump out, I think, at people. And we all go, ooh, I love that word. That just feels right, predictable, right? I mean, so many times people get anxious if there's ups and downs and volatility. And that's what we're trying to get out of when we get to the later years toward retirement. We don't want our money to be at risk.

So that predictable is huge. talk a little bit about what you do to help people get that predictable income. Well, what we do is we, first of all, plan to figure out how much, you know, they're going to need to live and try to figure out from there what's happening now and what will probably happen in the future and try to structure things so we can make sure that the funds are there when they need them. You know, and that almost is a art form where it's like, well, how much are you going to need in retirement? And you've probably seen people over the decades of you working with them where they tell you one number. Then when you start digging in and going, well, have you considered? And what about planning for this? That number tends to be a little bit low because in retirement, people might have more time on their hands to travel and spend money versus when they were punching the clock.

So you've got to have that number really dialed in well. Yeah, yeah, as much as possible. And so that's part of my service when it comes to this. And then, and then how people from there move forward. Yeah, that's a really good point. So when you're talking about retirement income, are you also managing investments or moving money from one stock to an investment or a fund or a sector and things like that, like a traditional, you know, investment an advisor kind of a setup? No, no, in fact, that's an important point because that's not my job. I mean, in fact, I don't try to replace that job. If somebody has some funds that they want to invest, you know, that's a separate issue. The type of retirement products that my services

involved tend to be where the rate is predictable with no downside risk from the market. And so when someone wants to take market risk, that would be the job of the investment advisor. But that's not what I do. What I do is when it comes to guaranteed income, working on ways to structure and position the funds. So they have guaranteed income as well as if they want growth to have guaranteed growth or growth without the risk of market downturn. You know, that's another good point you brought up is guaranteed income. So we want that predictability, but we also love guarantees. And in life, there's not many things that are guaranteed.

But when you can have a big portion of your income guaranteed and predictable, that sure helps you'd to close that gap on what you need in retirement. And I know a lot of people think about, you know, I've got these buckets in my investments and my social security and, you know, a rare percentage of people might have a pension. But most of the time it's like, here's my social security and investments.

Why do they need a retirement professional past that? Because security is kind of set, right? Not necessarily. I mean, here's the thing, you know, I kind of give this as an example. It's not exactly the same, because the risk is not the same. But think of it if you go to a casino.

Okay. I mean, in the market with the volatility, it's not as same. It's not as risky as a casino. But the thing is, you do have volatility. And so, but when you're in the casino and you're gambling, if you don't manage your money, you're going to end up losing it all. And so you don't necessarily going to lose your money investing in the market unless you're

targeting certain stocks because that could happen. It's pretty risky. But the thing is, what people need to do is they need to manage their funds. So some of it could be at risk if they want to get those big returns. But they have to have some of it that's more conservative, where they have predictable growth. They have, or if they do have growth that is a little bit higher than what you would normally get from a bank, it would be set to where there's no downside risk if the market turns around. And then also could be set up to where they have a guaranteed income stream for life if they choose. Yeah.

And like I said, going back to the casino thing, one of the strategies that, you know, works, this is what I do. If I ever go to the casino and play the tables or something like that, is once I start winning, I start taking some of that money back and put it in my pocket. And, yeah, I can put it on the table and maybe win more, but I don't want to risk losing it. And, you know, you have cycles too, you know, where sometimes you're winning, sometimes you're losing. And that's the way the market is. And so, yeah, you can make some big returns. But, you know, when you do make a return, you should start taking some money back. and put it away and don't put it back there. Keep that in your pocket to where it's not going

to make as much, but at least you know it's there, you know, and it's safe. So you don't have to worry about, you know, any volatility or changes. So I see it the same way. Like I said, the market isn't necessarily as volatile as going to a casino unless you're investing in specific stocks. but I think the comparison is the same. Yeah, yeah, it really is because you never know what that next roll of the dice is going to bring in. You don't want to put your retirement at that kind of a level of risk. And I know a lot of people might say, well, why don't I just take a percentage of my, you know, retirement, put it in savings and invest the rest, or vice versa.

Put a percentage of my retirement in the market and put the rest in savings, you know, or a C.D. one of those approaches might be too risky. One of those might be not, you know, not risky enough, but it might be too limiting because some people that go, I want to go hyper-conservative. I'm just going to put all my money in the bank CDs. Well, is that enough to stay up with cost of living, inflation, things like that? Where do you give some advice that way? Yeah. Well, you're right. there are some people that do that. And frankly, you basically really should just have enough, you know, you should have enough just to get by for a while when it comes to that.

And when it comes to a savings that, other savings that you should put that into something that's a little bit more long term that pays better, you can structure it and ladder it in a way to where you have what you need in the bank. And then at the same time, you'll be able to access the other funds later if you need it. So that would be a much better strategy than just keeping everything in the bank or, you know, check an account or money market or a CD. But you're right. There's some people to go one way and some people that go the other. And the balances is in between.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And how do you know where the in-between balance is? is if all you are doing is trying to figure out on your own, go to Google, go to AI, it's just so hard to know because everyone is different. And when you work with a financial professional like yourself, you don't want to be given just a cookie cutter template that everyone gets. You want to know that someone's sat down with you, asked the right questions, and put together a really safe plan. Yeah, that's the good point there that you, a very good point

you made is you need someone to help you identify, sit down and ask your questions. That's, that's a lot of what my services involve, asking people questions, discovering what they want, what they want to do and what their goals are and help them, you know, discover what's the best way to handle or achieve those goals. Yep. So what makes you different than other advisors? Because I know if we, I know that you have people in your area that do what you do. There's hundreds of thousands of advisors out there in any industry. But when someone sits down with you to chat about what your services are, what makes you stand out as far as what you can do to serve them, you know, to protect their retirement?

Well, one, I'm independent. And so this is a service that can be independent of anyone. else they ought or have to help them so this wouldn't interfere with their investment advisor who's investing on how to invest in the stock market or bonds or whatever and it's not going to interfere with any other financial services they have this is like I said more of a planning service and like I said I'm independent don't represent any one company I'm not obligated to to provide any business to any particular company should somebody want to do some work with me beyond just the planning. And so I think that's what really sets me separately. A lot of people

who are into the investment side try to do the same thing. But one of the drawbacks of that is if you are upset or not happy with the investment side you want to change, well, then you have to start all over again, where the people who work with me and have someone else separate that deals with the investments, then they don't have to start over again when it comes to the planning part. They can just move from one investment advisor to another, and they already have the predictable part of their

and the part that's not exposed to volatility already set up without having to be tied to the existing financial products that they're using, but the other advisor. You know, I know a lot of people feel like a number to some people. I've heard the term robo advisor. And without mentioning names of companies and all that, I know that we've all heard of the big companies or the people on TV or the people on the radio. And sometimes those big name companies that have advisors that would talk to you, they have a very limited amount of products. And that advisor has a limited scope of what to do with them. So I want you to really go a little bit deeper on that benefit of independent because sometimes people hear the word annuity or life insurance or ETF or whatever the case might be. And if that person that works for a, you know, captured company, let's call it.

and they're just providing, here's what we do. Well, that could be like a cookie cutter. But what you just described there is so powerful to be able to go, oh, you know what? Here's what I would recommend for you to consider. Let's talk through this. And it's something that would be outside the scope of what some of those non-independent advisors could provide. Talk a little bit about how that really provides that freedom. Good point, Mike.

You're exactly right. In fact, a lot of the financial companies are. or in their brokers, investment advisors, do have a limited set of financial products when it comes to doing something similar to, you know, my services, whereas in my case, I have a much broader selection than they usually have because even though they might be able to transact with many different companies,

usually the management of those companies say, well, no, we're just promoting this and that. that. So whereas my case, my job is to try to get the person matched up with the best financial products should that be something they need. Yeah, that's a really, really great point that people need to keep in mind. So let's wrap up here, Mark, if someone is listening to this going, you know, I might need a little bit of guidance or second opinion even to see if my retirement savings can be turned into that predictable guaranteed retirement paycheck. What's the best way that they can learn more about what you do and reach out and connect?

Well, the best way is to give me a call. My phone number 831-753-0507. They can also go to my website and get some general information at marktieroff.com. That's M-A-R-K-D-I-E-R-O-L-F.com. Perfect. Mark, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you. My pleasure.

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