Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Renee’ Kennedy, President of AAA Life Solutions Discussing Weathering the Financial Storms of Life

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

Renée Kennedy brings over 20 years of industry experience to the table. Our priority is always our clients and their financial stability, which is why we listen to their objectives and design innovative, personalized strategies that meet their unique needs. Our focus is on customizing employee benefits plans for businesses to reduce or eliminate costs, while offering tax savings. We also specialize in life insurance strategies, 401(k) rollovers, and more to help individuals and businesses build tax-free retirements, secure long-term care and death benefits, and more.At AAA Life Solutions, we always put clients first, with excellent customer service and up-to-date insurance strategies tailored to their individual needs. We do our due diligence to ensure that we make the right decisions for our clients, knowing that our choices will affect them for a lifetime.We provide peaceful solutions in uncertain times.Learn More: https://aaalifesolutions.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-renee-kennedy-president-of-aaa-life-solutions-discussing-weathering-the-financial-storms-of-life

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, Renee Kennedy, who's the president of AAA Life Solutions, and we'll be talking about weathering the financial storms of life. Renee, welcome to the program.

Thanks, Mike. Glad to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you because weathering the financial storms of life, you know what? That's not like, let's talk about if a meteor hits Earth, which is pretty remote chance. There's going to be financial storms in our lives, and we've got to learn how to weather them. So I want to learn all about your perspectives on that. But before we get going, what's your story, what's your background, and give us a little insight on what you, what got you into the financial services industry in the first place? Great. Yeah. So I grew up with military parents and we moved around a lot. My mom and dad were both in the Navy.

And so my dad was from Chicago. My mom was from Mississippi. And we moved north, south, north, south, until we landed in Tennessee. But when, so I've been here in this area for the last 50 years. And I started out. When my husband and I got married, we had our daughter about a year after we got married. And I started out working at juvenile court. And that lasted about three years. And then I got offered a job working for a big pension fund manager here in town. And I just loved the business. I was, you know, helping doing trades and things like that for big pension money managers. And I just became enamored with the financial services area. So I went and worked at Goldman Sachs. I got my licensing.

And then I became a stockbroker and bonds and everything, options, whatever we needed to do. That's what we did. And I worked at Dean Witter, did my training in New York on Wall Street, and just loved the business. And did that about 15 years while my husband was building up his business. So we've been business owners for the past 29 years, and I've been financial services over 26 years. And anyway, I just have learned so much. And coming from a business owner perspective, I've got a unique perspective that a lot of people don't have.

You know, it's interesting. You said, yeah, I want to get in financial services. So I went to work with Goldman Sachs. You just went straight to the top, didn't you? Yeah. They knew it, too. They were very, and still are, you know, top-notch company. And I guess if you had to cut your teeth in the business, that would be the place to go.

And then you take that learning and you bring it to, you know, the streets of where you live, kind of, so to speak, because, you know, you bring it to these business owners that don't have the wherewithal to do the big, massive corporate things that they could do. But you get that knowledge and then now you go, how can I help people right in front of me? Yeah, and it really started. The last 13 or 14 years really started when I stayed home with kids after we had our fourth child. I stayed home for until he got out of high school. And when I went back, I knew I didn't want to get back into Wall Street. I didn't trust them. I felt like they were manipulating the market so much. I was just really worried about the mom and pops and the retirees and people that couldn't afford to lose. very much money, you know? And don't get me wrong. I manage millions of dollars now. And I'm happy to do that. But I also, when I was a broker, my people didn't lose a lot of money. And I lived through Black Monday, you know, October 19th, 1987, I was there. And there were people that wanted to jump out of the

building, you know, but that wasn't, that wasn't me because I believe in, you know, I want to get the highest returns, but I also want to manage risk. And so that's kind of my focus. I love it. So let's talk about these financial storms in life. What are kind of, what is the approach that you take when you're preparing your clients to weather these financial storms? And then let's roll into what's some examples of these financial storms. Well, I think, you know, just based on the last few years and recently, we've seen a lot of businesses go out of business, either from COVID or, you know, just this huge downturn in our economy. me. And so the first financial storm that I want people to, I want to help them mitigate is, what if they lose their job? What if they run out of money? Or what if they find that they're on a

fixed income? You know, I am a Dave Ramsey debt coach. I'm certified, but that's not my main focus, but I want people to understand the basis of money. I didn't grow up with money. And my parents were disciplined in everything. And I don't know if you're from a military family, Mike, but, you know, my parents taught me how to make up a bed with military corners where you could bounce a quarter off the bed, you know. And we had to take a three-minute shower. I'm the oldest of five, and we had one bathroom, and it was just get in, get out, take care of business, and you're done. But I do think nowadays there's a lot of people that they don't know what it's like to not have money. They, they, they are, they're living in an excess world where you've got to

have these destination weddings and you've got to have every video game known to man and design your clothes. And I just feel so bad for those people because they really don't have a good handle sometimes on, you know, you don't go into debt to do that. And so, you know, well, you're saying the first financial storm is what if, you know, job loss. What if you, what if you You run out of money. And sometimes it takes the pain of having that happen to get that wake up call. Because to your point, I know that I have seen so many people that if you look at them from the outside, it's like, oh, they've got the big house, the nice clothes, the nice car, and they must be rich.

But in reality, if you were to pull their credit and look at their bank accounts, it's like, wow, you're just living on debt. And that's not wealth. And so I think that's a huge piece that you're bringing up here, which is when you realize is that you can have these things all in due time, right, but have it in balance. Make sure that you've got that amount of money, three months, six months, whatever the amount is in liquid backup in case. And so is that one of the things that you teach people about is, what if this happens,

what would you do? Right. And I think COVID gave us a little glimpse of what if the economy shut down. And, you know, we're starting to come out of that somewhat. But now we have all these other global catastrophes happening. And what is we start having blackouts? I mean, do people have water? Do they have, you know, three months worth of food?

And I'm not a prepper by any means. But there were a couple times my mom and dad usually had, you know, five or six months of food storage. And there were times when he lost his job that we depended on that food to get through. And people don't have that mentality. They're like, what do you mean? There's no, what do you mean the trucks aren't running? The ports are shut down.

What do you mean there's blackouts? You know, I mean, they're just not ready. And the worst case scenario is what if the market goes down and they lose 30, 40, 50% of their 401k right before they retire? They can't, they can't recover from that. But there's things they can do to offset that, you know. Or to prepare to offset it if it happens without taking it. volatility and risk and all that. But if you can imagine that it could possibly happen because it has in the past,

what can you do to prepare for it? So those are the kind of things that I really think that, you know, you sound already like someone that is not this. Here's my thing. Buy this stock, invest this mutual fund and let's go, no, you're going, let's look at a broad stroke. If this were to happen, what would you do? And if that were the case, how would we prepare to make sure that you're not going

to lose that amount of money towards your retirement. I think that's a huge piece. And you know, you said you didn't trust Wall Street, which, you know, probably is a wonderful mindset to take. There's a lot of people that you can get advice from that would say, I can help you prevent this. And they're going to give you advice that might not be very sound. So you have to be very careful. These brokers out there might have their agenda at play rather than your benefit. Yeah. And a lot of times when the market goes down, they will tell their clients because I was one. what they were telling me. I just, I just refused to do it when they would say, buy more or dollar cost average when the market is down. Well, if you knew what to buy,

it's like throwing spaghetti at a wall right now. You know, you don't know what's going to stick. Even Apple and Google and all these big companies that we could count on, they're having trouble. Look at Target. I mean, there's just so many different things going on right now that we're in uncharted waters for sure. And, you know, we can get into the weeds of let's look at the numbers and the analytics and things, and it'll come back. So let's double down. But if one news headline can topple a stock 10, 15, 20, 30 percent, you can't run a chart against that. And so that's where you need to have some really wise sound strategies that are going to protect your money. That's huge. So storm number one, what if you lose a job, things like that? What's

another storm that you advise your clients on? Well, my parents both got sick in their 60s. And they didn't plan on that. So I think we need to take a better look at, are we prepared to get sick? And we can look at environmental factors. We can look at, you know, DNA, genetics. You know, we can all try to eat healthy exercise. But let's face it, there are things in our food that weren't there 15, 20 years ago. You know, we can't mitigate everything.

We can't control the water supply. There's so many different things. but the main thing I don't see people planning for is what if you get sick? Now, if you've taken care of a loved one like I have, two of them, you are very much aware of all of these expenses that you had no idea. And most people fall in that middle, you know, middle America range where they make too much money to get help paying for nursing homes. but they don't make enough money to pay for a nursing home for five to seven years. And let's face it, nursing homes nowadays, they're about $8,000 on the low side, $8,000 to $12,000 a month. A month.

Yeah. You think about how long your money or your nest egg or you're selling your home if you're thinking, my kids can sell my home and then I'll be okay. But that's not true. But there's things that they can do to plan for that. And three years ago, my husband got sick in one day. Always been healthy, strong, golfer, you know, just athletic guy. And he got Lyme disease.

And we didn't know what it was. And $350,000 later, we're still dealing with the ramifications of that. Now, luckily, I had something in place where I could go and just borrow the money from myself through that account that we set up for him. And at a low interest rate, 3%, and it didn't reduce the amount of the account that I had invested in some index funds. And let me just say,

I'm not telling anybody to do anything on the podcast because I don't know you. I don't know them. I'm really not giving anybody advice. I'm just telling you what we did. So we borrowed money from this account. And thank goodness, I had it set up. So I had $2 million that I could get access to.

And it's come in handy. You know, it really has. But people don't plan on getting sick and they have no idea how much medical expenses are going to be. You know, and it's interesting, too, an aspect of that is you get have health care or, you know, medical coverage for if you go to the doctor and they're going to, you pay your co-pay and, you know, you get your health care. But if you need long-term care, that's a whole other story. And the other aspect is what if what's in between, you know, I'm healthy, oop, I got sick for a little. bit, now I'm out of the hospital and fine, and long-term care. Well, you might not be incapacitated. You might just not be able to work full-time. So whatever that medical condition is, you can go to

work, but you can only go to work part-time and now your income drop. So there's all these variables that go into when you're thinking about this storm here, medical and sick. And what if you don't have a contingency plan in place? Right. Well, you're in trouble. And I have people that are dealing with that every single day. And you can't wait until you have a medical condition to plan because then you waited too late, you know. And we buy homeowners insurance and car insurance, but everyone, there's like an 80% chance that you're going to have a long-term care event, 80%. And people aren't planning for that. But I don't want them to buy long-term care insurance necessarily, I want them to get it for free with something else.

I want to leverage what money they're putting away and saving money and putting it away so that they've got it. Strategically, and because, you know, maybe it's a broad stroke to say long-term care coverage is similar to auto insurance where you pay your premium for years and years and years. And if you never used it, you never needed to make a claim. Well, do they send your money back? Nope. No, they don't.

Some of them will give you your money back. but it's not a good place to save money. It's just like these people that try to save money on, you know, like let the government have money so they get money back to buy TV every year or something. You know, it's like, don't let the government have your money and, you know, increase your withholdings or whatever so that you can, you know, keep that money because you can invest it and use it more wisely than that. You know it. Good. Well, what's another storm that people should be aware of? Well, the third one that people think about and are going to probably think about a lot more in the future is the loss of a loved one.

And I lost my mom to COVID in 2021. She was fine. She had a few minor health problems. But she was gone in 10 days and lost my dad eight months later who had been in hospice for four years. And so we were expecting my dad, but we weren't expected to live. leave my mom in 10 days. Now, because they'd both been sick and I've been taking care of them for 10 years, we had things in place. So we knew exactly what was going to happen. But these young people, they need to plan. I mean, how many young people have we heard about that are just dying of heart attacks or just, you know, they're having a stroke or some weird anomaly thing that's going on right now? And so you have people in their 30s and their 40s that aren't prepared if one of them passes and they've got children. And it's just, it's just heartbreaking to me that, you know,

people are not preparing for the loss of a loved one. And I'm not trying to sell life insurance. I'm not. I do that. But that's not what I'm saying. There's, you know, you've got to have health care directives and you've got to have powers of attorney and you've got to have a will or, you know, do you need to trust? I mean, there's legal documents that need to be done that aren't hard, but it just takes a little work. And most people think, well, I'm just going to work until I pass out, die my sleep or die of a heart attack when I'm old, you know, but the reality is people are getting sick more. And it's a huge cost to pay for the family. Well, I think when we start talking about planning for the future retirement and having enough money to retire and throughout the

entire retirement years, you don't take into effect. You kind of skip over that and go, okay, let's think about retirement. But what about these speed bumps, hurdles, and storms that you're talking about? These are the things that can and will and statistically are going to happen, and they throw your for a loop. And if, and that messes with that end result, retirement nest egg number that you've been working on. So you let one of these, these curveballs hit, and now that you look at your, you know, spreadsheet for your retirement, now of a sudden it doesn't look too great unless you've planned properly. So, and then guess what else?

Like what you just said, and this is what I think is so huge about your perspective here. If you are planning the right way and putting some resources in the right type of account and you didn't need to use it for that long-term care, let's say, it's not wasted money. It then gets redeployed right on into that retirement plan that you're planning on. But if it was needed, it's there. And I think that's the big thing people need to realize is these curveballs and these hurdles can really throw you a loop. You need to make plans for it now and make the right financial decisions. And it can't just be, let's Google this and do it. Uh-uh. There's 10 billion ways that you can make

a mistake there. So working with someone like yourself can help you plan for those storms and make some wise decisions before you're in the midst of it and you've got to make some rash decision. Yeah. And a lot of people right now, let's say that they've got all those things in place. They've got their documents. They've got their life insurance. You know, But maybe they have a million dollars in a 401k or more. And that's going to be handed down to someone that's not a spouse. Well, now there's new laws in place on these RMDs that people aren't aware of that that person that inherits that has to take it out within 10 years.

Well, what if they're a nurse or a doctor and they're in their highest paying years? Now they've got to take $100,000 a year minimal to get it out by, you know, unless they do it all at once or something. but they've got to take that money out and it counts as ordinary income. So there's tax planning involved. So people can, you know, do Roth conversion. I mean, they can convert it to a Roth. They can do Roth conversions.

There's so many different things. But whether they have a lot of money or they don't, there's tax planning, there's legal planning, and there's financial planning. So that third financial storm of preparing to die or losing a loved one is just so important. And a lot of times people don't want to talk about it because it's their mortality. And so you just have to have some real conversations about it. Well, I just absolutely love on your website, front and center says peaceful financial solutions in uncertain times. And I think that no matter what time we're thinking about, we can look back in years and decades past and go, there was a little hiccup in the world.

And here's another one. We know that there's uncertain times. And so if you can provide peaceful financial solutions, that's what I want to hear about. So it's been such a pleasure to have you on chatting today about these storms, Renee. And if someone is wanting to learn more about what you do and reach out and connect with you, what's the best way they can do that? Well, they can email me at info at aAA lifesolutions.com or they can call the number, which is 901, 508, 2433.

And we can just have a conversation, see if there's any. thing we can do that might help them. And it's really all about them. It truly is. And I do this from a service perspective. I don't have to work. I just love what I do. And, you know, it's going to be great. And we want people to build that foundation. Let's just say build that arc before the floods come. Because it wasn't raining when Noah built the art, right? So don't wait until it rains. We want to get that in there and get you prepared now. And we do a lot of things for people all over the country. We'd be happy to help. I love it. Well, Renee, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. You too. Thanks. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders.

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