Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Ron Cook Owner of Cook Tax & Retirement Discussing Guaranteed Income

Episode Date: September 10, 2023

Ron began his career in the insurance and financial industry in 1988 and has included banking, mortgage origination, and retirement income planning.Throughout his career, he has learned that if you help people address their concerns, you will have a gratifying business. Steering people toward a more stable and predictable retirement is his mission, as he continuously strives to provide better strategies to procure the greatest amount of income for his clients while preserving the integrity of accumulated assets.Ron’s true passion is spending time with his wife and four children. He also enjoys golf and boating.Learn More:https://cooktaxandretirement.com/Licensed Insurance Professional Respond and learn how insurance and annuities can positively impact your retirement. This material has been provided by a licensed insurance professional for informational and educational purposes only and is not endorsed or affiliated with the Social Security Administration or any government agency. It is not intended to provide, and should not be relied upon for, accounting, legal, tax or investment advice. 20578 – 2020/11/12Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-ron-cook-owner-of-cook-tax-retirement-discussing-guaranteed-income

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 this Ron Cook, who's the owner of Cook Tax and Retirement, and we'll be talking about guaranteed income. Ron, welcome to the program. Hello, Mike. Hey, thanks for having me on. This is an awesome time for us to be chatting and, you know, to especially get word out to people. You know, I appreciate you coming on and certain words jump out at me when I am talking to people and my mental, you know, note pops in and goes, ooh, guaranteed.

I love when I hear things like, I want to hear about guaranteed income. But before we dive into that, I want to hear about you. What is your story? What is your background? And how did you get into financial services? You know, Mike, it's a difference. I don't think I was born with a suitcase and a hat, like in the trench coat, like the old guys from the insurance days, you know. But it was an interesting story. I got involved. I had businesses. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And it was one of the places I could get into the financial world and, you know, some studying, getting some licenses and whatnot.

But during that period of time, my mom and dad, you know, my mom passed away. My dad went into a nursing home. and I really found out how, you know, important it is to know about finances and money and the flow of money. And, you know, therefore I said, man, my whole family, my friends, everybody should know about these kinds of things. So I had a good remedy. I just needed to share my story. Yeah, you know, and I hear that very frequently with people in a variety of industries. You know, sometimes a chiropractor will say, hey, when I was a kid, I fell out of a tree, mesh my backup.

up and the only one that could help me was this chiropractor. So I wanted to be a chiropractor. And then same with your story. You had family. You wanted to help them. You jumped in. It felt good. You learned some things. And it's like, I can do this. So I think that is so powerful. And you know, the thing that I did not hear from you is I want to make a gillion trillion bazillion dollars. No, you want to help people. You want to help them understand money. You want to help them use money for that safe retirement. Amen to that. You know, so, yeah, I mean, when I started this, I mean, I started by venture back in like 1986, Mike. And then basically, you know, and I guess 1988 really things started to rock and roll.

And I just knew it was for me. I just, but, you know, I did have some hiccups that I saw in the financial world, things that I didn't like from going through the process because when I was working as a captive agent or for people, I found out that there were things like that. My mom and dad went through that. things that I really needed to make sure that people understood, like, in other words, the flow of money, like I was saying, and how things happened. And I really, really wanted to focus more on, like, guaranteed type of incomes and different types of things where it mattered

to people so that people didn't have a lack of income during those hard times. You know, you said another word that jumped out at me. So before we dive further into guaranteed income, which I promise we're going to get there, captured agent. So talk a little bit about. that and the benefit of being an independent versus captured and what you're able to bring to your clients as a independent. Well, you know, the funny thing, I didn't know anything about the difference, you know, at first. I just thought it was a job, a way of life and how to get trained and, you know, they'll learn the industry. But then later, I found out that you didn't have to do those things. I wanted to take my own path and help people. So now, after making that decision,

it was rough. It wasn't easy. And it was scary. But then all of a sudden, you say, hey, this is my path. I just need to make sure that people get the right information and they learn what they really need to learn about, Mike. And, you know, after going through that, I got to say it was a breath of fresh air because now, when I still even then after at those points, I was working with other companies and different things like helping them, you know, teach people about their financial products. But it wasn't about that.

It was about the individual, the person, and how to match up those needs. Yep. I love it. gives you more options. You're not tied to one thing. You're not trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. You've got a lot of variety to bring solutions to your clients. So let's jump into when you're working with your clients talking about retirement. Why do they need guaranteed income? Well, you know, Mike, how it started. I really wanted to get into an educational platform. So that's why we started, and I'm a co-founder of retirement money school. Also, too, I started to do things a lot

with Social Security and whatnot and that educational process. And then later, you know, basically I had Cook Tax Advisory, but group, and then all of a sudden I had Cook Tax and Retirement because, again, I wanted to be transparent and teach people about how to do things transparently and actually be, you know, forthright. So because after learning these things, just with the advisory part, you really need to teach people about retirement and those facets of retirement. One of those things that you just asked about was what about guaranteed income?

Well, heck, you know, everybody I talk to, they love Social Security. They love that thing because everybody we talk to, Mike, we say, hey, listen, when do you want to retire? And they'll go, oh, like, before it was like 66 or something. And you go, why 66? And he goes, well, that's when I can take my Social Security. And it's like, well, it's not about when you can take your Social Security. It's about when you have enough cash flow. And I think that's what they like about Social Security, Mike, is that when they have Social Security,

they have that guaranteed money coming through the door every month. Now, if you're married and you have a spouse, they have two of those coming through the door, and there's different ways of doing that. But that's guaranteed income coming through the door every single month. And again, there's different strategies on how to take it, of course. Of course, a lot of the gurus of people that we hear talk, they always want to say, oh, push that out a little bit,

or maybe till 70, but without knowing all the facts about the rest of the, their life. How can you make such a statement? You know, it's almost like you are a life coach of sorts. You know, it's like, hey, let me help you with the retirement. Tell me what retirement is to you. And I'll bet you if you ask 10 people, you'd get 12 scenarios. And everybody thinks of retirement differently, like your example there with the client saying 66. Well, it's 66 because they thought this or thought that. So I think that when you find out when you want to retire and then you put the pencil to the and go, how much will you have? How much will you need? And my question here is when you're meeting with clients talking about what their retirement looks like so that you can find the gap.

And the gap is, man, what am I going to need? What am I going to have? And let's really be clear on what I want retirement to look like because now that I have time on my hands, I might travel way more than I thought. So you can't just put down a travel number of X because that's what you've been doing up until retirement. So talk a little bit about how you're helping them really crystallize that so that you see the gap and then you're going to fill the gap with that guaranteed income. Well, good, good point, Mike, because one of those facets that we were just talking about, we asked if they have any kinds of pensions coming in or Social Security and they'll go, oh, yeah, we have Social Security coming through the door. And I go, that's awesome. So in other

words, if they have that guaranteed money coming through the door, and now you ask them if they have pensions, now a lot of times some do, some don't. Yeah. And then again, you know, I might try to clarify that. And I said, hey, man, if you could, if you could go back in time and you could have, say, a job at the police department, the fire department, a teacher, whatever, and have one of those old-fashioned type pensions, would you want one? And I go, yeah, heck yeah, of course I would.

And I go, well, you know, that's awesome. Well, let's talk about that a little bit later, but, you know, let's talk about just an income equation first, your equation, because this isn't about a product, but it's about your numbers and lining up those numbers. And now what I mean by that is you have Social Security coming in every single month. Now, later, you have expenses that come in every month. And so what are those, you know, that pension money and the Social Security money possibly coming through the door every month? And now would match that up against your expenses. Do you have an income gap or do you have a surplus? A surplus.

Yeah, a surplus of money. And hopefully some people have surpluses, but most people don't. And so if not, where are they going to get that other money from and how are they going to draw down on those other monies or are there ways of making something better because cash flow is king. When you have cash flow coming in, you're not going to have somebody mad at you. when you lose money, whether it's a home, a car, or whatever type of investment you have, if you lose money, you know, people get upset.

But when you have guaranteed cash flow coming through the door, that's a plus. Now, let me just say this. If one of the spouses pass away, we mentioned Social Security earlier, Mike. And if somebody passes away, do you understand that one of those Social Security, the lower Social Security goes away? So there's one of those income buckets that just wiped off. And now you still have to pay bills. You still have to meet a monthly, you know, heating bill, rent, possibly, possibly a mortgage, whatever, and taxes every year on your home.

So if that happens, like now you just had an X amount of dollar deficit. How do you make that of? What's your cost recovery strategy on that? 100%. And, you know, once you have that gap identified and then penciled in, As far as covering, the real aha is what you just said, which is what if. You know, what if this happens, that happens. The other thing happens because, you know, like the bumper sticker says, life happens.

And life does happen. So, you know, age spans of women tend to be longer than men. So what if, you know, that is the case. So I think that is so powerful. And once you get to that point, how do you help your clients incorporate these guaranteed income techniques and tools into their retirement? Well, first of all, too, when I asked those other people if they would like to have a pension, say if you were a nurse or a teacher, well, you had saved up all of this money in some kind of individual retirement account that you had, maybe a 401k plan, a 403B or an IRA. Well, what those monies they have to do is take that big ball of wax, that big ball of money, and then convert that and sign that money over to that company and have a guaranteed income for a pension.

but a lot of people don't know that they could stock their own private pension, Mike, and have something that was guaranteed. Now, another thing is, too, there are pros and cons to doing that because sometimes when they sign their money over to those other companies and they get that pension that everybody so well loves, well, the problem is with this, it's like, man, it's like, imagine this, imagine if you passed away and your spouse getting a reduced amount when you didn't know that there was another company that could possibly provide the same amount of cash flow to you.

So that way, you're already going through a rough time of losing that, you know, spouse. Imagine not having a hiccup where you don't have to have that heartbeat felt of saying, oh, my God, I got an income loss and, you know, or drag down in my cash flow every month. You know, the, the, the trite and true age old, you know, go get a job, work for 30 years, get the gold, you know, watch. Maybe there's a pension involved. A lot of that, glamour of that is because just give me that paycheck. And that's what you're able to advise your clients on with setting up their own private pension.

Because I don't know statistically, but the majority of jobs out there these days don't have a pension. And most people don't stay long enough to have gotten it anyway. So if you can talk to them that people know the word pension and they know that means, you know, this guaranteed monthly income. And if you can show them how to set their own up, that's pretty powerful. It is, Mike. You know, hey, listen, I was doing some educational classes one time. And just off the cuff, these people from down the street from my office came in. They were elderly. One guy was a maintenance guy. And he really cared about his wife. And his wife was just a little younger, but she would keep working all the time just down the street in the industrial park.

And now this is what happened. A week before they came into my educational workshop, they went into what they call the Green Line Company. You know which one I'm saying. You see the ads on TV. And they went there and they said, hey, listen, I want to retire. I just not happy with my job anymore. And this is what I want to do. And they said, well, how much money do you need for retirement?

How much money do you need every single month? And they said, this amount of money. And they go, oh, my God. He goes, well, you've got to keep working until you're 70. Well, her heart broke. I mean, she got a new job manager there at the firm where she was. And so what happened was this person goes into work every day. And these young person that got a new management job managing her basically put a lot of pressure on them to do things a new way rather than the old way, which they were used to after working at that place.

Like you said, for 35 years of their life. So they'd putting money away. Now, unfortunately, this person put so much pressure on them. They hated their job. They came home with high blood pressure, getting sick. Her husband seen her crying every day. They went to my workshop, and then a week later, they came in and saw me and my team. And you know what happened?

Like, we sat down and did that simple analysis that we just talked about, about, in other words, what was their income? What did they have for Social Security payments coming in for, what were their expenses. Well, they didn't even know, and nor that they show that at the Greenland, what those lines were and actually what happened that basically they were breaking even. They could pay their bills, right, with just the Social Security payments from both of them. Now, the other thing is we showed them where if they were dribbling down on those other monies, like in showing them how to have guaranteed income to create that private pension type of deal,

well, that was an awesome thing for them. You know, they're sitting in my office and they They couldn't believe it when they came back in the second time after we just did the discovery period and chatted with them, had a nice chat first and found out about them. And then later when they came back in and we chatted again, no pressure, just talking about them looking at a numbers equation. Retirement's a math equation, not a product. So now what we actually did is we showed them that math equation and said, you could have retired weeks ago, years ago. And they go, really? And they go, here's the numbers. And then the guy, her husband started crying.

I actually started crying because, you know, when these are real people getting that kind of pressure on them and somebody didn't show them that solution because of how we were trained, well, that happens. And it's not their own fault. I was in that industry too. And that's how I was trained. But that's why I got into this industry to be able to do that, to show people about an income plan and showing them how to do that through cook tax and retirement and showing them how to basically if it's okay. You know, Now, I've seen people with less money retire. Okay. And I've seen people with a lot of money in trouble because their expenses were higher. So it's all a numbers game. But the thing is to know those numbers is the most important thing, Mike. 100%. You know, in that example, you know, like I said at the beginning, you're almost like a life coach saying,

what does retirement look like? And let's help you get there. And then when you can show people at the end, like what you just described, hey, here's the numbers. Numbers don't lie. So if we just filed this, do this, create this, move this, all of a sudden you can retire next week. I can only imagine, yes, tears of joy and all of that, but just that new outlook on their

life. I mean, probably, they probably went home and within the next week took a sledgehammer to their alarm clock. Well, it's funny, you know, they did sell their house down the street. They moved down to the Carolinas where it's nice and warm. They could play golf. he was still doing some church maintenance and some different things at places but you know it's all fun you know and the thing is when you have that kind of um impact on somebody's life that's you know where you just like you said you had a earth shattering moment for them where the reality sets in that they don't have to have that pressure and they smash their alarm clock that's awesome and nobody can pay me a you could pay me a million dollars and i wouldn't be as happy as you know as i did helping those people yeah and again like i said it's not like you're you you know, you hear the old saying, oh, I just feel like I'm treated like another number.

Well, those people would not have said that. They were like, wow, Ron changed my life. And so hearing examples like that and hearing how you approach your serving your client with, wow, let's just figure this out. Let's just roll up our sleeves and see where you are, see where you want to be. Put the numbers together and look at it on paper. And then here's the clear path forward. So I think that is so powerful, I think that, you know, your example there of, you

You know, being able to look at some options for setting up that private pension probably raises some eyebrows like, oh, now tell me more because I had no idea that's possible. And then when you can put it into action and close that gap and then, you know, move people into that new feeling of I don't need to worry about watching TV and hearing the news on the news that the market's dropped. And my portfolio is now down 20% when you have that guaranteed income. Boy, that just removes all of that. Well, Mike, you know, what was really astonishing, when you see these things, they really work, that's when you become a believer. Because, I mean, I had a guy that, you know, during tax season,

he'd come, we were in talking with somebody, he'd come knocking on the door bang. He goes, I've got to just talk to you for a minute, Ron. I go, okay, no problem. I said, what's up? And he goes, you know, this guy's like 93, 94 years old. We met him back in 2003 and 4. And, you know, back then, you know, he was doing some things

with his wife and they wanted to retire. We showed him about guaranteed income. Now, imagine going from back in 2003. Now, here it is, 2023. He goes, Ron, I did not run out of money. The biggest fear in my life that myself or my wife would not be taken care of and I run out of money. He goes, I'm 93 years old.

He goes, and I've had the best life. And it's because of what you showed me in educated. That's powerful. Yeah. Well, if we had a microphone, we could just drop it right there because that, That is, you know, you just live for that. So that is spectacular. Well, Ron, if someone is interested in learning more about guaranteed income and reaching out and connecting with you, what's the best way they can do that?

I'd say the best way, you know, is going on the website to cooktax and retirement.com. Go in there, shuffle around, look about us, read about us, and, you know, we're on social media. We're everywhere. So, I mean, the nice part is if you go to cooktax and retirement.com, give us a jingle. And I promise you, we'll treat you just like anybody else. And we'll give you our best shot to help you and put you in a better spot than you're at. Excellent. Well, Ron, thank you so much for coming on today.

It was a real pleasure of meeting with you. Thank you, too, Mike. And have a great day. And it was a pleasure chatting with you. 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. www. influential entrepreneurs

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