Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Scott Edelman Founder of Edelman Wealth Management Group Discussing Guaranteed Income

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

Scott is the President & founder of Edelman Wealth Management Group and manages all aspects of financial planning and employee benefits, providing products and services for investing, retiring, insurance, and estate conservation for individuals, families, and businesses.He has a strong commitment to giving uncomplicated advice and unparalleled service and puts an emphasis on creating lasting relationships with his clients and within his community.A natural teacher and mentor, Scott is a member of Strategic Coach, an entrepreneur business coaching program. He is a thought leader in the financial field and a regular speaker at conferences. Scott is also active with local charities and is on several boards.Scott lives in Bucks County, PA with his wife and children.Learn more: http://www.edelmanwealthmanagement.com/Edelman Wealth Management Group, Inc. Heston Hall 1790 Yardley-Langhorne Road, Suite 202 Yardley, PA 19067. Securities and investment advisory services offered through Osaic Wealth, Inc. member FINRA/SIPC. Osaic Wealth is separately owned and other entities and/or marketing names, products or services referenced here are independent of Osaic WealthInfluential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-scott-edelman-founder-of-edelman-wealth-management-group-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 back with us, Scott Edelman, who's the founder of Edelman Wealth Management Group, and we'll be talking about guaranteed income. Scott, welcome back to you. to the program. Thanks, Mike. Hey, so I love the sound of the word guarantee. Give me anything in life that's guaranteed and I want to hear about it. And so guaranteed income sounds very, very promising. Let's first start with defining it. What is guaranteed income as it relates to retirement?

I mean, you're right. People love the word guaranteed. The word that I like to use when we talk about retirement is certainty, certainty of income. Because that's really what you're looking for in retirement. You've worked. You've saved your money. Hopefully your money's worked really well for you. But when you get to retirement, it's about certainty of income. And certainty of income is providing a paycheck in retirement. It's what clients are looking for. What is my paycheck? How much will I get? per month. You know, certainty is one of those things that I, when I hear that, I think of the word peace of mind. So if you are going to show me a way that I can retire and have a certain guaranteed income stream, and we've already articulated in a plan that I need X number of dollars

and here's the certain guaranteed income that's going to meet or exceed that, boy, that just gives peace of mind to people, right? It allows them to sleep. I mean, that's what you talk about. We want to make sure that you sleep well at night. We want to make sure that we're helping you to provide the income that you need so you can sleep at night. And that's where the guaranteed income or certainty of income comes into play. Clients want to know, when I retire, what does my check look like? It used to be, you know, years ago, there were a lot more, but people were used to be. You know, used to pension plans. If you work for a big company or maybe a municipality or your school teacher, hospital, they were providing pensions. Well, we begin to see less and less on the pension

front. And I know that individuals liked pension plans because they knew if they worked their whole life when they got to retirement, what the paycheck was going to look like. What am I going to get so that they can prepare better. So when we talk about guaranteed income, it's almost like a personal pension that the client sets up. And we talk about that certainly prior to retirement so that as the client gets closer to retirement, they begin to say, okay, I'm going to have X dollars coming in per month.

And what is that going to look like? It tends to give them a little bit more comfort it and being able to sleep better at night. You know, you mentioned this kind of one of the sources, you know, like a almost like an air quotes pension plan. So if someone works for a company that has a pension plan, wonderful. But these days, it's few and far between, as we know. But what are some of those common sources of your income if you don't have a pension

plan? What are some of the things people should be aware of considering? Well, the one that everybody talks about is Social Security, right? because social security does provide certainty. So you know what your Social Security check is going to look like. The problem with Social Security is if you really think about it and you think about your lifestyle and how you want to live, Social Security is probably not going to solve all of your retirement needs.

So what we try to do is we try to build in an approach that uses other investment vehicles like a guaranteed income annuity that will provide that paycheck, that will provide that paycheck. as long as you shall live. And that's what clients get really excited about. They know that they're going to have this check that comes in for the rest of their life. And that provides them the ability to better prepare for retirement. So now we take, we mitigate some of the risk in retirement. We take some of the risk off the table so that we can then prepare for all the other things that arise in retirement. So I think that what you said may be.

think of something and I've read a stat in the past that, you know, like one of the biggest fears people have is, you know, speaking in public and all those things. But as far as retirement goes, am I going to outlive my money? And so what you just described there with some security combined with the guaranteed income products out there, they're not going to outlive the money if you set it up and structure the right way because these are guaranteed to provide that monthly income for life. That's right. And that's something that we don't want to have happened.

We really don't want our clients living their money. And that's why we prepare early for that so that we can understand what their income needs are going to be and prepare properly in asset location for their assets in making sure that we're utilizing things that can protect their retirement while we're using other things that continue to help grow. So they're available for. or later years in life, or things that arise. There's a number of different ways to do it,

but the bottom line is if we can take as much as necessary to provide the clients some certainty, it goes a long way. Clients are really appreciative of the fact that we're looking out for them, maybe beyond the years that they're even looking out for themselves. We represent a lot of times, you know, retirement, you know, when you're talking to someone, we're representing them, you know, at times that they can't think about, you know, we might be looking at 80, 85, 90, and their mortality. And we're really their guide to help them get through those

years as well. So, Scott, I think a lot of times people think about their retirement plan, their overall financial strategy. And it's like probably the majority of the time you have clients coming to you and most of the money is in the market, you know, and at what point are you going to start saying, hey, you're at this age here, you're looking to retire at that age there. We need to start moving some of your money that's in the, kind of the volatility of the market into some of these products that give you that guaranteed income. Talk a little bit about how you factor that into their overall strategy. At what point should you start making those moves? I think it's never

too early to prepare. I believe in preparation. If you prepare properly, I think you have a better opportunity to live the retirement that you wish to live. So I'm going to say it's never too early to prepare, certainly. What I will say is that every client is going to have a little bit different appetite for risk and a little bit different appetite or desire for guaranteed income, right? It's not for everybody, but what we do tend to find is that as we talk about their options to protect their income, you tend to get more excited. Clients tend to get more excited because they understand that there's different risks to their retirement. You know, we've talked about this before market risk, inflation risk. We've talked about health care risk.

It's the client's appetite for risk. And from our perspective, it's trying to help mitigate as many of those risks as possible to live comfortably. And when they begin to understand that they can utilize some of their assets in a fashion that will protect them for longevity risk, because that's really what we're looking at is not outliving your money or not having a health care need arise that we didn't prepare for, they get excited and they, I think they feel emboldened to live a better retirement because they understand that there is money in their overall plan that is not subject to market risk and volatility. You know, I know you are big into fitness and taking care of yourself, and I know that you probably can point to some statistics and research out there, but I've heard something

to this effect. Stress is bad, right? We know that stress is bad for our bodies. We know that stress impacts us negatively. And if we relate that to retirement and it's like, hey, I don't even know if I have enough money to retire or live through retirement or get to this age. But when you start talking about certainty and guaranteed income and painting that picture for someone that their retirement is going to look the way that they wanted to look with

certainty, that gives that peace of mind, that give that redacted. reduces the stress. And then doesn't that add years to your life theoretically? I know we can't guarantee anything. But the point is you're going to live a lot better life. And when your friends are running over and going, oh, my word, did you hear what the markets did? You're like, hey, I've got it all dialed in. Man, you're so right. I mean, and you know, you talk about stress. What causes you to stay up at night? Stress. Stress keeps you up at night. So if you're able to eliminate or reduce some of that stress, you're going to have a better opportunity to sleep a little bit better at night. And you know, you talk about through the phase of the client saving or the

accumulation phase of their assets, you know, what we want to do is make sure as we begin to prepare for retirement that we're taking some of that gain or maybe profit kind of off the table now protecting it and utilizing that to help build a base for retirement. And the base goes back to, hey, this is the amount of money that I know between fixed sources like Social Security, like guaranteed income annuities and some other things. These are the fixed sources that I'm going to have. These are the ones I don't have to worry about, right? I don't have to think about.

And you could even throw, you know, long-term care planning in that. because again, that helps to mitigate risk. And there's some things available that, you know, can provide not only guaranteed income while you're living healthy and living your best life, as I like to say, but can also protect that, you know, I got sick or I need care or I need help. You know, there's things that can do both. And we want to be the ones presenting the options to our clients, right? Ultimately, the client's going to make the decision of what they feel most comfortable with.

but we feel as advisors that we're giving them all what's available so they can make a good guess, not guess, but really more a good plan based upon the information that we give them so we can provide less stress and certainly hopefully better sleep. Yeah, for sure. So you've mentioned a couple things. I want to tie them together here because you've mentioned that one of the options people can consider is a type of an annuity for that guaranteed income. And then we've mentioned in the past, and you just brought it up long-term care. And that's a big question mark. We don't know if someone's

going to need it. We don't know what type. We don't know the cost, but we know that statistically, it needs to be factored into the plan. Well, what type of annuities are out there that will kind of dip the toe in both sides of that equation, guaranteed income and also providing for some certainty regarding long-term care. Yeah, there are some annuities that do provide for both. And I happen to think that's a phenomenal way to help mitigate some of the risk. You know, typically what we talked about, what the guaranteed income annuities provide is your paycheck, right? Your monthly paycheck, set up properly for the rest of your life. But long-term care needs do arise, and there are some vehicles like that that not only provide the income over your lifetime, but the benefits

change if long-term care needs arise, right? Qualified long-term care needs. You know, the activities of daily living that you're not able to perform. And this type of vehicle kind of does both. It'll give you what I hope you're living healthy forever. It'll give you a degree. of income to protect your paycheck, but also the benefit changes if you need, you know, nursing home, a lot of times in-home care assisted living. And that gives an additional piece of mind because it's even an additional layer of asset protection because you don't have to dip into your assets at the same rate if you have a product that doubles in both. And we tend to really like that. And when we present it to our clients, they really love it to.

me, it's an added benefit to something that's already really good to provide them sleep insurance, like I like to call it. Yeah. You know, and another aspect of that is if you have a kind of a financial product that's doing double duty, like what you just described, that would prevent you from having the need to pay for some standalone long-term care policy that tends to have higher premiums, and it's either use it or lose it. So some of those things, can be very beneficial, again, like we've said in the past, to consider. Not that every person needs every plan to be the same, but for consideration. And I know that sometimes when people hear a word that they're like, oh, you know, like annuities.

I've heard that what are some of the things that are, you know, pros and cons of annuities, but what are some of the negatives about annuities that people have in their mind that might be kind of outdated and now they're maybe polished up and that's been a thing of the past? annuities have changed over the years, right? They continue to change. They continue to evolve to meet the needs of the retiring population moving forward. So they do tend to change quite a bit. We talked about a number of the pros for annuities and what they can provide and what they can do. Sometimes there are annuities that may be the expense, ratio are a little bit high. You know, that maybe they're not appropriate because expenses can eat away at some of the base of the annuity or the asset value or the account value of the annuity. But when you put them in a plan and you're showing protected income, you'll notice that

the fees are not... The benefit outweighs the shortcomings, yeah. Yeah, but typically when we place these types of products, we're very focused on making sure that we're providing something that's very cost-effective that will not dramatically hurt a client's retirement income because that's really what we're trying to prepare for is the income to the client. Kind of like in the old days you hear like, oh, don't do a mutual fund. There's high load and high fees. Well, if that's the case, you don't choose that mutual fund. If there's an annuity with higher fees, you don't choose that. one, you choose the one that has the fees that meet the plan that you put together.

Well, right. And the other piece that you hear that talk about is really the liquidity. You know, some annuities do not provide high degrees of liquidity. So they have to fulfill a specific role in your overall portfolio because you have to have assets that you can tap into that are liquid that you can use for something that arises that you didn't foresee. So, you position the annuity in the overall portfolio, you have to account for liquidity in other assets. So that's real, those are really the two cons. But we're, we're very focused on making sure that we're using annuities that are appropriate for the situation that we are trying to solve. Love it. Yeah, you'd never put all your money in any vehicle at all, you know,

no matter what the vehicle is. So liquidity, that's a big one. So let's wrap up with this, Scott, can you think of a client that you've worked with that they came into you kind of like uncertain and you put together a guaranteed income plan that really gave them that certainty and peace of mind? Well, I can, there's multiple clients. I can tell you, it's certainly not just one. And I'm going to use an example of clients that had guaranteed income. If you, the most recent period of time where clients got the most nervous,

if you recall, was during the COVID period of time. You know, no one knew which end was up, you know, markets up, markets down, sideways, you know, people weren't working, all kinds of things. That was the period of time that people began to get nervous. Well, the people that had some level of annuity, not even just guaranteed income annuities, but there are other annuity vehicles as well, they felt very protected during that period of time. And I can't tell you how many client meetings we had or phone calls that we had where a client said, I am really glad that you put us in that position to succeed, that we weren't as vulnerable to the market,

that we could still live in retirement and we could still sleep better. We all understood what was going on during that period of time and some of the other risk that presented. But I will tell you, we got many, many phone calls from our clients and said, thank you. Thank you for protecting us. Thank you for preparing us for things that were unforeseen. And that was just phenomenal. We know that we helped people. And we know during that period of time where there was a lot of angst that our clients did not feel that degree of angst.

Well, I know a lot of when the markets are topsy-turvy, a lot of advisors, their stomach goes into knots when the phone rings per se, because they're not getting the call saying thank you. So for you to have put plans into place that made your clients feel like that and feel compelled to call in and go, whew, thank you for that. Because probably they had felt it the other way in years past or had friends of theirs that weren't in those kind of plans. So that's just got to be super rewarding.

Well, Scott, once again, this has been very powerful to talk through some of these. If someone wants to get a little bit more information on putting some games, guaranteed income guard rails in place for their retirement. What's the best way they can reach out and connect with you? Yeah, Mike, we would love to discuss their options because, like I said, helping people provide some certainty in their retirement is rewarding for everybody. Our website is edelmanwealthmanagement.com. My email, personal email is Scott at my business email, Scott at eWMG-I-N-C.com,

and our office phone number 215-5-7-9-5601. Perfect. Well, Scott, thank you so much for coming back on today. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you. Thank you, Mike. I appreciate it. The views expressed are not necessarily the opinion of the interview guest and should not be construed directly or indirectly as an offer to buy

or sell any securities or services mentioned herein. Investing is subject to risks, including loss of principal investment, Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. No strategy can assure a profit nor protect against loss. Please note that individual situations can vary. Therefore, the information should only be relied upon when coordinated with individual professional advice. Securities and Investment Advisory Services offered through Osayek Wealth, Inc., member of FINRA and SIPC. Oseic Wealth is separately owned in other entities and or marketing names, products, or services referenced here are independent of OSEC.

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