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

Episode Date: November 7, 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-wealth-protection

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 Scott Edelman, who's the founder of Edelman Wealth Management Group, and we'll be talking about wealth protection. Scott, welcome.

to the program. Thanks, Mike. Good to be here. Yep, good to be having you back here. You've got some great insights on how you approach serving your clients. And boy, once we've, you know, articulated a retirement plan and then accumulated enough money to meet that plan, now we've got to protect that wealth. So where do you start when you're talking with your clients on bringing up the topic of wealth protection? Well, we've been in business now almost 30 years. We'll celebrate our 30th anniversary next year in March. And our firm and our planning is always built upon the fact that it's accumulate, protect, and transfer your assets. So a lot of times the accumulation is fairly easy for individuals. They understand what it means. It's save money. It's go to work,

save my money, and hopefully prepare for a good retirement. But the part that we focus on in the whole process is protecting, protecting your paycheck, protecting your assets, protecting what it is you wish to protect it every stage of your lifetime. You know, and there's a number of different ways to do that, obviously. You know, there's protecting your paycheck is really about protecting your income. And people tend to not emphasize that or not really think about it. But our job as an advisor is to be their resource, to be their education for all these things. Your paycheck, especially when you're younger and your working years, is the most important thing.

Without your paycheck, you can't pay the bills. You can't save for retirement. You can't educate your children. So how do we protect that? One of the things that we talk about is disability income protection. and that is something that no matter what age you are, especially younger and starting out, you need to pay close attention to that because if you become disabled and you are unable to work, where does your income come from?

How do you pay your bills? How do you protect your assets? How do you protect your retirement savings? How do you educate your children? Huge. You know, let's talk a little bit about that education. I think that once you start working with a client and you're putting these plans into place and they start understanding the philosophy that you're building for them, doesn't that have a trickle down effect so that the parents are now dialed into your methodology and they can then pass it along to their kids to make sure that they're doing things the right way at an even earlier age than the parents started. Well, certainly, I mean, you know, the idea is. not only are you protecting your assets when you're younger, you're protecting when you're

older. And most of our clients have a desire to create a legacy for their kids and grandkids. You know, they want to help educate them. They want to leave something for the kids and grandkids to make sure that they continue to transfer their wealth properly. And certainly, as part of the planning process, we identify and make sure that, first, our clients have, you know, the appropriate documentation in place, you know, did you do your will? Is your will updated? Was there trust planning required? What do you want to have happened to your assets if you're not here? Where do you want them to go? How do you want them to be? And then how do we make sure that those things happen while at the same time be able to protect your retirement? You know,

utilizing your assets properly in retirement, spending what you wish to spend. while still creating a legacy for your children. And a lot of times life insurance, a permanent life insurance policy, can help protect that. So while we're living our best life, as we like to call it in retirement, living your best life,

we have the insurance program in place to be able to still leave money to our children and grandkids to help with your legacy and help do the things you wish to do. So life insurance, does play an important role in that. And a lot of times, it can also protect against taxation to your kids and grandkids. You know, when you leave assets like a retirement account to your kids and grandkids, there's, you know, there's taxation on that. There can be federal income tax,

inheritance tax. And depending on your asset level, there could be some estate tax. So we want to help prepare our clients for all those things so that when money transfers to their kids and grandkids, we're able to transfer as much as possible. And again, while living your best retirement. You know, a lot of times people think of life insurance as death insurance. You know, I die, so I get X number of dollars. So what is your take on how life insurance plays a role in wealth protection as well as the balance between insurance-based protection and market-based investments? Well, life insurance, I call it love insurance. That's what I really call it.

Because you're showing love at every stage of the game when you purchase life insurance for wealth protection. You know, when you're younger, you're using life insurance to make sure that if you die prematurely, that you are protecting your spouse and children to continue to live the life that you planned all living together. You don't want to leave your family in financial hardship. You don't want to create a – your family suffers enough when you die. Yeah.

There's enough emotional suffering and some other thing. What you want to do is protect from financial suffering as well. So life insurance provides that. And same thing in retirement. You want to make sure that all of your retirement goals are met and that you're protecting your spouse for your untimely death and leaving them with the assets that they want. But at the same time, allowing you while you're all living to utilize your assets in a great fashion and know that if you do die, that there's going to be asset replacement for, your spouse. Yeah, huge. You know, and I love how you call it love insurance because when you have a plan in place for getting to retirement, getting through retirement, having enough money to make all that

happen, that's putting a plan into place through love. That's showing love to your current family and the future after you pass to the errors that come behind you. So I think that it's that mindset shift that people tend to get into the weeds of, I need to get X number of dollars, but in reality, I need to put a plan together that makes sure that, yeah, I'm protected, but so is my family now and after. That's right. You're going to die. We just don't know when you're going to die.

Yeah. Death, unfortunately, is guaranteed. But why not protect that? Why not protect your family and make sure that your legacy is intact? Your assets are intact. And you're protected. It's love. So where do you start?

At what point when you're working with the client, you know, I'm sure that you have multiple meetings and checkups and all that. Where does wealth protection factor into the plan and where do you start putting the pieces into place? What would that look like in from a 30,000 foot view? Well, it starts day one. Everyone has the need for wealth protection at different stages of your life. and your financial life, your protections can change or the necessity for different types of protection can change. But we all need wealth protection, whether we're just starting out, married, having a baby, buying a house, approaching retirement in retirement. There's never an end

date or a start date to wealth protection. When you go to work, it's time to protect. your wealth, your paycheck, your ability to save the assets that you've accumulated, how the assets are used and protected. For example, in retirement, we talk about one of the greater risk to your best life retirement, which is somebody gets sick. Well, if someone gets sick, that's expensive, right? It may be assisted living or some level of nursing care or in-home care. That costs money. How do we protect that? How do we protect your pool of assets to make sure that your spouse can live okay? And you have the funds to live properly while you have a medical necessity. And we have ways to do that. And we utilize different long-term care strategies because there's many. to protect that. And we design programs and plans to make sure that it fits your current needs. Everyone needs are a little bit different. Everyone's asset levels are a little bit different. But we still build a plan to address it and protect it. And there's many strategies to do so. But failure to plan,

we believe it is not an option. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a hope is not a strategy. So, you know, let's plan for the worst, sometimes that gives you a little bit of clarity and that's okay, great. Then if the worst does not happen, then you're in a good spot. Yeah. So talk a little bit more about just the life insurance aspect of wealth protection. Because I feel like too many times people still zero in on the death benefit side of things as opposed to getting some of the living benefits that some types of life insurance can provide. Look, I've always said this over the last 30 years.

I think life insurance is one of the greatest financial tools that we have available to us. Like you talked about, it does protect your assets. It protects you for the untimely death. And that's, you know, we all understand how life insurance works in that way. but it's also the ability to protect from some taxation on income. We have clients that utilize permanent life policies as a supplemental retirement plan, meaning they're overfunding a life insurance policy because of the growth in the policy, the cash value of the policy, grows tax deferred during the accumulation years,

and if used properly during the decumulation years or when we're using it as retirement income, can come out tax-free. So it's a great strategy to use for something other than life insurance. And then what it does is it still fulfills an insurance need, right? Because you're utilizing the cash value of the policy to fund retirement. But when you die, there's still some level of death benefit. So what it does is it protects you while you're living and can also provide an additional income source. I'll give you another scenario. A lot of the policies, and we talk to our clients about it all the time, we can add what we call a long-term care rider to their life insurance policy.

And that is, in fact, that is something that has gotten very, very popular over the last 15 years. and it's being able to utilize that death benefit. Obviously, if you die, that stays in place, but also being able to utilize that death benefit if you live and need care. So that death benefit becomes a long-term care pool of money that you can draw down. Now, certainly if you exhaust that pool of money while you're living, then it's little or no death benefit to your family, but it protects your assets while you're living. That is a big wealth protection because if you needed large chunks of money for the long-term care,

which we don't need to get into those projections because they're just off the charts from what I understand. But you either got to pay it one way or the other. If you take it out of an account, well, that's pretty much your retirement cash. But if you've got it in that type of a plan or vehicle, now all of a sudden that is protecting your wealth and letting it build and grow the way it was designed to. Well, Mike, it's even, think about it when you're using your assets and you're drawing down your assets, there's also taxation on the use of those assets. Oh, wow. And some of these life insurance or hybrid policies that we like to refer to, they're tax deferred and potentially tax-free. So you're utilizing additional dollars that you would have had to pay in tax by utilizing a properly structured insurance policy for that.

So the tax break could be tremendous. You know, we've touched on so many facets of benefit from this one vehicle with long-term care benefit, disability, tax mitigation. And it makes me think of what you just said, the word properly structured. So people should not hear this and go out and Google. Oh, give me that thing he talked about because you're not going to find it. You're not going to have it set up the right way. It's not going to do the thing that you need it to do because there's so many ways you have to set it up and do it the right way. Talk a little bit about how making sure you work with someone that knows how to properly structure this kind of thing is going to save you a lot of headache in the future.

Well, you can go out and you can look up products and you can webm-d it. But at the end of the day, WebMD isn't your doctor, right? You have to have a doctor. Well, this is the same thing. we're like financial doctors. Our job is going to be to educate you on what's available and build a plan tailored to fit what you're looking to accomplish. And there's many different ways to do that. So our goal is always to hash it out. Let's educate and let's figure out what level and what type of protection that you're going to need because there's many different ways to do it. There's many

strategies you can employ. There's multiple strategies. It's not just one strategy. It could be a combination of strategies, you know, to protect your wealth, to protect you from health care need, to protect you, your family from death and disability. Let's build a strategy and let's talk about it so that you feel comfortable. Your family understands what protection you've put in place and they understand it. So everybody's on the same page. Yeah. Love it. Well, I tell you, Scott, this has been really educational. I think it's it's that mindset shift of we got to build the wealth and we got to protect it all along the way. And there's so many ways you can do that. And there's not one way that works for everybody.

So if someone is interested in talking a little bit more about how you can properly structure some wealth protection for them, what's the best way they can reach out and connect with you? Mike, we'd love to help educate people. Our website is Edelmanwealthmanagement.com. our telephone number is 215-579-5601 and my email is Scott at eW-M-G-I-N-C dot com. Perfect. Well, Scott, thank you so much for coming back on today. It was a real pleasure chatting with you. Mike's, thank you very much.

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 invested. 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 Osceic Wealth, Inc., member of FINRA and SIPC. Osceic Wealth is separately owned and other.

entities and or marketing names, products or services referenced here are independent of osaic wealth. 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.com.