Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Stanley Targosz, Founding Member of The Responsible Brand Discussing Lifestyle Protection During the Expensive College Years

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

As the President and Founder of The Responsible Brand, he is dedicated to bringing financial education back to families and the industry. He believes that responsible solutions begin with a knowledge base that can be applied to each phase of life, helping individuals have more control over their current and future financial decisions. With over 20 years of experience in helping families understand how to afford the next step after high school without affecting their life goals, he also solves the extreme college debt issue organically, using a knowledge-based solution that everyone can implement. His mission is to put the family at the center of the solution, ensuring everyone wins.Learn more: https://theresponsiblebrand.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-stanley-targosz-founding-member-of-the-responsible-brand-discussing-lifestyle-protection-during-the-expensive-college-years

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 the Stanley Targos, who's the president founding member of the responsible brand, and we'll be talking about lifestyle, during the expensive college years. Stanley, welcome back to the program. Thanks, Mike. I'm glad to be back. Hey, I'm excited to talk about this because I know that this is a real thing. You know, the college years are expensive. And many times, it's not just four years because we've talked

about this in conversations before. Sometimes it takes five or six years for one student to get through school, but what if a parents have two students or three? This is a period of time that it really does elevate the need for planning. So where do you start when you're talking with your clients on planning for the expensive college years, but yes, putting some things into place like we've talked about before, but really focusing on that lifestyle protection. What does that look like? Yeah, lifestyle protection is the words we use to say, if you get your kids through college, your children through college, but your health suffers because of the stress that happens, choosing the right school, picking the right career, making sure they graduate on time, making sure they get a job, how do you handle housing, roommates, how do you pay for it? How do you absorb all the debt? And your health goes down and you're not funding your retirement and you start to feel bad about yourself and you don't feel like you can go out to eat and you're back to eating ramen noodles as a parent. Mike, kids should be eating ramen noodles in college. shouldn't be eating ramen noodles so their kids can go to college and eat five star cafeterias.

Amen. It's flipped. God gave us the ability to have kids to be good stewards of those children and to raise them in ways that allows them to use their skills and talents to go out and work and serve. But during those years, we oftentimes as parents put our needs on the back burner because it's such an urgent time for our kids. And the biggest thing that I see parents doing is they put their lifestyle on hold. They go into conserve mode. I almost feel like they go into the mode of my grandparents during the Great Depression, where they don't want to eat anything extra.

They don't want to spend another dime. Everything is all about paying for college. Well, when we help a family navigate the college years, whether they have one kid or six kids, it's how do we preserve what you've been working so hard for for 18 or 20 or 25 years without giving it all away during a four to six year window while your kids are going to college. And if we can help you manage your cash flow and protect what's important to you, get your kids through college. And if there's a little bit of debt and it's manageable and we get on the same page with how we attack it, we can preserve your joy out of life. You can actually go visit your kids instead of just seeing them on Thanksgiving and Christmas

and in the summertime. You can actually participate in the football games with your kids while they're at that university or maybe go to a bowl game or do some of the fun stuff that really creates and solidifies the beautiful memories that can happen out of college. Instead of looking back and thinking, man, those college years, I'm glad they're done. We couldn't fix the house. We needed a new car. We couldn't fix the car. We didn't want to spend money on our younger kids who were in travel sports. Everything stopped because of college. That's not the solution that we want. That's not the intention behind getting your kids through college. The intention is to help them become career ready with what they learn. So when we help protect that, it really begins with helping families to manage their cash flow to protect their goals.

And if our number one goal is to get the kids through college, our number two goals should be how do we protect our finances and the financial stability that we've been working on and being diligent about so that we have a financial foundation when the kids graduate college. So I feel like during the college years, families stop all of their good disciplines and jump into an emotional knee-jerk reaction that changes their focus unnecessarily. So an example of that is they'll stop funding a retirement account. Well, they've been working hard to fund a retirement account. Now they're going to stop to pay for college. We all know the impact of compounding interest in growth over a 10 to 15 year period of time. If you take six years out of funding your retirement, 10, 12 years before you retire, that has a huge impact, especially for most people when they're at their peak earning years

right as their kids get into college, which means they should be having the maximum ability to fund a retirement and fund their lifestyle and set aside savings and eliminate bad debt. But in the course of four to six years, they don't fund their retirement. They're not eliminating their bad debt. They're adding parent debt. and they wake up with a with a graduation hangover of oh my gosh how did we get in this mess yeah you know um you teach something or or propose something that at first blush is kind of a sock to the gut so i want to dive into this you say that the college years are the first distribution

from your retirement why is that and why is that so important to kind of clarify in in your mind Sure. You're 50 years old or 45 to 55 years old and your children go to college and you're thinking about funding your retirement, but you're transferring $100,000 to $200,000 of money that could be in your retirement ready for you and waiting at age 60 to the universities, to the education, to the student loan industry. That's a distribution people don't think about. They just think they're paying cash for it. I look at it and say, If you didn't spend $100,000, so let me say it this way, $100,000 paid for in college, 15 years before you retire, cost you between $1,500 and $1,500 a month in lifestyle. That's a distribution from your retirement account before you're ready for it. That has an impact on everything down the line. Well, then also, isn't there an opportunity cost in that one point right there, whereas if you pulled out a certain amount for the college out of the retirement account,

Yes, it's less of a balance, but it could have been growing, growing, growing over the year. So not only are you not contributing, but it could have grown to a lot higher and done more things for you. So it's really a double-edged sword. Yeah, you know, I'm going to, I agree 100%. And it's not just pulling money out of the balance by not putting it in. You're accomplishing the same goal. Mike, what it really boils down to is this is a huge transfer of your family's wealth to somebody else. And I'm not making the college as the bad guy.

They need to get paid for the services they're providing, and there's a lot of great colleges out there. There's not a lot of people out there who are scamming kids. That's not the big picture. The big picture is this. I transfer $100 to $200,000 or more, depending on how many kids I have, that could be kept in my family's control for my lifetime somewhere else.

That means that my kids and their future kids sacrifice, Over a 15 to 20 year period, just with simple math, that could be $6, $800 or a million dollars. That's gone. Because of compounding. Compounding. My father-in-law told me that my million-dollar wedding was expensive. And I said, Len, it wasn't a million dollars.

It was $30,000. And this was back then. This was 25 years ago. He goes, yeah, but 40 years from now with 7% interest, that's a million dollars. Wow. I'm like, holy cow. That's eye opening. right so and and and you and it's one thing to go oh that's frivolous to spend your money on x whatever that

is like this car this vacation but college is good but if there's a better way and you can still um um have that compounding happen for you why not make sure that's put into place or at least explored well people people really don't understand how wealthy people think and wealthy people the reason why some wealthy people, and I'm not going to say everybody's not wealthy and I'm not offending people who aren't wealthy, just when I was interviewing all the people in the financial services industry 25 years ago or 22 years ago when I got started, I found that wealthy people thought different than the average American. And I'm talking about the top 1%. I'm not there. I don't have a lot of friends who are there, but we all aspire to be there. The thing is this, wealthy people take care of

their families first, then they invest in a business, then they buy real estate, then they buy stocks and bonds, and then they put money in a retirement account. They do that because it helps them control wealth and maintain things inside of their family, has a lower risk rate and lower taxes. The average person puts as much money as they can in their 401k. When they get a bonus, they open an e-trade account to $200 a month. They end up getting a tax refund and buy duplex with their brother-in-law. Then they get a four gumball machines, put it in a laundromat. Then they take care of their families, which has the highest taxes, the highest risk and the lease control. So when we think about how wealthy people think,

let's take what wealthy people do and apply it to the college years. Because when wealthy people pay for college, they're not just taking their money and giving it away and never having access to the money again. They're leveraging assets to make it work so that they never lose control. And that's a conversation for a different day. But what we do is we take a zero off the end of what wealthy people do and apply it to the average American.

And when you work from taking care of, of your family backwards to funding a 401k, you reduce your expected family contribution, you reduce your taxes, and you increase your control, even during the college years. And if I can help someone capture $80,000 to $120,000 that they would have given away unknowingly and unnecessarily during the college years, that has a quarter million to half a million dollar impact on the family in their future. That comes with knowledge, not products. So talk a little bit about the plan that you put together because what you just mentioned there is not just one thing. It's a series of things that build upon each other.

What would that financial plan look like? Sure. The financial plan, we call it a GPS, a guaranteed practical solution because everybody needs to have a guaranteed practical solution that guides them through seasons. College is a season. It's the first distribution from your retirement account. it's the most expensive season that people have if they have more than two kids until the last five years they live. Think about that. So buying your house isn't the most expensive decision.

For most people getting their kids to college is the most expensive decision. Then the next thing that's expensive is the last five years that you live. So when we put this GPS together, we actually start and we say here's what you're currently doing. and here's how you're going to pay for college the way you want to. Now, let's change your trajectory six or eight degrees and implement some strategy that's based on your goals, based on where your kids want to go to college, based on your budget, based on your income, and based on what you want to have happen. And we can accomplish that goal, custom, by managing how your dollars go into your economy,

how you fund your retirement. Do you use a 401K, a Roth 401K, an IRA, a Roth IRA, or do you not fund a traditional retirement account for a season so you can fund something that doesn't penalize you while your kids are going to college? What's the proper emergency fund? How much are you allowed to have cash on hand before you get penalized from the universities? Where is that money sitting at? I'm not a stock person that's going to give you stock advice. And if you're working with someone, I give the right questions to ask.

I'm not here to derail your relationships. I'm here to be a specialist during a season of time that's super impactful. Mike, imagine if you had brain cancer. Would you go to your dentist to get suggestions on how to handle the brain cancer? Nope, and neither would you go to Google. Right? You go to a specialist. Now, is that brain cancer specialist going to become your general practitioner for the rest of your life?

Nope. Nope. So that person is there for a specific reason with a life, threatening need for a season. We can be that person that supplements and enhances your current plan. And that's the beauty of it. I'm not here to derail your relationships, but I do know you love your kids. College for most people is a must. I would argue if it's a necessary must, but most people believe it's a must. And you don't have to get penalized and pummeled during the college years and derail all the hard work you've put in and all your intentions in the future because of

college. So part of this plan is taking some things and repositioning what you're already doing. Talk a little bit about the savings vehicle that you recommend that helps with this financial stability during this temporary phase of life college. Sure. You know what people don't want to talk about is they don't want to talk about cash value life insurance. And I'm not here to browbeat people on that. I will say this, 90% of the policies that are designed out there aren't designed the right way. But if you look on FAFSA, page 9 or 10, it says the only two places you can effectively store money without getting penalized are the balance of a retirement account and the cash value of a properly designed life insurance contract, which is why we use it. Now, you and I both know that you can't access the money in your retirement account without pensions. these fees or without a loan payback unless you're 59.5 or older. And if you do access it when your

kids are in college and you're over 59 and a half, when you pull the money out, it hits your adjusted gross income and it creates a compounded penalty, which is like pouring salt in your wounds. It's painful. So the life insurance isn't something that I'm excited about. I don't wake up every day and think about it. But for certain people, it makes a lot of sense. During the season, I can have unlimited contributions that go into that program. And if it's designed, the right way, it actually works for you harder than everything else works against you. The problem is most people think of life insurance as death benefit. And the reason that is, is most insurance companies make all their profitability from the death benefit that's sold.

And most agents make money from the commission on the death benefit. But we're not designing this for death benefit. That's a need. We're talking about a want, which is the cash value. And there's a bunch of nuances. There's 10 different flavors that people choose from. The reality is everybody needs something that's custom and not everybody needs insurance. If you don't want to use life insurance, fine. Then you've got to use something that allows your dollars to grow in a tax deferred, a reason or ability that doesn't penalize you. And there's not a ton of those options out there, which is why the FAFSA lists properly designed cash value insurance is one of the options. Now I know some people are going to say, oh, we're just going to sell life insurance.

Now, 30% of the people that I see need that solution, 70% don't, which means 70% of the people I see get a solution. And I'm just changing a few of the structures and nuances inside their economy and they're walking away winning. But the 30% who need it, they might not want it. They might think that it's a bad deal. That's fine. I'm not going to arm wrestle you over it. But if I show you using this tool for a season saves you $60 or $80,000, or not using it costs you $60 or $80,000,

you actually have a fact that you can make a decision on, just like you would, any other investment out there. And I'm not saying that this is an investment. I'm saying if you look at an investment, you're going to look at the cost. So you have to look at it the same way you would look at an investment. But it's just one of the tools. It's an obstacle for people to get over as a mental block,

but at the end of the day, I'm not emotional about the tools I use. I'm not emotional about the tool my surgeon use. I just want them to use the best tool to get me through the same. season successfully in a healthy way. Yep, focus on the end result. You mentioned something I want to really go deeper on, which is properly structured. And I know I facetiously said, you know, don't go to Google either. But so many of us just go Google everything or chat, GPT, everything. But if you hear this and go, oh, well, I'm going to do this and go Google and set up permanent life insurance, whole life insurance, you've got to make sure it's properly structured. And like you said, 10 different flavors, there's probably

20 different variables or more to make sure that this vehicle, if it is the right choice, is set up the right way or else you're just spinning your wheel. So talk a little bit about making sure that all of these variables are in place to accomplish that end result you're looking for. Absolutely. You know, if you Google, and I've done the research on this and we posted online when we did our presentations a couple years ago, if you Google life insurance, you get 85 million hits in 0.35 seconds.

Half of them tell you it's great. half of them tell you it's horrible. By the time you're done researching the first million pages, you're dead and your children's childrens are dead because it's taken so long. So if you ask Google questions based on your current knowledge, you're going to get answers that reinforce what you think you know. So my job is to help you to understand how to ask better questions. Listen, people have made the best decisions they can with the information they had at the time. But if I give you better information, you'll be able to make better decisions moving forward. And properly designed means it needs to be designed based on the goal for when you need cash out. Is it this year? Is it next

year? Is it in five years? How much ability do you have to fund it? Are you going to create another pain point where you have another bill that you have to, that makes you painful every month? Or are you going to create something that that flows with your economy and works with your goals on dollars that you're currently spending that you're just redirecting? And when we design a properly designed program. It's got the flexibility to have cash available when you need it, not when the company tells you you need it, but when you need it. And we've been very effective at having people pull tons of money out of these programs two years, three years, five years after they started it, effectively paying for their kids college while maintaining control of an asset.

That's a concept that you're not going to grasp on a radio show or a podcast. You really need to see it, feel it, and think it. They told me years ago when I did my radio show, this is a Christian radio station. They said, Stan, God made people a certain way. He didn't make us to understand math over the radio. Right. Yeah. And you want to see it how it impacts you personally. So what are your numbers? What would this happen? And I think your point there is if there is a way that you can avoid cost and fees and penalties by pulling money out of a retirement account. And if there's a way to access grants and scholarships and all these kinds of things because you're positioning what you already have in the right way, what you want to know about it sooner than later?

Well, Mike, what's interesting is if someone had $150,000 in a $529 versus $150,000 in a vehicle like this that's transparent on the FAFSA, when their kids go to college, the $529 actually cost them on the low end about $9,000 in additional costs. same $150,000 in this policy is transparent on the FAFSA and it allows the university to make up to $9,000 more available to help pay for your kid to go to college. Multiply that times four years, times how many kids you have and tell me if it's impactful. Yeah. And being able to reaccess that without penalties and hassle and all that is pretty huge. It keeps you in the driver's seat. Yeah. And you don't just have to transfer it to the next kid or give it to somebody else if you don't use it. If you don't need it, that's the beauty.

Oftentimes, the values in these programs turn into a very effective emergency funds and savings accounts. They can be used to supplement some retirement or they have other benefits. I'm not here to talk about the insurance side of things. And you and I are here talking about a big picture. The reality is from a college standpoint, it's one of two things you can use. But it's the only one that gives you the accessibility if you're not 59 and a half. And like you said, that particular tool is probably, 30% of the solution when you sit down with people.

So if someone is interested in exploring some of the lifestyle protection during these expensive college years and just making sure that they've got a plan put into place, what's the best way that they can learn more about what you guys do and reach out and connect with you? Sure. Go to our website. It's the responsible brand.com. And you can get some information, some resources. You can connect to the YouTube page, listen to a bunch of videos. We have some books on the college years and the debt that's created that you can read. And really, everything is written and done in a way that it's easy to understand.

We don't use a lot of industry jargon. We just want people to really walk away keeping what they work so hard to earn. I love it. Well, Stanley, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you. Thanks, Mike. I appreciate you. And God bless you.

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