Business Innovators Radio - Interview With Stephen Ng, CLU, ChFC, CEP Founder of Stephen Ng Financial Group Discussing How to Grow & Protect Retirement Wealth

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

Stephen Ng, whom you may have seen in NBC, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, New York Daily News, and others. He has also been interviewed by Fox TV and Christian Television Network. Stephen is the Author of “10 Financial Mistakes You Should Avoid” which has been a wonderful resource for many of his clients. All of the proceeds from the book sales go to benefit World Vision International. Stephen is also the Founder and President of Stephen Ng Financial Group.Stephen is married, has 3 children, and resides in New Jersey and Florida. Stephen is a warm and passionate communicator who loves to share his financial wisdom and insights. He served as a Deacon at Trust In God BaptistChurch in New York City and was the Chairman of the Board from 2008 to 2016. Currently, he serves as a trustee for Doxa Church in New York City. Stephen attends Bell Shoals Church, in Brandon, Florida. He loves to travel and frequently speaks internationally during mission trips with his churchLearn More: https://www.stephenngfg.com/The views expressed are not necessarily the opinion of Stephen NG, 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 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 Wealth.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-stephen-ng-clu-chfc-cep-founder-of-stephen-ng-financial-group-discussing-how-to-grow-protect-retirement-wealth

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, Stephen Ng, who's the founder of Stephen Eng Financial Group, and we'll be discussing how to grow and protect retirement wealth. Stephen, welcome to the program. Yep, good morning, mate. Good morning.

Hey, thank you for being on. I always love learning from people and hearing perspectives from life experience, professional experience. And I think that anyone would check the box and say, yes, I want to learn how to grow and protect retirement wealth. But before we dive into that, give us a little bit of your story and your background. And how did you get into financial services in the first place? Well, I got into this business as a financial advisor. In actually in 1992, my dad obviously had a huge influence on my life. And, you know, no education whatsoever.

And he was born in Singapore and all that. Made a lot of mistake in his business. And basically from my dad's mistakes, I learned a lot. And when I became a financial advisor in 1992, which was 32 years ago, we make sure that it is in our DNA, in what we do, that we do well, that we want to grow to protect and to leverage our client's wealth. Basically, that was a motivation of how, you know, I got into the business and to help our clients over the last 32 years. You know, I love that you said you learned from mistakes. You know, and isn't it, isn't it

great when we can learn from other people's mistakes, whether it's friends, family, or other people because I think that when you can take that approach and learn from mistakes of people in the market and bring that to your clients and say, look, not that I've made mistakes, but let me tell you what other people have done out there. I see people making mistakes in growing and protecting and leveraging and that's what I want to bring to you as a client. And I think that is so important because if you feel like you've attained and know it all, then that's the time that you're going to topple off of that high tower, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And interestingly, Mike, the title of the book that I wrote a couple of years ago is entitled to 10 financial mistakes you should avoid. I've always said, if you make a mistake, it's costly, but if you learn from someone else, you are smarter than everybody else because it's free.

Exactly. Awesome. So let's dive into some of the ways that you are working with your clients to help them grow and protect retirement. What are some of the main strategies that you're you. You're working with your clients to help them grow and protect retirement. What are some of the main strategies that you're you. You're you're you. You're just. You're you have come to learn and be proficient in for really maximizing growth, but more than just maximizing, it's maximizing growth while safeguarding because I think that so many times people go, ooh, I want to maximize, but then here comes risk. And when you have market volatility, there is some risk involved. So you are showing your clients how to maximize growth, but at the same time safeguard as much as possible against market volatility. Where do you start in teaching your clients in that? Well, firstly, I mean, the cliché, which I say most people misunderstand the cliché,

is obviously diversification. It's just critical in different strategies that we use to help our clients in growing and safeguarding our clients' wealth against mainly market volatility. And we actually graphically explain it in our corporate logo, which is our yellow triangle, at the top half of our triangle, we usually use mutual funds, ETFs, which is exchange-traded funds that are liquid to grow our client's wealth to bid inflation and taxation. And the bottom half of the triangle represents a foundation of our client's financial house. The foundation will have some kind of a guarantee of principle or guaranteed income.

and we do this by transferring risk to insurance companies by using five different types of annuities to grow and to protect their wealth. You know, that's a lot to unpack there. So I want to kind of dive in a little bit. And I feel like a lot of people even misunderstand what diversification really is and how diversified they should be. Because by definition, diversified might mean you could have your money in 327 different types of funds or accounts. But you're not saying to do that. You need to kind of keep it tight, right? Correct.

Yes. Yes. I mean, you know, we, there are just so many things out there, but we try to stick with things that actually had proven to work over our 32 years of experiences, you know, based on the strategies that we put it nicely in to explain in a corporate triangle. Yep. And I know that we want to dive into this as we continue, but I always. like to comment when I hear words that kind of raise a level of comfort for me, which is

guarantee of principle, guarantee income. So I want to dive into that because I feel like so many people are so tired of opening up their quarterly statements or watching the news and just watching their portfolios getting hit with volatility. So I know we want to dive into that, but we can't get away from uncertainty in our economic times. So we can't control it. And sometimes that frustrates us because we want to control things.

things, but we can't control inflation and the economy. What are some of the recommendations that you come up with with your clients to make sure that your clients that are planning for retirement kind of have as much of a secure financial future as possible? Well, firstly, I think we have to understand, you know, the meaning of uncertain economic times. And the way we like to explain it is there are financial storms. There are basically six of them, the six of the major financial storms that you, you

got to recognize. Some of them, you know, historical U.S. government overspending, dangerous deficits, excessive inflation, health care costs, and so forth. And the way we use diversification in our practice is in, that we explain, in our corporate triangle is combinations of mutual funds, ETFs, real estate, gold, silver, commodities, different types of annuities, and even life in insurance to grow, to protect, and to leverage our client's wealth. And as I said earlier, we used it in our corporate triangle to graphically explain it to our client on what's the meaning of that vivification. So, you know, some of those things you mentioned about the storms, you know, like deficit and record debt. And then the next one you said was increasing taxes. And I feel like so many

times people don't even realize the connection with that because we hear that deficit of trillions and trillions of dollars. And we kind of can't even relate to it. It's so big. But we know it's growing. And we know that the only way to address the deficit, which has a lot of negative ramifications, you know, with our credit, you know, viability or or borrowing power as a country. But the only way to kind of spite that is to lower your spending, which we know the government it won't do that. And the other way is let's chip into that with raising taxes. Well, that becomes one of those storms, right? When we start seeing deficit and dead and then we notice that that leads to taxes, which can lead to inflation, that is that pin in the point that you're

bringing to your clients to say, because of these things, we need to make sure that we're putting as many protections in place. Yep, you're actually right. I mean, we have no crystal ball, right but it is how we look at the future and I've always said half of life is preparation right is to be prepared for the upcoming storms that we have so and and then also the other thing that I feel like sometimes people that are real do-it-yourselfers just like okay good I hear about those storms I'm going to go out and I'll figure it out on my own the problem is you don't have decades of experience like you do so what's the importance of kind of working with someone like yourself to make sure you're accomplishing these things and have a actual blueprint and game plan

in place. Yeah, I think we bring to the table the wealth of experiences over our 32 years. We have an incredible team and, you know, we are really team player. And in the words of King Solomon, one of my favorite quotation from King Solomon, from this wise king, is that in the presence of many advisors, your plan will succeed. So hanging around with the correct advice, are very, very important. And obviously, we have incredible advisors, you know, that we can reach out to in the strategic partnership with all the different mutual funds companies, Black Rock, Franklin Templeton, Invesco, Janice Henderson, and all that. And from all our strategic alliances is where we pray about it. We get wisdom from above, and we help our clients to grow, to protect, and to

to leverage their wealth. I love it. That's so awesome. Let's go a little bit deeper into that diversification without getting into details or making recommendations or anything. But I know that you mentioned, you know, gold and silver and ETFs and real estate mutual funds and all of these different types of things from annuities and life insurance. I think that one thing that comes to my mind is the word combination. And don't tell us, you know, well, the best combination is this percent of, you know,

Stocks bonds, mutual funds, because it's different for everybody. And you can never take a templated cookie cutter approach to saying, this is our formula, and it works for everyone because it doesn't. But talk a little bit about how you are going to analyze what a client needs and then make the right combination of some of these recommendations to make sure they're properly diversified. Yeah. So, you know, most, there's no one client that's exactly the same.

Most of our clients are pre-retirees and retirees, and usually when they come in to see us, whether there's a referral or coming to one of our meetings, we have a confidential free consultation. And from there, we will know about the client's objective, their goals, what they want to do. And depending on what they want to achieve and the understanding of risk, the understanding of their objectives, that's where we provide our recommendation as a fiduciary. And there's no one particular strategy. Sometimes it is a combination of strategies to help them to grow and to protect their wealth, given our many, many strategies that we have.

You know, you mentioned fiduciary, and I know that sometimes people throw that word around a lot and it might not have the full impact to someone hearing that for the first time. So talk a little bit about what that actually means, because from my perspective, when I hear it, it means that you are legally obligated to do the right thing for that client, right? Yes, Mike. And unfortunately, some advisors are not fiduciary. And we uphold obviously the fiduciary standard, meaning, you know, what we recommend, it is not in our interest that will be serious issues.

We have to make sure that we know our clients, right, to know them well. So we have what we call a financial planning guide that we use for our clients to be prepared for our meetings and the more prepared they are, the better it is because the more we know about what they want to accomplish and all that. And that's where we come in as a fiduciary to recommend the correct strategies for them to help them to grow and to protect their wealth. Yep, that's super, super important. So we've talked about diversification. Let's talk a little bit about risk management. Explain how you approach risk management and how you help your clients mitigate these risks as they approach retirement age because I think that risk management is kind of like

somewhat important when you're in your 20s and it's getting a little bit more important when you're in your 40s and then it starts getting really important as you approach retirement age. So how do you approach that when you're advising your clients? Yeah. So my comments to that might is risk management is critical in retirement planning because no one wants to lose money with the hard-earned money. individuals, both retirees and pre-retirees, have many opportunities to mitigate the financial risk.

We always tell our clients that in life, we cannot totally avoid risk, but it's how to mitigate the risk. So besides diversification in different asset classes, we tell our clients, educate yourself and know how each strategies help to grow and to protect your wealth. And in our last 32 years of experiences, we discovered that most people take on too much risk and have no idea how to grow their wealth

and protect their investment to bid inflation and taxation. And always remember the words of Warren Buffett, right? Warren Buffett said, rule number one is not to lose money. And rule number two is never to forget rule number one, which I think is a waste of themselves. It's really, it keeps it simple there, doesn't it? If you are focusing on don't lose money and then the next step is, remember, don't lose money.

You know, did I stutter? So that's really, really important. And I think that that ties in so well with risk management because so many times people will kind of look over the fence and see, oh, well, look at that fund getting this return or look at this person, my friend that I met down at the gym that said he gets this return. But those higher returns sometimes can either have a lot of fees associated, but like along with what we're talking about here, a lot of risk.

So mitigating. Now, I would like to ask you, how do you define mitigate? Because I feel like so many times people hear that and they go, oh, eliminate risk. Nope, we can't eliminate risk ever, just like we can eliminate taxes, but we can mitigate them. So how do you advise your clients on mitigating risk? Well, obviously, you said it right, Mike, is that, you know, in life, we know we can never totally eliminate risk, right? I mean, to live life, it's to face risk. But investors or retirees or wherever, what stage you are in life, you have an opportunity to reduce or to mitigate risk by using different strategies.

And there are a lot of different strategies. And unfortunately, I think most people just fail to spend the time and to mitigate the risk or to educate and to realize that, you know, there are just many different strategies out there to be aware. And our job is to educate and to make clients aware and prospective clients aware that you have an opportunity to take action and to reduce or to mitigate the risk. Yeah. So talk a little bit about some of these recent latest trends in retirement and wealth planning because I feel like someone can go to our trusty friend Google and put in, you know, retirement wealth planning management and you're going to get trillions of answers and get confused. So what are some of these latest trends and how should people be approaching them? Right. Yeah, good point, Mike. Unfortunately, you know what is on the internet can be for or against you.

Yeah. You're just going to be careful. There are some really good stuff and there are some really bad stuff. And unfortunately, not everyone is a fiduciary and not everyone is they have all the different strategies or license in all the strategies. And the analogy that I like to give is if all you do all the different strategies, you're long is to sell apples. You just say never eat orange. And if you sell orange, you say never eat an apple, which is unfortunate. So to just answer a question, obviously, we have, you know, many different types of ETFs, which are exchange traded funds, the latest innovation that you

should be aware of, what we call buffering strategy to grow and to protect your wealth. and buffering, it's like driving a truck with shock absorbers, right? The buffering strategies will help you to cushion your investment portfolio when a stock market is volatile. And one of the five strategies that we use, which is a relatively new innovation, is designed actually to beat the S&P 500 if the market is up and to have at least a 20% buffer of protection if the market is down. And in the area of risk management in long-term care, there are many updated strategies using a combination

of life insurance with long-term care rider or annuities with long-term care rider without medical underwriting that many people are not aware of. And you mentioned one of those annuities, and we don't need to get into the details of them, but aren't I correct in thinking that that's one of the protections and guarantees that that you were talking about earlier where, you know, yeah, you might participate in the upside, but also if the market crashes, then you're not going to lose money. And that's a nice feeling, right? Correct. Correct. Yeah. So what you've got to be careful in my disclosure and my explanation, as if, remember, there are five major annuities, right? And all of them are all different.

The problem with most people might is most people just maybe just get one annuities. And usually they end up with the wrong one because they do not realize that there are four others out there. And you're right, Mike. And, you know, one of the annuities that you just mentioned has the ability to guarantee you'll never lose your principle because you transfer the risk to the insurance company. And if the market goes up, you're not going to get 15%. You're going to get, for example, you may get 9.5 or 10% with a certain cap. So that is one features or one type of your annuities among the five. So my advice to most people is just educate yourself on all five annuities, and they're all different, designed differently to grow your money and to protect your wealth. That's huge, and that goes right back to what we were saying earlier.

There is not one cookie cutter templated solution for every single person. It's all about being that fiduciary and learning what the client needs and then providing options so they can make an educated decision. And I think that is so powerful. Well, Stephen, it's been great chatting with you about how you serve your clients growing and protecting and leveraging their wealth. If someone is interested in learning more and then also reaching out and connecting with you, what's the best way that they can do that? Well, in today's world, you know, you can call us. Our number is 973-218-960 or just go to our website.

We have all the incredible information, our webinars, and all our... information or you're just going to go to our website, which is Stephen, S-T-E-P-H-E-N-G-G-D-G-com. And we can just reach out to any one of our team members, and we just love to help you. Excellent. Well, Stephen, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much, Mike. The views expressed are not necessarily the opinion of Stephen Eng 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 Osaic Wealth, Inc., member of FINRA and SIPC. Osaic Wealth is separately owned and other entities and or marketing names, products or services referenced here, are independent of Ozaic 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. influential entrepreneurs radio.com