Business Innovators Radio - Interview w/Michelle Boyce, RICP, VP w/Rosenzweig Financial Services Discussing Guaranteed Income Streams

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Michelle has over 20 years of experience in Financial Services and her main goal is to always focus on her client’s long-term financial planning strategy to optimize retirement income.She prides herself on analyzing a financial situation, finding any potential issues, and creating adequate solutions to ensure her clients’ prosperous future. With her extensive insurance and planning experience, Michelle adds great knowledge to the already specialized team at RFS.She has worked in various capacities in the financial industry from being part of top producer teams to teaching new financial advisors through agency leadership. Michelle’s passion is to help educate consumers by taking complex financial strategies and explaining them in an easy way to understand the concept. Michelle is originally from Pittsburgh, PA and a graduate from Penn State University in Business.She now resides in Boynton Beach, FL with her husband Rob, their two daughters Olivia andLondon, and their three pets. When Michelle isn’t working with RFS’s clients or spending time with her family, she is likely exercising or on her Peloton, competing her way to the top of the leaderboard. Michelle has always loved sports as she grew up playing Basketball, Volleyball, and Softball. While living in Pittsburgh, she became part of Steeler Nation and that devotion has carried with her to South Florida.Michelle joined Rosenzweig Financial Services in October 2021 as Vice President, specializing in the professional marketplace.Learn more: https://www.rfsny.com/Registered representative of, and securities and investment advisory services offered through Hornor, Townsend & Kent, LLC (HTK), Registered Investment Adviser, Member FINRA/SIPC, 1 North Federal Hwy, Suite 201, Boca Raton, FL 33432. 561-314-3100, http://www.htk.com. HTK is a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company. Rosenzweig Financial Services is unaffiliated with HTK. HTK does not offer tax or legal advice. Always consult a qualified adviser regarding your individual circumstances.Retirement Income Authority is not affiliated with HTKInfluential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-w-michelle-boyce-ricp-vp-w-rosenzweig-financial-services-discussing-guaranteed-income-streams

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, Michelle Boyce, who's a vice president with Rosenzwegg Financial Services, and we'll be talking about the power of a guaranteed income stream. Michelle, welcome to the program. Thank you, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Hey, you're welcome. I'm looking forward to talking with you because I know that anytime you hear the word guaranteed, people kind of take a deep breath and go, yes, I want to hear about guarantees. So when you couple guarantee with income, now we're talking. So I'm excited to hear about this. But before we dive in, give us a little bit of your story and background. And how did you get into financial services? Yes. So actually, this year is my 20th year.

Next month barks, you know, 20 years. since I started in the financial industry. And I know it's the most interesting story. I graduated college and said, okay, what do I want to do with my life? And I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, right, and control my own destiny. But I also knew I also wanted to help people. I went to school for business. So I said, right, let me see what financial services is about.

And within the first six months of, you know, learning the industry, kind of saw the impact that we can have on individuals' lives. and how much non-education is out there for the consumers, right? You go to work, you earn your income, but we're never really taught in school about taxes or we're not talking about, you're talking about how to save. So I saw that this was a place that could really make a positive impact on the world. That's awesome. And I think that one thing that I did not hear in that introduction was I wanted to get into an industry

where I make a whole bunch of money. No, you want to make an impact in the world. reminds me, too, of some of the best sales trainers out there will talk about. This is not about selling products. It's about giving value, serving, teaching, educating. And that's what you just described. I think that is spectacular. So whenever we hear, you know, like guaranteed income stream, let's start by, you know, the first thought that comes to my mind hearing that is how does an income stream guaranteed income stream work? Because the opposite of that is a non-guaranteed income stream. So let's first define that. What is a guaranteed income stream? Right. So a guaranteed income stream is, you know,

a paycheck that you can depend on every month in retirement, that's not tied to the market. That's not tied to any volatility. Now, 30 years ago when most people retired, almost everyone had a guaranteed income stream in the form of a pension, right? But those days are long gone. And, you know, the companies have now shifted the risk over to the consumers through 401Ks and say, okay, now, you save along the way. And then when they get to retirement, they have to figure out how to take an income stream off those assets. Yes. Well, if we were to, if we were to type what you just said they try to take. And that becomes, you know, really, really tough. So that's really, really powerful because as we know in the markets or investments, there's not much guaranteed in life.

So when we can be focusing on guaranteed income stream, that's huge. So how does adding that guaranteed income stream give people planning for retirement some good flexibility? But also, I guess the word that comes to my mind, too, would be peace of mind. But talk a little bit about that flexibility. I like that as well. Absolutely. So let's compare two different people, right? So we have person A who goes into retirement and just use simple example here.

They have a million dollars in liquid assets. that they now have to pull an income off of, right? So maybe they have Social Security as well, which is another form of guaranteed income, except it's tied to the government, which, you know, as guaranteed as that can be. But that person's, you know, now has to rely on those investment returns

from the market each year to determine how much income they can pull. And if they pull too much in a year, maybe they're now losing principle from their investment account, and maybe that works. them, right? That doesn't give them peace of mind. And maybe they need to take increasing income throughout their life to keep up with inflation, but the market isn't doing those same things.

So that's person A, who lives with no peace of mind and really has a lot of risk of what can happen. Person B is a person that says, okay, I want to take a portion of that money that is tied to the market and in investments, it's very variable, and put it into a location that's a location that I'm now kind of going to create my own pension, right? So I give that amount. Let's just pick in that example, you know, 250,000. I give that to, you know, an annuity company that's not going to guarantee me an income stream off that 250 for as long as I live, right? So if I live to 100, they're going to continue to pay me. So I've now eliminated the risk of outliving my money from that because I know what's going to happen. Another rippling effect, right, is that, okay, now that I know I have this

much guaranteed, the other money that I have in the market, maybe I can take a little more risk in that because I know I have, you know, my foundation set from the guaranteed portion. So there's a lot of different positives that come by just kind of shifting your assets. They're able to take advantage of that guaranteed income stream. Yeah, that's a really good point because, again, I've feel like words are so powerful and words resonate. So when you use that word flexibility, it does provide you that flexibility because it gives you options. So talk a little bit about the financial benefits of having that guaranteed income stream versus just relying solely on those traditional retirement portfolio aspects like you mentioned, maybe, you know, Social Security,

things like that. Yes. So and I work with, so in my practice, right, I work with a lot of pre-retirees and retirees. So obviously we do a lot of modeling to say, okay, what does retirement income look like? And most people, their only guaranteed income that they have is Social Security, right? So if they need X amount to live each year, we know we have X amount coming in through Social Security, then we have to stall for the difference pulling off their investment accounts. Well, the only thing we know to be true about the market, right, is it goes up and it goes down. Nobody knows what your 20 or 25 year period of returns are going to look like within the portion that's invested. You could have a great 20 years in that your account value could double while you're pulling out income,

or you could have a bad couple years to start in retirement, and then you're potentially losing money much quicker and running out. So we have an unknown. So when we're able to take some of those funds and put that into a secured income stream, so now we're taking Social Security and we're stacking on top of that. And then now rather than maybe having 20% of your income guaranteed, you have 40% of your income on an annual basis guaranteed. So no matter what happens, you know, that you're able to pay, you know, the property taxes, your lights, your grocery bill, you're going out to eat.

Those are kind of your set expenses that you know are going to come in no matter what, right? The rest of that money that's in the market then, maybe now that's more your bigger expenses, right? Not something you're taking on a monthly basis, but maybe you want to plan a trip to go see the grandkids and you want to take them to Disney World or something. So you go in and you pull a lump sum, but you have the much more flexibility that. that way because you're not stuck about what the timing of the market is of if you have to pull out your income to be able to make your mortgage payment that month. Because putting food on the table is taken care of because of that guaranteed income amount. Exactly.

Right. So when I do. You know, it kind of makes me think too, like you almost become like a life coach of sorts to sit down and go, okay, tell me what retirement looks like to you. You know, because everybody, if you were to answer that question, everyone's going to have a different an answer like, oh, well, I want to travel a whole lot. I don't want to travel at all. I want to start a new business, nonprofit. And then once you determine, you know, what is that retirement going to look like? And sometimes people go, oh, I'm not going to need as much in retirement because,

you know, I'm going to be kind of throttling back in life. But in reality, you've got more time on your hands to spend money, travel. So I think that you're going to find, and maybe my question to you is, do you find that when you go through that exercise conversation with your clients, that it creates a gap that's bigger than what they were kind of expecting? Absolutely. And you hit on a great point there. When I have the initial conversation with someone, you know, and we're going over their data, I always say, you know, obviously I collect statements. I get financial figures. But I say the numbers are the numbers. I can figure out the numbers. But what I want to do is I want to know who you are. I want to know what's important to you. How do you plan on spending this second half of your life, right? You've worked for the last, you know, 30, 40 years very hard. You've seen. You've saved. Now we're on the back nine, right, of the golf course. What's important to you? It's like what you said. Is it traveling? Like do your, do the grandchildren live next door? Do they live on the East Coast and you live on the West Coast? Right. Those are things we have to plan. We want to put

into your plan because that's what's important to you. And then the second half of your question is absolutely, right? First of all, just showing someone the simple compound of adding inflation each year, the money that they're going to need to take out of their portfolio, sometimes it leaves them speechless. But I'm never going to need that much to live. I'm like, well, you're actually using that much today, but this is in 20 years. And it's just the power of inflation. Well, I know this will date me, but I know that back when I was in high school, we used to have this book that was separate from like your yearbook, you know, things like that. But it was like, you know, hey, oh, here's some pictures of, you know, this event, that event.

But one of the pages I distinctly remember was, you know, what does bread cost now? What does a movie cost now? What does an average how? And when you go back and look at that compared to today and for me, you know, high school was many moons ago. But still, a lot of times people look forward 20, 25 years and they don't realize that, wow, prices do change. Yeah. And imagine someone who retired in the early 2000s and where they are today. I'm sure they never imagined with our recent inflation, right?

That the cost of goods where they're at. Inflation and market volatility and fill in the blank with many, many other things. There's things that, unfortunately, an Excel file with numbers in it needs to have a little flexibility in it of itself right there. So that's a big thing that we're talking about here is when you're working with your clients. Yeah, it sounds good to talk about a guaranteed income stream, but that fits so nice. into we need to discover what that gap is so that we got that guaranteed income stream to cover your essentials. And then the other things are going to be in the other areas like you mentioned, where we can pull it out of maybe some of the money you have in the market. So that's,

that's a good point. Yep. So I say we want to be, when we do planning when you're in the accumulation phase, right, we do protection first planning, right? We build, we dig your your basement before we put on your roof. It's the same concept when we go into retirement planning. We want to make sure you have that strong foundation so that no matter what happens to retirement, right? Because there's going to be windstorms. There's going to be rain. That you still have that strong foundation built. And also, you probably would not, you probably would agree with this statement.

Probably every one of your clients, you do not put into the same percentage of this percent and guaranteed, this percent in the market, this percent in whatever else, because everyone is different. But is there a rule of thumb that, you know, if you're at this age bracket, you should start having this percentage of your retirement portfolio kind of shifting out of the market into some guaranteed income? How does that that process look? So that's a great question. And the first part of your question there, right, the answer is absolutely not. Everybody is different because it's based on their circumstance, right? It goes back to what I said earlier.

What's important to them, right? So that the second part of that is that it's really I sit down and I figure out with them, you know, what type of income do you have today, right? What we think incomes look like in retirement and what you're going to need for expenses? How much of that is your day-to-day expenses and how much of that is more your variable expenses, right? We figure that number out. Then we say, okay, the way I like to plan is say, let's back into the number that we need to solve for so that your fixed expenses are covered. Right.

And that's going to be different from everyone. It depends if they need $200,000 a year to live or if they need $500,000 to live, right? So then we'll back into that number to say, okay, we know if we need, you know, $60,000 a year to cover our fixed expenses and we're getting $30,000 from Social Security. well, now let's go to the market and find the product that has the strongest guaranteed income amount that's going to be able to solve that difference, right? And that lines up with the rest of the stuff we're doing in your plan. Yeah, exactly. And for one person, it's going to look completely different than another person, but it all gets down to what do you need? And let's take the time to roll up her sleeves and figure that out.

So I know that there's a lot of times people would go, oh, hey, give me a case study of when this worked out. But I like to ask, think of an example of a client you were working with that was not focused on integrating, guaranteed income into their retirement plan. And then when they came to you and you showed them some of these things, they came back and kind of went, oh, my word, what a great feeling this is to know that I don't need to hold my breath when I'm opening up my portfolio statement every quarter, every year. Or when I watch the news, oh, the markets drop. Talk a little bit about an example that way. Yeah, so that's actually, I'm working on a client right now that we just had that exact type of interaction, right? So he's two years from retirement, has been a great saver, has done very well for himself. And in his mind, in his own words, you know, he said he had a very primitive plan.

And his plan probably would have worked out okay. But when he shared his information with me and what he really wanted to have happened, I said, okay, well, let's kind of look through some different options. So we were able to ship some of his retirement money that, you know, he's 71. He's going to start taking RMDs next year. And we were able to ship some of that into now he's going to have those RMDs guaranteed. Right. So I just showed him the difference of what impact that has on the rest of his plan, which was all positive, what impact that has on legacy.

and then he sent me an email a couple days after our meeting and said, you know, I really thought, I knew coming to you, I was going to learn more and it was going to put me in a better spot. But I never realized how much I didn't know. And like the way that you were able to educate me and just show me different options and what that benefit is to me and my wife and then my family makes me feel so much more secure in the decisions that I'm making. and I'm so glad that I was able that we were used to each other.

So that made me feel really good and really proud. Like going back to why I got in the industry, right? It's exactly for moments like that. Yes. Love it. So let's kind of wrap up with this thought because I think a lot of times people feel like, okay, that's great. We put the numbers on the paper and we got some contingencies.

But how do you make sure that the guaranteed income stream will sustain someone through their retirement? not just get them to there or a few years in, but, you know, we don't know when, you know, when we're going to die. We know that. But, you know, what are some of those checkpoints you can put in to make sure that it's going to be sustainable throughout? Right. So when you work with me, it's never a one and done.

You're not getting rid of me is what I like to say. Because when we're doing an initial plan, it's kind of like we're charting the course to our destination, right? So if we are in a boat and we're leaving, you know, I'm in South, Florida, if we're leaving Florida trying to get to the Bahamas, it's not going to be a straight line, right? Retirement's not going to be a straight line either. There's things that are going to come in that are going to start blowing us off course, some of them good, some of them bad. So we're meeting, you know, at a minimum on an annual basis, depending on, you know, what all we're working on,

maybe even a quarterly basis, to make sure that that plan is exactly where we thought, right? Because things will change. And we want to build enough flexibility into the plan that if things change for the positive or the negative, we have the ability to change the plan so it still lines up with what they want to achieve, even if they're new goals. It has never said it and forget it. So I think that is a huge, huge point. Love it. Well, I'll tell you, Michelle, this has been some real good enlightening tips and topics that you've taught us about. If someone is interested in learning a little bit more and then also reaching out and connecting with you, what's the best way they can do that?

Yes. So they can look myself up and affirm on our website, which is www. RFSNY.com, which is Richard Frank Samnoy.com. So you can find us there. You can find me on LinkedIn as well under Michelle Boyce. And I look forward to having initial conversations, right? It never hurts to reach out and just, I love to hear from people, see if there's a fit and just hear what's on your mind.

You know, I do not charge for initial conversations, right? Advice is free. Yes, perfect. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. Thank you. I appreciate it, Mike. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders.

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