Business Innovators Radio - Mark Turner (AIF) on Retirement Accumulation vs Distribution

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

Mark has been helping individuals retire with confidence for over two decades. He is a passionate professional with a rich history of providing safe growth and advanced income strategies to help make sure his clients have an income they can’t outlive. Working with top estate planning attorneys, Mark assists his clients with life insurance and long-term care planning alternatives to ensure legacy preservation for loved ones.Mark has been in the insurance business since 2000 and has held a Series 65 securities license since 1999. In 2018, Mark founded Wealth Management Strategies Financial Services LLC, an investment advisory and retirement solutions firm. Mark is also an Accredited Investment Fiduciary (AIF), which he earned by demonstrating knowledge of ethical behaviors that follow a fiduciary duty to his clients.Mark attended California State University at Northridge with a major in business management and a minor in marketing.Learn more: https://www.wmsretirementsolutions.com/Investments offered through WMS Financial Services LLC, a California registered investment adviser. AKA “WMSFS”. CRD 291291 8820 E. Foxhollow Drive Anaheim, CA 92808. Insurance products and services are offered through Wealth Management Strategies, an affiliated company. Mark D. Turner, Insurance License #0759815 Wealth Management Strategies, 751 S. Weir Canyon Rd. Ste 157-610 Anaheim, CA 92808 [phone]. IRS CIRCULAR 230 DISCLOSURE To ensure compliance with requirements imposed by the IRS, we inform you that any US federal tax advice contained in this communication is not intended or written to be used and cannot be used for the purpose of (a) avoiding penalties under the Internal Revenue Code or (b) promoting, marketing or recommending to another party any transaction or matter addressed herein.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-mark-turner-president-of-wealth-management-strategies-discussing-retirement-accumulation-vs-distribution

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 Mark Turner, who's the president of wealth management strategies, and we'll be talking about the difference between investing, during accumulation phase versus the distribution phase in retirement. Mark, welcome back to the program. Thank you for having me, Mike.

Look forward to our journey here. Yeah, I think first of all, I would like to define what is the accumulation phase and what is the distribution phase of retirement. Well, the accumulation phase, a lot of people think of it as when I started younger and I started putting money away from retirement. Hopefully, for many of you, that is the accumulation. You started putting money away in retirement. Either you did it outside with after-tax money and you put it in mutual funds,

ETFs or other type of products, or you put it inside of your 401K, your pension plan, and you grew it inside of your plan. So that is the accumulation phase. It's a phase before we start taking income. The distribution phase, on the other end is once we decide to start taking income out of all that we've worked for, and we start distributing it to ourselves. And a lot of people have extreme questions on what do I do in the distribution phase?

How does that work? What are some of the things that they should be doing in the distribution phase? Okay. First of all, you need to talk to a planner. And you need to look at your situation. because when you were going through your accumulation phase, again, there's a difference between going to, getting to the distribution phase and going through the accumulation phase. And one of the biggest problems are sequence of returns.

And so in 2000 through 2008, I call that the decade of zero. A lot of individuals who are in their 401k's unmanaged, not actively managed, end up having the first three years, the market went down 30, 40 percent in many portfolios. Then it went back up. Then in 2008, it went back down, 35, 40 percent. And then it went back up and they ended up with nothing at the end of 10 years. But the difference was they had a job. They were still putting money in their 401k. So as they put money into their 401k, they were buying shares of these stocks and mutual funds as the market went down.

So they may be okay. But 20 years outside of that, they went through that phase, but it didn't affect them because they didn't need to retire yet. Now, if you were already retired and the same things happen and you're pulling money out of your portfolio while the market is going down and you're not putting additional money in there, that could cause a major change in your retirement and can potentially lead you to some devastating results. Yeah, because if you needed X amount of dollars every month or every year and you're pulling it out, that was part of the plan probably. But if the market is heading down, then you're getting a double whammy because you're taking money out and you're taking it

out at a loss. And then it's going to take longer to achieve those things that you put into the plan. So I think sometimes that's like you can't avoid it. You can't avoid when the market goes up or down, but you can put those guardrails in place, right? That is perfectly aligns with my way of thinking. I kind of think about the bridge in San Francisco, where how many people would drive on that bridge if it didn't have any guardrails? I know I would have a golden bridge,

but I will tell you that, with every individual that I work with, a portion of their assets are going to have guardrails on them. And what that means is that we use risk management to offset the downside. So when the market is going down, there are programs and products out there to protect a portion of your assets from losing money during a major stock market downturn. And so I think that that all comes. in with planning. So another thing that we didn't talk about is that when you're during your accumulation, a lot of people have 100% of their money in a risk position in the stock market. But you've probably heard this more than once. When you get to retirement, you don't invest

the same way you did when you were 25 years old as you do when you're 65 years old. you know, I think just me not being in the industry, just being a, you know, a businessman, that makes logical sense. But, you know, like in your 20s, you can, you've got 40 or 50 years before you need your retirement money. So if the stock market goes up down and all around, you've got plenty of time to recover. But in your 40s, 50, 60s, things should be changing. So from a broad perspective, what are some of those, you know, touch points or, or, or points? points in life where you need to start kind of going, okay, now you're in your 40s, we should start this. Or, you know, now at retirement, obviously we can't be risky. But what are some of those

points that you are kind of guiding your clients to be planning for? Well, most of my clients are in their late 50s. And that's when it starts hitting them. Oh, my gosh, I have got to get a plan. But I am starting to get even some of my higher income younger individuals in their 40s who might have gone through some of the downturns going, you know, I think I might need a plan. I might need a planner. And so that is what you need to do is look at your situation. And one of those questions that I asked my clients, besides doing a risk assessment,

some people are not investors. I ask them, are you a saver? or are you an investor? I sat down with individuals who have half a million dollars sitting in CDs and then half a million dollars sitting in an aggressive risk portfolio.

That is someone who needs my help. There's so much more you can do with a portfolio than take extreme investments in their portfolios. Yeah. Yeah. So definitely. I guess here's the takeaway. hearing you say. You should have a different mindset for your investments at retirement versus at the

beginning of or in the, you know, ramping up. But you shouldn't just, you know, flip a coin in or throw a dart with your blindfold on and go, here's what I'm going to do. You shouldn't talk to your buddies and you shouldn't go on Google. You need to have someone sit down with you and go, what are your goals? What does retirement look like? How much do you need a retirement? Let's make sure this plan is put into place. And then all of a sudden now, that mindset shift, starts to become natural because you've now planned for it. Exactly. And see, retirement is much more than just having a pot of gold.

I have a lot of individuals what I call do it yourselfers. And they're going, well, I have this pot of gold. And I know what I can do it myself. Well, that might be true. Maybe you got there and you got lucky. Maybe you're a great investor. but that still may not handle all of the situations that you need to handle for yourself and for your family. And so I've learned one thing in my life.

I don't know everything. Even though I've been in this business for quite a long time, I am learning every single day. And so even if you're a do-it-yourselfer, don't miss the chance to learn things that you may not know about. There are vehicles, there are products that you can use in today's environment that can help you invest, but still protect you from the downside. You know, you mentioned risk management, and that's a little bit of what we're talking about here, because in your younger years, you can weather a little bit more of the risk and storms, and so this is risk management. But you said that there are some techniques that you can put into place for those guardrails, and definitely

we don't want to get into the weeds of details, but what would some of those risk management approaches look like to make sure you're protecting that income once you start taking it out? Well, I'm just going to give you some vague examples because I work with so many companies and each company's situation is different. Let's say that you are someone that has your money sitting in CDs because you are so afraid of a downturn that you don't put your money in anything that is market related. There are programs that can give you an upside up to what's called a cap. And so let's say that the upside is 12% of the S&P 500.

And if the S&P 500 does 20, you might only make 12% for that year. But during that 40% downturn, which will come again, you lose absolutely nothing when the market goes down, and that is backed by the faith of the company we choose to work with. But there are even ETS now exchange traded funds that have some of these downside protection vehicles built into them. So once we sit down and look at your situation, we might find that perfect mix of risk management and upside potential.

that you're looking for. You know, I think that's a, again, I think when you can have a higher ceiling and a safe floor, it sure makes people feel really confident to go, you know what? I know we can't participate in the entire upside, but we're certainly not going to participate in the entire downside if there was a drop. I think that's a really, really powerful piece of mind. And then you get the people that are, you know, would come to, you and go, wow, Mark, before I came to you, I would look at the news or my portfolio statements and

my, you get a pit in my stomach. Now, it's gone because I know I'm going to get a little bit of the upside, but I'm not going to, you know, take it on the chin when there's a drop. After 2000 and at the end of 2008 through 2009, I cannot tell you how many people that I sat down with who told me they did not open their statements for an entire year because they didn't want to know what was happening. And they tried to call their advisor and their advisor wouldn't even take their call. That will never happen with me. After that happened, I am so cognizant of watching people's money and preparing for major stock market downturns. It's just ingrained in everything that we do at our firm to help our clients.

So let's talk a little bit about that downturn because I would venture to say that nobody knows when there will be another downturn. And we emphasize the word when because just looking back over decades and decades and decades, it goes up and down. We know that. And it doesn't matter what day or month or year that someone is listening to this conversation, the marketer is going to go up and down and we don't know that. But when a downturn happens, we know that that could derail retirement when you're trying to take out the distribution. And talk a little bit about that. And it reminds me kind of the concept of, man, you worked, you know, 40, 50 years to build up that retirement account. And now it's kind of like climbing that mountain.

Well, now the most dangerous part is coming back down the mountain because it's slippery or you think you're good to go. And then that's when accidents happen. and that's representative of that distribution phase you were talking about. So kind of tie all that together and wrap us up with the thought of how you can help clients avoid some of those pains. Well, after what I saw, I used to work for a very large firm in 2008. I stood up in their mahogany office and said, guys, unless the Lord is going to coming back and we're all going to be able to live 150 years,

these companies don't show any profits. They told me that I was an idiot. I didn't know what it was talking about and that I don't have to prepare for major stock market downturns. In the next three years, they lost most of their clients over 40%. I'm not going to name the company, but I left them in May of 2008, and I decided that my clients were going to have guardrails

during their distribution phase. And like I said, this is not your grandma. most times. There are vehicles out there that can, can based upon the claims paying ability of the company we choose, guarantee an income that you cannot live. And then other things that we do is we use calculations to look at the type of investment we're working with. And we also use active money managers inside of the stock market. Now, some people say, oh, you just buy and hold and everything's fine. I call it buying hope.

And so I don't want to tell you that we're going to be right 100% of the time, but we always err on the side of caution with our active money management strategy with those that are in the market. And then we also apply some of those guard well programs along with the money that we have managed in the stock market. Almost 100% of our clients are getting near or in the district. distribution phase and they do not want to run out of money. And we want to make sure that happens.

You know, I think that there's so many people that would resonate with that last statement that you made and go, wow, I wish that my broker would take my call even today. And we're not anywhere near craziness, you know, but I want to have that piece of mind. So, Mark, if someone is wanting to learn a little bit more about this topic and reach out and connect with you, what's the best way that they can do that? Well, first thing is we've created a wonderful educational website to teach you a lot about the things that we're doing. We're creating new videos on a daily basis. And our website is WMS, like wealth management strategies, Retirement Solutions.com.

That's WMS Retirement Solutions.com. Or you can call us at 714-912-4906. And if you go to our website, you can set up an appointment on our schedule to meet with one of our advisors to answer any questions you have for no cost. Perfect. Well, Mark, thank you so much for coming back on. This has been a really enlightening conversation. Thank you for having me, Mike. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders.

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