Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with Apryl Pope Founder of Pope Financial Planning Discussing Your Retirement Accounts Aren’t a Retirement Strategy

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Apryl Pope, CFP®, CPFA®, CEPA®, is the Founder and Lead Financial Advisor of Pope Financial Planning, where she helps successful professionals approaching retirement turn what they’ve built into a clear plan for what comes next.With more than a decade of experience, Apryl serves as a Personal CFO to individuals and couples typically within 10 years of retirement, coordinating retirement, investments, taxes, insurance, estate planning, and other major financial decisions. Her planning-first approach provides comprehensive guidance without requiring clients to move all of their existing investments.A former Peace Corps Volunteer and lifelong educator, Apryl was named a 2025 Woman of Excellence by the National Association of Plan Advisors. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband and three sons and understands firsthand how career, family, and life priorities shape financial decisions.Her goal is to help clients move from asking, “Have I done enough?” to feeling confident about what comes next.Learn More: https://www.popefinancialplanning.com/The opinions voiced in this show are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine which strategies or investments may be suitable for you, consult the appropriate qualified professional prior to making a decision.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-apryl-pope-founder-of-pope-financial-planning-discussing-your-retirement-accounts-arent-a-retirement-strategy

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 us April Pope, who's the founder of Pope Financial Planning, and we'll be talking about how your retirement accounts aren't a retirement. Strategy. April, welcome back to the program. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me back again. And I like your approach to teaching and educating and you just make some tougher concepts really easy to understand. So I'm excited to learn about why you think retirement accounts aren't the strategy. It makes me think about the phrase, you know, hope is not a strategy. It's like you've got to put some pen to paper rather than just hope. So where do you start when you're working with a client to teach them in education? educate them on this concept.

Yeah, so really it starts when you have the conversation and we sit with folks and they have a 401k and maybe an IRA and a pension and, you know, they have a CPA that's doing their taxes and but nobody really knows if all of it's working together. So having good financial pieces is not the same thing as having a coordinated financial strategy. So that's what we're trying to focus on. that's a that's a really interesting point because it's like um if you just focused on one piece of that equation of a retirement plan um and you didn't see where that impacted other aspects it could be out of balance so what what does that look like when you say you need a coordinated plan what would a coordinated plan look like yes it's a i'm so god jazz so really think about

it this way like your CPA may be focused on your taxes right You have an investment advisor. They may be focused on the portfolio. Your employer is administering your 401K, maybe be giving you some stock options there, matching contributions. You have Social Security. That's a whole decision on itself.

That's a whole other thing. And then estate planning running around the back of your mind, too, is another, may have a whole other professional involved if you're working with your estate planning attorney. So all of those people are doing their jobs amazingly well. But you still don't have. anyone looking across the entire picture. So one of those decisions often affects the other. They're all intertwined. So a withdrawal decision is going to affect taxes. So security decision affects how

much you might need from your investments or a higher taxable income might even affect your Medicare premiums. So that's really why we describe ourselves as like a personal CFO, like someone who is responsible for connecting all the dots for you. So it kind of reminds me of this, and I find myself using this analogy a lot, even though I don't play chess. But when you do play chess, you make a move and you leave your finger on the piece and you're looking around going, is this the right move? What if I make this? What is this could expose me to? And when you finally go, okay, this is good.

You take your finger off. Now it's for real. Same with what you just described. I would venture to say that there's some decisions like, oh, I'm just going to claim Social Security because I'm whatever age. That might be something where it's like. hey, hey, hold up. Let's just see how it impacts this and that and the other. So talk a little bit about some of those things that could prove catastrophic. What are some examples that way that, hey, don't get all antsy and make this decision.

Let's make sure that it doesn't impact negatively other aspects. Oh, yeah. No, and I love that chess analogy. That's a really good one. Because it's usually like people aren't missing the pieces. They have all the pieces on the board. But it's just, yeah, can you imagine if somebody, if there was something flying above the chest and was like, it's okay, Mike, take your finger off now. Yeah, yeah, we're good, you're good.

I'm the chest grandmaster and that's a good move. Okay, good. That's good. Okay, take your finger off. You're comfortable. But yeah, you're having all the pieces, you know, means really you own all the accounts and have the things, but the strategy is, you know, making sure that each one of them has a job. But you said catastrophic, like what could happen. And in catastrophic, I will say, like, there are some things that, you know, could.

you might lose money in taxes or, you know, you might, you know, lose money in market or something like that. I do say in our industry, like, fortunately, you know, no one is actually usually dying over anything that we do. It's like, it won't, it's not going to be super catastrophic, but an example of like, usually when it's time for people to retire, what we see is, oh, I'm retiring. I made it, you know, retiring October 1st. I finally got, you know, I'm going to get out before the holidays. And then they're thinking, now I've been waiting to do this. I'm ready to start pulling money from my retirement accounts. They start pulling money from their IRAs and thinking stuff out. And it's like, oh, wow, you worked almost a full year. Like, you're in a really high tax bracket. Had we just waited until

January where you had no taxable income. Now everybody's not the same situation. But that's one that's very common where people just start grabbing money from their retirement account, not realizing they're adding it to their taxable income. And that might be the last year that they worked and they may have made the most money they've ever made and be in the highest tax bracket and didn't know, you know, within 30, 60, 90 days, if they could have waited, they would have helped them out a lot. That's one thing that is very common. Yeah, that's huge. So what do you think when you're working with the client of saying, okay, now we've got this

plan put together. We're moving your mindset from just having a bunch of scattered accounts into a strategy or a plan, how much of retirement money should be guaranteed and untouchable by the market? Yeah, that's a good question. And there's really not a universal percentage, I would say. The right amount starts with the income you absolutely cannot afford to lose. Notice I didn't say the balance. It's the income you can't afford to lose.

So that's why we begin with essential expenses, your housing, food, utilities, health care, you know, all those basic lifestyles that you want to make sure you maintain. Then we look at what reliable income already exists. Maybe that's through Social Security pensions, other sources. And if there's still a gap, the question becomes how comfortable you are relying on the market to cover those essential expenses. So for some people, we talk about guaranteed income. More guaranteed income creates a tremendous amount of confidence. So others,

Maybe not. Maybe they have more flexibility and risk tolerance. They can keep more of their assets invested, you know. It's a really personal answer, but it should be intentional. You don't want to just fall into it where you're like, I thought I was going to be doing just fine. But now I'm mark it down. I'm scared and I'm pulling everything out. You know, you bring up something interesting where you should never hear a good idea and go, I'm all in, right? So, oh, here's this great fund. I'm all in putting every dime I've got into that. Or, oh, here's this one account that's getting. guaranteed income. I'm putting everything. We know that. But when you have some confidence in the plan and you have a nice amount, whatever the percent of your retirement of funds should be a good amount in those guaranteed income sources where you can't lose. And maybe that's the amount that just pays the bills and that just gets the essentials done. Doesn't, isn't it true that I've seen or heard of research that says when you have that kind of peace of mind, you literally live longer? Oh my gosh. Imagine the stress it releases. Right. The stress or releases, the happiness. I mean, there's even studies on all of this with happiness studies, like the happiness it brings.

Because like you said, right, the goal isn't guarantee everything because, you know, there's always going to be tradeoffs, right? If you're guaranteeing something that might be losing a little bit of liquidity or something like that. But when you look at everything that you need, imagine going, like, it would be a lot easier to sleep at night and have fun and go spend time with the grandkids and take an extra. trip. If you knew, no matter what happens in the market or the world or with wars or with anything, I've got this. Everything I need is going to come in. It's coming in every single month. That releases stress. Like I said, all the things you are able to enjoy. And a lot of times, this is where we have the conversation sometimes. If you ask to somebody that described the best investment in the world, what is the best investment? It's, oh, I want to make all the money. I want to,

You know, I make a ton of, you know, return and I don't want to lose any of it. And I want no risk. I'm like, well, that would be really awesome. I think we would all be in that. It's usually not that. That's usually not how they would. Yeah, I want massive returns and no risk. Well, that doesn't exist.

Yeah, don't we all? Yep. But that's where when you, but when you say what we hear a lot of times, they don't want, the risk is what they don't want there. When you put them in different pots of like what money we're talking about when we say, what money, what do you want to do with this money for? for these goals, these reasons. So we're talking about your guaranteed income for your essential expenses.

They don't want to take risk with that. No, no, no, no. I need to make sure my paycheck's coming in. And so that's where I think you describe it. And they say, I want a paycheck that's going to come into the day I die. And then when I die, I want to go to my spouse. And then it goes away, not until they're gone. And they say, you describe all that.

And if you say the word annuity, you're like, oh, but those are, I don't want an annuity. No, no. Yeah, yeah. Oh, no. Those are evil words. And so. Okay. but tell me exactly why.

And those kind of people are like, well. Yeah, and I think there's a couple of things here too. And understanding where I come from, like I did not grow up in this industry. I was a teacher. Like I was a professor. Like I came into this industry later in life. I didn't grow up with all of the like what I know there are the history of how they work.

But the negative connotations around it. So when I'm looking at a blank slate and I'm figuring out, you know, what's going to be best and what. am I looking for and what do these things do? That word doesn't scare me. It never has. I've been on, you know, I know there are plenty of talk show host and other things that there are plenty of people that say that they're bad. But what that came from was really the old school types where you really give complete control up of your money. When I, you know, dug into it. Yeah. It's like, it's like a, you know, you give me your money and then you're never can touch it again.

You can't access it. You know, if you pass away, then it's gone. Those, I mean, then my head, be a few of them still out there. I don't know. I haven't seen them, but it's just not like that anymore. And so it really is, people love pensions. They love Social Security. And why do they love them? Because they give them guarantee. They know they're not going to go away until they die. And that's literally the same concept. So I'm like, it's hard to, it was hard for me when I heard a lot of the pushback. But I think it is not a bad word. We can say the word annuity. You need to understand what you're doing just with anything in the world. It's not for everybody. But you need to understand. what you're in and what you're doing and how it fits a part of your plan. You might not need one.

You might not need guaranteed income. You have plenty of money if the market drops 30%. It won't even affect you at all. Then maybe you don't need to guarantee anything. But no matter how much money you have, if it drops 30%, that's a chunk of change. And no matter what your position is, it's like, well, that's still lost money. So there still is a place for making sure there's safety and security. And yeah, to your point, the news have changed over the years. It's not for everybody. And you certainly, even if it is for you, you don't put every dime you have into an annuity. It's just like, should it be a leg in that stool? Potentially. Look at it. Yeah. But doesn't that solve those, that guaranteed income concept solves the aspect of having

all your money in the market where there's potential exposure to volatility. And if that market does drop, whatever, 20% or whatever the number is, then you need to have the market go up way more than the 20%. just to catch up. And people don't think that. They think, oh, it dropped 20% last quarter. Now when it goes up 20%, I'm good to go. Nope, it needs to go up 35 or 40. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely, you're right. And do you have time when you are 65 to wait for that to come back? Yeah, when you're, you don't. And so that's really when you have to switch your mindset from, you've been taught to grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, and you have time, let's market, go up and down. that's when you're in accumulation phase.

You've been taught that. We're not in accumulation phase and we're planning for retirement. We're in decumulation phase. Yeah. We are taking money out. We are going to start living on this finally. So the goal has changed. The goal is not to get, you know, get these high returns and have time if the market

bounces, you have time to let it recover. We don't have that time anymore. You could have still some flexibility. You know, I said we have decades in retirement, but you're, you were building this nest egg. Now we're trying to use it. So your rules kind of change on what you're thinking about that way. It's how can I use my nest egg now?

First, guarantee my income that I want to make sure I'm going to live on. Then I'm still going to be in the market and take some of that risk. And, you know, if I want to get some more growth, we can do it that way. But I don't even feel comfortable having that second conversation of where we're going to do and how we're going to, you know, what are the kind of fun things that we're going to do with these money. Until you know what you have to have is guaranteed. Because I don't want any of my clients calling me in retirement saying, I can't pay the insurance or the mortgage.

Yeah. The market went down. Yeah. So let's kind of think about this. What is a retirement decision that on the outset might look perfectly reasonable, but could create problems when taxes or income or Medicare are kind of viewed together, kind of that strategic approach we've been talking about keeping your finger on the chest piece? What's a decision that looks good, but oops, you might want to rethink it because it could cause

that domino effect. Yeah, I would say, yeah, an example. I'm thinking of a client that we recently worked with, came in asking about, I've heard about these Roth conversions. Is that something I can do? You know, what are these and how does it work? And, you know, they heard something online and they wanted to see what it was about. But that's an example where a lot of retirees or pre-retirees before law,

most of them had pre-tax. It wasn't, you know, Roth wasn't around always. And so they've had these pre-tax accounts. So now they have a ton of money in pre-tax accounts. And when they don't, when they're not ready to use it, they, you know, they're saying, well, I'll just wait. I'll just wait. Eventually, the required minimum distribution. R.M.DA is going to come. You know, it's changed recently now for folks that are in their 40s, it's like it goes to 75. But whatever happens, whatever your age is, and you can look it up to see exactly what year you were born, what your required minimum distribution age is. but if you have all pre-tax dollars, you have to take money out at that time. And it will give you this specific amount. And there is a penalty if you don't take it out. And so not strategically using or even spending some of those assets before where you get to that requirement.

Now you're forced to take them out. And that might not be the time that you want to. So there are some strategies that you can do. And that's where we're thinking they were, it was a couple and they were retiring at different times. And so when one was going to retire, we had talked about, okay, well, we're taking one W-2 paycheck off. That's going to be lower income. You could start to think, well, I might be able to fill up that tax bracket at this time a little bit with some of those conversions or different ideas that we would do. And then when the other one retires and we don't have income, let's fill up those lower tax buckets instead of pushing it all and waiting until RMDA age.

So that's an example we see. You could really keep your finger on that chest piece to make that work. Yeah, that's a really good point. And it's just like many of the things we've talked about. It could be a great strategy for someone. Let's see what it looks like for you. And what age are you, you know, right now, given how many, you know, as an example with the Roth conversion, when you start taking money out of those accounts, you're going to

trigger taxes. Okay, let's cover that. Take care of that. And then you put it in the Roth and then it grows tax free. Well, if you only have a month and a half or two and a half months to grow tax free, was it worth it? Question mark. You know, it might be.

but you'd need to look at it. Just because you heard someone, you know, at the pickleball court say they did it, doesn't mean you should do it. Absolutely. So think about this. I would venture to say that many or most people have over the years, you know, oh, I've got this IRA forming multiple accounts, multiple accounts, and even multiple financial professionals helping them with those accounts.

What's the first step in turning all of that into one coordinated retirement strategy? Oh, good question. So even if you have, and this is a great question or something that you can take away, you know, listening, if you're interviewing CFPs, certified financial planners, you're trying to get, you know, the right planner to put this together for you. One thing you want to see is, is it a requirement that they manage all your assets? So, like you said, some people have their advisor that they love or they manage their own accounts on their own brokerage. They're okay with that. They're looking for a plan. So financial planning and managing investments are two very different things.

And so a real financial plan can look at your 401k, your pension, your Social Security, all your outside investments, insurance, taxes, you know, even estate planning, even if some of those assets stay exactly where they are. But you have to ask that question. So like we do not have any requirement that you move any assets over for a plan. You're hiring us as planners. You're hiring me as a financial planner. So we can put that in together for you without requiring you to move those.

Because that's a big headache. They're like, yeah, I really want to get this plan. But I don't want to like do this and roll them all over. Yeah, paperwork. Yeah. It's a lot. But sometimes they do want to put it over. Again, just like this whole anything we talk about, it's not for everyone.

But sometimes the right recommendation is to leave the accounts where they are. We may just want to do some advising around them. So good planning is about coordinating the decisions, not really about collecting every account. But what I will say is when you start to think about that R&D that we just talked about, it does get a little tricky if you have your accounts spread out all over a bunch of different institutions, because then if you don't have someone coordinating all that, you're going to get each one of those institutions are going to be sending you how much you need to take out. And so there is some complexity that you can get rid of if you want to consolidate and put them in one

place with your advisor, but it's not a requirement for all financial planners. So that's something that asks. That is a really, really good point. Well, good. This has been really helpful in eye-opening. I really appreciate your insights on this. What's the best way that someone can learn more about what you do and reach out and connect with you? Yeah, we are very active on LinkedIn. Feel free to check me out April Pope. It's April with the Y. Also check out our website at Pope Financial Planning. And you can schedule a chat with me at Meet with April. April.com, APR-Y-L, that is. Awesome.

April, thank you so much for coming back on. It's been a great pleasure chatting with you again. Thanks, Mike. 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.