Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with Chris Hudspeth Founder of Retriever Financial

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

Chris Hudspeth is on a mission to bring the Pension back! Author of The 21st Century Pension and host of the Money By Chris Podcast, Chris shows people how to roll their 401(k) into passive income for retirement with honesty, clarity, and zero financial jargon.Learn more: https://www.retrieverfinancial.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-chris-hudspeth-founder-of-retriever-financial

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 Chris Hutzpeth, who's the founder of Retriever Financial and will be talking about his book, The 21st Century Pension. Chris, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me, Mike. I appreciate your time. Hey, you're welcome.

I'm looking forward to chatting with you because it's always neat to get people's perspectives on a common topic. And you tend to come at it from different angles based on life and business experience. So I want to hear what you have to say and how you serve your clients. But before we dive into that, give us a little bit of your story and background. And how did you get into the financial services industry? Well, I tell you, it was kind of by accident, but I attribute what I do today to my mother. And my mother, she passed away in 2008, and that last decade of her life was a little tougher than it needed to be. And the main reason is because she did not have income in retirement.

So all she had was her social security. So I saw her and she was, she was 60, 61 years old somewhere around there. She had her social security. She was going to turn on. She was let go from her job. She couldn't find any other work. And she felt like, okay, well, what do I do? And so what she thought was, okay, at 62, I'm going to turn on social security.

I'm going to sell my house. And between social security income and the proceeds. from my house sale, which is paid off, I'll go move into a 55 plus retirement community and I'll live comfortable. And that was a good plan. Now, had I known then what I know now, I would have known what to do with the proceeds from that house to roll that into pension like income. Well, I didn't. I was only, I was 20 something at the time. I wasn't in the industry yet. So I didn't know you could do that. And neither did she. So she did. She sold. She put the money in the the bank. She turned on her social security. She went to move into a 55 plus retirement community.

And she loved it there. She, none of the maintenance, all the yard and the plumbing and all the stuff that she had with the house, gone. She didn't have to mess with any of it. There was someone there. She could get grocery. She could go get her. Back then you go, you didn't have grocery delivery like you do now. But back then, she could go get her groceries, pull up to the front. And there would be a bellman that would come out, collect her groceries, put them in a cart, wheeled them up to her room. She loved it. Yeah. She loved it.

Well, as you might expect, Social Security, it didn't pay all of her living expenses. It only covered a portion. In fact, Social Security will tell you that they only cover about 40% of your working wages in retirement. So little by little, she had to eat indoor savings to make ends meet from her house sale. Well, so now she's living on a deficit every month and having to bite into her savings a little bit every month. And so she's living on an ever dwindling pile of money. Eventually, the money ran out. And when it did, she had to move out of the retirement community because she couldn't afford it anymore.

She stopped doing all the things that she loved doing. She stopped bowling because there was a cost associated to it. She stopped buying makeup. You know, it's a little thing, but it mattered to her. Yeah. her prescription. She started cutting them in half or stopped taking them at all. And I thought, this is horrible for my mom. Later in life, when I got into this industry, I realized that's a common thing. What mom experienced is what millions of people experience. And she just struggled. She had to

come live with me for a little while. She lived with my sister for a little while. She would babysit neighborhood children for extra money. She may do those last 10 years of her life. And she died right before she turned 70. And I remember that that was tough. And there were a lot of Gen X kids who saw their baby boomer parents live like this. And so we have a whole different attitude towards saving for retirement. But when I got into this business, I thought, wait a minute, this is the way, this is how mom should have had it. Mom should have done this with their money.

So as I start learning about the insurance products and the way pensions are created, today, I'm thinking, man, if I had just known this, I bet mom would have been able to stay in that community. I bet she would have had a happier time towards the last decade of her life. And I bet she might have even lived longer. You know, I know that you've probably heard this research and I'll probably get it wrong, but the concept is this. When you have set guaranteed income, no worries that way, you literally are living longer statistically because that stress level, that worry level is down rather than either not having enough and knowing it or rather than, oh, my money's in the market and is volatile

and is going up down and all around. So I think your statement there really is factual as well. I've heard a study like that as well. And there is one that I know is true that will make you a surprise. This is especially true for the men. When you have money trouble, when you've got when you're dealing with a financial deficit, that means you don't have enough money coming in this month to pay all your bills that month. When you're dealing with that, we are intellectually dumber. Wow. Our brains are so preoccupied with that financial deficit that our IQ drops by several points in some cases. So, you know, do you feel like, I think that's, I think that's so interesting and it and it might be how people are wired because if you look at like this

mountain of of to-dos for the day and you've got you know 78 to-do list on your list you feel like not tackling it you feel like I'm just sitting here paralyzed so maybe that point that you're bringing up there like oh I don't have enough money there you know I'm going to outlive my money um and you get paralyzed and then all of a sudden your mental faculties kind of start diminishing going I'm throwing up my hands and giving up because I it's it's just not working Or better yet, it's like you're stuck in an arm wrestling match that you can't win. You're losing every single month. You don't know what to do about it.

And you can't focus anywhere else because this is the largest, the biggest problem in front of you and your family. Now, imagine for a minute. Imagine for a minute. Let's say it's the first of the month, which it's going to be here saying. It's the first of the month. Let's say you wound up with a deposit in your bank account on, let's just say, August 1st, let's say. And that money that you got in your bank account on August 1st was enough to pay your rent, your food, your insurance, your medicine, your utilities, all of your bills. All of your monthly obligations are paid with all the money that you got on the first.

plus you've got, let's call it an extra 600 bucks left over to live for that month, let's just say. How would life feel different for you? Yeah. Or a thousand bucks per month or whatever. Yeah. Knowing that all my goes are paid. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's guaranteed. And it's not like, oh, this was a good month. But next month, what if it goes down? This is guaranteed coming in. And you know that that $6, $7, $800 a month. could go, ooh, I can go see the grandkids this month extra, or I can buy them this extra gift. I can do that.

I can go visit family. I can go play bingo. I can do any number of things because it is true most of my clients when I talk to them. They've got families scattered all over the country, in some cases all over the world. Traveling would be easy for them because they're still generally healthy. But I've had clients who needed dialysis. And they said, I'm going to go visit my daughter. She lives in Florida.

but there's a dialysis place two miles from her house, so I'm going to travel there and I get my dialysis while I'm there. I thought, wow, is that tough? She says no, because I've got my income to do it. I've got income that comes in so I can buy a plane ticket. I fly to Tampa. My daughter picks me up from the airport. We go spend, I stay at her house. I go to dialysis every day. My husband takes me. We're fine. I have the money to do it. And I thought, she's taking something that most people would look at as a detriment. This is, oh, dialysis, this illness is problem. No, I'm great.

The freedom that my income provides me lets me see my family and my grandkids despite my illness. Yep. I know I've got to do the dialysis anyway. I'll just do it, you know, a couple miles down the road and then get right back to having fun with my family. Yeah, exactly. I'll get my dialysis done. I'll be back home in time for lunch or for the picnic we're having this afternoon or

whatever. Yeah, you know, I find it really, I'm one that I zero in on specific words. I love, you know, almost like a wordsmith in the title of your book, The 21st Century Pension, How to Roll Your 401K into Passive Monthly Income, Like a Pension. I want to focus in for a second on the passive monthly income aspect because as opposed to the example you gave with your mom who took a chunk of change from her sell of her house and put it in the bank and we don't need to get into what type of, but it was just a chunk of of money and she was probably just drawing down and just living versus passive monthly income.

Talk about the difference there. Yeah. So we'll use my mom as an example. So some people said, Barbara was her name. Some people said, hey, Barbara, what if instead of selling your house, what if you just moved out and rented it? That would provide income, right? And she decided not to do that for a couple of reasons. One of which is she didn't feel like her house. was at a rentable state. It needed some repairs. She hasn't been able to do the repairs. So she thought, well, I got to come out of pocket to make the repairs anyway.

Plus, she thought, well, all it takes is one bad renter or if the house sits empty for any more than two or three months, I'm in a real jam. And so she said, if I just sell it, now I have the asset. So she actually was looking at one avenue, a common avenue of passive income into retirement, which is I'm going to move out rent my house, having rental property. She declined that idea because her situation needed something different. Then someone said, okay, well, if you're going to make, let's say, $200,000 on your house sale, okay, well, Barb, if you put that in the stock market and the stock market's averaging 10%

every year, you should be able to earn $20,000 per year from that nest egg. that should be enough combined with your social security to cover your bills, shouldn't it? Or you can use the 4% rule. You can use the 4% rule on that and take the money from that $200,000, and that would be $8,000 or so. That plus Social Security, would that work for you? But her fear there was, what if the stock market takes a dip? Yeah. Yeah, she lived through the 1980.

She lived through what they call it Black, what was it called Black Monday? Yeah. Black Thursday. She saw all that. She lives. As an adult, she saw what happened with all that. So that scared her enough to say, no, I just want to, I want it safe. I want to put it in the bank.

That way every day when I look at my bank balance, I know it's right there. It's not going anywhere. That's how she felt. Yes. And, and you know, To her, that felt great, but then knowing what you know now, it's like, yeah, but. So what I learned was, okay, mom needed that money protected. She felt this is the last pile of money I'm ever going to have.

And if it's gone, that's it. There's no more. I don't have any rich uncles that are going to pass away and leave me in the inheritance. I don't have a husband anymore. These are my assets. This is all I got. So if this, if I need to protect this and have a death grip on this money because this is all I have. And I feel like as I've grown, you know, since mom passed away, I see that mentality so common with so many people.

So many people have that. This is it. What I have here, I'm 60. This is it. What I've got on the table, that's all my cards. And I need to protect it at all cost. And so most passive income opportunities like rental income or stock market, people say, too risky.

I see a potential where I could lose and I can't afford to lose, so I'm not going to do it. You know, you're playing not to lose. You're not playing to win. And I think that's a mental shift that I think a lot of people don't pick up on. So the power of guaranteed and passive monthly income is huge. And I love the word passive because it's like, okay, guaranteed income. Oh, that just means that you're going to do data entry and get guaranteed to get a paycheck. Nope.

Passive means you've done the work decades ago and it's going to roll in every single month. So people have in their mind, let's grow, grow, grow, strive, save, and accumulate. And that nut, that amount of money that you've got there. that's my retirement in my retirement account, but they don't translate that into how to turn a switch on and make it come to them every single month safely. See, it's funny you mention that because in my book, I talk about the difference between passive income and guaranteed income. And now the first thing someone's going to say is, Chris, you wrote passive income right there on your book, how to get passive income just like a pension. I used that word because that's a word that triggers the mind, passive income. Oh yeah, we all want that.

And so many people, now that Gen X is, the older Gen X's generation is starting to enter into retirement, a lot of people have that idea, set up passive income, you'll live like a king in retirement, king and queen. And I say, okay, that yes, mom was looking at that too. Mom was looking at different passive income opportunities when she sold her house. And so there's a chapter in my book talking about the difference between passive income and guaranteed income. passive income is good to have, but what passive income is, is a stream of income that could be interrupted by an outside influence beyond our control. Something outside of our control can come in like a wrecking ball, smash into our passive income stream, and now we're left with a problem. And I use

the example of the rental property idea, because I have some clients who have rental property. And I had one who said, Chris, I think I want to get out of rental properties. And I said, okay, what's going on? She had a renter that moved. Everything was fine. Had good credit. Nice lady, single mom. Moved into her house, signed a year lease.

Everything was fine. Paid rent on time. Everything's good. The lady moved out. I said, I'm going to end my lease, gave a 30-day notice, 60-day notice, whatever. Everything looked good. On paper, everything was perfect. No problems. No complaints from the neighbors. No, nothing. No, yard got mowed every week or two. Everything is fine. She moved out. The, the property owner, my client, went into the house to, you know, go clean it up and get it ready for the next renter. It was destroyed. This lady had dogs. And these dogs were big dogs. And she said, you know, she had, she said, I'm a single mother. I've got kids. I need dogs to protect us, right? Well, these.

dogs tore the house up. Now this house, it wasn't dainty. She had tile floor all through the house, but these dogs had done so much damage that she had to replace more than half of the tile that was in the house. Drywall up three and a half, four feet the wall, that had to be done on virtually every room. It was destroyed. She had to come out of pocket $35,000 just to make the place habitable again. And it took two and a half months. So not only did my client lose income, because the property sat empty for three months while it was being rehab, she had to come out of pocket five figures to make, to bring the house back up. And there's the worst part. There's no insurance policy for that. Yep. I can't go to the insurance company and buy bad renter insurance.

And keeping the the security deposit was a drop in the bucket. It didn't cover it all. Of course not. No, not at all. And so, yeah, that's, how do you offset from that? Now, is that a occurrence common? No. But again, there's risk with passive income. And that's what I say in the book, with passive income, there's still risk.

There is the risk of something outside your control that you have no control over coming in as a wrecking ball and crushing your passive income. had another client who had a vineyard in California. That was their passive income. Drought came. Drought came and they lost two crops in a row. Now what? You still have the expenses. Now that income stream turns into an expense

that you have to somehow mitigate. Again, completely out of your control. And that's what passive income is. A little bit of work. You're making money while you sleep. Yes, as long as everything is kosher, as long as everything is good, but there is risk involved.

And that's where we start talking about guaranteed income. What if we set up contracts with insurance companies where we transfer that money over and it pays you income? And that income is now bound by a contract, not by weather, not by renter habits, not by the stock market, not by who gets elected president, not by who bombs who. It's a contract between you and an a rated insurance company that says, I'm going to get this much money guaranteed for the rest of my life. And I think, obviously, guaranteed we don't need to go there because that's a wonderful word. We love that. But for the rest of your life, it's not a matter of until the money runs out. It's guaranteed for the rest of your life because it's backed by an insurance company.

So it's something to wear that worry. And I think that, you know, the fear of public speaking is above the fear of death. But I think the fear of outliving your money in retirement ranks right on up there with those two, right? Right. And that's one reason why I wrote the book. is because there are people out there who think, okay, I've got a million dollars. I've got a million dollars in my 401K.

I've saved it for retirement. And then they retire. And then they take that million dollars. And then they, at some point, they realize, wait a minute, that money's not all my money. Had a client had a million dollars in their 401K, and they were going to buy a rental property. So they took $150,000 out to buy this rental property.

And they did that and they took it out. They bought the property. And so they did it in a certain way, and they did that during the summer. By January the following year, they get a tax statement from the 401k administrator. They give it to their tax guy, sure thing, everything's fine. And then by about March, it's time to file your taxes, file and send the money into Uncle Sam. And the guy calls the client, the CPA calls the client, guys, did you take $150,000 out of your 401K? Yeah, we bought this thing over here.

Well, you've got a $42,000 bill that you have to pay the government. Your silent partner. Yes. What happened? You took money out of your 401K. Yeah. It's not been taxed yet. We humans live daily life on after tax income.

When we look at our bank account, we look at our paycheck, Uncle Sam's already been paid. That's our money. When we look at our brokerage account and we see it growing, yes, we've got to pay capital gains. largely that's our money that's there. And we tend to have the same goggles when we look at our 401k. That's our money. It's not. If you're at a 24% tax bracket and you've got, I'm rounding these numbers. I know. Your CPAs that are listening are going to crunch their numbers and say, no, no, no, you're wrong. It's 21.7.4%. I know. I know. But if you've got a million dollars in your 401k, that million is not yours. About a quarter of it belongs to Uncle Sam. You really only

have about $7.50-ish in your that part's yours. And so so now someone's thinking, wait a minute, I have less than I thought I had. What else am I mistaken on? And so now they're thinking, okay, well, what if taxes keep going up or what if the cost of medicine keeps going up? The last few years people have seen the cost of insurance going up tremendously. So now people are thinking, can I afford at this pace to live? What if my money runs out? What happens? And these insurance products are designed for that.

When you roll your 401K, you're rolling it into an insurance product that is guaranteed to pay you income forever. And I think a lot of people have trouble wrapping their mind around it. And because of that, they question it. Yep. Explain how those, how those, how those, uh, how those, uh, policies work. Well, I'll tell you, it really is just an eye-opening contrast to think about an amount of money I have saved up, A, is it all mine? B, how do I turn it into that reliable, guaranteed monthly income stream? So I'm excited for people to get their hands on a copy of your book. What's the

best way they can learn a little bit more and reach out and connect with you and pick up a copy of your book? Well, the easiest way to do all of that is you just come stay high on retrieverfinancial.com. So retrieverfinancial.com is where my agency is. You'll, on there, you'll talk, you'll, we talk about different strategies that we use to help provide passive income guaranteed for the rest of your life. But there's also a section there about the book. So you can go there, click the button, enter some information, and get the book. Awesome.

Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you today. Thank you so much for having me on. And any opportunity that I have to share the, great, a great and wonderful world of passive income, 401k rollovers into passive income to even just one person. It's a lovely experience. So thank you for giving me this opportunity. You're so welcome. 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.com.