Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with George McReynolds Founder of McReynolds & Company Discussing Fixing The Survivor Jaw

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

George McReynolds, CFP® is a veteran wealth manager, tax strategist, and best-selling author who has spent four decades at the intersection of money, taxes, and real-world decision-making.After leaving public safety in 1985, George entered banking, where his early grounding in tax fundamentals made him a natural fit for working with business owners and affluent borrowers. He became a go-to resource within private banking circles, earning what he describes as a “ringside seat” to how wealthy families actually manage — and mismanage — money.In 1994, after discovering The Great Boom Ahead by Harry Dent, George returned to school to earn his Certified Financial Planner™ designation. Around the same time, he opened a tax preparation practice and worked inside a high-volume tax firm preparing blue-collar returns under intense time pressure. Then followed a CPA firm serving business owners and high-net-worth families. That experience gave him an unusually broad view of the tax system — from the simplest returns to the most complex.After passing the CFP® board exam, George was recruited to a prestigious investment firm on Philadelphia’s Main Line. Soon after, he launched a comprehensive financial planning program inside the credit union of a major pharmaceutical company, where he helped more than a thousand pharma employees and retirees navigate retirement, taxes, stock compensation, and benefit decisions.In 2001, George published his first book, Prosperity by Design, and became an independent advisor. Since then, he has authored or contributed to multiple books, including The Longevity Trap, Defuse the Tax Bomb, Uncle Joe’s Gems, The Pension Shield Option™, Stop, DROP and Roll, Retire Abundantly, and Expert Stories and he wrote the foreword to The New Holistic Retirement, and 9 Money Mistakes Doctors Make.George has spoken internationally at venues including Oxford University, the Royal Society of Medicine, the London Stock Exchange, the Harvard Club of Boston, and the FBI National Academy Association. He has been featured in CNN, the Financial Times, Yahoo! Finance, Business Insider, and Philadelphia Life magazine.Defuse the Tax Bomb distills the framework George developed after watching too many successful families lose hundreds of thousands of dollars to taxes they never saw coming — not because they made bad decisions, but because no one showed them how the system actually works over time.Learn more: https://www.mcwealth.com/Or buy the book at: https://justabundance.com/Securities and Advisory Services offered through LPL Financial, registered investment advisor. Member FINRA/SIPCInfluential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-george-mcreynolds-founder-of-mcreynolds-company-discussing-fixing-the-survivor-jaw

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 this George McReynolds, who's the founder of McReynolds and company, and we'll be talking about fixing the survivor jaw. George, welcome back to the program. Thanks for having me back, Mike. You know, I've enjoyed this series talking about the traps and the jaws that people get caught in

and how to avoid it, most importantly, because that's what we want to avoid is falling into those kind of pits. So first, let's define what actually is the survivor job. Well, most plans are based on averages. The average is the best of the worst and the worst of the best. And they figure, okay, what's the average person going to live in retirement? The problem is that a spouse could then live for another 10 to 15 years. Some interesting research from the Social Security Administration, the age of widowhood, when it starts, and how long it lasts. It just boggles the mind.

So you can't just plan on one life expectancy and life expectancy by itself. You have to plan on eventually the plan is going to be for one person. The problem is when it becomes the plan for one person, a couple of things happen. Number one, income goes down. When someone's making that pension decision, if it's a lot of the guys that I know, they think they're just going to live forever. And they just get that what's called the single life annuity where the pension is going to last as long as they last.

But when they pass away, it disappears. If they take a joint and survivor annuity, they're taking a haircut. They're not going to get the same amount. So if they want that higher amount. mail, they have to leave the survivor naked without that benefit. And there's a couple of things we can do to deal with that if they start early enough. But that's one of the things so that a pension could go from 100 percent and then on the death, it drops to 50 percent if they get the basic survivor option.

So the tension goes down. When they're collecting Social Security, one of the paychecks is going to go away. at the higher of the social security benefits, but one of the social security benefits is going to go away. The problem is when that happens, even though their income's going down, the tax brackets get cut in half. The Irma thresholds get cut in half so that at the time when incomes down, expenses go up. We call that the widow's penalty. Yes. And the widow's penalty is it makes me think of too, sometimes the like married finally joint. Like, you know, when you're married, finally single and join, and you don't think about all the ramifications

are following one way or the other. So that widow's penalty is a real thing, but people don't think about it, right? Right. And in the meantime, if you're taking IRA money, retired minimum distribution, that's not going down. So you've got the RMD, so that's going to make sure that you're paying higher taxes. I mean, there are other income pension, income goes down, social security, income goes down, and you still have to take the same amount out of the IRA. And again, it's triggering the tax, the higher tax on the single brackets with the smaller standard deduction, the loss of the second enhanced senior deduction. And then the Irma, the Medicare thresholds, they're cut in half.

It's just a real mess. And again, this could go on for 10 or 15 years after the first death. Wow. You know, and also, I've heard statistics that women live longer than men, and that sure would impact the retirement plan because you can't just take those two parties and plan accordingly, plan the same way, right? Right. The female longevity or life expectancy is longer. And also, men tend to marry younger women. So there's that age disparity that that's there most of the time.

And so the fact that she'll be younger and the fact that she's going to live longer really creates that 10 to 15 year gap. One of my friends I've known since first grade, he was an early reviewer on the book. And the thing that struck him most was that, you know, he's been married for 45 years, but his wife is probably going to outlast him for 15 years. And he was when he was envisioning his retirement, he was just thinking his own mortality, not their joint mortality that it could go on for another 15 years. Yeah. You know, and I think that so many times people will say, oh, well, that really won't happen to me until it does, right? I mean, you could fill in the blanks with a lot of things like, oh, I don't need long-term care or I won't,

whatever the case is. But sometimes those things happen, and you need to have that plan in place. And if that means that you've got to have a little bit extra, you know, stress tested if the wife lives longer and then if you and if you live as long as she does then wonderful but plan for it right i mean that's a that's a calculation that a lot of times people don't think about right we we test our plans what if one of them passes away next year what does that do to the plane what if one of them lives to a hundred or 105 or what if they both live to 105 once we have the plane in place there's so much wiring it's kind of like my heating system on my house i have five different heating systems because it was built in different stages.

But honestly, I just go over to the thermostat. If I want to be a little warmer or a little cooler, and that's the benefit of the way our plans work, it's we use Monte Carlo simulation to figure out the probability of success of the plan, and then we can test it with all these different scenarios. But if we want to take a little more risk, if we want to take a little less risk or spend a little more money, it's already wired there.

If they want to move from Pennsylvania to California, all those state taxes are factored in there. And I've had clients change their mind. They moved to Pittsburgh instead of LA because of the difference. But all that is wired up within the system. So it's just like a little slider and we can test it. Again, we'll test it 30,000 times to see if it worked. It's a lot of input to get it there.

But once it's there, it's just like adjusting a thermostat. Yeah. You know, recently I had to go to DMV because I inherited a car from my dad's estate, but it was only in my name. And I wanted to add my wife's name to it. So I did my research and got my documents and went in and I had, you know, all the things they needed. And the person said, wow, this is great. You've got everything you need.

And isn't this joint tenancy? This is the best decision. So many times people don't think of this. And basically just means if I die, my wife gets the car. If she dies, I get the car without more paperwork. I know that that kind of thing happens in a lot of, you know, whether it's financial tools, annuities or life insurance. But what about pension?

There are some things that would maybe considerations with, you know, what should couples think about with pensions and survivor options? Because there's some choices to make there, right? There are. And they should start thinking about them long before it happens. One of my books that came out last year hit number one in several categories back in January on Amazon, number one bestseller, called the Pension Shield option. and it kind of goes into some of the statistics that play into it. But there's something called pension maximization. That the pension is based, they pull out the life expectancy chart, figure out how long you're going to live, and that's how much money they have to set aside.

And then if it's going to be two people, then they have to cut the benefit by a certain amount to make sure the money will last. The flip side of that is the mortality chart, which is what the life insurance companies use. So that life expectancy, that's the. got that's the best of the worst and the worst of the best that's that's that's the chain smoker the obese chain smoker uh diabetic and it's also the guy that that's training for for half marathon right and that that's that's where those numbers come from those two extremes when the life insurance they're going to check your blood pressure your EKG they're going to they're going to look at your weight and your height and see so if you're in really good health uh if your your longevity is better

you can get a better deal on the mortality table than you can get on the life expectancy table. So you go to the life insurance company and instead of taking that haircut on your pension, you give that money to the insurance company and then they provide a benefit that will replace the pension. And that could be done with a tax-free benefit. It could then also be used to as an advance for long-term care coverage as well. but if the spouse passes away first, if you take the reduced pension and the spouse passes away first,

you're still paying for that benefit. But if you have the life insurance, you could stop paying the premiums, you could remove the cash value, or you've created a legacy for your other heirs for your children. So you don't get that option when you're sitting at the pension, at the human resources office or the pension board's meeting. and say, okay, just do this checkbox.

It's too late at that point. But if you're thinking ahead, ideally, you know, five years or longer, when you're still in good health, when you're still young, it's a bargain to get on to the mortality table with underwriting while you're healthy rather than wait until the pension meeting and then move over to the life expectancy table. Wow. You know, we're talking about here some of these things with that survivor. and I think that sometimes a scenario might be a surviving spouse might have a lower income,

but still inherit a lot of the same assets and required distributions. How do you plan ahead for the possibility that the survivor could maybe face a higher effective tax burden? Well, again, we model it. We do some estate planning for our clients. We don't practice law, but we look at things like wealth, will substitutes, how to avoid probate, how to reduce the cost of probate. we have a system that will actually draft documents for doing trust and such. She's called Esther.

But again, I'm not providing the legal advice. I'm providing the financial advice. So we look at those things. But as far as how it's going to happen, how it's going to work out. Again, it's the simulations. What choices do we have? What things can we do today? And how will that affect the future?

And again, we just model it a number of different times. We come up with a kind of a base case. we stress test it. One of one lives longer, lives shorter. What's going to happen? What's going to happen when one of the social security goes away? If you take the 50% survivor annuity, what about the RMDs, the taxes behind the scenes of the tax returns? In our actual goal setting, we we base it all on after tax money that you can spend. Behind the scenes, we create a tax return for each year of the plan. And again, we simulate different different random numbers for inflation and for investment returns and risk. But again, it comes back to Uncle Joe, measure twice, cut once. He also said it's

better to be, better to be lucky than smart. So the best estate plans don't die. But again, for preparing for it, it's a matter of measuring it, simulating the different things that can come up. And then having a safety measure as well. So when talking about stress testing, when you stress test the plan for a survivor, what does a good plan look like so that you could, what would look like if you're now coming to the conclusion of, yep, this spouse will still be okay if the other one dies first. What is that, what would that look like? Well, again, we'll run a thousand simulations of their retirement. Again, we'll, so most plans are based on the average and they'll look at the average life expectancy. So the average life expectancy at birth is 78, but at 865, the average life expectancy is 90. So if you hit 95, the odds are there's a 50% chance you're going to hit 90. But if we base your plan on the average, there's a 50% chance you're going to run out of money.

So we can handicap based on someone's family history, sometimes their health and a number of factors. But at a minimum, we look at what's the 30% probability? there's a 30% chance that each of them will live to be 88 or 90 or 92. And then there's a 30% chance that one of them could hit 97 or 30% chance that one of them will hit will hit 94. So again, we look at all these different numbers and then we run the simulations based on that. Again, we start out with a core plan. So for most of my clients that are retiring, we'll assume that he's going to live to 92 and she's going to live to 9. But again, if I got a client and both of his parents are 95 and still driving around,

then we'll take that basic assumption and extend it from there. And again, we have the actuarial tables. And then there's also places where people can go to look to see some of this stuff. There's a, in my book, I give two references. So where you can figure out what your actual life expectancy is, there's like a society of actuaries, social security administration gives them information. but you don't want to go by just the average. You want to personalize it and then put in a margin.

So your life expectancy is 50%. We would routinely go to the 30% number just as the starting point for all of our planning. You know, and I think keyword they're planning, it makes me think, what if someone doesn't plan for this surviving spouse aspect until it's too late? What could be done if no pre-planning was done? Well, there's always prayer. and then run for the hills. Yeah, but again, at some point you need a plan. And the plane, if you don't plan it, the plane is to impoverish one of the spouses.

It's a plan to impoverish them. So there are some things that can be done. And I've had people walk in my office that didn't do any planning. And now I'm talking to a widow. But at the same time, I've had people walk into my office as a couple where one of them was terminally ill. and we've saved incredible amounts of money by doing those kinds of plans, right, by getting things lined up to reduce taxes, to see the spending, to make provisions for final expenses, and especially in some kids,

we had two kids in college and a terminal client. But again, by planning for that, by knowing what was available, we were able to make things work. you know and it's it's kind of like um you know if you fail to plan you plan to fail which is exactly what you were just saying there it's a big point and there's so many of these things that in our series here it's crossed my mind that i would have never known to think even think about that one or i would have never known that that was a factor good or bad that's why you need to have someone that knows everything has their finger to the pulse of what you need and then where it fits

into what you're going to face so that you can plan well ahead of time because there's many of these instances where if you don't plan ahead of time, you've taken the next best thing and it's not optimal, but it's all the option we have right now. And that walks right into one of my favorite Uncle Joe's sayings. It was the first quote in my book, Uncle Joe's gems, done is better than perfect. And when people come in and we're talking about their plan, I always get them started, get a basic will, a basic power of attorney, a basic medical directive, or living will done, get that now, and then we'll improve upon it. But done is much better than perfect, because perfect

never gets done. Yep. And perfect is elusive. Well, I'll tell you, George, this has been really, really eye-opening for this survivor jaw. If someone wants to pick up copies of your books and reach out and connect with you, what's the best way that they can do that? Well, they can see all of my books at justabundance.com. And if they want to see if there's a good fit, they could go to talk to george.com and schedule a discovery call. And otherwise, if they want to find out more, they can go to my website, Mick Wealth, MCWealth.com and find out all about me and the team that I work with. Well, George, thank you so much for coming back on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you. It really is, Mike. Thank you for your time and for your attention.

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