Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with George McReynolds Founder of McReynolds & Company Discussing The Longevity Trap

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-the-longevity-trap

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 George McReynolds, who's the founder of McReynolds & Company, and we'll be talking about the longevity trap and the taxes jaw. George, welcome to the program. Hi, Mike. Hey, I want to get started and hear all about what you do and how you do it and why you do it and hear your story and all that.

But first, let's kind of clarify what is a jaw. What is that word picture all about? Well, can you picture a bear trap? Yeah. The jaws are the things that hurt. They're the point that stick into the bear and they're the things that hurt the bear or make the trap actually work. Okay. So we're talking about some traps.

We're talking about some things that might catch you in them, and we want to teach people how to avoid them. So that's awesome. Well, before we dive in, tell us a little bit about your story and background, and how did you get into the financial services industry? Well, I was in banking, and I had some training in the military where I was really good at telling if people were telling the truth. And so I was really good at finding problems. So when people apply for loans, they do a lot of fibbing. And I would figure out those fibs at the first appointment. So I got a reputation with the people in the private banking department.

So they were referring people to me for like the bank presidents from other banks, really big real estate developers. And, you know, I was a kid in the projects in South Philly. So I didn't know a lot of this stuff. But that's where I really got to understand what real money does, what smart money does and what stupid money. he does. And I had a really good background in taxes as well. So it was all those, all those bank referrals that, that I finally found out what wealth was. And then in 1993, on PBS, I came

across Harry Dent. And he was talking about demographics and the economy. And I realized why I was so successful as a lender. There was 100 million people looking to get into debt. And I was selling debt. So in 94, I went back to school. I got my CFP over two years. And I got recruited to a mainline investment firm and worked on my investment credentials. But it was the combination of the private banking referrals. And then when I discovered Harry Dead and he discovered the demographic connection, I knew that lending was going to take a turn and that people were going to be really interested in getting out of debt and retiring. Interesting. You know, we could probably go down that path for about three and a half hours on the word debt. And I

I love, love, love that topic because it is so painful. And I could tell you stories of my debt disasters that I got out of 25 years ago. So I know how powerful that is. And I'll tell you this, you might appreciate this. Do you know the Latin derivative of the word mortgage? It's from death. Yes. Death, mort and gauge grip.

So a mortgage has a death grip on people. So I love that. And so when you now started kind of realizing love the industry, I want to help people, you know, avoid some of these things, avoid debt, avoid mistakes that they make in retirement. Now we're kind of talking about this longevity trap. And in your book, your book is called The Longevity Trap. Living Longer really kind of sounds like good news. But the problem is living longer means we got to pay some extra money for health care or for expenses. What can Longevity? longevity actually become one of the biggest risk of retirement? Well, longevity is a really good thing if you plan for it and prepare for it. It's only a problem when you plan for the average. So life expectancy at birth is 78. But if you hit age 65, there's a 50% chance you're going to hit age 90. So it's those extra 10 to 15 years that people haven't planned for that creates a problem.

All of the normal risks of retirement compound against you. It's not just simple arithmetic. It's compound interest working against you. So the taxes will grow more and more and more. The health care issues become more important. And that's why the focus is working with really successful people. I work with a lot of pharmaceutical executives and scientists. And they're going to live longer than average.

The average is the best of the worst and the worst of the best. It's the chain smoker and the guy that runs to 5K every weekend. Yeah. The 5K runner, the guy that's taking his staten and flossing his teeth, he's going to live 10 to 15 years longer. But if he just goes to the website and figures out, you know, how long he's going to live, it's going to be an issue. And he's going to run short. And the big issue, the thing that really hurts me is that there are people that are so afraid about living their money that they never really live the life that they could. And that's why with a really good plan that's based on your real life expectancy with a safety margin,

people can be free to spend money, free to give money. One of my clients uses the term giving with warm hands instead of cold hands. But when you have that confidence in a tested plan, then it makes all the difference in the world. You can go take the travel, take the trip to Alaska. You don't have to get the senior special at the diner on Thursday night. That's the difference. The trap is not the longevity. The trap is planning for the average.

That's where people get into trouble. You know, that's such a great point, and it brings up a thought to me, and I think you've probably seen it over and over again in your work with your clients. We tend to be kind of almost misers and go, I need a bunch of money for retirement. I don't know how much, but I just need more and more and more. and then they eat ramen noodles, you know, in effect, in essence, and scrimp and save and never spend money, never take that trip.

But then the problem is they're working against a number that really is kind of a smokescreen or vague because they've not articulated it out well. So that becomes a big problem. But secondly, because they don't know exactly, they just aren't trying to spend money. When you do get to that age, you're talking about maybe 70, 75, or whatever the case is, and they're like, okay, good. Well, now I'm going to take that trip.

But now my body's not cooperating with me because I can't, you know, it's like I'm a little slower than I used to. So I think people need to have that balance and realize, okay, I've done the work, I've planned it out, I've got everything put into place. I could spend X number of dollars this month to go take that trip. How do you help explain that to your client so that they really have that freedom? Well, about 20 years ago, a mentor of mine, Nick Murray, said, George, all of the great goals of life emerge after you. answer the question, am I going to live longer than my money or is my money going to live longer than me? And I tell that story at every new client meeting and also when we're doing the quarterly reviews to remind them what we're doing, why we focus on their goals more than we focus on the money.

But when you realize that your money is going to live longer, it completely changes your perspective. You've heard the expression, you only live once. Well, that's garbage. You only die once. If you do it right, you live every day. And you create your legacy, not by who gets your leftover stuff when you're done with it. Your legacy is the people whose lives you touch along the way. It's the giving with the warm hands.

It's all the things you get to experience with other people, especially with a spouse. That's what your legacy is. And you can't, if you realize that your money's not going to last, you really can't come up with any compelling vision for your future. But when you realize that you've got enough money that you've tested it, you've got safety margins, you've got plans to deal with all five jaws, it's very, very liberating. And as we've done a lot of reviews with clients this year, a couple of them have called me back and tears. They say, I just can't believe how this has changed my vision of the future. It's really touched them, focusing on the goals and the things that they can confidently do now.

You know, the couple that's always, oh, Alaska cruise is going to be next year. And then it's always next year and next year and they never make it to Alaska. You know, it becomes more of a, it becomes more relevant than only merely peace of mind. Because peace of mind is like knowing I've got a plan in place. But that jubilation and that joy that you just described is once that peace of mind sinks in and they go, I really can do this. Right. You know, too many people don't have the peace of mind and don't have a plan. get that fixed. But then when it sinks in and they go, man, my friends aren't going to that

Alaskan cruise because they feel like they're compelled to scrimp and save, but I can because George got this plan together. So what a gift that is. And I know in your book you talk about the five jaws of longevity, taxes, health care, inflation, survivor, and safety. Briefly walk through kind of from a high level, each one of those risks. And then why are each one of those so dangerous the longer you're living in retirement? Because I think sometimes, people feel like if I can just get to retirement and get X number of dollars to to make it to retirement age of why. Well, the problem is you've got to get to and through retirement, and we don't know how long retirement is because we don't know how long we're going to live.

Well, one of the things is the myth with taxes. People believe, and they've been told for their whole working careers that they're going to be in a lower bracket in retirement. That may be the case for one or two years, but there's so many things that say you're going to pay more in retirement. And it's not just your tax bracket is going up. Your bracket may go down, but your actual tax dollars will go up. In the book,

I have the story of Willie Be Rich. And Willie decides to take $1,000 out of his IRA to go to a Willie Nelson concert at Penn State. And he takes that $1,000 out. He's in a 22% bracket. So you would think that his tax is going to be $220 on that. But the fact is, it's actually $407. It's 40.7% even though he's in the 22% bracket because that dollar that he takes out of the IRA creates tax on another 85 cents of his Social Security.

So in 1983, Social Security first became 50% taxable for most people. The threshold, which that starts at, has not been raised since 1983. It got raised to 85% in 1990s, and again, that threshold has not gone up since then. So as you get a Social Security raised because of COLA, you're actually losing ground because now you have to pay more in taxes on that. So it's these stealth taxes that hurt people. Penny Sillan, she takes, she sells $2,000 worth of big pharma stock. She's got a $1,000 gain. So if Willie B. Rich sold stock, it would be 15% capital gains.

But she's in the 20% capital gains bracket because she's a retired pharmaceutical executive. So 20% tax on capital gain for her is actually $238. Right. It's not just a 20%. Now there's a 3.8% Obamacare tax on that. So she's not done yet. So she took out, she sold 2,000. she got a $1,000 gain, but her total tax is $3,400 because she has to pay tax on what's called Irma,

the income-related monthly adjustment amount for Medicare. She pays five times more than her neighbor for the same Medicare Part B and D. There are 37 other phaseouts and surcharge that I've identified that affect the individual taxpayer throughout the tax code. There's the new enhanced senior deduction, an extra six, thousand dollars that you get but as an individual goes above 75,000 you start to lose that that's a stealth tax talk a little bit more about that stealth tax because i feel like that becomes like something like you don't know what you don't know right stealth means something's creeping up on me so what are some other examples of that well the social security the the enhanced senior deduction

if you own real estate and you get to write off your depreciation and create a loss, you start to lose the ability to take that loss if your income goes above $125,000. And that's for a couple as well as a single. So you'll eventually, when you sell the house, that's when you can recapture that additional depreciation. And like I said, I've identified 37 different ones. For young families that are putting kids through college, you lose the ability to deduct the,

the interest on student loans. You lose the ability to use U.S. savings bonds for that. You lose the credits. You lose dependent care credits. It just goes on and on. But again, they don't change the brackets. And people don't realize this until they actually get the tax return done because they've been told by, you know, for so many years, they're going to be in a lower bracket.

And they're just looking at the brackets. The politicians know this. So they keep doing more and more and more of this. Back in 2000, not the top bracket, but the middle quintile, the middle 20% of taxpayers was paying 28% on average. Today, that group of taxpayers, the mid quintile is in the 22% bracket. Back in 2000, there was a $3 trillion federal debt. We just hit $40 trillion recently. Wow.

And they will absolutely have to raise taxes. But again, if they raise it too high, if they do away with Social Security, people will march on Capitol Hill like they're going after the Frankenstein monster with pitchforks and torches. So they come up with these stealth taxes. So they have a news conference. Hey, we got this enhanced senior deduction. You don't even, even if you're not taking Social Security, you get an additional $6,000 deduction on top of your itemized or your standard deductions, right? And then they quietly take it away with the phase out of the enhanced senior deduction. And that's just the most recent one.

You know, you bring up that number, I think, did you say 37 of these kind of like tripwires? And we don't need to get into detail, but it kind of makes me think, is there some way that you could sit down with someone and go, give me all your information, let me run my magic numbers and poof, here's this report. And we need to avoid this trip wire. We need to make sure of this. Is that something that could bring that to life for people? There was a couple of ways that we can do that. But one is they could buy my book, defuse the bomb. Okay.

And so that's where I really cover this much more in depth. But also as part of our wealth management, we also do tax planning for our clients as well. But we start out with the first engagement, we look at their lifetime taxes, right? How much are they going to pay based on all that money that they were told to put away in 401Ks and IRAs and show them? Because you're not getting, even if you die, the taxes aren't going away. So we measure that for everyone and show them the lifetime impact of those taxes. And then we come up with each year we try to what we call fill the bracket. How do we move it from the tax later bucket into the tax never bucket?

So there's only four things that are actually tax free. There's muni bonds, which are some to an extent they're tax free except for the Social Security. Then there's a health savings account, which is fantastic. It saves the taxes on the way in and it's tax free in the way out, but there's severe limits on that. And then there's the Roth IRA, and then there's life insurance. Those are the only four things. So it does really simplify things. But over time, we want to diffuse that.

There's a window, ideally when someone first retires, but before they're on Medicare and before they get Social Security, where they will temporarily be in a lower bracket. So we just, we just met. measure what's the amount that we can move from the tax later bucket into the tax never bucket. We do those plans. We visit them twice a year. And again, we do the lifetime tax when we first engage with the client. And when is that sweet spot?

Because I think a lot of times people might think, you know, I'll plan for retirement or I'll put that plan in place or I've heard about Rothconversions. I can do that later. When should some of these things be put on that, you know, on calendar so that they can start thinking about it ahead of. retirement. Well, if they wait until 63, it's already too late because the Medicare, Irma, the surcharge for Medicare is calculated two years before. So Medicare starts at 65. It's based on your 63 income. Now, I work with a lot of scientists and pharmaceutical executives,

and they typically retire around age 55. So they retire in 55. They may have some deferred comp, some stock options and things. But again, we map this out. We measure when's the optimal time to take Social Security. If you take Social Security at 62 and you're still working, you start to lose benefits, but you're also taking a discount. If you wait beyond your full retirement age, then you get an 8% increase per year plus the cost of living on that. But what it really does, it extends the runway into which we can do these conversions. So if I've got a senior director that's retiring at age 55, we're going to start really

doing conversions by the time he's 58. Really, we want to be done by the time he's 62 because that's when the two big tripwires hit for the Social Security and the Irma for Medicare surcharge. So let's wrap up with this question and I want to zero in on that Roth conversion, which probably would be a weekend seminar in and of itself. I get that. But here's one question that comes to mind. when you say Roth conversion from a high level, that means you're going to take money that's in an account that's not been taxed yet, and we're going to start putting it into a Roth IRA, which grows tax-free. But in that transfer, it triggers a tax. You've got to do something with that. But once the money gets into the Roth, now it's going to grow tax-free.

But if you do it, let's just say age, whatever, 61, my mind goes with, well, man, I just paid a whole bunch of taxes. it's going to take me seven, eight, nine years of growth to recoup those taxes I just paid. But there seems like there's another benefit of that Roth conversion as it relates to RMDs, right? Actually, yeah, there's several benefits to it. Number one, if you got a million dollars in your 401K, you really don't have a million dollars, right? Yeah. If you, if that's all that you have, you're going to take money out and have to pay the taxes. And then you're going to have to pay tax on the tax. and then tax on the tax on the tax.

And it goes on and on and on. So of the money that you actually end up with that you can spend, if you're in the 25% bracket, 49.9% of it has gone into taxes. So it's a matter of pay me now or pay me later. So if someone's in the 22% bracket, it's cheaper to pay it today when you're not tripping these bombs. So then that cascade of taxes on the tax on the tax,

So the tax is eliminated with doing that conversion. So that would be one potential benefit. Exactly. And also, you're not getting out of it when you die. So one spouse will inherit yours. And in all probability, they're going to get hit with what we call the widow's penalty. So at a time when their income goes down, because Social Security, they'll get the higher of them, or possibly a pension could be cut in half. At the time that the income goes down, they switch over to the single tax bracket.

So when their income goes down, they're actually paying more money in taxes. So by diffusing that, by getting it moved over into a Roth, we're taking care of the widows penalty. But let's say that the second spouse, they pass away and the money goes to their kids who are probably in their peak earning years. So they've got a 45-year-old executive son and daughter that are into 35% bracket. So if they have the chance to diffuse this when they're in the 15 to 22 or 24% bracket, that's, again, that's really going toward the whole legacy of it.

That's why we're measuring the lifetime taxes. So based on their life expectancy, how much are they going to take out for the RMDs? But the Roths are not subject to the required minimum distribution, which begins at age 73 now. Wow. I'll tell you, it sounds like some of these stealth taxes and tripwires are things that if you don't know anything about them and don't have a plan into place, it's going to catch you. and you don't want to be paying any more taxes than you should. Let's pay all the taxes we should, but not a penny more. So George, this has been super helpful.

If someone has got a big question mark in their mind of how can I prevent some of these things and falling into that tax jaw, what's the best way that they can learn more and reach out and connect with you? Well, of course, it would be great if they bought my book. But then they could also just go to talk to george.com and they could schedule a discovery phone call. and we can see if there's a good fit. Perfect. Sounds good. Well, thank you so much for being on today. It was a great pleasure talking with you.

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. www.influential Entrepreneurs Radio.com.