Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with Greg DuPont, Founder of Advocate Wealth Solutions Discussing Achieving Peace of Mind in Retirement

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Greg DuPont is an estate planning attorney, comprehensive financial advisor, and entrepreneur dedicated to helping families protect what matters most—while making confident, informed decisions about their future.As the founder of DuPont Law Group and a leader behind The Wealth Solutions Network and Advocate Wealth Solutions, Greg works with individuals and families who want more than documents or disconnected financial advice. His work focuses on clarity, protection, and long-term stewardship—helping clients reduce financial loss, avoid unnecessary conflict, and align their wealth with the lives they actually want to live.Greg is known for taking complex legal and financial topics and translating them into clear, practical guidance. His approach is intentionally different: instead of selling products or pushing pre-packaged solutions, he leads with education, diagnosis, and trust. Clients often describe him as calm, strategic, and deeply invested in helping them think clearly before acting.Over the course of his career, Greg has advised thousands of families on estate planning, wealth protection, retirement strategy, and legacy design. His work emphasizes proactive planning—addressing risks before they become crises—and helping clients make decisions today that still make sense decades from now.At the center of Greg’s philosophy is a simple belief: good planning isn’t about money—it’s about people, responsibility, and peace of mind. Whether working with young families, business owners, or retirees, his goal is the same: to replace uncertainty with confidence and help families move forward with intention.Greg lives and works by a mission to impact one million families by protecting legacies, reducing avoidable financial loss, and elevating the way people experience planning. When he’s not working with clients or building new initiatives, he is focused on teaching, mentoring advisors, and creating systems that make high-quality planning more accessible and human.Learn more: https://www.advocatewealthsolutions.com/The information provided by Greg DuPont is intended for general informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, investment, or financial advice. Nothing discussed should be relied upon as a substitute for individualized advice from qualified legal, tax, or financial professionals. All planning strategies and concepts are general in nature and may not be suitable for every individual or situation.Any references to financial strategies, investments, or planning concepts are not intended as a recommendation, solicitation, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial products. Advisory services are offered only pursuant to an advisory agreement and where permitted by law. Past performance is not indicative of future results.Participation in this content does not create an attorney-client or advisor-client relationship. Outcomes depend on individual circumstances, applicable laws, and market conditions, which are subject to change.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-greg-dupont-founder-of-advocate-wealth-solutions-discussing-achieving-peace-of-mind-in-retirement

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 Greg Tupont, who's the founder of Advocate Wealth Solutions, and we'll be talking about achieving peace of mind in retirement. Greg, welcome back to you the program. Glad to be back, Mike. Thanks for having me.

You know, this is a big undertaking here. Achieving peace of mind in any realm is pretty amazing. But in retirement where, you know, do I have enough money to live for retirement? Am I going to run out of money? What does it look like in all of those things? That's a big, big pill to swallow. So I'm excited to hear your perspectives on that. So let's dive right in.

What are your feelings and your advice on the key elements that that really create peace in retirement? The first element of peace in retirement is getting clarity on where you are and what's going to, and what that looks like. Because that's where most people get their dis-ease as they're heading into retirement. They're looking into this future and they're saying all these unknowns. And I've got all these variables that are in front of me. And many people say, I got no idea what.

what to do with all this stuff. I may have been a good saver, but now I look at what's going on in the country. I look at the market being at all-time highs. I look at taxes and all this stuff. I look at health, all these things, and it just becomes overwhelming. And so the first step for people to get that piece in retirement is to get clarity, to be able to have numbers that can rely on, not these unrealistic projections that basically are called Monte Carlo analysis, that people just, they look and here's a probability curve and say, you're okay. And the client looks at that and they say, wait a second, no, that doesn't resonate. That doesn't fit right with me because you're showing me I could have this outcome where

when I die at 90, I could have $0 or $2 million. dollars, well, what's the difference? And so being able to have numbers that they can rely upon to plan for the future is where it starts. Yeah. It's like the book begin with why. You've got to begin with the end in mind. You've got to know why you want something. You've got to have the clarity of know where you're headed.

So that clarity is a huge piece. Once you have that clarity, what if there are little fly. in the ointment and it's like, ooh, but that clarity just uncovered the fact that we might have a large tax burden or we might have volatility to deal with. How do you make sure then that you're zeroing in on, okay, here's the boxes that this, you know, clarity exercise uncovered that are good. Here's the ones we need to address. Well, clients find comfort in knowing that there's a defined process that they are going through, that other people have gone through. that helps them see these hurdles and show,

and they can make their own informed decisions on those outcomes. You know, not everybody is going to choose to pay for long-term care insurance. Everybody has to understand what their family risk is of cost of long-term care and how that's going to fix. And so it's being able to know that you've got unbiased data that you can work with to be able to make these decisions. You know, I find myself more and more reflecting back on Desert Storm, Operation Desert Storm. Remember that, Mike? I do.

Back in the 90s general Schwarzkopf, I think, was connected to that one. That's right. And so was a fellow by name of Donald Rumsfeld. You have a polarizing figure, but Rumsfeld had a saying that he said over and over and over again during that time. We're talking about the battlefield and such, and that was there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Yeah. And with retirement planning, the more that you are able to plan for the known unknowns, the more resilient you can be for those. unknown unknowns. Yeah. And so, you know, once people start realizing that, okay, this is how

money works in retirement and how it is significantly different than how money works for them in their savings journey. Once that light bulb goes off, then they start saying, wait a second, if I only need a 4% rate of return on my assets to not outlive my money, to live the life I want to live, and that 4% can be achieved with very little risk, then why am I chasing? Why am I in a portfolio that may be chasing 10, 12%, but has a corresponding risk

that I could lose half of that money at some point in time in our retirement. And that's how when we start building on information and knowledge and most importantly, wisdom, we've seen this. This is how it's happened. This is how has worked for others. Once clients start recognizing that, then they're able to start filtering out a lot of the noise that's out there. The Internet's full of noise. But once they can start filtering some of that out and realize,

okay, this is my life. This is my family. These are our funds. We are not like the Joneses. This is us. And this fits for us. Then they're able to put the head on the pillow at night and say, yeah, we're, we're protecting us as known unknowns.

And we can handle the unknown unknowns. Yeah. Because we have a team that we surrounded ourselves with that we can go, okay, here's this new revelation that I've now discovered that could be a landmine in my retirement, help me with this. You know, kind of like the old Henry Ford example of, you know, he was on trial for not knowing everything about everything. And his company, he goes, I can just push a button and get the world's foremost expert on my team to answer that. Why do I need to know it? So talk a little bit about how understanding that intersection of all of these factors, financial tax, estate planning,

helps once you understand it helps reduce that anxiety and uncertainty because you've got then the team around you helping you out. Yeah, well, a lot of consumers don't understand is how just how intertwined all these elements can be. You know, they recognize that their primary asset is their 401K, that their life savings is this big bucket of money that they have set aside. And now when they understand how, okay, you mean if my personal income tax rate goes up, I got to take more out of the bucket to take the same amount of money home.

Yeah, it does happen that way. Similarly, if we can take that bucket and we can reconfigure that so that less of it is taxable, then you don't need to take as much out to get the same amount in your pocket. And those type of shifts, as I mentioned in our conversation before, if we make these kind of shifts between the age 60 and 73, we can really change our dynamic so that we could look into the future and say, wait a second, I've got my life is supported by my tax preferred Social Security, my money is coming from tax-free sources. then I'm good regardless of what happens. And similarly, if they look at it and say, okay, I've got these are what my needs are, and I've got it covered by my Social Security, and I've got a private pension, whether it's one that I was my employer created or one that I've created,

that means I have guaranteed income each month that I can rely upon, then they know they can weather a little storm here and there in the market and be able to not change their lifestyle whatsoever. It really is a mindset shift too, isn't it? Like sometimes it's like, yeah, but I've got to have X, Y, and Z because that's the way we've always done it. And it's like what you were saying about the known and unknown. It's like, why don't we break free and kind of go, let's just look at it objectively and go,

here's what I need. Here's some views that maybe we've held in the past that may or may not be right. But what do I need right now? Because if you were to ask the people, you know, going back to Henry Ford, I don't know why that is in my mind. But if you would ask people back in those days, how could you improve transportation? They would just say get bigger, stronger, more horses versus a car that he had the vision for. So talk a little bit about, you know, kind of latching onto things that just are solid, proven, feel right. And again, that guaranteed aspect of things, whatever the product is, it doesn't need to be one product versus the other. It's the idea that in order to achieve peace of mine, I know that my retirement living expenses are covered because I've got guaranteed income of X to cover it. You know, you brought up one great American entrepreneur. I'm going to bring up

another one. Okay. Steve Jobs. You know, what was the great campaign when they, launched the Apple, the Macbook and all those kind of things. It was think differently, right? Remember seeing that? That picture all over the place? Yeah. Yeah. The think of the computer differently.

Yeah. Yeah. And unfortunately, the, as I like to call it, the financial industrial complex, has brainwashed many savers because it's intoxicating. It's intoxicating to follow rates of return and to have, be able to say at a cocktail that I've got X percent on this investment. And that is what is reinforced by the financial industrial complex, that you've got to be chasing rate of return. And when people realize that, okay, if I have. have, if I had $100,000, and they'll call it a million dollars, I have a million dollars,

and I was like my grandparents, and I was able to get a 4% savings rate on that, and generate $40,000 a year. So, and I could have that coming out and still have my principal protected. Many people would take that deal, especially if they see they only need to take $30,000 out a year to fill that gap and whatever they've got between their Social Security and their needs. But they are, instead of getting something that's paying them 4% regularly, they are in a market-based solution that has market variability.

And so if you, you know, there are studies or models, you know, you name it, look for it. I can send it to people. You know, if you would have done that in the, you know, blog. decade, 2000, 2010, if you had a million dollars in the S&P 500, and at the end of that 10 years, if you're trying to take that $40,000 a year off, you'd be in a way worse place than if you just had it in a investment or a bank account that was paying you 4% throughout that whole time. Yeah.

And so people that have been saving have been through the institutional inertia, moved into investments that started with high-cost mutual funds, which then evolved for the better into lower-cost index funds that have then evolved into, for many people at this point in their life, not better, unmanaged indexed funds, thinking that, okay, just buy and hold, things are going to go fine because studies show that money managers don't make their, you know, don't earn their keep. but that adds extra risk. It does.

And those same people at that cocktail party talking about that big rate of return, you sure don't see them coming back to the same party later that month going, by the way, it tanked and now I'm under, you know, they only want to do the social media posting of look how great my life is. Look how great my portfolio returns are not. Oops.

And I think that that, that, that, you know, really hits people hard. And, you know, the peace of mind and retirement concept, do you really want to open up every quarterly portfolio statement you get in the mail or watch the news or look online at your rates of return with that pit in your stomach? Yeah. Yeah. And by and large, people that are my clients don't want to have that experience.

There are people out there that are fine with that experience, but those aren't people that are good fits for what we do. Yeah, 100%. Hey, what are some of the misconceptions you see that people have when they come in talking to talk? talking to you and they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, financial safety, peace of mind, you know, what I'm going to do is or what I've been doing is talk a little bit about some of those misconceptions and how you help to frame that up and help them understand, you know, what they should be really considering. Well, when people start their, I'll call it education journey, what are they doing?

They're going out to the internet. And again, they pop their head up and they end up going down whatever lead funnel. there are. And who are the people that are spending so much money to advertise and end up getting the eyeballs? Well, it's the financial industrial complex. You know, there are, you know, you look at the Fidelity of the world on TV and what's your number, all that kind of stuff that we had back in the day. You look at the I hate annuity stuff that's out there. And these are the people that are spending millions of dollars on advertising to push a message that ends up keeping people at risk. Yeah.

And so, so, you know, many times, you know, somebody comes in and says, hey, Greg, you know, I like the idea of security and safety. I don't want any more risk than I have to. And here's my portfolio. And don't bother to talk to me about annuities. well, okay. You know, so why? Well, they're bad. Why?

Why? Okay. If all of them were X, Y, and Z, would they still be able to be sold? No, right? Okay. So, well, they're just high commission products. Yeah, but do you understand that the commission on that, unlike commissions on investments, doesn't come out of your principal? Oh, no, I didn't understand that.

Do you realize that you paid your investment advisor here X dollars a commission when you went into this product? So you're $100,000 immediately had a loss that you had to gain from? It's just people don't get the full picture. And as I said before, there are no good or bad financial instruments or tools. Each one solves different problems. And it's just how those are applied, if they apply, to a person's story and what they want to have accomplished. And so we got a, we got a deep program. If we want peace of mind, we got a deep program.

Because if we are trying to go into retirement and we need reliable, predictable income from our savings, and we haven't come up with a strategy that balances that out. Now, you know, if I've got a client that comes in and says, Greg, I do want reliable, predictable income and I don't want anything near an annuity because I've got, I don't think I got longevity. I don't think that, you know, I don't like the being tied up like that. It just doesn't fit right for me. Then, okay. There are other strategies that we can have that will start with a baseline of reliable predictable income for you. So we can have that predictable income without the volatility of the market. It's just we have to have the conversation that starts with an understanding by the consumer that the game has fundamentally changed when I've crossed that Rubicon from a saver to a spender of my savings.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's kind of like we have now crossed the line of practice to this is real. And if I make a decision that is not the best decision, it makes big changes. and you don't have the time to recoup. Whereas in your 30s, if you made a decision like, oh, that was kind of volatile. I lost some money in the market.

You got many years to recover. So the import of timing is so critical because I think people think, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll just, I've got time to recoup, but maybe they don't. You know, anybody that's been in this business for a while has a story similar to this for me, from a point in time of the market. But I had a client, you know, the last, when COVID, when we had the bottoming out of the market, that was a husband, always taken care of the finances.

And we talked many times and hadn't done anything. And when the bottom dropped out, he called me. And he says, Greg, I'm so afraid of what I've done. This may never come back. Time is not on my side. Is there anything we can do? My wife's relying upon me. And I'm just, I'm so worried.

And, you know, there was really not much we could do, right, at that point in time. And the helicopter fed came back in and took care of that problem then. but I tell everybody as they're approaching retirement, we can't rely upon the helicopter fed pumping money again. They've run out of that grace. That's why we had the inflation scare. And so, you know, it's easy. In a bull market, anybody can look like a financial genius.

And that's what many people, you know, feel like they are. Yep. Don't put a floor on some of this stuff. They can be like that guy that was crying to me on the phone. Greg, I think I screwed up and my wife's going to pay the price. Yep. 100%. Great example.

Great way to end the conversation on the approach, the proper approach to achieving peace of mind in retirement. Greg, if someone is interested in reaching out of connecting with you, what's the best way that they could do that? So, you know, there are plenty of places to find me. You can find me on LinkedIn, find websites for various interesting. surprises I've got. As I mentioned previously, I've got a complex of businesses that are all around trying to solve this problem for the consumer. The best way to reach me personally would be to email me at Greg at Advocatewealth Solutions.com. Excellent. Well, Greg, thank you so much for coming back on. It was a real pleasure chatting with you again. Pleasure is all mine, Mike. Take care.

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