Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with Greg DuPont, Founder of Advocate Wealth Solutions Discussing Coordinating Financial, Tax, and Estate Decisions

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 Greg DuPont, who's the founder of Advocate Wealth Solutions, and we'll be talking about coordinating financial, tax, and estate. decisions. Greg, welcome to the program. Mike, thank you for having me. I'm excited to have our conversation here today. You know, I am as well, and I always love when I hear the theme of the conversation.

Starting point is 00:00:42 I always love when you can coordinate or integrate things together, because when you think about a certain phrase like financial or tax or state decisions, those could be silos and those can be longstanding, you know, four-hour seminar topics in and of itself. But let's talk about how to coordinate them together. So before we dive into that, give us a little bit of your story and your background. And how did you get into the financial services industry? Yeah. So, Mike, first of all, that concept of molding the taxes, the investments and estate plan, all that stuff, that's what's been available to the high net worth individuals and families for years and what they call their family offices, right? And I came to the position of creating that from my client.

Starting point is 00:01:29 that are not high net worth people, you know, maybe emerging high net worth, but not necessarily the $100 million an up club like that is, from my experience as an estate planning attorney and a financial advisor, how I melded them together. You say, I'd like to say that I spent the first one-third of my professional career being part of the problem. At that point, at that point, time, I was siloed as an estate planning attorney. And I saw during that part of my career the impact on families when they did not have coordination, and let alone having a trusted advisor in those realms. And so I've spent the last two-thirds of my career, as I like to say, fixing that problem.

Starting point is 00:02:13 And Advocate Well Solutions is one of the tools that is there to fix that problem for my clients. I've often heard people in your situation say, well, I'm a recovering. attorney or I'm a recovering meaning yeah yeah that's my background but I'm taking all the good that I got from the industry and I'm bringing it out and leaving all the negative behind and you're able to bring to your clients maybe not specific legal advice because maybe they've got their attorney but to know that perspective and I think the power of having the seeing the whole field and we hear you know in football seasons you know the quarterback can see the field well if all they did was look at one receiver one time they're getting picked off every single play but

Starting point is 00:02:54 being able to have the vision inside of the whole financial field, there's a lot of moving pieces. So talk a little bit about how people can make sure that all of these things really are working together because, number one, the first step is to realize, in my opinion, realize that they should work together. They shouldn't be siloed. How do you bring that realization to your client's minds? Well, simply stated, Mike, you know, when I started practicing law back in the 90s, it was the standard of care for an attorney that's engaging with a family and talking about estate planning to talk to them about specific asset protection trust, tax type of trust, when they had assets in excess of $600,000 because of the estate tax that we had to deal with back

Starting point is 00:03:41 then. As you fast forward, 30-odd years into my career and where we are now, you know, when you have a family whose net assets, their primary wealth. are tied up in the retirement accounts that have, you know, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax embedded in that asset, most attorneys are turning a blind eye to it. And on the other side of that equation, when that family is going to their financial guy, whether he is a thinly cloaked insurance guy or a thinly cloaked investment guy, calling himself a financial advisor. They're not going to have that conversation either because for many of them that means they're losing revenue by making the changes that the family needs to be made. So what we do, and by the way, I'm not a recovering attorney. I'm a flourishing attorney.

Starting point is 00:04:37 I love the practical law. And because I've been able to focus on this particular element, the intersection between law in terms of taxes and estates and the tools and the tactics. as it were, of the financial world. So when we come in, we come in with one perspective. And that is, how does your money support your life in the way you want to live it? Let's plan for that. And then if God's plan is different than your plan, and you leave this earth early, how do we save what's left for the family from being confiscated by the U.S.

Starting point is 00:05:18 government? And I use that phrase deliberately. Yeah. that's huge well let's go dive a little bit deeper on confiscated because that's a trigger word I think that a lot of people are like wait a minute what yeah well that's that's because most people don't understand the impact of the deal they made with a devil which is their 401ks or IRAs that little tax break that they got early on very few of them realize until they meet with an advisor that tells them this.

Starting point is 00:05:51 Very few of them recognize the fact that there is a exponentially compounding tax time bomb in that asset that they think is theirs. And it's not. You know, I'm a, I'm part of Ed Slot's master elite group. And Ed's, Ed's known for saying it says all the time that your IRA is an IOU to the IRS. Yeah. And most consumers don't know that. Or they might know it logically, but they might not really feel the full import of what it does to their portfolio when the time comes due. Absolutely correct, Mike.

Starting point is 00:06:30 You know, it's human nature, right? Heck, I'm an independent business. I've been, I've been doing tax withholdings and paying my taxes directly since I was 18 years old. So I, and I've had, I've had my own dances with the IRS over those many years. So I know the feeling of writing the check and the urge for instant gratification to delay, to defer, reduce our current taxes. But now when most people are through that savings journey and are now facing, hey, I need to use this money. And they're looking at the horizon saying, wow, the world is kind of screwed up right now. our taxes, our tax rates are at the all time, whoa, we've got these debts and deficits,

Starting point is 00:07:19 what's going to happen with my personal tax situation in future? And when they finally come up for air from life and deal with this, they realize, wow, there is a whole lot of risk here. And if I do manage to navigate these waters and leave things behind for my family, at the tail end, who gets rewarded for the risks that I'm taking? the IRS. Yeah. What can we do to fix this? And conversely, who gets penalized if we don't handle this, your family, your legacy. So we need to fix it. And something just came to mind that I think is really powerful. You kind of touched on it. But when you say coordinating financial tax and estate

Starting point is 00:08:03 decisions, you're coordinating it against what? And what I mean by that is this, hey, Greg, I'm going to take a vacation. Tell me all the details. else well where do you want to go how long you want to stay do you all of that so you're coordinating what against what meaning i'm sure that you have to sit down with a client and say well let's talk about this what does retirement look like for you do you want to sit back and literally do nothing and play golf all day or do you want to start that non-profit do you want to start a side hustle do you want to travel the world so we need to coordinate the financial tax and estate decisions against their vision of their retirement how do you um help our tip your clients are

Starting point is 00:08:41 articulate that for them, because everyone is different. Oh, and many people, when I ask them those questions, have you given yourself the time to visualize to, well, I like to say whiteboard, what that retirement looks like. First of all, many of them give me the deer in the headlight look when I say whiteboard. They don't know what that means, but most of them end up in a position where they really have not given themselves the grace to even think about that because they're scared to set these goals of what the future could look like in light of the lack of clarity on what's going on in their situation. So it takes a lot of coaching to get people to start seeing that, you know,

Starting point is 00:09:31 wait, I'm in this new phase of life, new season of life, as it were, and I've got the ability to design what that looks like. And what I've seen. seen over time dealing with many, many, many people is, you know, there are very few of them that go into retirement with a clear vision of what they want to do. It's, you know, very murky, you know, travel, golf, et cetera, et cetera. Some of them are perfectly fine and happy doing absolutely nothing. My father-in-law was that way. Live many years happy sitting on the couch, watching TV and doing little things around the house. Other people are, you know, just need to be up and at it.

Starting point is 00:10:12 And many people see once they're able to get clarity that their money will support their life and the way they want to live it, then, you know, they go to the old Maslow's hierarchy of needs. They start looking for things like contribution and significance and all that. And that's one of the real exciting things with what I do is that I'm able to see people, sometimes that light bulb goes off when they're able to go, wow, I can do this, that, or the thing that I never thought possible. I could have this kind of impact that never thought possible. Yeah. And I think opening their eyes to opportunity and possibility is huge. The other side

Starting point is 00:10:52 of the coin would probably be, oh, you said you want to do X, Y, and Z. Well, have you considered and have you considered? Meaning, I think that a lot of times we punch the clock from nine to five in corporate world, then you retire and you think, oh, I'm just going to, my expenses are going to go down. They might not, because now you have more time to spend. spend your money. You're bored. You want to travel more. So having them have a clear vision of what retirement looks like, but then what is going to cost literally could be an eye opener to go, ooh, I need to plan better. Or it could be like, you know, I thought it was a lot worse. I can do a whole lot more. So having that clear vision is just, I think,

Starting point is 00:11:29 essential. You almost become a life coach of sorts. You know, Mike, there are two types of people in this world. Those that like the budget and those that don't. And, and, And I think that skews like 99 to 1 don't like to budget to people that budget. But, you know, one of the things I've observed over the years is, you know, is that many people, you know, have been good stewards of their money. They've been planning towards this event, which we'll call retirement. As part of their planning, they get their cost in line. They get their house paid off. And now they wake up and it's time for retirement.

Starting point is 00:12:14 And again, being good stewards and good savers of the money, they have a very reasonable cost of living. And cost of living that currently may well be, you know, mostly covered by their Social Security if they've been working the whole time and all that. And that's when they realize this problem with RMDs and taxes, when somebody finally points out to them that, okay, you can see. support your life the way you want to live it here. But here, in a handful of years, you're going to have to pull out this much more money

Starting point is 00:12:48 than you need so that you're paying much more taxes than you need. Yeah. And so you've got that whole class of clients that are, that wake up that day and say, holy moly, this is what's happening to me. Can we fix this? And yes, we can. If we, if we are aware and we, and we, and we, take steps. And then you have the other class of people that, you know, have a high cost of living.

Starting point is 00:13:16 They, they, they don't want to change their standard of living as they go into, to, uh, to retirement. And that's when they realized that they were sold a bill of goods when people said that your taxes be low in retirement. Yeah. Because they don't want to reduce their, their lifestyle. And so it's, it's, it's, it's, damned if you do, damned you don't. Yeah. For, for the consumer. But you at least need to face that fear, clarify, articulate it, you know, paint the picture and then start making steps toward chipping away to achieving that because sometimes not knowing is the worst part. Like, oh, man, if I had only known, I could have whatever.

Starting point is 00:13:55 So being able to guide that decision and it kind of leads me to another thought, I'm sure that if you hear, yeah, yeah, yeah, I should do that, but, you know, I'm too busy. Well, what are the risks for not having this coordinated strategy? So if you've got financial tax and estate decisions, and again, that could be a weekend long seminar on, you know, coordinating all of this. But from a high level, if you were to lay out to someone to say, hey, I spent the last week working on your coordinated plan, I'm going to go over it. Here's this, you know, 20 page PDF we're going to go over. If what are the hidden risk of not having this and only having those siloed decisions like, oh, I've got my tax guy, I've got my state planning person. But if they're not coordinated, what happens?

Starting point is 00:14:39 Well, Mike, here's where I make some enemies in the financial industry, because you mentioned that 20-page report presentation, which is, you know, part of the modus operandi of the financial advisory world. That, you know, the consumer is confused. They're trying to get some information. They poke their head up like a gopher or the, shoot, what's the? the punks of Tony Phil, you know, the Groundhog to try to get some information. And next thing,

Starting point is 00:15:17 they know they have been whisked into somebody's lead funnel and all they're wanting is some information and they get into the lead funnel and now they realize that, hey, wait a second,

Starting point is 00:15:31 that this quote unquote advisor on the other end is into speed dating. And I just want this answer. I just want some clarity on what we're doing, and whether or not I'm on the right track. And they're trying to either take over my assets or sell me annuities or whatever. And that's the consumer experience. So we deliberately have broken free of that type of approach.

Starting point is 00:16:00 And our planning process is a two-part process. The first part of that is clarity. you're going to get clarity. We're going to go through everything that you've got. We're going to assess that. We'll charge you a nominal fee, very reasonable fee, but we're going to charge a fee so that you're engaged and you're going to follow through.

Starting point is 00:16:23 And so we're going to do that and we're going to let you know, okay, this is the implication of what you've got established with your savings, how it's been structured. This is the implications of the tax. These are some of the risks. because these are some of the strengths. And then if the consumer feels like they've gotten what they need because they just wanted to touch base on this thing,

Starting point is 00:16:48 then they part ways happily. Maybe they come back in a few years to get another touch point. But maybe they see this. Now they've got their clear vision of what the future is going to be or what the risks are, and they want to have it fixed. So, okay, then we'll proceed to. fixing that problem. And then only if, you know, number one in that clarity map session, if they feel like,

Starting point is 00:17:16 yep, there is a problem here and we want you to work with us and fix that, then we'll fix that. Same goes on with the planning session. If they like the plan, they like to work with us, then we can work with them. And then if they want to work with us to provide the solutions, the tools from the industry, that solve the problems, then we'll do that. But each point in time, the client can disengage, and that is designed to get the client what they need at that point in their life, instead of just being a data dump in a...

Starting point is 00:17:55 Yeah. When I started doing financial planning back in the day, it was, you know, it wasn't a 20-page, it was 100 pages because you baffle them of bullshit, right? Yep. And that's still, by and large, what the industry relies upon. And unfortunately, even when you have that big old, you know, proposal or plan or whatever you want to call it, it's a bunch of techno babble that even if the advisor is walking them through supposedly and the client is nod in their head going, okay, they leave going, what in the world was that? So just tell me how this affects me. And I love your approach there.

Starting point is 00:18:31 It's like, here's the clarity. here's what you could do. Disengage, engage, I'm here to help. And that just takes all of the pressure off rather than that, you know, let's just buy this and shoot this shot over here. Let's hope for the best. And that's not a coordinated plan. It's somebody's sales presentation that convinced you that they had a good answer. Yep.

Starting point is 00:18:55 But it's not a coordinated. Can you think of a time where someone came in to meet with you that they had their plan? and maybe they even brought it in with them. You're looking it over. You're then showing them your, you know, plan. And it's like, wow, this is totally different. This is, you know, and you could actually say, look, going down the path, you're currently going down, let me just show you what most probably will happen.

Starting point is 00:19:17 Here's some of the risk and here's some of the volatility that you could experience because of what you're showing me. Here's my solution. Give me an example of working with someone where it's almost like the light comes on and they're like, hallelujah, where have you been on my life? Well, I'll give credit where credit is due and damning where damning is appropriate as well. You know, had a client that was referred to me by, you know, by big wirehouse that shall not be named, Raymond Fidelity, Schwartz, whatever you call, want to call it, okay? That their advisor said, hey, this is what we've got together, but, you know, I cannot, underscore cannot give you tax advice.

Starting point is 00:19:58 So you should really talk to this guy. And, you know, so we sat down and I looked at what they had and, you know, from an investment plan perspective, you know, great rate of return projected. No criticism of all that. But, you know, the projected race return were well in excess of what this family needed to make their goals. So they had excessive risk. This plan had absolutely no tactic in place to minimize lifetime tax. cost, you know, and people have to realize that between the age of, call it, 60 and 73, this is the golden zone. This is the opportunity for them to make small tactical changes in the way that they are either saving or using their income that have huge positive tax outcomes for them throughout their lifetime, let alone their heirs. so we walked through that process we got that clarity for that client and we made some very

Starting point is 00:21:03 significant changes and from our projections we saved that family well over two million dollars of taxes throughout lifetime wow wow that's you know and and probably when you laid that out and they're like even if this is wrong it's still a massive amount of savings versus what I'm going through right now yeah yeah This is what happens if you don't do anything. This is what happens if you do. And so the end of that conversation, does this is a problem you like to fix now? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:21:36 Do you want us to fix it for you? Yeah. Okay. We'll fix it. Yeah. We'll see the next week. We'll get done. Wow.

Starting point is 00:21:42 That's amazing. So let's think about something. When we're thinking about the families that, you know, would check the box, you know, I've got a CPA. I've got an attorney. I've got an advisor. Why do these coordination gaps still happen? And then who should be the party responsible for kind of quarterbacking that process of making sure there's no gaps, fill in the gaps, making sure that there's a plan put into place?

Starting point is 00:22:07 You know, it is a turf war when we have families that have strong advisors. When I started my path to my education to become a CFP, you know, part of the trainings there was, well, you need to bring the family's team together. You need to bring in their financial guide, the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And number one, most high net worth or emerging net worth, or any people this day and age, if you don't have to put money on it, we don't get a lot of time. Yeah. And so they don't want to be having a meeting with their tax guy, their insurance guy, the best guy, all separate. Okay. And so, first of all, many people don't have all of those elements, right?

Starting point is 00:22:56 If you look at the numbers on how many people actually have advisors, it's negligible. Now you add a layer on that. How many people really have a CPA as opposed to doing turbotax? Or maybe they have an enrolled agent that's doing their taxes down each and our block. And to be inside of those practices, you know, there's just not the time for them to be tax strategist, let alone the training if you're just an EA on some of these things. So, first of all, then, many people don't have somebody's there to get them true tax guidance.

Starting point is 00:23:34 They think they're getting that kind of stuff from their financial advisor, quote, unquote, but again, most people's financial advisor is who is their rep from Fidelity at their 401K? That's who they consider to be their financial advisor. And that is not somebody that has access. to the full toolbox of tools, let alone, and this is the pernicious thing about the business is, you know, if you're a long-time successful person in the investment world or the insurance world or the legal world or the tax world, any of it, you have to become a true advocate of your silo and believe in the tools that you have.

Starting point is 00:24:24 If you got a hammer, everything looks like a nail, the old adage, right? And so people can be in good faith saying, hey, this is the right thing for you because this has been their influence that, hey, I've got this investment solution, this investment plan, this portfolio that we've created that's going to blow everything out of the water. And it's been working like clock work for the last 12 years. Great. Sounds perfect. But what happens to the Black Swan event comes? Okay. But that's that, you know, so anybody that's been in the business for more than five years hasn't washed out, they end up becoming very much a believer in their silo.

Starting point is 00:25:12 And it, and it's only because I come to this from the perspective of, I started out preparing things for trial. And when I started investigating this business, I solved that problem. And one of my cornerstones from day one was to avoid having institutional or product bias. And that is, I wake up every day with that as one of my, my cornerstones. And that's how we've built out our models, how we've built out our culture. so that all financial tools are neither good or bad. They all have certain tendencies and properties that take care of certain problems. And it's just the allocation and the alignment between those solutions and the clients' problems

Starting point is 00:26:07 and making sure that they have access to whatever needs to be done to solve their particular problem. you know if we could just take that sound bite out and post that up on a on a document that is just sound advice Greg it's just powerful to say look it's what it's what's benefiting the client let's figure out where you want to go let's figure out where you are what's the best combination for you it doesn't matter to me let me show you some options so if someone is is thinking let me see what this coordinated approach would be what's the best way they can learn a little bit more and reach out and connect with you they can check out our website at the

Starting point is 00:26:47 we'll put the website here but it's my email is Greg at advocatewealthsolutions.com they can reach out to me directly again check out the website and they can also I don't want to confuse things too much but I think it is necessary for people to understand

Starting point is 00:27:03 because when they start looking at me they see I'm multifaceted you know I've got my law firm DuPont Law Group I have a page where it's just G.Sdupont.com, where all of my public appearances and those kind of things are on, because I do have a higher calling, which is the March to the Million, and I have the Welles Solutions Network, which is a network of attorneys I'm training to do what I do and further impact people. and we'll get into those conversations at another time. But the primary way to get reached to me is just go to email me, Greg, at advocatewealthsolutions.com. Excellent.

Starting point is 00:27:51 Well, Greg, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking with you today. Pleasure is mine. Mike, take care. 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.

Starting point is 00:28:10 influential entrepreneurs radio.

Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with Greg DuPont, Founder of Advocate Wealth Solutions Discussing Coordinating Financial, Tax, and Estate Decisions

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