Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with Patrick Cotter, Founder of Cotter Financial Group Discussing Proactive Retirement Planning

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

Cotter Financial Group, LLC. is a community-based concierge-level retirement planning firm helping pre-retirees and retirees in the most critical phase of retirement known as the Retirement Red Zone. 10 years before and after retirement. They are a lifestyle-based planning firm. They do incorporate the numbers aspect while helping families and individuals plan for maximum enjoyment in retirement, while keeping in mind your values, relationships, and more importantly, how people wish to spend their precious time. So whether they are in retirement, on the verge of or just starting to prepare, they will help get people ready for what matters most and take action with more confidence. Focus areas are:Retirement Income Planning – safe, predictable, and guaranteedLegacy Planning – maximize to whom and what is left to heirsWealth Transfer – tax-efficient transfer strategiesEstate Planning – Wills, Trusts and Asset ProtectionSocial Security Optimization – claiming strategy guidanceWealth Management – safe and tax-efficient strategies for inflation riskLearn More: www.cotterfinancialgroup.comCotter Financial Group, LLC and Kinetic Investment Management, Inc. are two separate entities. Insurance products and services are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed agents in all appropriate jurisdictions under Cotter Financial Group, LLC. Investment Advisory Services are offered through Kinetic Investment Management, Inc., a registered investment adviser. Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Be sure to first consult with a qualified financial adviser and/or tax professional before implementing any strategy discussed herein. Past performance is not indicative of future performance.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-patrick-cotter-founder-of-cotter-financial-group-discussing-proactive-retirement-planning

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 Patrick Cotter, who's the founder of Cotter Financial Group, and we'll be talking about planning for proactive retirement to ensure. your longevity. Patrick, welcome to the program. Thank you, Mike. It's a pleasure. And look for to talking to you because it's always neat to hear people's perspectives on topics. And I know you've spent many years in the industry and I want to hear how you are serving your clients and

teaching them on these topics. But before we dive in, give us a little bit of your story and background and how did you get into the financial services industry? Sure. Well, Mike, I got into the financial service industry sort of by accident because I graduated from college in 1987. I went through college as an engineering graduate. And so I'm a big math and science guy. I love numbers. And I took a job coming out of college as a financial advisor slash stock broker. And I did that for a couple of years. Then I got more into the insurance side, the protection side. And it turned out that my skill set was, I was very good at building relationships. So I got into the corporate side of the insurance business in about 1990. And I always had a dream of

retiring from corporate life at the age of 60. So I spent a little over 30 years on the corporate side, the insurance business, and actually retired in July of met my goal, retired in July of 2024. And it's a bit of a long story on how I got into the retirement income market. But when I was in the, on the corporate side, my dream was always to be a teacher. I was sort of following in my father's footsteps. And so I went out and got a few more designations and certifications and opened up in 2024, a retirement income planning, you know, concierge's level boutique style firm, which is Cotter Financial Group and been loving it ever since.

You know, it's neat, you know, when people feel forced to do something, it feels like a job, but you've retired it and was like, you know what, here's where my passion is going to kick in. So I'm going to start this, and I think that's spectacular. That's correct. And my passion comes from real-world experiences and things that I noticed about the industry, the way that I was personally treated by, because on the corporate side, even though I had all the licenses and I was not able to be my own advisor, so I saw many weaknesses in the

industry. And then I looked on at how my parents had been treated and were being treated. And the back of my mind, I said, there's got to be a better way. There has to be something different out there. And it wasn't until after the death of my father about six years ago when I was helping my mother going through all the paperwork and all the finances and looking over their accounts, I'm like saying, if my mother did not have me, how would she have survived with everything that goes along with longevity planning on the financial side, on the emotional side? And that's when I really said something's got to change. What do I need to do? And here we are today. Wow. Yeah, yeah. You know, that's, um, when you,

when you can layer in personal passion with, you know, a family, the drive of family to go, you know what? This is what I experienced in my family and I want others not to experience it or I want others to experience the same thing. That's super, super powerful. And today we're talking about ensuring longevity and proactive retirement. So talk a little bit about how proactive planning helps make sure that we don't just outlive retirement savings, you know, and check the box.

But you need to plan ahead of time, not be real. active. What does that look like and how do you start that conversation with your clients? Well, I do a lot because I'm an educational financial planning firm, I do a lot of educational workshops. And I always open up my workshops, Mike, with a story. And everybody, I don't, you know, whether you're 80 years old, 70, 60, 50, 40, everybody knows the story of Alice in Wonderland. So there's a part in Alice in Wonderland When Alice is skipping down the path And she comes along a fork in the row

Where there's four different forks And the Chessire cat is sitting up on the top of the tree As you recall And he looks down to her And he says Alice Actually Alice looks up to him And says You know

Which path should I take? And the Cheshire cat's answer is, well, where do you want to go? And she says, I don't know. He goes, well, then any path will do. So that story always resonated with me because when I look at people and I've been doing my research on retirement planning is most people don't know what the end result is going to look like. So I always start with my planning with the end result in mind. And so when I engage with a prospect or a client, there's two ways you can look at retirement planning.

Number one is just a pure financial, just the numbers, numbers, numbers, which is probably the way, you know, most people think of, you know, there was a commercial line years ago from an I-N-G, and you probably remember this as it says what's your number that was the big commercial what's your number everybody's trying to save for a number well that's fine and dandy but you know once you have your number you know what do you want your retirement to look like you know let's let's talk a look let's take a look at the human side of retirement planning and what what do you want retirement to be Mike how many times you get to retire in your

lifetime well most people would say one but you've uh you've you've got already got that box check right and and isn't when you think when you think about retirement is like what is the scariest thing that you may ever do in your life and if if you don't think that retirement's one of them then I would tell you to think again and I'm not talking about you know putting your head into a bucket full of snakes I'm talking about you wake up every single day for 40 years and what do you do you have breakfast you have your cup of coffee and you go to work and you go to work and what are most people doing they're trading their time for dollars and it's with those dollars that we're paying our mortgage and paying our bills and sending our kids to school and

buying clothes and food and shelter and everything else but all of a sudden you hit that retirement age and this is what people don't think about is like all of a sudden You wake up one day. It's like, I don't have to go to work today. What am I going to do? So, Mike, in my workshops, I always start out with that question in mind. And I have a piece of paper and I said, okay, what day of the week? These are people that are still working.

They're pre-retirees. And I said, okay, what day of the week do you spend the most money in your life? right now the answer is saturday yeah so then i i follow that up with is okay just imagine every single day for the rest of your life is saturday meaning you can't spend as much money when you've punched the clock and you're at work so your saturday is free and you're spending money well what if that's every single day in retirement you might be spending more money than you would assume you're going to spend more money because you have to keep yourself busy you know so so i i decided that i'm making it my mission it's my passion to make sure and when i do my

workshops is i always asked i ask a lot of questions because i do a lot of listening and the biggest question I asked, I said, what is everybody's biggest fear as while they're in retirement? And bar none, overwhelming response is outliving my money. Yeah. So people don't want to, uh, they, they, they, they don't know what to do on how to plan for not, for, for, for actually living a a fulfilled retirement and doing everything they want to do but yet also have that peace of mind knowing that I can do this and I'll never run out of money and there are techniques and strategies that we can implement that we do implement to make sure that people will never run out of money and I know that's probably enough content to fill a weekend seminar three days long

but let's start with what's like a 30,000 foot overview of the steps that people can take. Just get started, you know, to kind of start securing their retirement, you know, so that that doesn't happen. Certainly. So when we talk about the various risk of retirement and we always, and I always, we already spoke about that longevity risk always comes out as the number one risk. But there's also other risks that are involved to make sure that. somebody has a great retirement, we also have market risk.

There's inflation risk. There's withdrawal rate risk and sequence of returns risk because most people that come to my workshops, their biggest source of their savings are in a 401k or they've rolled it into an IRA. So they have to know, you know, at what percentage can I take the money out and what if the market goes down? there's tax rate risk and legislative risk and then another big one is there's health care risk or long-term care risk and then there's always mortality risk what if I die you know why

what if I die too soon how are my loved ones going to be able to to get by and so we address all these various factors in the workshops but you ask you what's the one you know what are some of the things that people can do. Well, number one is everybody should work with a professional, a specialist that specializes in retirement income planning. So I mentioned earlier, I went out and got some additional designations. I am actually a retirement income certified professional. I went back, got a designation. It's sort of like, why, you know, why should somebody deal with me over just their normal broker or the guy at the bank? Well, it's easy because let's just say Mike for example that that you needed to have your gallbladder

removed or you need to have open heart surgery would you go to your primary care physician or would you go see probably not bro you would go seek a specialist why your primary care physician he went through the same medical school he went he's got the same education he did a rotation in surgery but that's not his specialty well it's it's in my opinion And there's two areas that, and we are in a DIY world right now. Yeah. Because of ChatGPT and Gemini and Google and everything else, everybody thinks that they can just look it up and do it themselves.

Well, as far as I know, ChatGPT is not an advisor. You can get information, but then what are you going to do with it? It's the same way you can get information on a medical condition that, you know, I don't feel well. let me Google you know what's wrong with me might give you two or three options then you're going to go need to see a specialist um to make sure that uh that you're going to be okay why because if you try and when it comes to finances if you try and do it yourself when it comes to retirement planning there is no margin for error if you if you make a mistake you are cutting off

from potentially cutting off years of retirement income. And the resources, the tools that a specialist has, you just can't get that online, on chat GPT. Yeah. You know, you're never going to replace human interaction, personal experience, the cognitive, like, oh, you mentioned that your grandkids had this. So what if we did?

I just think that AI is spectacular for helping automate some repetitive tasks, but you need to have that human touch. And I think that is huge. You know, you've mentioned a whole litany of risks, and one of the biggest fears people have is the longevity risk is outliving money. So how does addressing that risk contribute to peace of mind? Because here's what I would suspect. Like when you go, hey, here's my goals for the upcoming year.

or I've laid out, you know, the path forward and the plan. It kind of makes you feel like, okay, good. Well, if you've put together a plan to address longevity risk and, okay, as long as things go well and we're going to keep checking into the plan, then we're going to have enough money to make it. Talk a little bit about how that longevity risk contributes to giving your client's peace of mind. Well, you, I believe you have interviewed a mentor of mine.

the past, a gentleman by name of Tom Hegna. And Tom Hegna wrote a famous bestselling book called Paychecks and Playchecks. And I bought into that philosophy, hook, line, and sinker. And sort of what was the evolution of me retiring from corporate America and starting this practice on my own was, you really have to ask yourself a question is, you know, your success and happiness, you know, and your retirement is going to depend on. Number one is how much guaranteed lifetime income do you have? You know, and then number two is have you taken the key retirement risk, which is those other risks off the table and how have you

done that? And so you ask yourself, well, how much retirement income do I need? And then the other question is is what do I want that retirement income to do for me you know so you need to know I make sure that everybody when they come in to see me we look at what their budget is how much do you need what is your mortgage payment what are your cost what do we absolutely have to cover today with that's for the rest pretty much for the rest of your life and that's what what we need to cover with some source of guaranteed lifetime income. And a lot of people will say, well, I get Social Security. Well, the bottom line is there's 98% of the people that come and see me,

they don't know how much Social Security they're going to be receiving. And the other problem is they always make a mistake on the timing of taking Social Security. And that's another mistake. that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars through the course of retirement. But Social Security is another topic that I could spend, because I am also a certified Social Security claiming specialist also. So that's another one of my specialties, but where most people get wrong.

And it's costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, not just for yourself and income, but also for your spouse and your kids. And that one piece, like you said, you can spend days on that topic, but I'll just ask from a 60,000-foot view on Social Security Claiming, if you do it wrong, that impacts outliving your money, because you might think that you're going to get X number of dollars and need it to last X time frame,

but if you didn't properly set up or claim or set up your security the right way, you could be leaving money on the table. And so that's an important consideration, a big bullet point with a big yellow highlight, you know, that you need to put on that one to make sure that's done right to ensure that that retirement planning is going to get you to the age you need to be without running out of money. I think that's a big point you bring up. Yeah, it's huge because there's in almost every single plan that I do when we do the Social Security analysis and we look at somebody's lifestyle or the life. and it's a lifestyle that they want to maintain all through retirement. There's always a gap there. And so it's up to me, it's up to individuals like me to figure out how can we maybe maybe

shift some assets around, how can we fill that gap so an individual does not have, so they can retire when they want to retire and they don't have to go back to. to work because one of the problems that people don't realize when they when they start claim if they take social security at 62 and go back to work you're you're hurting your social security for the rest of your life because there's certain tests that have to be done that if you make one dollar more than than than what you're allowed you're being penalized on the social security side so we're not going to you know I'm not going to sabotage this this interview on talking about social security, but I will recommend anybody that wants an analysis

on their social security claiming strategy. Give me a call. Yeah. Because it is important. It really is. And let's just kind of wrap up with this question regarding the longevity and outliving your money. What are some of the common misconceptions people have when you're having this type of conversation with them where they assume one thing, but really when you clarify it, they go, ooh, thank you for bringing the clarity, that's a good point. That's a, that's a fantastic question. So the biggest misconception is I have Social Security and that's going to be enough. And it, trust me, if somebody's used, if somebody wants to have a, a lifestyle that calls for

$6 to $8,000 a month in income, but they're social security, but, even between them and their wife is only, you know, $4,000, $5,000, there's already a shortfall there. And then what people don't realize is when one of the spouses die, all of your expenses stay the same, except maybe food costs go down little. But do they really? Because now if you're alone, you're probably going out to eat more. So your food costs might go up. But guess what?

You're only keeping the larger of the two checks. so your income automatically gets split in half. And then what happens, guess what, Mike, what people don't realize, this is, again, why you need to talk to a specialist is now your problem. Most likely you're going to be put into a higher income tax bracket at the same time. Again, that's another conversation for another podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. That's huge, you know, and I think that if you were to lay out all of the factors

and all of the things that need to be done, it feels overwhelming. but when you have a plan and when you address it sequentially and have someone guiding you through, it really helps to give you that peace of mind to know that everything could put together the right way. Well, Patrick, that has been really helpful to really put this together in that clear way that you've been explaining it. If it brings up in someone's mind that's listening to this, you know, hey, how would it work if or what would my situation look like or tell me more about this with security? What's the best way they can learn a little bit more and then also reach out and connect with you? certainly everyone can certainly go on to my website which is www. cotter cotter financial group dot com what i will offer for anybody if they mentioned that they you heard about me on this

interview is we when i mentioned about the resources uh that i have uh we can do a lot of analysis I am a fee-based planner, but anybody that calls it, hey, I heard you on your interview with Mike Saunders. I will do all the analysis, give you what your retirement score is, do a Social Security analysis. I'll do it completely complimentary. Excellent. Perfect. Well, Patrick, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you today.

My pleasure. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneur. With Mike Saunders, to learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www.organt influential entrepreneursradio.com.