Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with Scott Staschke President of Guilford Financial Group Discussing Navigating Financial Fears and Expectations

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

Scott A. Staschke CFP®, RFC®, President of Guilford Financial Group Inc. has been with the firm since 2000. Guilford Financial Group, Inc. is a family business celebrating 37 years of serving the shoreline community.Scott’s areas of concentration include Estate Planning, Business Retirement, and Succession Planning, Individual/Couple Retirement planning, Client Portfolio Design and Investment Analysis, Retirement Income Planning/Withdrawal Strategies, and Advanced Options Strategies along with insurance, life, disability to long-term health care, business pension plans, and employee benefits coordination. Scott holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Elon University. Also holds the Series 7, 4, 24, 53, 63 securities registrations through LPL Financial, and separately, Life & Health and Variable Annuity licenses. Scott is a Registered Representative with LPL Financial. Further, Scott is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ Professional and a Registered Financial Consultant®. CFP CertificateScott lives in Madison with his wife Karin and his three wonderful children. On the weekends Scott is busy going to his children soccer games, theater rehearsals and other activities. In his free time he enjoys golfing, biking, hiking and any other outdoor activity. Is an active member of the local Rotary Club.Learn More: https://www.gfgadvisor.com/Securities and Advisory services offered through LPL Financial, a Registered Investment Advisor. Member FINRA & SIPC.The LPL Financial representative(s) associated with this website may discuss and/or transact securities business only with residents of the states in which they are properly registered or licensed. No offers may be made or accepted from any resident of any other state.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-scott-staschke-president-of-guilford-financial-group-discussing-navigating-financial-fears-and-expectations

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, Scott Stashke, who's the president of Guilford Financial Group, and we'll be talking about navigating financial fears and expectations. Scott, welcome back to the program. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me today.

You're welcome. You know, as I think about navigating financial fears and expectations, the first thing that pops into my mind is sometimes there's elevated fear because you have unrealistic expectations. Have you ever seen that before in your experience? Well, yeah, quite a bit. there's either the concern and fear. This is real fear. I'm not saying that it's not. Just believing that they don't have enough money.

So there's a constant worry that you can't spend or you got to live on, you know, you got to start saving the sugar packs from the diner. Yeah. You know, so that's, you know, and we could get more into this through our conversation. But, you know, these are things that we try to help with. is, you know, yeah, but that's a great point because I think sometimes people go,

yeah, yeah, you told me, Scott, that I'm going to have enough, but I'm going to eat rice and beans and save the sugar packs and never take any trips ever so that I make sure that I have the money that I need

even 10 years down the road. But the problem with that is you're not living life currently and maybe sometimes this comes up. When you really wanted to take that big trip or start traveling, maybe your health is not going to cooperate. So there's that dichotomy of preparing the right way, but also allowing you to enjoy retirement as you proceed on, right? Absolutely.

I mean, one of the things that we do, we have obviously financial planning software, so we're able to put in there, you know, we'll put it your numbers in. and we could kind of show what we should be able to expect at a safe withdrawal level. We could build in, you know, what if we do some trips, we could kind of stress test it. Maybe we have some negative outcome years on portfolio there, unexpected costs. But we could at least create a, what I call it, a benchmark or a base camp of, you know, what is our safety zone for how much income we could safely generate? How much can we spend without putting ourselves into a lot of risks? And then, you know, we spend a lot of time, you know, because again, a lot of times people still think, hey, you know what?

We want to do a lot of good trips, but maybe we're nervous about it because of the cost. I have a couple right now. We're going away for a couple of weeks on a luxury trip. It's going to cost the two of them 50K for a two-week trip. Well, it sounds like it's going to be a beautiful trip, but that's a couple of it. a large sum of money. Yeah. And for a lot of people, they would definitely be hesitant to just, you know, say,

okay, sign me up. But if you have a good plan and, you know, especially, you know, have been working with someone that's been kind of making sure that we're within our numbers, it's not, you know, those trips exist for a reason. People do go on them. Yeah. You know, so, you know, having a good benchmark of, you know, where you are in your safety safety zone.

Sometimes it takes individuals and couples a few years of just saying, hey, you know what? We've been living off our portfolios and they're growing and we want to, we want to start traveling. And I always encourage, like, you know what, we got a front, I call it front loading the retirement because, you know, health is probably the biggest uncertainty out there. You know, we, you know, usually through your 60s into your 70s, likelihood is that your health will be pretty good. And you're not going to be inhibited from traveling.

But you push in late 70s, early 80s, you know, you're really rolling the dice. And believe me, there's, I have plenty of clients who would love to travel, have all the means in the world to travel. But their health just won't allow it. And, you know, that's not what you want. want to be at where you have lots of money you can't use it and i think part of that fear that we're talking about is like the the overarching one of will i have enough money and will my money run out you know like i yeah well i mean you know it's um it's interesting because there's not just

do you have enough money but you know with inflation and i you know i know we touched off a little bit on our previous recordings. But, you know, when you're looking at a 30, 40-year timeline, you know, the fastest growing segment in the United States is the satinials. People living past 100, you know, and there's a, you know, a 90% chance at a couple that one of you might get to 90 that's now when they're 65. Like, it's pretty high. Like, there's a good chance that one of you is going to live pretty long.

Now, yeah, some of you may have gotten the short straw on longevity in your life, but for most part people are living pretty long nowadays so you're looking at you know a 30 to 40 year time horizon that you're going to be you know retired uh so you know understanding that and they kind of understanding you know what is what is normal aging like what exactly is that not everyone has parents that they are are nearby or or or are around where they could say okay you know mom mom did all this stuff and she was fine until she was in her 80s and 90s. And some people just don't know. They tend to,

they tend to understand. Centenarians, because it wasn't, I don't know when this was, but I know that in financial planning tables of, you know, expectation, let's say back in the 50s,

let's say, they would expect someone to retire and live to 70, let's just say. And then it got to be, oh, 80. Then 85. Well, we're taking better care of ourselves.

And to your point, the fastest growing demographic is people hitting and going to 100. If you retired at whatever the age is, you've got several decades your money has to last. So that fear of not having enough money really rears its ugly head when you start going, wait a minute. If you're going to retire at whatever the age is, 65, 67, 70, you might have 20, 25 years. Is your money going to last long enough? You better have that dialed in. really well. Yeah. And, you know, I have a fair amount of my financial overachievers that, you know, they're 55 and they're like, Scott, I want to, I want to be done. Wow. Okay. That's the long time horizon.

Yeah. Yeah. What are you going to do for the next 40 years money wise? And now if you got plenty squirled away, let's put the plan in action. Yeah. And I don't know. But, you know, for me, for me, at least like, look, if I'm not working, I'm doing something out, out in the world. And it's usually costing money. Right. So, you know, that's a little, you know, if you're planning on doing a lot of stuff, you know, you better have the wallet for it. That's a great point. So let's get back to that expectation aspect and talk about how can a retiree really balance and evaluate their strategy against their expectation. You mentioned benchmark.

I want to dive in a little bit deeper on that. What does a benchmark look like? Because you need to really figure out what your expectation is. And then here's my strategy. And is there a gap? Right. So, you know, one of the things we want to look at is, well, where are we have, what do we have for retirement now?

You may have social security income. You might have a pension. You know, you may have had some 401K or 403B. you may have had real estate. How much income are these assets able to generate? If it's a portfolio, can we put it into a balanced portfolio with a reasonable return profile? What can we expect for income and have that inflated out? So this is where software does a really good job because it could crunch all those numbers.

And then we could put different inputs in there to give out. What we're looking for is probabilities, right? So we want a we want a very high. I look for 95% success rates. I mean, to me, having, I don't like to have like a,

you know, 5, 10% chance of failing is not comfortable with me. Right. And, you know, and so I look at probabilities a lot. And, you know,

some more times than not, when initially we put in the numbers and we put in the budget and we're like, you know what, we can do it. But if we keep this, path that we're on. We don't make changes.

You know, there's, you got to, you're on a 50-50 right now. Yeah. You're going to run out of money before you run out of life. But the good news is often we can make some changes and, you know, we could greatly increase that probability of success. So that's just looking at like what, what the assets can potentially produce. And, you know, you know, over a time frame and give you a kind of a benchmark.

If anything, whether you become a client or not, I want you to at least know kind of where you stand. And so you're not surprised. No one should have to be surprised going into retirement about what may or may not happen. You know, that's a big point because if you plan for the worst and it does not happen, then you're good to go. If you don't plan for the worst and something, you know, curveball hits, then that throws a big, punches a big hole in your retirement bucket per se.

So let's talk a little bit about some of the questions that people need to be considering to get clarity on their financial future and make sure that their fears don't come to realization. Like as an example, what are some of the biggest things that can knock that biggest hole in the retirement bucket? You know, like you mentioned health before, you know, there's a. a big statistical probability that many people, and I've heard as high as 60 or 70%, will need some form of long-term care. And long-term care can be pretty expensive. Long-term care is very expensive. And when I do some education presentations and, you know, Fidelity, which is one of the larger investment firms out there, they've done a lot of research

on long-term care and medical care costs. So this is not just long-term. care, but it's what they call out-of-pocket medical costs. And this was something done back in like 2000, I want to say 19. I would have to check the numbers there, but it's an older report. And back then they were saying that a couple at 65, a married couple will over a lifetime have $650,000 off out-of-pocket medical expenses expected, which is a pretty large number, if you asked me. And that wasn't necessarily talking about long-term care costs.

Now long-term care costs, depending on what part of the country you're in, I mean, it's in Connecticut, if you're a full-time nursing home, you could easily be at $300,000 a year cost. I've seen that. Wow.

You could quite quickly wipe out a retirement portfolio, a legacy for sure. So, you know, there's strategies that we could work on. It is, I would have to say that's probably one of the more, more cloudy, difficult areas to solve. The best thing to be is to be aware of it.

Yeah. You know, there's, you can look at, there's various insurance that you can look into. And there's definitely some strategies, I mean, there's ways to mitigate that was impact. But you need to kind of know that that's, that's a real risk. No matter what you do, you need to be aware of it and have a, at least a pretty good plan in place. Because like, to your point about long-term care, there's different varying levels. of long-term care. Some of the lower levels might not cost as much as some of the higher levels, but at least be prepared for it and know that that's in place. So let's kind of shift gears and

talk about confidence, meaning when you have specific financial fears and expectations, but you've now addressed them, isn't it kind of like the personal development gurus out there say, well, hey, what's your greatest fear? And if you can paint that picture and then have a plan to combat it, then the fear has not got that much control over you. Well, if you have a certain financial fear and you say, okay, well, that could happen. Let's put a plan in place. Doesn't that help build confidence and really help that retiree go, you know what? I'm going to trust the process because we put a good plan into place. What does that confidence do to help them in their daily life, really? Well, I mean, first is to try to prevent knee-jerk reactions of like, oh, my gosh,

the market's gone down, let's sell everything. I mean, I think the most extreme case of maybe making bad financial decisions was, it was back in 2008 during that the great recession is what they're calling it. You know, we at that time, we acquired another advisor's book of business, essentially, and timing was always perfect for us. And by time we were able to see everyone, their portfolios, which they were mostly in growth portfolios at the time. You know, someone were down 30, 40 percent when they first, we said, hello, we're going to help you with your monies. Wasn't the best introduction.

And, you know, we saw all sorts of things. I mean, people wanting to cash themselves out and pay off their mortgage. You know, this is, you know, real emotional scare when they're... see their account values down. So having, and this comes down to educating and I, you know, I review and we spend a lot of time on just history and how markets recover and, you know, what takes place. We talk about fear and worries. And so they kind of understand, hey, what you're feeling is probably normal.

You know, if we create some guarantees, then we could create some things that we could count on. So as long as we have a functioning society, you're going to be okay, you know, take away the stress. I mean, that's the biggest thing. We can help alleviate your stress and anxiety. And there's plenty of other things to be worried about. And when you address that, it gives a better quality of life because that piece of mind that comes in. And, you know, they're not worried about turning the TV on and watching the market update or

open in their portfolio statement because it's like, we've got a plan in a place where we're not impacted as much as we used to be. So that gives a better quality of life. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think today's investor, today's retiree, and they've been, they've been through a lot in the past 20 years. I mean, look at all the crises, the pandemic. I mean, it's been, it's been wild, really. So they're kind of getting used to volatility in portfolios. But I think they might be getting a little wrong is that so far through, I want to call financial engineering, but nonetheless, every downturn that's happened in the market has recovered historically fast. You know, barely a quarter and the markets are back up.

That's not normal. If you look at more over a longer period of time, you know, sometimes recovery is multiple years before portfolio gets back to value. So, you know, they got to be aware of that. Like, you know, it doesn't mean that just, you know, just don't open your statement one quarter and the next quarter will be fine. Yeah, that's a great point. You know, how can someone distinguish between a legitimate financial concern and a fear that might be causing them? to make a poor decision. And I emphasize the word fear because it reminds me the old acronym, fear stands for false expectation appearing real. So sometimes fears never come to fruition. I like that. I like that a lot.

I haven't heard that, but I like that because, yeah, it's true. You know, a concern is like, you know, a phone call, SNAs, are we okay? Is our portfolio? Are we, you know, are we on track? A fear is more of, you know, like I said, knee-jerk reaction like we need to sell or we need to get out of all our stuff or you know this just put me in a CD like well that's barely keeping up with inflation yeah that's this emotion taken over that's not rational you know that's the big things you know people and it's true

there's plenty of studies on that people make decisions emotional there rarely are they making rational decisions, right? Usually it's, the investors usually their own worst enemy, right? Yep. The, you know, sell low, buy high. It's, you know, if everyone was really good at it and did what they should have, should be doing, you know, we wouldn't have to worry about it. Everyone would be investing doing everything the way they should be.

But, you know, so one of the benefits of working with a financial advisor, whether it's me or, you know, anyone that's, you know, qualified is, you know, you can offload some of your concerns from the anxiety that money will have in retirement income off onto a plan. Some of those will helping you work on that, having a soundboard essentially. So you don't make bad decisions. You know, and I don't know if we touched off on this, but, you know, we see, especially with our older, retirees now, cyber security and some of the scams that are out there. Yeah.

You know, sometimes we're the last defense before the scammers are getting everything. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. You need someone in your corner. And if someone wants to feel more prepared and in control of their financial future, they need to take a look at some of these things and have someone ask the tough questions and put pen to paper and really make those calculations.

So, Scott, this has been really, really eye-opening and helpful. If someone wants a little bit of that insight, what's the best way that they can reach out and connect with you? So the part of the best is to send me an email, but also we have a website, gfgadvisor.com. And you probably have on the link there our contact information too. Yes. We will do that. And that's incredible that just kind of that, you know, low-key approach to let's just take a good look at everything, give us a second opinion if needed or list, you know, a re-look at how things are set up just to make sure

you've got that confidence and peace of mind. So, Scott, that's been really enjoyable to have this conversation with you. Thanks for coming back on. Thank you, Mike. Have a good day. 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.com.com com