Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with Shelby Green Retirement Expert with Retirement Heroes Discussing Reducing Unnecessary Risk in Financial Planning

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Retirement Heroes specializes in helping retirees and those nearing retirement secure their financial future with confidence. Whether it’s ensuring a reliable income stream, protecting assets, or planning for healthcare costs, we take a personalized approach to understanding what matters most to each client. Our mission is to provide the guidance and strategies needed so they can enjoy their golden years without financial stress.Financial security in retirement isn’t just about numbers—it’s about peace of mind. I’m here to help retirees make informed decisions so they can enjoy life on their terms, without the fear of outliving their savings.Learn More: https://retirementheroes.org/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-shelby-green-retirement-expert-with-retirement-heroes-discussing-reducing-unnecessary-risk-in-financial-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 back with a Shelby Green, who is the founder of retirement heroes. and we're going to talk about reducing unnecessary risk in financial planning. Shelby, welcome back to the program. I appreciate you bringing me back on.

Hey, you're welcome. And, you know, when I see certain things like, you know, reducing unnecessary risk, it makes me think about maybe you need to have a little bit of risk in financial planning, but not unnecessary risk. So let's start off with the first question that comes to my mind. What's the difference between risk and unnecessary risk? Yeah, I think people can have a specific amount of healthy risk, right? I think especially when you're younger, I think it's pretty standard for people to be more aggressive than when they get older.

I think the older somebody gets the less risk they should take. But because they are already familiar with the market, they maybe just had 10 years of positive returns. And their portfolio has been going up and up and up. Now they want to just keep taking the same risk that they've been taking. and that doesn't really make much mathematical sense because you spent time building it, now it's time to stop taking anything unnecessary risk-wise just to make more money. You don't need more money. And if they do need more money, they actually probably just more realistically need a plan, right?

This way they can work best with what they already have. I love it. That makes a whole lot of sense. I think that's something that a lot of times people don't really think about. They spend so many decades building and growing and building and growing. And now they think that it's hard for them to shift that mindset into, okay, let's circle the wagons. It's time to stop growing per se. It's nice if you see some growth.

But you no longer have the runway you did in your 20s and 30s where if your money is at a little bit more risk and volatility and you take a hit, well, we got plenty of time to recover. Well, in your 50s and 60s, you don't. So what are some of those common risks that people typically are facing that threaten their retirement port? portfolio. Yeah, I think it kind of all boils down to the same risks. Number one risk is going to be longevity. Longivity basically is the idea that they just outlive money because of the fact that they just live longer than somebody else. The person who lives to 95, they need more money overall than the person who lives to be 75. They need an extra 20 years of income. Number two is inflation risk. I think people understand that the cost of goods tremendously go up over time.

I think the average of inflation over 20 years is somewhere near 3%. And I think that people don't really actually plan for inflation. And therefore, even though they're good today in retirement, 15 years from now, when the price of goods are going up significantly, it raises the bills. And once those bills go up, if they haven't already prepared for what could happen, they might be in a position now where they actually are starting to run out of money faster than they thought because they didn't plan for inflation. I think also one thing is social security planning, right? I think some people are always under the impression of like, okay, let me take it younger versus older. It really depends on the person when they should take Social Security, right? Market volatility.

Yes. If you're relying on the market to grow the funds that you're also withdrawing from, it means that you're now going to have an extra risk called sequence of return risk. This is the risk, and this is actually what my dad experienced, because he retired back in 2008. And more or less, his portfolio got a big hit right when he needed to withdraw the money. Wow. And so if somebody in early retirement years ends up having some negative years in the market,

but they have to use that money to live off of, well, it means they're locking in their losses and they have to take the money anyway. They're going to run out of money significantly faster than somebody who just got lucky with the years that they retired. Yeah, it's a dumbleway, I mean, because you have to take it out because you're required to from, you know, like the government required minimum distribution, but then if you have to take it out in a down time or down period, boy, you feel like, oh, that's a double hit to the gut. Exactly. I have a very strong mission that really the income that you require for retirement should be

relatively safer than the money that you don't actually require, right? So if I need $6,000 a month of income just to live, well, wherever we're withdrawing that money from shouldn't be high risk because of the fact that, well, depending on what happens with the market is that we may or may not be able to actually utilize that strategy. So I like to just be guaranteed or to be in somewhere safe. We withdraw that money and then just let the money that we don't need to touch go to the side and grow. You know, do you ever found working with clients because I think that some people would be this way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I need $6,000 a month and I want that $6,000 to be guaranteed and all that. But I kind of like having a little bit of something to watch.

You know, I like to log in and see the activity in this fund or that fund. So do you ever find people that are like, okay, cool, let's put X number of dollars into this safe fund guaranteed. So I got my expenses covered. But I want another amount of money into something safe and secure and all that because I do like to log in and see how it's going. Do you ever have that mix going on? Yeah, actually, that's the most common scenario. The most common scenario is I say, hey, I like all that stuff just like you do. But let's get a mix of it. Let's put some of the money that we need over here, some are more safe. And then the rest of the money can be aggressive. You know, I think because in the aggressive, if you took a bad hit and it's not going to affect keeping the light bill on or paying the property tax because you've got that covered.

Exactly. It doesn't matter who's president this day. It doesn't matter what's going on with the market, what company is doing what, what's going on in the news, what war is happening on when we were at. But it doesn't really matter what's going on is that we still know that regardless of our portfolio that's at risk, we have our income coming in no matter what. It's just a good feeling. You know, you mentioned a couple things that I want to go a little bit deeper on. You said lifespan. And I think that I don't know the statistics you would know more. But back in the 50s or 60s, people would have the actuarial tables that says, hey, in retirement, you're going to live two age, whatever, 65. Well, then it was like now you're going to live to 75, then 85. And now, you know, because in this day and age, we are taking better care of ourselves,

we're eating better. We're taking better supplements. We've got better health care. people are living longer. And so now if you retire at whatever age, 65, 70, whatever it is, you might need 20, 25 years past that in retirement. What have you found in those calculations where maybe people are going, wow, I really need to make sure my numbers are dialed in because of that extra lifespan that people are seeing?

Yeah. You know, it's funny, on top of the extra lifespan, one, it just means you need more money. And you know, you need a plan that's going to actually last and assume a higher age of expectancy. So when I first started, we used to use age 80. Kind of like, hey, if we, you know, took out this amount of money per month, you know, for X amount of years, you'll be good until 80. And people usually were comfortable about that. They said, okay, I could see myself living to 80. But, you know, as long as I'm good by then, I'm fine.

Yeah. Now people start to see. Wait a second. I might live to be 90, 95. Yeah, people are out there riding their bike 10 miles a day at 80. It's like that's not anymore the last nail in the coffin. 80 is the new 60, you know, so to speak. Yeah, yeah.

I think one of my grandparents actually lived to be 94. Yeah. And she ran out of money by 86 because she didn't expect it. And, you know, her parents both lived to be, you know, in their late 70s. And so the fact that she outlived them by almost 20 years, it was actually really surprising. And, you know, we ended up having to have, you know, us grandkids and everybody else kind of helping her with her retirement because she just didn't expect to live that long. You know. Okay.

So that brings up another point that I've heard of. And let's use your grandmother as an example. Did she live longer than your grandfather? Significantly longer. So, you know, the statistic I've heard out there is women statistically live longer than men. And so when you're putting together a retirement plan for a husband and wife, maybe you need to calculate that in the numbers because, you know, hopefully not. Hopefully you die on the same day and you live to 95 or whatever. But what if the woman lives longer than the man, that retirement plan has to reflect that? I'd say nine out of 10 times,

one of the spouses will go before the other, right? It's very rare that they both go at the same time. Yeah. And so what I always do is I stress test it. I stress test the income plan. I said, hey, if in 10 years even one of you guys, boom, someone died and now you guys live by yourself or you know, whatever the situation may be without each other. First thing that changes is going to be the social security situation, right? You might go from two social securities in the household to one. Then on top of that, your tax situation changes because you're going filed married and filing jointly to now being single, individual filing. And so your tax brackets change and your tax rates go up. And so these things are counterintuitive to actual, you know, retirement money because you're

having to now use more money for taxes and you receive less money due to social security. And so we always stress test the plans to make sure, hey, no matter what, no matter what literally happens, even if somebody passes a little bit unexpectedly, you're going to make sure that you're going to have enough money for the both of you to live. And that stress test made me think about something else. That should be done, you know, up front. And then it should be done several times throughout. So how many, what do you recommend your clients coming in for an annual review or every six

months or what is that frequency because you need to be just double checking the plan. Not that it was a wrong thing to do three years ago and now we better fix it. No, it might just be that, hey, inflation reared its ugly head or whatever has changed. We just need to kind of be up with the times. How often do you meet with your clients to just make sure everything is set right? And depending on the client and, you know, obviously how frequently they'd like to meet, typical is usually one to four times per year. We always meet at minimum once per year.

But something really important. I've realized is that whenever I'm doing retirement planning for people, especially now, another thing that they need to take into consideration is that we've already been told, it's been announced already that Social Security is actually, technically speaking, at a position where it might actually go down for retirees in the future. You know, the Federal Reserve Fund, they're running out of money and they have to figure out some solution in order to not have to lower social security. But if you go to SSA.gov, it's already actually been announced that your social security

could go down by 25-ish percent. If that's true, it means that because we can't control social security, but we can control our portfolio, let's figure out and put a plan in place that just in case that happens, that you're still going to be fine. Yep. So what are some steps that people can take to mitigate these unexpected challenges? and I know that you can never eliminate, but you can mitigate, lessen them. So what does that look like?

They just need a plan for every single risk that possibly exists for them. I say, number one, sequence of return risk, have a plan for that, have a plan for inflation, have a tax plan, right? Have a plan for longevity. If you end up living longer than you expected, make sure that the income accounted for keeps going until at least 90, 95 years old, right? Have a plan for Social Security. Have a plan for health care.

Medicare exists. Figuring that out properly is always going to help. Doing proper planning so you don't end up with EMA surcharges. All we have to do is change your income that you're taking out. And where we take the income from determines what your taxable income is going to be to the government. Now, what are EMA surcharges? Irma surcharges are basically say, hey, once you hit $109,000 of ordinary income, you actually have a surcharge on your Medicare that you're going to have to pay.

And so if somebody's just taking money from one bucket of funds, let's say it's their pre-taxed account, but they could have taken some money from their brokerage or from a Roth, but they just decided to utilize one. Well, now their income is going to be counted as a higher number. And that's actually the calculation they use to figure out, hey, should this person pay Irma? Right. And so all the whole entire income planning is also what bucket of money do you withdraw from first? Yeah. There's a very strong order of operations that people should typically follow. You know, that makes me think of something, too.

It's like one time you made a comment in a conversation like, you know, you, you don't want to take the advice of the news of the radio, of the TV, of online Google. Also, you can't just put into Google or AI, you know, what is the best choice for me to do, fill in the blank? Because everybody is different. So you need to have someone that sits down with you and says, look, not only do we need to have this plan, but we got to do it in the right order. because I will bet you we've mentioned a couple times like the RMD's required minimum distribution. There is a time that I'm confident that someone has been like, you know, oh, you know what, I sold my RV and I got some cash. I don't need to do any withdrawals this year.

I'm good to go. But if you don't, there will be consequences. So talk a little bit about just making sure. I guess that falls into the one to four times a year when you're just making sure of how everything is going. You're making sure that you are taking money out at the right time and from the right accounts. Yeah. And that's exactly, you know, why it's so important for people to have customized plans to their own situation. Because the general rule of thumb in retirement is because

you know RMDs are coming, required minimum distributions, typically speaking, the first place you typically want to draw money from is your pre-taxed accounts. Those are the ones that you have to pay RMDs on. But at the same time, and you have to plan it accordingly because if you took out too much money from the pre-tax bucket, well, now what? Your tax bracket goes up, which means you're going to pay more in taxes. You potentially could have new charges like Irma, et cetera, that come out of nowhere. And so the goal is to basically finagle the income where it's, hey, we have enough coming in from the ordinary income that now we're going to take the rest from your brokerage. And that's the idea is like, hey, yeah, we want to touch that pre-tax bucket first, but within reason, because depending on how much

you touch also affects how much social securities get taxed as an example. So we just kind of want to make sure we plan accordingly and have a custom plan that really fits the specific person way they know exactly when to draw what, you know, what bucket of money from. And so I know that when you're thinking about mitigating taxes or lessening, you know, those kind of out of, out of pocket expenses and dealing with RMDs, I know that Roth conversions can be a possible. What's a 30,000 foot view on how you would advise a client to assess if that would be a benefit or not to them? Yeah. I mean, the first thing would be, what's the purpose of this Roth conversion? Is it if it's just to save money in taxes,

then, okay, we look at it strictly from a mathematical perspective. And the reason why I say that is because sometimes we'll Roth convert, for example, so that way their kids don't have to pay taxes. That's a different purpose. Yeah. Right. And so I'd say number one, most important detail with the Roth conversion is does it even make sense? The most important detail is, are you going to have liquid cash available in your bank account

to even cover the taxes if you did the conversion? And should you convert all at once in the same year or should you convert over the course of X, Y, and Z amount of years? if you have to take money from your IRA in order to actually convert, typically almost never makes sense to do a Roth conversion. Right. And so it always depends on what situation the person is going through. Roth conversions can make sense for the right person. But for some people, honestly, it just ends up being one of those, I guess, terms that people hear. And it always has a positive attitude towards it.

Like, everyone thinks positive things about Roth conversions. But sometimes it's just unnecessary. That's a really good point because you think about something. And without getting into the weeds of the specifics, but if you have X number of dollars into a non-taxed account like an IRA and you take a chunk out, you know you have to pay taxes on it that year. Well, where's that money coming from to pay taxes? Well, maybe you can find it some other place.

Maybe one of those conversion strategies will give you a little bit of a bonus. But still, you put money into a Roth. You've got to now have a lot of. runway to start growing and putting it in the right account and gaining so that you can maybe recoup that amount of money you paid in taxes. So yeah, to your point, is it a great strategy? Maybe. Yeah, maybe is right. And I think one thing is that as they always have positive inclinations, what always says a negative inclination is typically going to be RMDs. People see RMDs is a bad thing. Yeah. Now, while being forced to take money out of your account, technically speaking,

I would say is inherently bad. If you plan for that income to be. taken out, knowing that it's going to, that it has to be taken out regardless, well, you're just accessing your money. The worst thing about RMD is the fact that you have to take money out, even when the market's down. That's really the bad thing about it. Yeah. So people say, you know, it's Roth Convert, so I don't have RMDs. Once again, RMDs are not necessarily inherently bad in and of itself. There's a reason why it's bad. And the reason why typically is when you have to pull money in those down markets, you're forcing yourself to have a loss. So have a plan in place for sure. Exactly. So the reason, the reason, the reason why,

why you make moves, I think is huge. You know, like a Simon Sinek book, famous concept, begin with why. You know, having that why behind some of your strategies is so critical. Like one of the ones you mentioned was, what if you want to help your family, your, your heirs, avoid taxes. So you're going to do things now so that when money passes to them, they don't have to deal with it. And so that might impact you, but then it's not going to impact them.

So let's wrap up this conversation with the talk about a little bit. bit more of those reasons why and how does that impact some of the decisions that could be made for your retirement? In reference to the Roth? In reference to any moves that might come up, like even legacy planning and where to shift money. Oh, yeah. Actually, this is actually a conversation I just had with a client maybe two or three weeks ago. This relatively wealthy guy has over $10 million. And, you know, one thing we were talking about was legacy planning. It's like, hey, at the end of the day, you have plenty of money. You're not going to run out.

You know, everything's looking good. However, when it comes to passing money onto your kids, how do you really want, how do you imagine that plays out? And he said, well, I just want to make sure I leave the most amount of them for them in the most effective way. And what I did was, is he basically said that he wants to do a runoff conversion because he knows that, you know, he doesn't want to leave them with a big tax bill. I said, I get what you're saying, but because of your wealth you've amassed,

once again, he's over $10 million. If you Roth convert, you're already at the highest tax bracket possible. Whereas your kids are not. And so actually, you're going to actually do yourself and your kids a disservice. If you actually did this conversion now, while you're going to pay 37% in taxes, when you can leave it to them, and they're going to pay a lot less. And so we actually ended up not doing a Roth conversion just because of the fact that I was like, mathematically, this won't make sense. And I think sometimes if they take into consideration your specific situation,

and if it makes any sense, we always have to make changes according to the person's plan. Yeah. You know, I guess we kind of wrap that thought up with just something that's an overall thing is there is not one cookie cutter solution for anybody for in every situation. So what does it look like for me? And if someone is listening to this going, you know, what does it look like for me? What's the best way that they can learn a little bit more and reach out and connect with you, Shelby? Yeah, of course, our website, Retirementheroes.org. that's Heroes, H-E-R-O-E-S.

Obviously, my name is Shelby Green. You can email me, Shelby Green at Retirementheroes.org. I look forward to talking to you guys. If anybody wants to reach out, reach out anytime. I'm open 7.30 to 7.30 every day. Awesome, Shelby. Thank you so much for coming back on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you.

You as well, Mike. Thank you. 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.