Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with Terry Wheeler Founder & CEO of WE Alliance Wealth Advisors Discussing The Retirement Income Blind Spot

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

WE Alliance Wealth Advisors if founded on the belief that an integrated Family Office style approach to wealth planning is the best way to protect and maximize the wealth client families work so hard to accumulate. Combine powerful proactive tax strategies, a powerful system of investing called Defined Outcome Investing, and a Family Centered approach to estate planning to deliver uncommon results while reducing risk for each client family. Founder Terry Wheeler’s book “Laugh When the Market Crashes” is a must read book outlining this investment approach.The firm and its founder traces its roots back over 35 years with its origins beginning at Dean Witter Reynolds. In the 1990s the founder added a law degree focused on tax and estate planning advocacy. The integrated wealth, tax, and estate planning approach now truly sets them apart in a crowded financial planning space.Learn more: https://weriaadvisors.com/Buy the book at www.LaughWhenTheMarketCrashes.comAdvisor Coaching at www.StrategicWealthLegal.comAny opinions, projections, or forward-looking statements expressed herein are solely those of the author, may differ from the views or opinions expressed by WE Alliance Wealth Advisors, and are only for general informational purposes as of the date indicated.All investments involve risk; please consult with a financial advisor prior to investing.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-terry-wheeler-founder-ceo-of-we-alliance-wealth-advisors-discussing-the-retirement-income-blind-spot

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 Terry Wheeler, who's the founder and CEO of We Alliance Wealth Advisors, and we'll be talking about the retirement income. Blind spot. Terry, welcome back to the program. Hey, thanks for having us again, Mike. It's been fun talking to you. Yeah, I love these blind spot topics that you're talking about because you just don't know until you know it. And I think that a lot of people, you know, check the box and go, hey, I want to retire at X and I want to have Y amount in my account so that I can retire well.

And the blind spot might be like, hey, there's a big difference between having some lump sum portfolio and having actual cash flow and income. So talk about someone who's got a really strong portfolio, maybe a couple three million dollars, but still they're a little uncertain that is it going to be enough? Sure. So one of the hardest things I think people struggle with is how much do I need? So the first step is really figuring out what their needs, wants, and wishes are. And there's some formulas and rules of thumb that we can utilize in order to help them get

started. But ultimately, once you dial in that budget and you figure out what they need and then they do maybe some bucket list streaming to figure out, you know, what does this ideal retirement look like? We then have a target of what we need. And we typically are wanting to evaluate first. What are they going to have from Social Security? What are they going to have from maybe whether it's a government pension or maybe it's a pension from their employers? Like Kaiser physicians get a solid pension. But if you go to Sutter or something, you may not have a pension, you may have to create it yourself. So the first step is let's secure that base level of income that you cannot outlive.

And we can do that through portfolio design or through private pensions that can be very powerful to help make sure a client cannot outlive their money. So that is kind of the first step is let's lock in the basics, lock in things so that you can't outlive things. Let's clarify that. Exactly. And then I would venture to say some people don't even. have a clear picture of that. And when they do kind of run the numbers, they come up with the figure

that when you then maybe give some guidance, you're like, oh, but did you consider and did you think about all of a sudden that number grows? Yeah, inflation, for example. So a lot of people are surprised like, well, I need $15,000 a month and they've got it structured for the next 30 years because they're retiring, it maybe 60. And then you're like, well, no, by the time you are, you know, 15 years down the road or so, you might be needing $30,000 a month just to maintain the same standard of living. So we kind of, we kind of stress test portfolios and we build it to keep up with inflation. And then we also kind of address the reality that your income is not going to be the same needs over the life cycle of your retirement. You're going to have your go-go years and you

should embrace those and do those things that are on your bucket list why you have your health, because we're all eventually going to hit the slow go years. And once you hit the slow-go years, between your private pensions or public pensions and your Social Security, those should be structured so you can't outlive your money. So your slow-go years are taken care of, which frees you up to enjoy those go-go years better. So it's very individualized based on what each client needs. Some are living off their portfolio.

Others have strong pensions, and there's two very different sets of issues, but both need to manage their portfolios very different than in the accumulations. years. And it comes really, I would suspect, down to, like, is there a gap? Let's identify the gap. I need X amount of dollars every month in retirement to do what I want to do, whether it's, you know, dreams or desires or just putting food on the table. So I need that amount of money. But ooh, my current retirement plan is only going to provide, you know, this amount. There's a gap. So when you clearly identify that, now you can start figuring out how to close that gap.

What do you find some of the mistakes you retirees make when they think about turning this lump sum investment account into cash flow monthly paychecks so that they can then close that gap? We find that they keep doing what they did to get to where they are. Meaning if you do the classic like 60, 40 stock bond portfolio during accumulation and your dollar cost averaging into the market, that worked well during accumulation. But let's say you're taking out 5% of your portfolio, which in a. 60-40 stock bond portfolio, it's really in the high three is all you should take out. But if you do a process called defined outcome investing, which adds defense to your portfolio, you can take 5% out very comfortably. But if you were taking 5% out of a 60-40 stock bond portfolio and you needed that money to last for 30 years,

you barely have over a 50% chance of that working. So the fear about living their money should be a real fear if you're doing it wrong. It should not be a fear if you do it right. So you have to change the portfolio. You add defense through a process called defined outcome investing, which is where you're going to have your stocks are going to be three strategies. One is going to be your traditional naked in the market. And for many people, that's all they do, which is a big mistake.

Right. And then you have some that is going to maybe only give you an 80% of the upside, but give you a zero and a down market. And then you're going to have some that will cap your returns. but maybe it's eliminating 20, 30 percent of a down market. That combination is the winner. And it beats the Naked in the Market portfolio over almost every 20-year period in your lifetime with just a couple of exceptions. So doing the right portfolio, you shouldn't have to worry about filling that gap if you do it right.

The problem is too many people just do this, stocks and bond portfolios, and too many advisors that were trained 15, 20 years ago, don't even realize they're doing it wrong for their clients. That's all they know. Yeah. So filling the gap is. Yeah, that's, I think that, um, a lot of people, it's human nature. Well, it's just the way we've always done it.

So you, you know, you, you, you talk about the 6040 or the 4% or 5%. That's just the way that it's always been done. But maybe there's some, uh, in, in advances that have happened in the last decade or so that would actually help you out put some safe, safe strategies in place. advances and there were flaws all along. I mean, we have to talk. So in the book, Laugh when the market crashes, we talk about the wolves of Wall Street. And they've trained all of these advisors, including me.

I was trained in this at Dean Wedder. They trained them to teach a system that is good for their business model. So if you tell me where your portfolio is, I can pretty much tell you what your portfolio looks like. So there are shops that are mutual fund shops. There are shops that all they're doing is selling variable annuities or life insurance. or a whole life. Like, it's so predictable.

It's comical. But it's because the Woolsoe Wall Street are teaching salespeople to do financial planning, but it's not really financial planning. So when you get away from the Wools of Wall Street and you build a proper portfolio, 6040 was always wrong in retirement. It just, that's what was sold to the American public. Diversification is your only form of defense has always been wrong. but they teach diversification as being your only defense because they can do all that electronically.

They don't have to work very hard. But if you do it right, it doesn't take much more effort and it should be your advisor doing the effort. And you can have far more of what you work so hard to accumulate. So for instance, in a long term, let's say a full cycle market, maybe even two over a 20 year period, a defined outcome investment is going to be the winner over most 20-year periods of your lifetime, yet most people just have stocks and bonds, which is just bad, bad advice. So combine that with what we did in a prior episode where you do a nice tax layer and you have more money for retirement if you do truly proactive tax planning and very few people do it.

So we can often create a quarter million, half million, even million plus of additional money for you to spend in retirement if you do truly proactive tax planning. So instead of converting Rosses without any thought whatsoever, we do strategies where maybe you're only paying 60 cents on the dollar for taxes. And we even have a strategy where we can zero out the tax bill. So when you have these gaps that you talk about, there is no one answer. So you have some advisors that say, okay, you have a gap. Let's use this product to fill the gap. Right. Might be the right answer, but it might be that simple tax planning can solve that gap very easily and it's not hard to do and you don't have to take on more risk. I in my portfolio did what we call it private pension.

So I worked with a group where I'm getting 9.5% compounding per year until I turn on my income stream on a guarantee basis up to 12 years. So depend on what you go into and what's available in that interest rate environment, you'll get different guarantees. But that can fill the gap nicely. And it works well for me because I have. no pensions. So I wanted a pension that I can't outlive that goes above and beyond a simple social security pension. You know, a lot of people think of, you know, I need income and retirement to pay the bills. And the first thing they think about Social Security, well, that, you know, can be, you know, that income stream. Pensions, you know, what percent of people have pensions these

days? Not many. So you look at maybe that private pension that you mentioned. And then how, what are some other ways that people can get retirement income flowing? into them that they can consider. Yeah. So people with pensions, it used to be one in, or it used to be three and four had a pension. Now it's about one in 16. So creating private pensions to supplement the basic needs for your lifetime is a very important step.

Now, the other thing is bonds. So bonds are boring, but they're a key part of the safety of your portfolio. The problem there is a lot of people, they'll go into like the vanguard. our total return bond fund, thinking that that's their safe money. But if you go through like that 2018, 19, 20 year period, you see that it crashed when interest rates went up and it took five years just to get back to break even. So one of the solutions there is you got to have laddered maturities. So if you need 20,000 a year off your bond portfolio, make sure you have high quality bonds or treasuries or municipalities depend on the portfolio that are coming due so that you're not

worried about the value fluctuation that interest rates cause. So structuring things well with all the different tools we have is not hard. You just have to know what tools are available and what fits what circumstance. Instead of having somebody that's selling you something where they're constantly trying to fit a square peg into a round hole because they're selling this product. So it's got to be the solution to everything. So true fiduciary, we have all the products. We have all the tools. It's what is best to be used to be used to be.

build your financial fortress that you need for retirement. And we'll plug all those gaps along the way quite easily. So income is more about how you constructed the portfolio so it can sustain the income. The solutions are many. It's just what is best for you and where are we in the interest rate. And sustaining carries over to a lot of areas, right? Like sustaining could mean we need to have your portfolio sustained through a market decline because there's volatility. It needs to sustain. It needs to sustain through inflation because in one time period, inflation might be way up and then it might go way down. Sustaining might be like, oops, taxes are going crazy.

So what are some of those areas that you are watching, those indicators you're watching, so that you can make sure that portfolio is being sustained properly? So you just hit on a lot of things that really cover the planning process. So the planning process is you have to build a portfolio that is going to keep up with inflation. So it's as big of a risk to be too conservative and therefore not being positioned because bonds don't typically keep up with inflation too well. So if you're too conservative, you could be actually imploding your portfolio on a maintaining your purchase power basis. You've got to have growth, which stocks and leverage real estate are your primary growth factors. Leverage real estate is a little bit too risky sometimes for a retiree.

So you need stocks and then you just need defense so that the market. market crashes. Maybe you're only getting 15 or 20% of the crash and the rest is buying the dip. And that's the defined outcome, which was a whole episode that you did, you and I did earlier. So the way you do this is you have a great defined outcome portfolio, very proactive tax planning. And that tax planning might even go into your estate planning to maximize what's going to the kids and minimize the taxes. When you bring all that together, your income challenge. is solved within that process. So we design a plan that's going to work for your life. And we actually do things like longevity analysis. So this is where we figure out what your unique life expectancy is for everybody that has similar circumstances to you. So if you are a white individual and you have cancer in your family history and heart disease in your family history and you don't have longevity. in your family, your life expectancy might be less than the general population.

Now, that same individual that their parents lived until they were 95, they have no cancer, they have no heart disease, their chances of making it to 95 might be over 50%. And you've got to look at their spouse too. Let's say their spouse was an Asian woman who is healthy. She exercises every day. She eats her fruits and vegetables, which I don't. My report said I have to eat more fruits and vegetables. And she's got longevity in her family.

She might have a life expectancy of 98, 99. As a couple, the chances that one of them will live at least until 95 is well over 75%. The life expectancy tables say that you're going to live to you're about 83 or 84. Now, why do I bring all this up? You mentioned Social Security. You mentioned pensions. We've talked about private pensions. The first individual that has a short life expectancy should be making.

very different elections under all of those programs than this couple that has a long life expectancy. They're going to want to delay Social Security to optimize it. They'll pick up about 400,000 or more by optimizing versus taking it 62. They also will benefit greatly from a concept like private pensions because they're designed for people to run out of money about 85 and that's about the break even for the insurance company. So if you do a private pension and you hit till you're 95, you're the big winner. You should not have life insurance probably. Now, if you do, it should be cheap term because you're probably going to overpay because

you're going to live too long, whereas the first gentleman should be investing in life insurance to protect his family if he can get it. So doing these gives us guidance. It gives us guidepost to put the odds in the favor of our client instead of just blindly saying, here's the uniform standard table that applies to everybody because it doesn't apply to each client is unique and they have their unique life and you need to factor that in. You know, and unique and unique life means custom means it's not cookie cutter. And everyone, you're not just running through an assembly line going next, next, next,

next. So that's the power of someone like yourself who's independent, not working for some captured name you see on the news where it's like, oh, well, this is all we have an offer. So here you go. You can structure things based on what they need. And I think that's a huge takeaway for people to understand as well, right? Yeah, I think working with the fiduciary is very important, but it has to be a fiduciary that is actually acting as an advocate for you.

So in Laugh When the Market Crashes book that we have, we talk about being a financial advocate. And this is somebody that truly is in your corner and they're working hard to keep more of what you make in your pocket, to protect you from those things that can go wrong in life, whether it's a market crash, whether it's social security going broke, whether it's long-term care. So all these things that can affect you, they are your advocate to make sure you are prepared and you're ready and hopefully your position to thrive when things like a crash occurs. So it's a fun business because most of the people in this business really want to help people. They just have to make sure they get educated enough to be able to do it properly.

So when I was younger, I had great intentions, but I made mistakes. I invested my client's money and my money into things. I would never invest in today because somebody was teaching me to sell what they wanted to sell. And I thought they were giving good advice. Yeah. There's a big difference. So the wolves of Wall Street need to be avoided.

If you do that, planning is powerful. Well, if someone is wanting to avoid the wolves, of Wall Street and look at the blind spot potentially in their retirement income plan and not just have some lump sum. What's the best way that they can reach out and connect with you and learn more, Terry? Sure. So if they're wanting to work with us, reach out to us either at the law firm, which is www.com, or the financial firm, which is www.w.w.orgiaadvisors.com. If you're a do-it-yourself or just want to learn more, go to laugh when the market crashes.com and just pick up a copy of the book, it will give you a lot of this information and strategies.

Strategies change, of course. We have to keep it a little bit broad, but you'll have a lot of signposts there to actually implement in your portfolio with or without an advisor, but it's important to embrace these concepts. Perfect. Well, Terry, it's been such a pleasure chatting with you during this series. Thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, thank you for having me, Mike. Have a great 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.

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