2021

Episode 124: Telling the PG-Rated Story About The Retirement Crisis With Doug Orchard

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Prior guests on the show have expressed a desire for someone to objectively talk about the retirement crisis and the positive role annuities can play in solving it. That person has arrived. Today, we talk with Doug Orchard, an independent film maker who is about to release “The Baby Boomer  Dilemma” at a theater near you. And our guest host this week is none other than Bruno Caron.

Links mentioned in today’s show: http://dougorchard.com/wp/

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The discussion is not meant to provide any legal, tax, or investment advice with respect to the purchase of an insurance product. A comprehensive evaluation of a consumer’s needs and financial situation should always occur in order to help determine if an insurance product may be appropriate for each unique situation.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Paul Tyler:

Prior guests on the show have expressed a desire for someone to objectively talk about the retirement crisis, and the positive role annuities can play in solving it. That person has arrived. Today, we speak with Doug Orchard, an independent filmmaker, who’s about to release the Baby Boomer Dilemma at a theater near you. And our guest host this week is none other than Bruno Caron. We want to thank our primary sponsor and my employer by day, Nassau Financial Group, our tagline is working harder to be your carrier of choice. We support you with best in class service. We seek to keep things simple and will have your back in the years to come. We’re headquartered in Hartford, Connecticut with 27 billion in assets, and over a half a million policy holders. We’ve been doing this a long time, 170 years, but we remain humble enough to always try to improve.

Intro:

Welcome to That Annuity Show the podcast that will make you an expert in explaining annuities to your clients. Give us 30 minutes each week, and we’ll shave hours from your client presentations. Now here’s your host, Paul Tyler.

Paul Tyler:

I just all Tyler and welcome to another episode of That Annuity Show. Ramsey, great to see you this morning.

Ramsey Smith:

Great to be here as always and very excited about today’s guest and our guest host Bruno.

Paul Tyler:

Yeah, our guest hosts, Bruno.

Bruno Caron:

Ver…

Paul Tyler:

Bruno Caron, how are you? Welcome.

Bruno Caron:

Well, thank you, and appreciate the, again, the opportunity to be a guest host, especially with the guests we have today, which I have a pleasure to introduce. His name is Doug Orchard. He is an award winning filmmaker, cinematographer, and director. He’s directed many movies including The Truth About the Pandemic Flu, The Motivation Factor, revenue credit, sorry, Revenue Reserve Fasting. And he’s here today to discuss his new documentary, The Baby Boomer Dilemma. So, Doug, welcome.

Doug Orchard:

Hey, thank you very much. I actually brought a clip of the trailer, so maybe you want to watch that right now. It would probably be helpful.

 

Paul Tyler:

You know what? I’m going to cue this up because first of all, Doug, thanks for joining us. And I’ve never seen a documentary like this. So, with that, I’m going to cue this up, and fasten your seat belts this is going to be a great show.

Edward Siedle:

If you’re counting on a pension being there when you retire, you should be aware that there are consultant corporations are busy hiring to figure out how to screw you out of your pension benefit. And that’s what’s happening across the world right now.

William F. Sharpe:

And it’s scandalous, and it’s creepy.

Robert C. Merton:

Everybody seems to like a pension. If you doubt that, try taking it away from them and you see how people react.

Brigitte C. Madrian:

Those are a risky type of retirement plan to operate because you don’t have a lot of certainty today about what your obligations will be in the future.

Ted Benna:

Well, most people refer to me as the father of 401K because I designed… Got an internal revenue approval of the first 401K statements plan.

Speaker 11:

I don’t want to do what my father’s family did. I don’t want to do that.

Speaker 12:

I know lots of people have a 401K and it works really well.

Sheryl Moore:

When the.com bubble burst, my 401K became a 201K. I did not know that you could lose money in a 401K.

Speaker 14:

I’m ready to retire. We have all of our money, and then the crash happens.

Speaker 15:

The reality is that you chose the risk based option, where money was in the market.

 

 

David Babbel:

You give the burden of planning retirement, place it upon the shoulders of the person who knows the least. I think it was a disaster.

Brett Kitchen:

There’s got to be a better way to try to save for retirement than using something where half your money can disappear almost overnight, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Moshe A. Milevsky:

And what’s been happening over the last few years is, yes, our accounts have been growing. It looks like we’re getting wealthier, but the income that we can get from that sum of money is shrinking.

Tom Hegna:

Retirement is so much different, and the advisors need to shift to become income experts, and retirement income experts, and risk managers.

David M. Walker:

You have to figure out what are you going to get from social security Medicare.

Olivia S. Mitchell:

It’s been estimated that of social security will run out of money, not entirely, but it will run out of money such that benefits will have to be cut by one third for everyone, current retirees, future retirees.

Michael J. Gallagher:

What is often underappreciated is that doing nothing and really politicizing the issue is a way of doing nothing will result in a massive cut to everybody’s social security benefit.

Paul Tyler:

Okay. Wow. First of all, I’ve never seen anything like this Ramsey, or Bruno on the issues that we care most about. Have you have either of you?

Bruno Caron:

No, I agree, Paul.

Ramsey Smith:

No.

Bruno Caron:

Your platform has always been top notch and I’m personally the one who always gets those issues. So I understand completely.

 

 

Ramsey Smith:

Yeah, it was fantastic to watch for a number of reasons. For one thing, there are a lot of familiar faces in the video. So there are a lot of people that we know from the industry that we’ve had as guests here on That Annuity Show. And it was really a very good mix of people in the industry talking about what they know, and then sort of the dramatic backdrop with the family you brought into the process. Doug. So, thank you for putting it together. I think it’s a very important issue.

Bruno Caron:

Absolutely.

Doug Orchard:

Thank you very much.

Bruno Caron:

Yeah. Congrats on [crosstalk 00:06:19] this incredible achievement. To Ramsey’s point, so many top familiar facing are from the academic world, from the sales side, from the industry, I think it really, really rounds it well, and brings across the right message.

Ramsey Smith:

So, Doug, the big question I have is you’ve been a documentary filmmaker for quite some time. We had a chance to talk to you ahead of the podcast and your journey’s been a remarkable one. What brought you to this specific topic? What made you bring your talents to this specific issue, and motivated you to put so much time, and energy into this project?

Doug Orchard:

So, back in 2018, I made a documentary called The Power Of Zero, and that looked at the national debt. And it also looked at the question of, should we, if taxes have to go up as a consequence of our excessive spending over the last couple decades, should we be shying away from paying taxes today and pay them later if taxes going to be higher later than they are today? So, that film really looked at that question. When it was complete, Tom Hegna and quite a few other people in the industry asked if I would make a retirement movie, one that really looked at retirement income. And for the past three and a half years, there’s been a lot of talk, and discussion about the framework, how that would look, but it never really got me to the point I was ready to pull the trigger.

Doug Orchard:

And so what happened is there was a nexus of two things that got me really interested. One, was for another movie that will be coming out early next year, called M&A it’s the big film about mergers, and acquisitions. Baby boomers own the vast majority of all small businesses that are three employees or more representing $10 trillion, and only 20% of businesses in that framework ever sell successfully. And so you’re looking at roughly eight trillion that are going to go up in smoke when the baby boomers retire, because they won’t be able to pass it on to anybody. And so that was interesting. And one of the economists for that movie, who’s not in this film, he wrote a book called Prosperity in the Age of Decline back in 2013. And he’s a forecaster, he and his brother, and a good one. Past decade or so, they’ve had a 98% success rate forecasting in six months or a year from now, what the economy’s going to look like, whether you should have inventory.

Doug Orchard:

So, the big companies of the world hire them to say, “Hey, should we be increasing inventory or not?” Well, since 2013, he has looked at the demographic problem and said, “The United States of America will be going into a great depression to a depression in the year 2030”, and why, because of the demographic, underfunding problem associated with social security is the reason. Social security will not have enough money to pay the monies owed. And when that occurs, everyone’s going to reexperience a haircut as that trailer showed. Now, it may not be a third, but it really doesn’t matter what it is. Any haircut with that volume of people, because these retirees who receive guaranteed in income spend 99% of it every single month, those are what Tom Hegna calls playchecks. So they spend all their money each month. So they’ll have less money to spend. So if it’s 10% less, that’s a 10% reduction that goes in to our nation’s GDP.

Doug Orchard:

So, structurally in 2030, we have a depression as a nation it’ll last at least six, or seven years. And it’ll be very, very significant. Well, as I learned about annuities, and I had this conversation that was absolutely convincing was, for me, with a professor from Wharton, Dr. David Babbel, who he had me sit on his couch with him before I interviewed him, and spend hours with me actually going over these charts that he created for me to convince me that this is a message that absolutely needs to get out there. Because he knew that I was very independent, and this film could be anything it’s going to be in. And he spent serious time with me. And he absolutely convinced me that, of what happens when you have guaranteed income that’s not dependent on the government or someone else like that, or a pension falling short.

Doug Orchard:

If you had that essential needs met by the annuity, and all the baby boomers were to do this over the next couple years, let’s think about what would happen. 2030 rolls around, and they have to do a haircut on social security, you can spend every penny still on that annuity, and you’re fine. We would not experience as a nation, what will absolutely happen if we don’t do this. And so I’m always interested in what will move the needles for society. And I make films only when I think that this is something that could be important, because my films tend to last a long time, because it’ll be sitting there for a decade on iTunes, and Amazon and all that stuff.

Doug Orchard:

And so you want it as relevant 10 years from now as now, but I can’t think of anything that has a greater likelihood to prevent what demographically, and math shows will happen. You can’t… Once you look at this problem, you come to the conclusion, “Oh, wow. We really will experience a depression.” It’s unavoidable. I mean, and so his whole book is about prosperity and age of decline. Here’s how you sell your assets before that happens, and how you buy a bunch of stuff cheap later and all that. But I’m more interested in the question of how do we prevent this, because that will decimate so many people if that were to happen.

Bruno Caron:

And wasn’t there an argument in your movie about economists sometimes disagreeing on one single topic, but on that particular one, actually agreeing if I’m not mistaken.

Doug Orchard:

I could not find disagree agreement in that entire state of academia on the point of the value of pulling resources together, people together for the distribution of their retirement assets. It is considered the most efficient way to distribute assets in wealth. That’s something no one disagrees on. Now what percentage of your income should be there? and which kinds of products? Sure. A lot of thoughts there, but on that principle, there’s no disagreement. And yet you would think that there’s disagreement based on what’s out there on how people talk about annuities, and of course, that’s the message I had been receiving, I’m 52, my entire life. To the point, and I’ve been in this space for a while in that I keep touching into the financial advisor world since 2004, I keep kind of being introduced, doing something there that I’m out and I’m doing other things. And in one of my decisions early on in that I never saw anything to change my mind was, “Well, I’ll be in all these other assets, but I’ll never own annuity. Why would I own that?”

Doug Orchard:

And because it seemed like everybody, that was the general conclusion. That was the general conclusion of everyone. It just seemed like, “Oh yeah, you don’t own annuity. That’s just [inaudible 00:14:15].” And then when I look at the people who actually have spent their entire lifetime, looking at that question at the highest level from MIT to Stanford, all the way through Wharton, and these are the individuals who not just have PhDs, and dissertations on it and published on it, but had been recognized, and received a Nobel prize for it in the space. Okay, so this is the top of the top. All of them have annuities. I didn’t, and I used the word all without any check. All of them have annuities and they don’t have to. They have enough, they’ve been doing well. They don’t have to. All of them have annuities. And so that is the one thing that I thought, “Well that maybe I don’t understand it.” And I didn’t.

Bruno Caron:

Would it…

Paul Tyler:

Okay. So we’ve had a number of people on our show, Doug, come on and say, “We got to do better job talking to consumers telling our story. Oh, wow. Here’s this movie. By the way, that’s right, it’s PG. Maybe just explain to us, what does it mean to have a rating with a movie? What does that enable you to do that others may not have been able to do, to tell a story to a broader audience?

Doug Orchard:

Right? So the Motion Picture Association, people will always say of America, it’s actually just the MPA now. They try to be international, but the MPA has a group called CARA, C-A-R-A. And that’s the part, that’s the division that does the ratings. So they have individuals that look at films to give it a rating. And that’s required if you’re going to play in a theater, you have to have a rating. You can’t be in a theater without a rating, that’s required. And so they also have people on that team who have one specific job, and that is, should this movie be here to receive a rating? Well, what are things that we would get that would be disqualified from being there? Well, the number one, the very first thing is corporate infomercial. If it’s an infomercial, if it’s a corporate video, if it’s a sales pitch for something, a product or whatever company, it can’t be there, it would be gone. And so you think, “Well, wait a second, I’ve seen a movie about Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, he’s with Apple.”

Doug Orchard:

Like how did they do a documentary on Steve jobs? Well, and trust me, I’ve studied this probably more than almost anybody, because I was interested in doing things in spaces that were really close. How do you do that? Well, Steve jobs is a film about Steve jobs. It’s an artistic look at him. It’s not a film about Apple. If you were to make that same movie and say, this is a film about Silicon valley, this is a film about… So you have Apple, you have Microsoft, and you look all this stuff. And then Steve’s in it, and Bill Gates, and that would be turned down, but it was about Steve Jobs, and it was an artistic treatment of him. And so the Motion Picture Association is interested in art. So when you’re an artist, you have a different lens that you’re looking at a question about. And if you go look at documentaries and you stack rate all of them, and by the way, this past year, you would have probably close to 14,000 documentaries that were submitted to Sundance Film Festival.

Doug Orchard:

That’s how many happen every year that think that they’re the caliber to be at Sundance 14,000 of them. How many of those are rated by the Motion Picture Association? Almost none. 99.9, whatever percent of all documentaries do not have a rating by the Motion Picture Association. Why? Because they’re infomercials. That’s what they are. It’s not that there’s a huge cost associated, there’s a cost, but it’s not nearly as much as my music, and all these other things cost. The issue is they can’t get a rating because they’re infomercials. And so at the outset, I tell everyone, this is going to be rated by the Motion Picture Association. What does that do for me as a filmmaker? It means I get to be objective. Nobody gets to tell me, “Oh, this has to be in it, all that stuff.” No, sorry that can’t be in it because, and it allows me to make films in the space that I’m interested in making them, and I want to stay there. Why? Because I’m still young. And I want to do a lot more of these. And I don’t want someone to have a problem later.

Doug Orchard:

I’ve never had a problem with anybody in any of my movies later say, “Oh, I wish I wasn’t in that movie. It didn’t turn out the way I thought it was going to be”, that ended up being a infomercial for this. So, that hasn’t happened to me because I take that approach. But what you asked the question, what does it allow you to do, because it’s rated? Again, it qualifies it to play in all the motion, all the theaters in the country. So a person could, upon getting the license and license for any movie is the same, it’s $300 to get a license, to play a one time showing. You get a license, and you can do an event, and have that play at your local theater, and have total confidence it’s going to play. They might have sub questionnaire. You might forward it over to me, and it takes a nanosecond. I sent it right back and they just see the links. Here’s where it’s rated by the Most Picture Association. It’s already done. And we go from there.

Ramsey:

So, Doug, that is a remarkable journey. So we lost Paul for a second, but I think we should keep going, because I think he’ll come back in. So I want to touch a little bit on this issue of independence. So I just, again, thinking about your journey, you were introduced to this, you were a skeptic, you thought I’m going to make a film about this. You had to get it funded, but it sounds like you had complete artistic license here to do this, to do this the way you wanted to do it, address the questions you thought you needed to be asked, and answer them accordingly. Is that accurate?

Doug Orchard:

Yeah, it is. What happened was I received, and I do get almost every week as someone calls me about a film, David McKnight referred two individuals, they’re the authors of Wealth Beyond Wall Street, Brett Kitchen, and Ethan Kap. He referred them to me because they had for the past several years about doing some type of documentary, and they called to interview me about doing it, because he says, there’s really only one person to talk to, which was great that he said that. And then there was the… I had to do this dance, right? Because they were interested in doing this, but I had to get them from that to saying basically you don’t know what you want. Let me tell you what you want. What you really want is just raise and give me some money. So I could go make a movie, and you have no say in it, and you’re going to be happy about it in the end. Now that takes a little bit of effort.

Doug Orchard:

I’ve done that for a corporation, had a full board, and let me do tell you it’s a little bit of a sales pitch. People have to trust you. And that’s why it’s super important that that, I mean, you bank on all your movies, in your last film, if you mess up that is over. So what they did is they actually held a podcast like this, invited agents to listen in, and they did a crowdfunding thing and said, if you want to be an executive producer it’s 15 grand, and your name’s on the beginning and end. And you can help propel this. There are individuals who are barely, barely doing much. There are a few in the space, but felt strongly, this message [inaudible 00:21:43] go out, and they plunked out 15K.

Doug Orchard:

Four days, four days, that was fully funded of the slots they had. And then later there was a second thing for contributing producers. It was a similar thing. It was 10K and it was four days as well.

Paul Tyler:

So, [crosstalk 00:21:57].

Doug Orchard:

And so there was no agreement that was between their parties. And then they just wired me money. There was no say, no one had any rights. They didn’t see it. The first time any of them saw it was at the film’s premier that was in Salt Lake City on October the 14th, I was shaking hands, taking pictures with them before. And one of them expressed he put 15,000 into this. He did individual and we’re all excited, but I’m just realizing no one in this room except for you seen it, huh? So…

Bruno Caron:

Well, I’m sure they…

Doug Orchard:

So, [crosstalk 00:22:31] yeah, I had complete autonomy in this film. So, I’m the blame. If there’s something in there, you don’t like.

Bruno Caron:

I’m sure there must have been…

Doug Orchard:

But who did review it? The experts in the movies, in that movie all reviewed it. The insurance commissioner Bill Sharp at Stanford, Olivia Mitchell at Wharton and Robert Merton, there at MIT, and Moshe Milevsky, York University. They were my review team. All right. I also had Brett Kitchen review it too with Ethan. I allowed them to see it. The only feedback I received was from Bill Sharp and Moshe Milevsky, they felt that the state of Florida was hit a little too hard, a little unfair to them. And so the version you watch today has a little thing in there that kind of fixed that, because I could have included something that… Because they had, the state of Florida in fairness hired those two individuals to create a viable annuity option and communicate that, that option’s there when they were to create an option for state employees in 2000, 2001, 2002, to switch from defined benefit plan over to a divided contribution plan.

Doug Orchard:

They had that option if they wanted to. And they could have selected annuities to grow in, and distribute from, and not have it just in mutual funds. They had those choices, they had 15 options. But in the first version of the film it was getting too detailed. There was just too much about… This film wasn’t about Florida’s thing. And so I kind of edited that out, but then they reminded me that should be in, but that was the only thing, and that was it. Otherwise, everybody gave it… They checked it all off. So there was a lot behind the curtain to get to that moment.

Ramsey Smith:

So what has been the reaction of the folks in the industry that’ve seen it? So, so far that the people that financed it and a lucky few were able to see the premier in Salt Lake City. What kind of feedback are you getting so far?

Doug Orchard:

Okay. So, way bigger than I thought you always hope, as a filmmaker, I can’t even tell you… As you can imagine, I think every artist doing anything, you always think, “Oh, this…”, You imagine big.

Ramsey Smith:

Sure.

Moshe A. Milevsky:

You just do. Then you check it down, but you do imagine big. And to be honest, it’s way better feedback than anything I imagine. And the first came from Moshe Milevsky, like what he said, and Olivia Mitchell, and Bill Sharp. Bill Sharp wants the moment this is sitting there on iTunes and everything, he wants the links, because he wants all of his colleagues at Stanford and the other universities to see it. They’re even, well I don’t want say until it happens, but…

Ramsey Smith:

Wait, we’re among friends here. It’s only us [crosstalk 00:25:34] and the That Annuity Show audience. Come on, man.

Doug Orchard:

There’s a possibility this will be curriculum required watching at these universities, okay. So…

Ramsey Smith:

Well, then.

Doug Orchard:

I’ll say it that way. But that happened with Motivation Factor. So I have that precedent [crosstalk 00:25:48] another film. And so it was great. For me, in the film, I invited, I don’t want to give away the film, but one of the professors, he passes away after I film.

Ramsey Smith:

Yeah.

Doug Orchard:

And I had 20 members of their family there at the premier and I invited out and that was really special. And to hear their feedback after, because you’re always a little like, “Is this okay?” And especially what I did with it. and yeah, it was huge, huge support from their family. I had about half the people in that audience made sure that they were just run of the mill individuals, watching the movie for the first time, no idea what this is really even about. But baby boomers, all of them, wanted to meet with somebody immediately and review what they’ve got, and do things around. And most of them had already decided, “Hey, I have this 450K here. I have this here. And they knew that has to be moved over to an annuity”, like that they knew. And so, hey, is there’ somebody, of course people are all matching up immediately, as you can imagine there. So, that I know will happen. It’s, again, I didn’t try to create. And when you watch it, it’s not a sales pitch.

Doug Orchard:

It is an accurate mirror of reality looking at social security pensions, 401Ks, and annuities. And those of you who do this for a living, you’ve had a long time to see that reality, but the average individual will never see that, right? They just won’t see it, but they get there in 85 minutes. You watch it and you absolutely see it. You understand 401Ks, aren’t all bad. There’s some positive stuff there, but wow is there ever a weakness? And that is shown. Social security. Hey, turns out social security has some really great points, but third of a haircut’s happening, it’s got to happen. It’s just going to happen. We aren’t raising taxes. I don’t know. I mean, that’s probably going to happen. So, adjust accordingly. Pensions. Okay. I mean, there’s not even time to talk about what this film covers in pensions, but, and who we have.

Doug Orchard:

I mean, I have the people. There’s really, I don’t know who else we could have got from who I had. I had other people, I had to cut a lot of interviews, tons of interviews didn’t make it into my film. And I don’t want to say their names. I don’t want to make them feel bad, but I do have one of them as a deleted scene when people buy this film at Reelhouse they get all these extra extended interviews now with it. And one of them is one of those fund managers for CalPERS. And what he said was fascinating. I’ll just tell you, I mean, he [crosstalk 00:28:52].

Ramsey Smith:

Yeah, let’s hear it [crosstalk 00:28:52]

Bruno Caron:

…hear it.

Doug Orchard:

He says that he did it for the state of New York’s pension fund and CalPERS and a bunch of them. Then he left that actuary side of the business and started just being a fund, it helped individuals. So, but he’s an actuary, and COVID happens, and he’s bored. And so he, because of the hat he wears, and who he is, he was able to go query 25 of the largest pensions, and a couple small one in the United States. So CalPERS, and all these other ones. And he got all their data of their returns of what that pension fund actually yielded from 1980 to 2020. So 40 years of data. And he says, if you look at any 20 year trach and even from 85 to 2005, or whatever, and he takes as an example, 2000 to 2020, and he’d like to start in 2020, because that of the year there was a monster separation from how corporate pension funds predict interest growth on those reserve funds that they have based on their future obligations, they were going to have to pay.

Doug Orchard:

What return are they going to estimate that they’re going to receive for that payout that they have in the year 2040? Well, throughout the history of corporate pension funds, and public pension funds, it has always been the US treasury rate. A little bit of corporate rates, but essentially that’s the rate they went off of, because they had to pay that you will and project this, oh, look at the average return of the stock market perfectly throughout the history, and now sequence or returns, all these things coming. But yeah, [inaudible 00:30:51] …average growth, so that means we’re going to… You would never do that because this is something you actually have to pay. That’s just a sales pitch, right? That other idea, that’s not truth. There’s no reality for distributing money with that average return on the stark market.

Doug Orchard:

As I learned that with this film, that really was frustrating to me. And I’ll explain why later, but maybe if we get to it, because I experienced that myself in a bad way. So, they went off of treasury rates, but in the year 2020, we saw such changes from the 1980 in the corporate tax code, right? Those 20 years. Corporate tax rates went from 45% down to… Anyway, basically, you put a dollar into it you’re able to write off half of it as a write off putting money into a pension fund. So the federal government essentially was subsidizing half of your contribution into pension funds. If you want to think it like that. And of course that was also their own individual’s executives paychecks, too. So they were always happy to do that. And the other thing in 1980 was interest rates were like 15% or something crazy number, right?

Doug Orchard:

So you were getting incredible growth, and you had it subsidizing in half by the federal government. Of course you want to do your pensions. Yeah, let’s go all day long. This is great. Well, that’s not the status today, right? I mean, it’s not at all. I mean, you’re sitting there at 2%, and corporate tax rate’s 21%, and like, ugh. That’s the last place you want to put it. So corporations ran away from it, and people go, “Oh, well Mitt Romney and the whole all that stuff was going, they wanted to steal it.” There were anecdotal little things here, and there, but the whole story was what I just told you. That was the whole story that, and when Arissa came around, it was about financially being obligated if you can’t make that pension payment personally, like the corporation, like you’re opted [inaudible 00:33:03] bankruptcy, you’re not protected, and all that stuff.

Doug Orchard:

Arissa did all that. So from Arissa, 1974, forward, that wounded it for new ones. But the existing ones, they still were happy to be in that space, they were there, and then they’re no longer happy. So by the year 2000, corporations were getting out of it fast and they were all switching over the state of Florida, decided to get in on that same thing too, and create an option. They kept it, but they tried to get everybody to, if they could, move over to a defined contribution plan. But most of the states did something else instead. So, corporations, they stayed with that treasury rate, which are like 5.6%, 2000. And if you go to look to today, what did the states do? The states said, “Oh, we’re going to get 7.2%.” You’re going to get more than the treasury rate. Okay. All right. Well what have they done on? They did the US treasury, right? There’s not a 20 year trench from 1980 to present any 20 year trench where they did better than the US treasury rate at all when you take [crosstalk 00:34:12]

Ramsey Smith:

So, you’re saying that [crosstalk 00:34:14]

Doug Orchard:

That interview did not make the movie, but it’s in the bonus footage. It was fascinating.

Ramsey Smith:

Right. So the results of the study were that in fact, despite taking more risk, right? So justifying the higher expected rate of return by taking more risk, the average pension fund based on the sort of 20 year periods did not actually outperform the treasury rate when all was said and done?

Doug Orchard:

Correct.

Ramsey Smith:

Got it. And which contributes to why so many of them are underfunded today.

Doug Orchard:

Well, actually, yes, to that, but the other thing that the film points out that, this is Bill Sharp in the movie, and this is what he’s doing right now with Stanford, [inaudible 00:34:55] So as credible as it can be, he says that when the CalPERS says “You were only 75% funded?” That’s based on that 7% number when everyone else right now is saying, it’s two.

Ramsey Smith:

Right.

Doug Orchard:

So, these are… It’s worse. [crosstalk 00:35:17]

Ramsey Smith:

Pictures, even worse than the [crosstalk 00:35:18]

Doug Orchard:

…if you have a client, who’s got a pension, and they got social security, and they do those two numbers and they go, “Look at it”, I look at my pension number and it says, my benefit is X. And social security says it’s Y that means Z means I make this, which is all I need. Okay, now go back and take a third off social security. And let’s really look at this pension. And that’s not something you can really do without probably getting in hot water. They need to watch the movie themselves, and they’re going to need to go back and look at this. And wow, when they do, they might be doing a half of a haircut. They’re going to have to do some haircut off of that to safely do it. And that difference, that gap, they’re going to need to fill in with an annuity so that they’re guaranteed of their needs are now met.

Doug Orchard:

And that’s what I would do. Otherwise, it’s a little bit risky. I mean, how do you sit there, and you’re in the state of Illinois and say, “Oh, I’m good. I’m a teacher. It’s going to be fine.” Or Ohio, or Kentucky, or, I mean, for the baby boomer for the power of zero, I interviewed David M. Walker, and David Walker had just done what Bruno’s always up to. And looking at those numbers for the rating, and he was doing it for, I think he was doing it for Standard & Poors. It was his assignment. And he had looked through those, and he stack ranked the worst states. And number one was Illinois. Number two was Kentucky. And then you went over to New Jersey, and New York. And then eventually like seventh or sixth was California.

Doug Orchard:

Well, California is pretty bad, how’s it not… Well because they have such a huge tax base that they can draw from, that’s why. And they’re just assuming they’re going to just fix it by taxing new taxes way more, and do all this stuff. And that’s why they’re not quite as bad, but the numbers of course are the biggest there. And since then, we’ve seen this massive flight from California. Of course, he says that I was a citizen. I was in California when he told me this. Three months later, I am now living in Florida. I moved!

Ramsey Smith:

Because of that? Was there a cause and effect there?

Doug Orchard:

There was.

Ramsey Smith:

Really?

Doug Orchard:

Yeah, absolutely. I know it’s coming.

Bruno Caron:

Obviously, [crosstalk 00:37:33]

Doug Orchard:

It has to come. It has to come. There’s no ifs. That hole is so huge. And my dad, by the way, is on CalPERS. And so CalPERS gets a nice little dig in the movie because it’s my dad, and he’s 84, and he’s living a hundred percent off that pension and social security. Except some money, he’s got an account. He watched the movie and he goes, “Hey, Doug, I need to move like this much over to an annuity.” Yeah, probably [inaudible 00:38:00] So, yeah, he saw it. He saw it. 84 years old, electrician. It was clear as could be.

Bruno Caron:

So, obviously…

Ramsey Smith:

Bruno, you had a question?

Bruno Caron:

Through your movie, you talk about the pension, social securities, and social security, and annuities. And I think it’s really striking that none of the time we talk about assets, or asset management or assets under management, whatever you define in many of your guests, and your interviewees are talking in terms of about wealth, in terms of income, not into terms of assets. Can you expand a little more on that particular element?

Doug Orchard:

I found that really, really interesting. And to be on honest with you, that was something that was innate to me because in the nineties, I was a big tech recruiter. I made more placements than anyone else did in 1995. I did lot consulting. I formed a streaming media company. ’99, 2000, my stock was worth 28 million bucks. I watched when the dot-com bomb happened in ’99 or 2000, when the second shoe dropped, I was at Comdex in their booth being profiled as the storage and streaming solution for video at Comdex in Cisco’s booth. So everyone wants to take us out for dinner. Everything’s great, but there’s no US president at the time. The hanging Chad incident, is it Gore, was it Bush? And the market just that week, that was the week. I was at Comdex, and it just went, boom. That was the other shoe.

Doug Orchard:

It had happened in April. And then it was the other one. I remember it very, very well. And I ended that experience watching 90% of all my money that I’d saved that entire decade, doing the best decade of my life, never, ever replicated what I accomplished when I was a 25 year old whiz kid, right? Everybody told me Tom Sullivan was on the radio, I remember. Hey, when you’re young, you want to put it in high risk because you got time to make it up. You know what, Tom? You were wrong. I never made it up. I don’t have $28 million sit in the bank right now, right? I’ve never been able to make it up. You lose 90%, you don’t make it up. You don’t put all of your assets at risk, high risk. It’s stupid. That is bad advice. Stop giving that bad advice, people. So it decimated me. I caught it in 2008, I’m that person that keeps catching it now different, never going to… Very different.

Doug Orchard:

So I experienced it. And of course, a lot of that was in the four, not all, but that which was in the 401K I actually needed access to. And I paid the fees, whatever, and that was it. I was like, “Who cares about that?” What did I want? I wanted my house paid off. I wanted to be in a situation that I had essentially this net, like this core net and I’ve had plenty of experiences with friends, and family, and people. They got cancer. Certain things happened along the way. And that gravy chain ended, instantly, like one day just ended. And as you age, we see the statistics, the statistics are your disability, all these things will happen, like statistically, more so than death. So running out of money is the problem. Income is the solution. You need income. Nobody cares about a big fat asset. Your fat asset can be taken away a lot of ways, pretty easily. Asset protection. I also moved to Florida because it’s the asset protection state. So that’s why OJ moved here. That’s why it has like all the con people move here too.

Doug Orchard:

You got all these legitimate people who want to protect their money, and you got all those other sides too. It’s an interesting state, Florida, but that’s what it’s about. It’s about income. And what I found is when people know that their income is there, there’s a happiness, a peace that’s there. And you see elderly when they hit a certain age experience, a happiness in life that exceeds twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, all those years. And you’re like, “Well, why is that?” Because they’re waking up and they’re in pain. And their body’s just getting worse and worse. The one thing they can count on is more pain, a year from now than they have right now. How is that something to be happy about? And yet they’re happy because they’ve got that figured out. They’ve adjusted and that’s where they’re living. And that’s done. Even those who are just on social security, that’s done, they’re mentally, they’ve adjusted.

Doug Orchard:

So it is what matters. And that is the message. And we haven’t been talking about that message, but by the film, the bonus footage that wasn’t in the movie, I have Robert Merton talking about the Secure Act, and how that will become law to show at least what the income is off of your big pile of money. But that big pile money by itself, without it being converted in safety and guaranteed in some type of income, it’s nothing. It’s as it’s as real as that $28 million stock was for me.

Ramsey Smith:

So, that’s… So, one, we always look for sound bites. So big fat asset is clearly one of those. But I think it’s amazing that you literally moved like this… You were moved by this process of making this movie, and you literally moved to Florida as a result. That’s remarkable [crosstalk 00:43:55]

Doug Orchard:

Bear in mind, the people I talked too, I could text back and forth. They really are the top of the food chain. It’s an interesting situation to be in that I’m in right now. And there’s one thing when people say things, either they’re being interview it’s on the news or this, or that, it’s in the film. It’s another thing when you’re eyeball to eyeball with David Walker, the cameras are off, and he’s talking to you and he’s moving from the state of Connecticut, and kind of relieved he wasn’t voted to be the governor because of its problems there. And he’s encouraging you to do the same out of California.

Doug Orchard:

And he wanted to go to Florida, by the way, that was his top choice. He actually went to Jacksonville in college and stuff. He and his wife, that’s where they wanted to go, but they had family and stuff in Virginia. So it was a better choice. So he relocated down to Virginia, but he said, “Yeah, I made the right choice.” And I’m not saying Florida, I don’t want everyone to move here, but you know what I mean? There are some situations that are pretty bad, and for me it made the difference. It made the difference.

Ramsey Smith:

The other thing is, it sounds like you could make another movie out of those outtakes.

Doug Orchard:

I [crosstalk 00:45:10] I could on every [crosstalk 00:45:12].

Ramsey Smith:

…or build around it.

Doug Orchard:

…I like to kind of move on, but yeah, there’s stuff for other people to do. It’s really…. What I’m trying to do with this film, I guess, now that it’s done, what do I want to happen with it is I’d like it to be a flag that people can wave and solve the miscommunication problem that exists up until now. It’ll be over. Someone watches that film they’re not going to criticize annuities, like has been done in the past. They’re not, they can’t, they won’t. Someone who has, like me, you would watch that film like, “Oh, wow. I was mistaken. I get it now.” Why do they do that? First off, it’s not data. I mean, if we had like three hours, I would go into the neuroscience associated with why we make our decisions. This is something that I studied for four years, the Neurosciences Institute, not as a student, just as a professional guy who happened to live there in that area, and going back, and forth with them.

Doug Orchard:

And I study deeply neuromarketing, but why we make our choices that we make and how do you present stuff so that people make the choice you want them to make. Like video enables you to do that. Ken Burns a famous documentary filmmaker did civil war, a lot of great, great historical documentaries. He’s the best in that space. He’s just awesome. Ken said that documentary filmmakers, as an example, have a great responsibility because you have so much there that you can tell any story you want. You can tell any story you want. I mean, and he talked about the ethics needed, and associated with being a documentary filmmaker, because you’re documenting ideally, that’s what you’re supposed to do.

Doug Orchard:

And that’s why so many of them aren’t rated by the Motion Picture Association is because they’re not doing that. And they have no interest in doing that because they can’t figure out how to be in this space, and have a funded without somebody who does control the message, driving that. And that’s been the problem with a lot of Hollywood films, too. That’s a whole nother topic, but China absolutely have completely control over the money now, and have review rights of those scripts. And that’s been going on for a long time. This was five years ago covering the Wall Street Journal. And I remember just being, understanding why it’s certainly this way. You see nothing negative about that country at all. Like a film that is American, it’s all negative. So, I use that as an example, because I think most people get that is so many films now are like that.

Doug Orchard:

So here’s a movie on the topic people are, that you guys care about, that was actually done in an objective way. This is how it would look at the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or whatever else, if they didn’t have that somebody sitting there kind of going, “Hey”, if they didn’t have that, this is the message. This is how this would look. This is how everything would look. I’m not affiliated. I have this zero connection with your industry. If this whole industry makes a billion dollars in sales in the next year, I make zero. Nothing. I’m not affiliated by anybody. There’s nothing. Okay. Nothing, nothing at all. And so I make money when people buy a movie, that’s it. And that’s it. I don’t even own stock [crosstalk 00:48:56]

Doug Orchard:

So, that’s what this is really about. It’s about communicating something, what I want this to be and what I’m hoping the industry does right now is wake up and go, “Okay, we have this moment to fix the miscommunication, to debunk the wrong messages that have been happening. This is our moment.” How do we do this? Well, this needs to be playing in theaters. Everybody [inaudible 00:49:22] So baby boomers should know about this. You get a 100,000 agents to share this with 800 people, that’s 80 million people. That’s 80 million [inaudible 00:49:28] …done. It’s done. Now 40 million of them need to hear about it, so 400 each. There we go.

Bruno Caron:

Oh, we’ll settle for half, so that’s good.

Ramsey Smith:

So let’s talk about distribution. So how do you plan to get this film out to the agents, who will get it out to their clients? Or how do you plan to get it in the theaters? what’s the next phase?

Doug Orchard:

Okay. So there are some groups, some IMOs, or insurance companies that are approaching me and I’m inviting them to approach me, to host a special online event for their individuals in which I will set something up that their agents can just preview this for free. Costs nobody anything, they can see it. One day only. There you go. In absence of that, they need to look the film up at reelhouse.org. And I can give you a link, but reelhouse.org, they just look up the film there, and they can pay $29.99 and own it. And they could watch it that way. Or wait in the middle of June, January, it’ll be on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play. And about a month later, it’ll be everywhere else. Like all the cable, all the video on demand, places that no documentaries are, it’ll be there.

Doug Orchard:

I’ve been assured by the distributor, I have a real distributor, the distributor for films. I landed as high as I can go for this movie. That it’ll be one of those top seven slots in iTunes. You’ll see James Bond, and this, and this, and this, and then The Baby Boomer Dilemma. The only documentary that will be sitting there, there it is. So this is a big deal, okay? This is not like some little small corporate video. I just want everybody to get this, to understand what is happening, and this is the moment. It’s a great time to be talk, selling annuities, okay? And so I’m trying to work with this industry and say, “Hey, this would be the moment to push this.” And it’s a new release. So it’s $29.99 online all the way until April, because it’s playing in theaters the whole time. Some agents are paying the 300 bucks and hosting it, don’t have to, others will go to boomermovie.com, boomermovie.com.

Doug Orchard:

And there’s like some different options, you can buy gift cards in bulk, and hand out this DVD sized gift card with a poster on the front and instructions on the back that has a coupon code, and it takes the price down to zero. So the person that you give it to will go in type in Boomer Movie/access, it takes them right to that spot at Reelhouse. And they enter the coupon code at zero, and it becomes zero for them. And they get the film, and they get the other eight extended interviews, and the deleted scenes that are there, which is, I don’t even know what it adds up to. I think it’s 260 minutes in total of everything. [inaudible 00:52:29] …a lot of good stuff. David Babbel’s interview alone is 42 minutes. And I’ll tell you that’s required viewing for everybody. I wanted every ounce of that in the movie, but you just can’t, and so there it is. Extended interviews from Robert Merton, and from Olivia Mitchell, and all those people. Moshe has stuff, really great stuff.

Doug Orchard:

So, it’s all there. It’s just the PhDs that are there and the insurance commissioner. And so that’s what they get, and of course you’re paying it out as the $20 off in bulk. You’re going to buy this something that’s reasonable. There’s also a DVD, Blu-ray that you could hand out that also comes with that gift card. Because when you hand that you don’t know if they are people that have Blu-ray’s, or DVDs, you don’t know if they’re online people. We really don’t know. So, any DVD Blu-ray comes with that as a package, you just hand the whole thing out. So, there’s that option. And then there’s like this mammoth of all those things put together where everything’s like cost per units ridiculously cheap, but it costs a lot. But those are the people that will make money with the film. And I think everybody should buy that one by the way. So, that’s what’s there. So there’s no excuse right now, none. This should be out there. Those gift cards I’m putting in the first orders today. So those are being, by Friday, the first ones will be going out.

Doug Orchard:

People will start being to hand them out. And the Blu-ray’s and that’ll be like middle of December and stuff by the time that process is done, and available. But that’s just where it is on timing. It’ll be in rent mode online after April. Like by May, it’ll be cheap like a normal rental six bucks, or whatever, five bucks, everywhere, but between now and then that’s how it is. And so the value add for an agent, if you want it to have that, wow factor, hand them out a thing and they see, they can go to iTunes. They will, by the time they get the cards, they’ll go to iTunes, and see it’s in preorder. They can even get it preorder for $29.99, or here’s this thing for free. So you really gave them something of value and then they’ll watch it. So that’s what it’s about.

Doug Orchard:

Getting people to see this and have them route back to you. I want that to work for you because will help with the film anyway. When it comes to getting a message out to a wide audience today it’s difficult, and the financial advisors are uniquely in a situation to cross the political spectrum. And as we are so divided, subdivided by everything, you’re working with this whole category. And so this is an important message. This message does include the debt problem as a country. I mean, it’s there. It’s definitely there. Every film I’ve ever made, that’s that’s my hot button. So it’s there.

Ramsey Smith:

That was something interesting you said, in preparing for this, is you said that you’re independent, you don’t adhere to one side or the other, but the national debt is, to use your words, is a hot button in absolutely everything you do. I thought that [crosstalk 00:55:37] was very interesting.

Doug Orchard:

That’s my issue. I’m not the abortion person. I’m not name the issues, that’s not me. I have my opinions or thoughts on these issues, but they won’t sway me. I’ll vote for anybody. But if you’re going to spend crazy money that we don’t have in the country, I’m not voting for you. And by the way, it’s been really hard to select a candidate for a while.

Ramsey Smith:

I was going to say, who are you going to vote for? Both sides are guilty.

Doug Orchard:

I’ve had issues going into vote, and not knowing when I’m going in, and what I’m going to do. And it’s just you just plug your nose, and who’s the worst. I don’t know. Okay, this one’s better I guess. And I’m always really happy who I voted for compared to the other option, or at least happier, but it should be a major issue. And that problem is on us as a people. It’s our fault. The reason politicians don’t address it is because we don’t want them to, as a people. We’re just blindly, foolishly spending more than we collect that doesn’t work for us at our house. It won’t work for us as the country. People say, “Oh, it’s modern economic three.” It’s not modern. It’s been tried before. Oh, but we have a central bank. Don’t be an idiot. It’s never worked. It’s never worked. It won’t.

Ramsey Smith:

Right. Well, there are some behavioral issues there, right? The hyperbolic discounting. Humans value what’s in the present, much more than they value what’s in the future. Implicitly, the future is discounted at a much higher rate than is actually applicable in the financial markets. And that’s, I think, that’s part of the reason why [crosstalk 00:57:14].

Doug Orchard:

…well, that’s the whole…

Ramsey Smith:

…we have these problems.

Doug Orchard:

That’s the whole point about this problem we have with the pile of money versus income, right? That’s the whole… Because there’s this illusion that you’re rich, according to Olivia Mitchell, “I got $100,000. Oh, I’m rich.” And then she says, well you can only buy about $650 a month with that, at this age. So you’re not exactly rich. But if you had $100,000, you might think you’re doing pretty well. I could spend it this way. I could spend it that way, same with a million bucks. And so it’s important that people really understand, and we do understand income. We don’t understand 30 trillion, 18 trillion of national debt, those numbers, that doesn’t mean anything to us. We’re spending more than a trillion, a trillion and a half. We bring in three, three and a half. We spend one, and a half, or we spend 10.

Ramsey Smith:

Yeah.

Doug Orchard:

That’s closer to what we actually did, but over five. We bring in three, three and a half, we spent five. That we could understand. Here’s a word problem, how many years can we keep doing that?

Ramsey Smith:

I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. Not forever, obviously, but I don’t know the exact number, because there’s lots of inputs that make it last a lot longer than all of us ever expect.

Doug Orchard:

Well, I think… Hopefully it makes it clear. I mean, David Walker did a great job really quickly explaining that it was… That in our national debt we have in there monies we owe social security. Literally remember we had a surplus for all those years?

Ramsey Smith:

Yeah.

Doug Orchard:

Well we took that and we gave it IOU. IOU this many trillion of dollars. Those trillions are sitting in that 30 trillion. We’ve given an accounting in that 30 trillion we owe. But what about all the years forward that we show we don’t have the money?

Ramsey Smith:

Yeah.

Doug Orchard:

All those years. That’s not reflected anywhere at all. And that is an accounting problem. That gap is called the fiscal gap. That’s fiscal gap accounting. And now we have most of Europe doing fiscal gap accounting. Japan does fiscal gap accounting, but we don’t. Why wouldn’t we do that? Why… Because isn’t that important communication and what would that number mean? And that’s where you’re over 100 trillion and that’s when you realize, and also pensions, you throw that in. That becomes worse. And so our problems are seven to 10 times worse than we are reflecting. And so that’s even worse, right? [crosstalk 00:59:58] So we’re going to have to make cuts because the reality of if we tax at 100% on every single body in America, it’s still not enough to address that.

Doug Orchard:

I mean, that’s what everyone needs to understand. Oh, we’re going to tax the rich. Oh, come on. If we communicated it correctly, we would just call these people out. If we had real media, they would call them out. Well, hey, okay. Well tax the rich, why don’t we just tax everybody 100%. Would that at solve it? Yes or no, president Biden? Math quiz for you president Biden, if we text everybody 100% of everything they make this year, would it be enough? And we just keep doing it for 10 years, all their money for 10 years, everybody, would it be enough? And the answer is no. And that was in the power of zero in 2018 before the COVID numbers.

Ramsey Smith:

Incredible. So, look, we’re almost out of time here. Bruno, I think you had a question you were going to ask.

Bruno Caron:

No, I just found it fascinating that the national debt has is your common denominator, and that has brought you through multiple documentaries and movies and all the way back to the importance of income, of lifetime income, and of annuities. And again, congrats to the movie. I’ve seen it. I thought it was fascinating. Extremely well done. Very professional high caliber people. So heavily recommend it.

Doug Orchard:

May I give a personal plea for a moment?

Bruno Caron:

Please?

Ramsey Smith:

Sure.

Doug Orchard:

My first documentary that I made was in 2009, called the truth about pandemic flu. In that movie, I had the world’s experts, who all said, we are going to have another pandemic. And they said, because we’ve had 10 the last 300 years, but we were due for a really big one. And the United States of America did not have, and were not prepared adequately for a pandemic. And what we needed were these FDA approved N95 general public use respirators, that actually block the minute particulate matter, not these face masks that everyone’s been wearing, that don’t work like those work, but those actually would be protection. All we needed to do. And the government needed to stockpile 65 billion, Time Magazine had done an article. It was all known. We didn’t do it. Obama didn’t do it. Trump didn’t do it. Biden’s not doing it. No one’s done it, right? No, one’s done it. Bush hadn’t done it.

Doug Orchard:

Clinton hadn’t done it. Nobody did it. But it was approved. Like they knew what they needed to do. They knew it was coming. It was 2009. 10 years later, it happens. Let me tell you how frustrated I was that nothing happened. And I did a film in 2014 revenue reserve. No one understands that what took us down were bad commercial loans. All right? That’s what took us down. Go back, and watch that movie go back, and look at what really happened. It was those bad commercial loans. So no one’s changed the behavior for what that is like. We’re just as vulnerable there. Motivation factor, I go that fast. I can say the same thing, power zero. And now we have this. Okay, we know there’s going to be a depression in the United States, but if we can just get baby boomers to make sure that their essential needs nuts met, that means the out spending would stay standard. And we wouldn’t have a depression in this country. That one thing, that’s it. That’s it. That’s it.

Doug Orchard:

It is so frustrating to go work with the best people. And I do this huge sales pitch to them, and I say, “Look, I’m putting this big effort out and we’re going to have this thing that’s going to be out there. Everyone’s going to see it, and we’re going to fix it. We’re going to fix it early. We’re going to fix it now.” I did that with of a movie about the pandemic. I’ve done that for a lot of different topics, and nothing happens. And it’s so frustrating. But at this moment we can change this. You’re financially incented, and that’s been missing for like everything I’ve had up until now, this one, you guys make money, good money, to promote this message, right? Like this, the stars I think are aligned this time that we could really fix something that absolutely is happening. We aren’t changing the behavior at the government level. So it’s going to be worse, and probably a little sooner than when we want it to be.

Doug Orchard:

But that number, that D-Day is happening. We’re going to unfortunately have this structural depression as a country. And 10 years before I did the pandemic thing. And it was 100 years after the last pandemic major pandemic that happens, and that little page site on that page where it showed 3M, and pasture pharma, the GPUs, the FDA approved things, two weeks before they said, we don’t need masks. I looked. There it was. Then the day they came out, everyone needs to wear a mask. I go look, and that section of that page was gone. They just took it out. That was the answer that America’s medicals… For failing to do what they’re supposed to do. That’s what that was their answer. We’ll just delete this little part of the page and let people just go put on the exact same thing they were putting on during the Spanish flu, and have them do the exact same thing that didn’t work then.

Doug Orchard:

And we have the exact same number of people died that happened then. So it’s frustrating. All right, it’s frustrating. So my personal plea is, please, please do this one. Even if you don’t want to spend a penny, then grab the social media icons, and at least share these things. Let the people know that this is out there, that it exists. It’ll benefit you, but let them know it exists. There’s nothing more that I can do that Robert Merton can do, that Olivia Mitchell… These people put in serious time, and David Babbel was dying, literally dying. And his pain level was off the chart. He would get up, and walk around the room. We’d come down. We’d interview for about two, three more minutes. He’d get up, walk around the room. And he was in extreme pain. You watch him. He has this beautiful smile on his face. He did amazing, knowing he was dying, he put the effort out. So please, this one matters.

Ramsey Smith:

All right, hard to top that. Doug, want to say, thank you, one, for making the movie. I thought it was a great movie, and for all the reasons we’ve talked about and hope that it gets the kind of reach that we’d all like to see it get. Want to thank Bruno for being a great guest host, and being a catalyst for bringing Doug onto the show. So thank you for that. And thanks to Paul. Paul is still with us, but unfortunately we can’t see him, but he’s assured me, he’s still been there with us the whole time. Look, we want to stay in touch with you, Doug. I think this is an important issue where we see things eye to eye. You’re a great communicator, right? That’s something that that… Our biggest challenge in this industry is getting the communication, right, and so we look forward to be remaining in partnership with you on a going-forward basis. And with that, thank you so much for joining us.

Doug Orchard:

Thank you.

Bruno Caron:

Thank you.

Outro:

Thanks for listening. If you’ve enjoyed the show, please rate and recommend us on iTunes, Stitcher, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also get more information at thatannuityshow.com.

Ashley SaundersEpisode 124: Telling the PG-Rated Story About The Retirement Crisis With Doug Orchard
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Episode 123: Getting Your Web and Social Presence Right With Robert Knop

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What’s the first thing we do today when we’re about to meet with someone for the first time? We Google them.

What do your clients find when they Google you? More often than not, your profile on major social media platforms like LinkedIn will come up before your own website.

Today, Robert Knop, CEO of Assist You Today, joins us to talk about the steps you should take to put your best foot forward in your potential client’s search results.

Links mentioned in today’s show:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertknop/

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The discussion is not meant to provide any legal, tax, or investment advice with respect to the purchase of an insurance product. A comprehensive evaluation of a consumer’s needs and financial situation should always occur in order to help determine if an insurance product may be appropriate for each unique situation.

Ashley SaundersEpisode 123: Getting Your Web and Social Presence Right With Robert Knop
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Episode 122: Getting Smart About Medicare Options With Ryan McMillan

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Brace yourself for another few months of continual Medicare ads on television during open enrollment. I can almost guarantee these ads will cause one of your clients to call you with questions about their coverage. Can you answer the question?

Today’s guest is Ryan McMillan, Vice President of Sales for Senior and Individuals at Bankers Fidelity Life Insurance Company.  Ryan will prepare you to at least help your client ask better questions this year and help them sort through a wide range of options.

Do you want to get regular updates on news from Ryan and other guests of our show? Scroll down and enter your email under “Receive Updates” to subscribe to our newsletter.

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Ashley SaundersEpisode 122: Getting Smart About Medicare Options With Ryan McMillan
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Episode 121: Helping Life Insurance Agents Explain Annuities with Jeff Affronti

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Many older clients who need life insurance can also benefit from annuities. However, many life insurance agents feel they lack the expertise to integrate annuities into a comprehensive plan.

Today, Jeff Affronti, President of FSD Financial Services shares his thoughts on how to best help life insurance agents identify opportunities for annuities and effectively present solutions to their clients.

Do you want to get regular updates on news from Jeff and other guests of our show? Scroll down and enter your email under “Receive Updates” to subscribe to our newsletter.

Thank you to our show sponsors; The Index Standard!

Fixed Index Annuities and RILAs are getting more complex and technical just when fiduciary rules are getting stricter. How do you choose the right index and allocate to them? The Index Standard is your answer. They are an independent provider ratings and forecasts on all indices and ETFs used in the US insurance space. Their process is systematic and unbiased, identifying robust and well-designed indices. We all know finance is complex and The Index Standard has a clear ratings system and uses approachable language to demystify this complexity. Visit theindexstandard.com for more information.

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The discussion is not meant to provide any legal, tax, or investment advice with respect to the purchase of an insurance product. A comprehensive evaluation of a consumer’s needs and financial situation should always occur in order to help determine if an insurance product may be appropriate for each unique situation.

Ashley SaundersEpisode 121: Helping Life Insurance Agents Explain Annuities with Jeff Affronti
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Episode 120: Riding the RILA Wave with David Hanzlik

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Registered Index-Linked Annuities or RILAs have taken the broker-dealer market by storm over the past several years. David Hanzlik, Vice President, Annuity and Retirement Solutions at CUNA Mutual joins us to reflect on the recent growth of the product and how it may evolve over the next 2 years.

Do you want to get regular updates on news from David and other guests of our show? Scroll down and enter your email under “Receive Updates” to subscribe to our newsletter.

Thank you to our show sponsor; CUNA Mutual!

Built on the principle of “people helping people,” CUNA Mutual Group is a financially strong insurance, investment and financial services company that believes a brighter financial future should be accessible to everyone. Through our company culture, community engagement, and products and solutions, we are working to create a more equitable financial system that helps to improve the lives of those we serve and our society. For more information, visit cunamutual.com/annuities.

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Ashley SaundersEpisode 120: Riding the RILA Wave with David Hanzlik
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Episode 119: Creating Authenticity, Innovation & Empathy In Insurance with Maria Ferrante-Schepis

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How can insurance carriers build an empathetic relationship with policyholders? How do we drive innovation in a stressful time within our companies and practices? Industry veteran Maria Ferrante-Schepis joins us today to share her view of the present and her hope for the future of the business. We hope you enjoy the show.

Links mentioned in the show:

Maria’s LinkedIn profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-ferrante-schepis-03b4031b/

Flirting With The Uninterested: Innovating In A “Sold, Not Bought” Category:
https://www.amazon.com/Flirting-Uninterested-Innovating-Bought-Category/dp/1599323699/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1632963818&refinements=p_27%3AMaria+Ferrante-Schepis&s=books&sr=1-1

Maddock Douglas:
https://www.maddockdouglas.com/our-team/maria-ferrante-schepis

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Ashley SaundersEpisode 119: Creating Authenticity, Innovation & Empathy In Insurance with Maria Ferrante-Schepis
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Episode 118: Finding Meaning and Making Money with H. Adam Holt

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Today, we catch up with one of our first guests, H. Adam Holt, CEO of Asset-Map to discuss a wide variety of topics. He gives us a sneak peek of an algorithm his firm will release that will find the hidden gaps in your clients’ retirement plans. We also talk about the commitment that Adam and his firm have made to supporting diversity and inclusion in the retirement advice platform ecosystem. We hope you enjoy the show.

Links mentioned in the show:

Adam’s company:
https://www.asset-map.com/

Adam and Derek’s podcast:
https://rethinkfinancialadvisorpodcast.blubrry.net/2021/07/01/1-rethink-change-is-coming/

Do you want to get regular updates on news from Adam and other guests of our show? Scroll down and enter your email under “Receive Updates” to subscribe to our newsletter.

Thank you to our show sponsor, The Index Standard!

Fixed Index Annuities and RILAs are getting more complex and technical just when fiduciary rules are getting stricter. How do you choose the right index and allocate to them? The Index Standard is your answer. They are an independent provider ratings and forecasts on all indices and ETFs used in the US insurance space. Their process is systematic and unbiased, identifying robust and well-designed indices. We all know finance is complex and The Index Standard has a clear ratings system and uses approachable language to demystify this complexity. Visit theindexstandard.com for more information.

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Show Sponsors

The discussion is not meant to provide any legal, tax, or investment advice with respect to the purchase of an insurance product. A comprehensive evaluation of a consumer’s needs and financial situation should always occur in order to help determine if an insurance product may be appropriate for each unique situation.

Ashley SaundersEpisode 118: Finding Meaning and Making Money with H. Adam Holt
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Episode 117: Matching Your Practice Model To Your Client’s Psychology with Wade Pfau and Alex Murguia

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Last week, we explored the psychology of building a retirement solution for a client that not only delivers results, but also adapts to the personality traits of your client. This week, in part 2 of our discussion, Dr. Wade Pfau and Dr. Alex Murguia explore how advisors and firms should change their engagement strategy and even their service offerings to meet the exact needs of each client.

Also, do you want to get regular updates on news about Wade, Alex and other guests of our show? Go to https://thatannuityshow.com and subscribe to our newsletter. We hope you enjoy the show.

Links mentioned in this episode:

The Retirement Income Advisor Challenge on October 25 and 26 will allow advisors to learn more about what the RISA is, to take it, and to learn how they can incorporate it into their firms: http://risaprofile.com/challenge

Wade’s new book is the Retirement Planning Challenge. The RISA is discussed in Chapter 1:
https://www.amazon.com/Retirement-Planning-Guidebook-Navigating-Important/dp/194564009X/

General website for the RISA:
www.risaprofile.com/

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The discussion is not meant to provide any legal, tax, or investment advice with respect to the purchase of an insurance product. A comprehensive evaluation of a consumer’s needs and financial situation should always occur in order to help determine if an insurance product may be appropriate for each unique situation.

Ashley SaundersEpisode 117: Matching Your Practice Model To Your Client’s Psychology with Wade Pfau and Alex Murguia
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Episode 116: Finding Retirement Solutions That Stick with Wade Pfau and Alex Murguia

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What makes a retirement recommendation not only work but also stick for your clients?  Could it be a combination of personality traits and beliefs about the market? We were really fortunate this week to have Dr. Wade Pfau and Dr. Alex Murguia on to discuss their research on the topic. They walk us through the tool they have built to help decode what exactly makes our clients tick.

Also, do you want to get regular updates on news about Wade, Alex and other guests of our show? Go to https://thatannuityshow.com and subscribe to our newsletter. We hope you enjoy the show.

Links mentioned in this episode:

The Retirement Income Advisor Challenge on October 25 and 26 will allow advisors to learn more about what the RISA is, to take it, and to learn how they can incorporate it into their firms: http://risaprofile.com/challenge

Wade’s new book is the Retirement Planning Challenge. The RISA is discussed in Chapter 1:
https://www.amazon.com/Retirement-Planning-Guidebook-Navigating-Important/dp/194564009X/

General website for the RISA:
www.risaprofile.com/

 Watch

 Listen

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Show Sponsors

The discussion is not meant to provide any legal, tax, or investment advice with respect to the purchase of an insurance product. A comprehensive evaluation of a consumer’s needs and financial situation should always occur in order to help determine if an insurance product may be appropriate for each unique situation.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Paul Tyler:

What makes a retirement recommendation not only work, but also stick for your client? Could it be a combination of personality traits and beliefs about the market? We were really fortunate this week to have Dr. Wade Pfau and Alex Murguia on to discuss their research on the topic. They walk us through the tool they built to help to decode what exactly makes our clients tick. Also, do you want to get regular updates on news about Wade, Alex and other guests of our show? Go to thatannuityshow.com and subscribe to our newsletter. We hope you enjoy our show.

Ramsey Smith:

Today’s show is sponsored by our friends at The Index Standard. As many of you who listen to our show certainly know fixed index annuities and RILAs are getting more complex and technical just when fiduciary rules are getting stricter. So how do you choose the right indexes and allocations? You should consider The Index Standard. They’re an independent provider of ratings and forecasts on all indices and ETFs used in the US insurance space. Their process is designed to be systematic and unbiased with the goal of identifying robust and well-designed indices. We all know finance is complex. The Index Standard has a clear rating system and uses approachable language to demystify this complexity. Visit theindexstandard.com for more information.

Paul Tyler:

Finally, we want to thank our primary sponsor and my employer [inaudible 00:01:34] NASSAU financial group. Our tagline is working harder to be your carrier of choice. We support you with best in class service. We seek to keep things simple and we’ll have your back in the years to come. We’re headquartered in Hartford, Connecticut with 27 billion in assets and over a half a million policy holders. We’ve been doing this a long time, 170 years, but we remain humble enough to always try to improve.

Intro:

Welcome to That Annuity Show, the podcast that will make you an expert in explaining annuities to your clients. Give us 30 minutes each week and we’ll shave hours from your client presentations. Now here’s your host, Paul Tyler.

Paul Tyler:

Hi, this is Paul Tyler. And welcome to another episode of That Annuity Show. Ramsey Smith, how are you today?

Ramsey Smith:

Fantastic. Always glad to be here.

Paul Tyler:

Yeah and we’re we’re missing our other two co-hosts, Mark Fitzgerald and Will [inaudible 00:02:42]. They had other commitments, unfortunately, that prevented them from joining, but I know they were actually really looking forward to the discussion we had. By the way, Ramsey Smith, I actually, last night you can’t believe what I did. I actually went to a concert.

Ramsey Smith:

No kidding.

Paul Tyler:

A Sheryl Crow concert.

Ramsey Smith:

Nice.

Paul Tyler:

We have a local theater, that’s pretty well known in Westchester. She was there. We purchased, can’t make this one up tickets two years ago.

Ramsey Smith:

Wow.

Paul Tyler:

We finally showed up. What a different experience. So, go in, show our proof of vaccination, Yes, I am vaccinated. Everybody please get vaccinated if you haven’t. And we wore mask. It wasn’t like a totally packed place, but yeah, it was interesting. Why am I telling you this is because it actually did connect with her show. I mean, Sheryl Crow, I mean, she was great. She’s 59 and [crosstalk 00:03:39] doing this, right? Like, does this change our perception of what age is? And I was listening to one of her songs and I’m thinking, okay, I got to talk about this safe and sound. Okay. I don’t want to be lonely. I don’t want to be scared. And all our friends are waiting there until you’re safe and sound. And you think about our business. That’s what we do. We make people feel safe and sound, especially when they get that age. It’s a bracket. So I don’t know. Ramsey Smith, do you want to set this up? Am I safe and sound in retirement? Can you tee up our desks for our guests?

Ramsey Smith:

Well, one way to get on the right track is make sure that you’re learning from the right people. And we’re very lucky to be rejoined today by, by Wade Pfau, who has become a lion in the retirement industry and Alex Murguia. They work together at Retirement Researcher. Among many other things, they wear a lot of hats. Wade is a fellow Princetonian like you and me, Paul. So we’re always, always glad to have tigers on.

Paul Tyler:

Yeah, look, yeah, go tigers.

Ramsey Smith:

There you go. And you know, Wade has been a prolific writer. His most recent book is the Retirement Planning Guidebook, but what we’re here to talk about mostly today, or at least for this first segment, is to talk about a new platform that Wade and Alex have developed called RISA. And we’re very excited to talk about it because it deals with, very importantly deals with a lot of behavioral elements of the investment process. So with that, Wade, I’m going to turn it over to you. Tell us a little bit more about yourself, whatever I missed. Tell us about RISA. Tell us how about how you and Alex got together and then we can meet Alex too.

Wade Pfau:

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Ramsey Smith. And so I do, as you noted, wear a lot of hats. My, one of my primary day job would be the RICP Program Director at The American College, where we have a three-course designation on the different aspects of retirement and complaining. And that really just speaks to in general, the research I’ve been doing. I basically write computer programs to test different retirement strategies and that really along the way, and with The American College as well, needing to be agnostic and starting to recognize there’s a lot of different retirement strategies.

Wade Pfau:

I’ve also been working with Alex. Now, I think it’s been about nine years on different functions and things and with McLean Asset Management, the RIA firm we work at and then Retirement Researcher. And now with the RISA that we’re going to be talking about today, it has been a great opportunity and really glad to be here today to talk about that and Alex, if you have an introduction for yourself

Alex Murguia:

Well, hello. Well, thank you for that, Wade. No, actually, just as Wade said, we’ve been working for a number of years. Every time you say that Wade, I’m getting to the age where I can say, “Wow, I’ve been here for X number of years.” I guess I’m officially on the other side of that hill to a large extent, but now Wade and I have had a great working relationship for about a decade now. And it was through his writings that again, he alluded to it earlier, I’m a Managing Principal of McLean Asset Management that I reached out to Wade. I think he was still in Japan. And just started a conversation with him and something that [inaudible 00:06:59] bear is saying Ramsey Smith had noted it and Paul as well. He’s a lion in the industry, but Wade is also one of the most unassuming, nicest folks you’ll ever meet.

Alex Murguia:

I mean, my honor is just to be able to call him a friend. He’s just an amazing, amazing person. And with that, we you hang on to people like that, that’s the reality. And we joined McLean Asset Management and we’ve been running ever since. And you know, we’re intellectually curious. And when we see something that there’s a little [inaudible 00:07:29] in the literature, in the profession, we start trying to fill it. And this is something that we’ve been doing within McLean, where we’ve taken that agnostic approach. I mean, we were frankly, the traditional AUM advisory firm. And now we’ve amplified beyond that simply because we feel that you need to provide the entire purview of services for a client. I mean, not doing so we thought was a gap and we needed to address it, but we also created Retirement Researcher from that, and that spawned from Wade’s writings in Japan, and that was the start of his block, but we realized, “Wow, Wade, we’ve got like X thousand number of readers and we’ve gone all into that to make that, in our view, this preeminent educational site for retirement research” and that’s done wonders.

Alex Murguia:

And we used that frankly, to segue into the conversation. We used that to start an investigation into retirement income beliefs. And so, at heart, I think I’m a tinkerer. I’ve done that through businesses. I mean, [inaudible 00:08:35] fancy, I’d say scientist-practitioner, but the reality is, we like to tinker with ideas and see how far we can push it. And this is one of the ideas that we seem to have a lot of runway.

Ramsey Smith:

So, you know, when I think about the body of work that you’ve already created, it’s sort of amazing that right here, right now, you’ve come up with something, something new. So very interested to hear about how you came up with a project, I mean, you sort of alluded too a bit Alex, but most importantly, what is it that RISA is doing that’s different than what you’ve done before and you know what you’re seeing your peers if you will doing. What is the main crux of what you think this is bringing that’s new and different?

Alex Murguia:

Wade, just because people came to hear you probably me. Why don’t I start with the methodology because then I can get that, that part out of the way, like what started it and then I’ll hand it off to you in terms of the concepts and so forth. Makes sense?

Ramsey Smith:

Sure.

Alex Murguia:

All right. I have just started really to answer the question. It depends. On Retirement Researcher, we were getting asked, our inbox would be full every day with somebody asking, “Hey, should I do this? Should I do that? Hey, should I have this allocation? or “Hey, should I buy this annuity?” or “Hey, should I do this with a bond letter?” And these are just straight up emails that we were receiving and you can’t answer that. You just can’t answer that without knowing the context. And ultimately our answers were always, “It depends.” And that wasn’t satisfying for us and I’m sure it wasn’t satisfying for the person receiving it, but we can’t, from a professional standpoint, we can’t do any, anything more than that.

Alex Murguia:

And so Wade and I were like, “Wait, what, what do you think that it depends really is?” As opposed to having it depends what can we get at is to find out what it really depends on? If you can do this or that?, and that started the study, figuring out what it depends. And we ended up at, we took Wade’s. He has a retirement income optimization map, where it’s okay, this is the sort of the map, if you will, for how to source retirement income. And we looked at it and we wanted to see. There’s nothing right or wrong here. It’s really about preferences. Which path you wanted to go on this map? And that’s the underlying assumption for everything that we’re going to say and talk about, which is, listen, we don’t think there’s this winner.

Alex Murguia:

There are many credible ways to get your retirement income done correctly. I think the person that says “This is the best way,” I think they have to check their assumptions. I think ultimately there are many ways to have a credible retirement income plan in the same way, there’s many ways to earn a living. There’s not one right way or wrong way. It’s just, it really has to do with your preference. So we started asking ourselves, “What are those preferences?” And we scoured the literature and we sort of compiled them into themes. And from there we have a very healthy membership, but at that point, it was probably 20,000 plus. And Wade and I wrote down 800 questions on things that it could depend on and we gave it to our readership.

Ramsey Smith:

Can I ask a question, 800?

Alex Murguia:

Yeah.

Ramsey Smith:

[crosstalk 00:11:53] Is that literally 800? Are you, is this somehow appropriately or did you literally create 800?

Alex Murguia:

I think it was 836, to be honest, something like that.

Ramsey Smith:

Okay.

Alex Murguia:

Because we were like, okay, let’s see what it [crosstalk 00:12:04] Right. No, no, there’s not that many now, but we just wanted to throw everything out there. What does it defend? We’re very thorough, Ramsey Smith. And from that we gave it, but to give you a sense of our readership, right? We actually were telling them what we’re doing. We just said, “Listen, we want you to just rate these questions and let us know if they’re good or not. Don’t answer them. Just let us know if they make sense.”

Alex Murguia:

And it took like probably two hours for them to look through, you do a SurveyMonkey, you send them out, you say, rate them, let us know, that kind of thing. And it came back and then we ranked them and then we reduced it to something like 330, something like that. So we’re not [inaudible 00:12:44] we reduced it to 330. And that was the start of the RISA. Yeah that was the start of the RISA and that was the start of me trying to go back to school for grammar, because I got so much feedback on my syntax on these questions that it just destroyed me personally. But from there we started the study, we gave it out and it came back and wait, I’ll hand it off to you in terms of what we started to find.

Wade Pfau:

Yeah. And I mean, this has really been a work in progress in terms of, as Alex was saying back about 10 years ago and I was still living in Japan, getting into retirement planning. I just started to recognize that you can ask someone a basic question and get a completely opposite answer on all these different fundamental issues like that. Do stocks become less risky over longer holding periods? Some people vehemently argue, “Yes.” Some people argue, “No.” Is there such a thing as a safe withdrawal rate from a volatile investment portfolio? Some people say, “Sure, you can look at US historical data and get your answer.” Other people say, “No, there’s really no such thing as that. And so that line of thinking, I started to who kind of classify, we have this probability-based approach, which is more of a total returns effort of thinking about. It’s like the 4% rule of thumb for retirement.

Wade Pfau:

You have a portfolio of 50% to 75% stocks. You invest in the total returns basis and you take distributions. And then on the other side, I called it safety first, where you’re looking more at “No, let’s build a floor for a core retirement expenses, essential versus discretionary, and then invest for the upside beyond that”. And that just kept going. I mean, we’ve had the Financial Planning Association talks about systematic withdrawals, which is the kind of what we call total returns, time segmentation, which is that bucketing approach, where I try to invest in bonds for the short-term stocks for the long-term, and then essential versus discretionary, which is the flooring idea that we talk about in the context of income protection or Risk-Wrap.

Wade Pfau:

And that’s kind of now leading to where we are today, where we know there are different retirement styles, but there was really never anything to assess, which is appropriate for which person. If I’m somebody approaching retirement, am I comfortable investing in a 60-40 portfolio and taking distributions from that and relying on market growth? Or am I somebody who would prefer to have contractual protections?

Wade Pfau:

And so as Alex was saying about the 800 questions into 300 questions, and then now into where we’re at today, we recognize there are six factors that can help to identify someone’s style that they’re, they express distinct characteristics people have. And then of those six, two of them are, are particularly important. They help us to really start to outline people’s styles in terms of how they approach the retirement decision. One of those, we gave the name of the probability-based safety first. It’s I’m comfortable relying on market growth, or I prefer to have some sort of contractual protection. And then the other big factor was like commitment or optionality.

Wade Pfau:

I want to commit to a strategy and feel like I can check that off my to-do list and, and have something that I know is going to work for my plan, or I really just want to keep my options open as much as possible. [crosstalk 00:16:03].

Wade Pfau:

And then as we start looking at that, we see, well, these retirement strategies that we’ve known about, they really start to make sense in the context of different combinations of these preferences. And then you can also build up this story with the, I said, there are six total factors. So the four secondary factors help to tell that story as well, but you can see how the existing retirement strategies we have really fit into that kind of dynamic and framework.

Paul Tyler:

This is fascinating. I mean, Alex, to your point questions, oftentimes I find are more powerful in the answers. You know, answers are usually easy to find. Did you ask the right question in the first place? So wait, as you look through the results, did you kind of look through and say, “Wow, our model matches some of these other more famous personality models, like the [inaudible 00:16:56]

Alex Murguia:

[crosstalk 00:17:01]

Paul Tyler:

Yeah. The disk. Yeah, the ocean. Was there anything you found that sort of said, “Ah, this, this kind of matches this personality test and I put this together and this explains it.”

Alex Murguia:

You had a gentleman on the show a few weeks ago that talked about the Big Five and things along those lines. What we did with this and my background is a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology. I was more a researcher than a practitioner. And I did quite a bit of Psychometrics from that standpoint. And what I always prefer is to just ask directly how they feel about a certain subject. I like to be very localized as opposed to not that it’s wrong or right, but you’re an extrovert, so you’re high on [inaudible 00:17:48] will equate to a 30% fund allocation. I’m not a big fan of that. From that standpoint, we prefer to be a lot more localized with what we’re asking. So the questions that we asked were not that general. And frankly, we did ask quite a number of psychological variable questions such as numeracy, Dunning-Kruger, which is self-awareness. We created our financial bias scale, self-efficacy with regards to retirement income, but that’s another sort of realm if you will, from that standpoint.

Alex Murguia:

So the long answer is no, we didn’t find those kind of connections, but because we didn’t really source for them, but we were able to find preferences that were quite strong and were more trait like, from that standpoint as opposed to states.

Wade Pfau:

Yeah. And where this fits in as well. So we’ve had like the risk tolerance questionnaire idea, but that was really always an accumulation tool. It’s we know, I mean, Harry Markowitz, who developed modern portfolio theory and it kind of recognizes, it was never designed for the household problem. It was really how do I seek a risk-adjusted return if I’m only investing, I don’t take distributions from the portfolio and there’s not really a sense of, and I have a finite, but unknown retirement that I’m trying to take those distributions over. And so the risk tolerance questionnaire, it was not designed at all for retirement, but it was the only tool out there. And it really presupposes. Everyone wants a total return investing strategy and there was nothing else out there about. Well, no first, I mean, we’re not saying there’s no role for risk tolerance questionnaires, but first, what’s your style?

Wade Pfau:

How do you want us source retirement income? And then at some point, most of the retirement strategies will include an investment component and you need the risk tolerance questionnaire for that component, but that’s not the starting point. You first need something broader to recognize how does somebody want to source a retirement income strategy? Do they like what resonates with them? The story behind total returns, the story behind bucketing, the story behind having safe, reliable, protected, lifetime income through the annuity. You really want to get a sense of that as a starting point to have that conversation. And then the rest will be able to be built up from there.

 

Speaker:

Yeah [inaudible 00:20:07] to follow up on that, that question as well, apart the way we look at, it’s not so much from the Big Five personality, but more like a strength finders, if you will, that help you sort of begin to think about what role within your employment you may thrive in. I may be butchering that, but yet something along those lines.

Alex Murguia:

Well, we’re trying, we’re playing with that concept with regards to retirement income. How do you want to earn retirement income? And there’s four strategies. And so these factors, probability, safety, first, optionality commitment. Really that was our aha moment. We initially wanted to just quantify retirement income beliefs. We wanted to have the right to say, there is such a thing as probability-based, there is such a thing as safety first, we can quantify that and there may be some safety first cops here, and we concede nothing is completely safe, from that standpoint.

Alex Murguia:

But our view is contractual obligations are more certain if you will, on a relative basis than the probability of some asset will go up, so you can take a sustainable withdrawal. I just want to get that one out of the way. But by being able to really capture these preferences, our aha moment was, wow. These actually lead to strategies. These strategies that are out there make sense. And we didn’t envision that at the beginning, but it just like slapped us in the face, while we were going through it. Wouldn’t you just say Wade, when we were like, I remember that meeting, we were speaking to each other and we were like, “Wait, take a look at this. Can you believe this?”

Wade Pfau:

Yeah, I think it’s probably worth walking through that of just that, that process we went through with how these factors identify strategies and also how some of our strategies are more behavioral in nature that were developed to meet certain preferences that might fall outside the natural realm of like correlated preferences.

Ramsey Smith:

Let’s do it. You tee it up, let’s go.

Wade Pfau:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so there is a correlation. If you like to have a lot of optionality, you also tend to be more probability-based, which is you’re more comfortable relying on market growth. So you do have this first category, the optionality and probability-based, that’s a total return investing strategy. That’s having that diversified investment portfolio and taking distributions and investing from a total returns basis is with secondary factors. There’s also an element of you have more of an accumulation mindset where you’re focused on portfolio growth, more so than predictable income. You have more of a technical liquidity mindset and you’re more of a front loader. You prefer to like, get your spending done early in retirement when you know, you’re still healthy. And that’s one of the core strategies.

Wade Pfau:

Then the other core strategy from that, we call income protection. And that’s these elements of your safety first. So you desire are these contractual protections more so than relying on market growth. You’re more comfortable committing to a strategy with the secondary characteristics. You have more of a distribution mindset. So you’re thinking more in terms of having predictable income over just having like the highest possible growth for your portfolio. You’d like to have a perpetual income floor. You think more in terms of true liquidity, which is just even though a brokerage account may be liquid, if you’ve already earmarked it for some other use, you can’t really say it’s truly liquid for your financial plan.

Wade Pfau:

And then also you have more of a backloading preference. Like you have more longevity risk aversion. You’re worried about outliving your assets. And, therefore, you want to put more effort into ensuring that if I’m 90 years old, I still have some money left.

Wade Pfau:

And that’s the flooring income protection, more the world of either like a SPIA or a DIA or a fixed index annuity with a principal protection and a living benefit attached to it. And those are the two core strategies.

Wade Pfau:

And then the other two strategies are more this like behavioral idea, like bucketing, time segmentation. That was always a play on, on the behavioral aspect of people kind of thinking if they can leave their stocks alone for a few years, because they have bonds to fund their short term expenses, they’ll be okay.

Wade Pfau:

Well, that corresponds to people who want contractual protections, but they also want optionality. And those two ideas don’t always coalesce. I mean, if you want a lot of optionality, it’s hard to sign a contract. But time segmentation really was a behavioral strategy developed to help meet those desires, those conflicting desires. And you do that again with you make the contractual protection, not with lifetime income, but with just a short-term, holding individual bonds to maturity covering the upcoming expenses-

Speaker:

Could also be a [inaudible 00:24:35]

Wade Pfau:

…letting your stocks ride. Yeah. I mean with annuities as well. You’re probably not thinking there in terms of lifetime income, but a fixed index annuity as an accumulation tool, [inaudible 00:24:45], those can play an important role in that sort of strategy as well.

Wade Pfau:

And then the other behavioral kind of strategy is, is Risk-Wrap. And that’s you want to rely on market growth. You also want to commit to a strategy. You also there do have more of this back-loading preference, you have more longevity, risk aversion, so forth. And that’s the whole world of differed annuities with living benefits. You can still have upside potential, especially with like a RILA, with the variable annuity that allows for a more aggressive asset allocation as you want it, even in some cases within an FIA, but this is probably more focused on, you’re going to be willing to accept some downside risk to get more upside potential.

Wade Pfau:

Because you do have more comfort relying on market growth. You are more probability-based, but you are more also want to commit to a strategy. You have the back loading. Your longevity risk-averse. You don’t want to outlive your assets. So you want that lifetime income protection. And that’s exactly really the story of deferred annuities with living benefits and how they’ve developed, especially since the 1990s to meet these kinds of conflicting type characteristics that people have.

Wade Pfau:

And so these preferences and that we identified is just like where Alex and I were saying it. It’s really amazing how well they align with existing retirement strategies and how we can then tell that story. And that’s then helping to better place people and the type of approach that’s going to resonate with them. Or at least it’s going to be the starting point for the conversation. They might disagree. And for whatever reason say they want to do something different, but at least you’ve got a great starting point for a conversation about here’s what your results show. This may be, how you best prefer to source your retirement income. Let’s look at it this way.

Speaker:

Wade, just because you’re on a role, you may want to consider too the whole concept of everyone gets a seat at the table and just the frequency distributions of this. How is this representative across a normal population?

Wade Pfau:

So right now we’re working with the Alliance for Lifetime Income. They’re doing a national survey. So we can talk about this from the perspective of the US population soon. Right now, our perspective is the 1500 readers at the Retirement Researcher, who are not necessarily a random sample of the US population. But what we were seeing was approximately about a third of the population is total returns. And that’s important to just reflect upon for a moment because really the whole so much of consumer media and the way retirement planning is pitched to the general population. It’s very much focused on total returns and that kind of approach really only fits about a third of the population. And then about a third of the population is income protection and that’s more of the, like the full annuity type story, you’re really more committed to possibly annuitizing the contract and getting the lifetime income that way.

Wade Pfau:

And then about a sixth of the population is more of a time segmentation bucketing approach. And about a sixth of the population will have more of a preference for, what we call the Risk-Wrap, which is getting that lifetime income through the deferred annuity with a living benefit.

Ramsey Smith:

So this is fascinating and it’s fascinating because we talk so much about out the importance of financial education and I’m sure all of us in our conversations with whether with advisors or with consumers, we sort of, empty our coffers of all the years of experience we have between the four of us. I’m sure we like we give people everything we have because we want the best for people, right?

Speaker:

That’s what this podcast we’re doing right now.

Ramsey Smith:

Right. Exactly. But, but what’s often strikes me is you’ll have a conversation with somebody. You’ll give them the absolute best most objective advice you can think of. And then you find out later what they did and you’ll find the thing, sometimes they do nothing. Sometimes they do everything. Sometimes they just take some part of what you advised. And ultimately it’s not really a conflict of intellect, right? It’s a conflict of style, right? [crosstalk 00:29:00] And so that’s sort of, what’s interesting about this finding is like the most important thing to figure out is before you do anything in is like, well, what style of person am I talking to so that we can have a conversation that’s likely to yield to some action.

Alex Murguia:

I think that’s a 100% percent [crosstalk 00:29:15] I think quickly what happens. I think what we’ve gotten used to, I think advisors tend to be more engineer like, and optimizing for the highest balance sheet number at the end of life, kind of, but the reality is-

Ramsey Smith:

And the highest AUM in the interim.

Alex Murguia:

…yeah, yeah, yeah. You said it. I mean, but there’s this optimization and the reality is, is there’s two sides to that coin. The advisors are obviously a human being. They have their own profile. They have their own preference. And so they when somebody walks through that door, are they optimizing for the preference that they want? Remember the underlying assumption for the entire argument is there are many ways to get this, right?. Okay. So when someone walks through your door, are you just, and, and this goes for, if you just sell annuities and nothing else as well. But [crosstalk 00:30:04] Are you just telling the story that optimizes for your own profile business model suck for your own profile or are you taking the time to just empathize with the client and figuring out how does that person want to optimize retirement income? Let me open up my toolbox and now provide the right solution set. That’s there it is. That would be my comment to your comment.

Alex Murguia:

In addition to empowering the individual, to let them know that, “Hey, you don’t just because you walk through the door of somebody doesn’t mean that whatever they tell you is, is the way to go. There are many ways to do this correctly. You have your certain style, figure that out, and then you can begin the process of analyzing.”

Ramsey Smith:

What they’re telling you is good or bad, right? Again, it comes back to this sort of style conflicts. So you bring up this very interesting notion of like it sounds like you’re focusing on determining the style of clients, but I wonder if it makes sense to also determine the style of advisors as well.

Alex Murguia:

There is absolutely, we’ve given, as word has gotten out, we’ve gotten a lot of inbound.

Ramsey Smith:

Yeah.

Alex Murguia:

And so I’ve noticed folks that want to take this, we, we demo it. And so we give it to people. So folks that come from the insurance side, the annuity side of the business, guess what quadrant they’re at. Folks that come from the investment side of the business that are professionals, guess what quadrant they’re at? [crosstalk 00:31:27] You’re absolutely right. Now you could say, is that because of, or do these people naturally, gravitate towards these industries because that’s their own personal proclivity. As an aside, I’m income protection and Wade is more in the Risk-Wrap. And so I don’t think lesser of him. No, I’m kidding. But you know, it’s fine.

Wade Pfau:

Yeah. I mean, each strategy has a story and it’s really which story do you resonate best and find most compelling. And yeah I do. when I’m presenting this to advisors, I say it’s important to understand your own style as a starting point, and then understand whether, I mean, when we do get pushback on this thus far, it is from people who do believe there is just one superior retirement strategy and that all the others are garbage. And so trying to say, someone should try something else is inappropriate to even talk about that. [crosstalk 00:32:21] But I’ve seen that from total returns people. I’ve seen that also from like time segmentation people. Haven’t seen it a lot yet from the annuity world, but no, that’s we’re starting from the point. I mean, I have my personal preferences, like Alex said. I resonate better with the Risk-Wrap story with the deferred annuity, with the upside potential, but still having the living benefit.

Wade Pfau:

I don’t resonate with the time segmentation story. I don’t think that if I had five years of bonds to cover me that my stocks are going to be perfectly okay with a five-year holding period before I have to tap into them. But I still think it’s a viable strategy. And if that’s what someone resonates with, I’m comfortable talking about it as a viable strategy. So advisors need to think about if you really want to serve one strategy, that’s fine. And then you can kind of use this to identify who’s the most appropriate people for you to be talking to, or like the approach, we have taken and [inaudible 00:33:16] let’s try to be more holistic and be able to serve all the different styles so that we can meet people where they are and give them the right strategy.

Ramsey Smith:

Paul, you’re on mute.

Paul Tyler:

Sorry. Yeah. A little bit of work going on the other, other side of the house here. So this is really interesting. So we’re going to have, we’ve got kind of uncovered two tracks. One track is Paul has his identical twin, same age, you know, same assets, different personalities. Wade and Alex, what I’m hearing is, it may be much more easier for each of us to have a very different structured retirement portfolio for our personalities to actually embrace and adopt. Wade am I right in, in stating that?

Wade Pfau:

Absolutely. And before that conversation was more, maybe you should be 70% stocks and your brother should be 30% stocks.

Paul Tyler:

Yes.

Wade Pfau:

But this is, no, it goes a lot further than that.

Paul Tyler:

Yeah. So Ramsey Smith, we could almost do a separate conversation here and talk down the track you’re headed with the advisor. Does that make you know?

Ramsey Smith:

Sure. Sure. We can make this a two-parter. We can go the chapter two.

Paul Tyler:

Why don’t we do this? I mean, Alex, you want to just so far our listeners, we got you here. We’ve got a lot of great content. I want to make that when people get to wherever they’re going, they’re listening to stuff. They know that they can, there’s got something else next week to listen to. Alex, [inaudible 00:34:49] it up? So you did a little bit, but like what did your findings really focus on in terms of like the advisor selection?

Alex Murguia:

Sure. There was another part of this where I think Ramsey Smith had asked me, does this resonate like with the, is this similar? Does it echo a DISC or does it echo Big Five personality traits and things along those lines.

Alex Murguia:

As part of the study, in addition to retirement income beliefs and something just cause I got to get in there. With regards to the RISA, not only did identify styles, it was actually predictive of annuities. If you were income protection and along those lines, there was a significantly high probability that you had that strategy. So there was a lot of validation going on in that as well. But as part of the study, sorry about that segue. As part of the study, we also included a lot of psychological variables and we noticed, and again, I’m a big fan of being very localized when we ask a question.

Alex Murguia:

So instead of just general self-efficacy, I want to know about retirement income self-efficacy for that standpoint or instead of overconfidence, I want to know specifically about this particular subject matter. And so we included in there because I think you have to control for these factors when you do these types of analysis. And we also control for age, gender, marital status, net worth, and the RISA factors were significant controlling for all of that. And we did compare it with loss aversion. Loss aversion just trailed away, pretty quickly, but we included a lot of psychological variables. And so we created scales around that, created them, validated them, etcetera, etcetera. And we did, we created a retirement income self-efficacy scale and what we were getting at there and different from like general confidence. Confidence is more generalized across many items.

Alex Murguia:

If you will, I’m a confident guy. I can do anything. Self-efficacy is a concept that’s a little more localized with regards to what you’re measuring. I’m confident, but you know, when it comes to self-efficacy for home repairs, forget it. I’m just not there from that standpoint. So we created a scale around retirement income self-efficacy. How well do you think you can overcome the challenges that you will see with regards to retirement income? So we’ve created a scale around that. We created an advisor utility scale, an advisor usefulness scale, which is how useful is an advisor from a cost effective standpoint. Sure everyone can say, look, an advisor will help you [inaudible 00:37:21] advisors, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We wanted to just put it out there. “Hey, how useful do you feel an advisor is relative to the cost?”

Alex Murguia:

I don’t know about you folks, but you know, anyone that walks through McLean and we’re talking, if they really don’t believe an advisor is useful, you can show any Morningstar study you want of advisor [inaudible 00:37:39] and all of that. I’m not persuasive enough to convince anyone differently. So I just want to know where they’re coming from. I think that’s a better angle, at least from our standpoint.

Alex Murguia:

So advisor usefulness, advisor self-efficacy as a side note, we created a financial bias scale. We took a bunch of heuristics and actually we thought we were going to get a lot of different biases, but they just seemed all closer together within the financial, within the factor analysis view. So there really was a big like financial heuristic scale we created, numeracy, how well they are with the [inaudible 00:38:11] concepts, a concept known as Dunning-Kruger, which is, you don’t know what you don’t know kind of vibe. Where you ask from the numeracy, how well you think you did. So we took that and we measured inertia. Once you know that you have to deal with an issue, how quickly do you turn that around?

Paul Tyler:

So, sorry. [crosstalk 00:38:30] go ahead. Yeah, let’s cut. Ramsey Smith makes sense to cut here. I think, but we’ve flooded appetite to listen next week’s episode. Does this make sense? [crosstalk 00:38:40] All right. And so I’m going to, we’re going to leave you hanging. Okay. This is our cliffhanger. Okay. So stay tuned. Same podcast channel, same annuity station.

Paul Tyler:

Exactly. And we’ll be right back and we’ll continue this discussion. And I can’t wait to hear the next session. So thanks and thanks for joining us and tune in next week. Thanks a lot. Alex, Wade, thanks so much. And we’ll continue from here.

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Ashley SaundersEpisode 116: Finding Retirement Solutions That Stick with Wade Pfau and Alex Murguia
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Episode 115: Building Real Policyholder Relationships with Molly Black

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Carriers spend a lot of time talking about building strong policyholder relationships but how many actually have? Molly Black, Chief Product Officer at Life.io joins us today to talk about how her company makes those relationships a reality. What can we learn from their software design that we can apply to our own practices today?
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The discussion is not meant to provide any legal, tax, or investment advice with respect to the purchase of an insurance product. A comprehensive evaluation of a consumer’s needs and financial situation should always occur in order to help determine if an insurance product may be appropriate for each unique situation.

Nicholas BreniaEpisode 115: Building Real Policyholder Relationships with Molly Black
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