2126 - Future-Proofing Your Retirement Through Innovative Solutions with Jonda Lowe

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1:05With us right now, it's Jonda Lowe. Jonda, you are the founder and CEO of Jonda Knows. Your website is jondaknows.com. That's K-N-O-W-S.com. Jonda, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, Josh. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here this morning. A woman after my own heart. I come from the kind of the personal finance. I was more on the consumer savings, consumer spending, consumer skills kind of side of things with Savings Angel. So grateful to connect and kind of geek out on this. And I want to talk about a topic that's absolutely relevant, Jonda, for small business owners and those who are leaders of people.

1:50So again, thank you for joining us. Jonda, would you maybe just kind of give us a quick overview of the work that you do? So I've actually been in the financial services industry almost four decades. Quick note, I started when I was four. So that's my story. and I'm sticking to it. No, seriously, I've spent, I'm getting ready to start my 39th year in financial services. So we really cover a full gamut. We do work with a lot of individuals, but more business owners and businesses have started gravitating towards our brand for a number of reasons. But we're very strong in the personal finance area where we're just educating, just purely educating consumers and business owners on options and strategies that they have available today.

2:31Yeah. Yeah. Well, John, give us a little bit of a mini TED talk, if you were just kind of kick us off and talk about, you know, maybe the relevancy to, you know, our friend that may be listening to us. They may run a consultancy. They may have been business for a couple of decades. They've got a great team and, you know, they may be in their 50s and they're starting to think about, you know, their goals and maybe an exit and maybe retirement or whatever that is. But what do you normally share with that audience? So I thank you so much for asking that. I might be throwing a couple of people under the bus here, so I'm going to apologize in advance.

3:12But I often - Throw away, throw away. I often find myself saying that whether it was 20 or 30 years ago when you got your first job in corporate America, you got some pretty bad advice from your HR manager. OK, so now it's not that they intentionally misled you. They did their job. But you probably have heard a conversation, something like this. It's like, hey, Josh, we've got this great program. It's called a 401k. And all the money that you put in that 401k is going to be tax deferred. You won't pay tax on it until you draw that out in retirement. And we all know that in retirement, we'll make lower money.

3:48So you're going to save a ton of money in this 401k program we're offering. Oh, and by the way, we match. It might be dollar for dollar, might be 25 cents on the dollar, but you really should take advantage of this program. And we all do, including me, for a little while. And why do I say that's bad information? The fact is, when we meet with someone, whether it's an individual or a business owner, I ask one simple question. What's your goal? Right? What's your goal in retirement? And nine times out of ten, we hear, I just want to maintain my lifestyle. Okay, fair, absolutely fair and doable. But here's the thing.

4:27Thanks to inflation, thanks to income tax, chances are if you maintain your lifestyle in retirement, you're going to be making more in retirement than you did while you were working. So this tax deferral thing is one of the myths that I bust in my latest book. I'll do a shameless plug for my latest book that came out in December called Why You Must Take Your Hands Off God's Money. But I bust a number of financial myths in that book, one of them being tax deferrals. So there is a very small percentage of business owners and consumers that can benefit from tax deferral. But honestly, there's more that really do not get a great benefit from tax deferrals.

5:12So that's a way that we introduce ourselves to consumers as well as business owners because one of the things we wanna do is absolutely minimize your income tax liability. Well, I suppose you're going to imagine what my next question is then. If not tax deferral, then what? So you've probably heard of a Roth IRA, and I am a fan of them to a degree. I'm also not a fan of stock market risk. Again, we address that in our book as well. There's a ton of risk in the market. We have been, I hate to use the word brainwashed, but we've just been given a lot of information over our lifetimes, and it's not entirely true.

5:55The stock market does not work exactly like they say it do. Average returns of an investment are not investor returns. Again, in my book, I go through that and let you know about the significant risk of what's called sequence of returns risk. And so Roth IRAs are a partial answer. That means the money that you put into that is after-tax money, and you'll never pay tax on it again. So that certainly is a better option, I think, than deferring it. But we actually have a product and a strategy, and I refer to it as a Roth IRA on steroids. And I won't get into it on the program here today, only because we have a vast audience, and I want to make sure that I keep all my regulators happy.

6:43But we definitely have some strategies for business owners, and consumers that can blow the roof off of a traditional or a standard Roth IRA. Okay. So how, how, and why is this relevant for small business owners? Because again, I'll tell you, like, I've had that experience of like, you know, I walked into my local SunTrust, now Truist bank, remember one day, you know, and I'm a business owner and, you know, I'm just walking in, you know, handle it. Like I needed something notarized or whatever. Well, the guy comes up, starts talking and his language is just straight up W2 language. And I'm like, man, I don't think you know your, I was, I didn't say this, but I'm like, this guy does not know his audience.

7:25Probably could have asked a couple of questions. But what he was talking about was not appealing to me, John. What is the best advice? Let's talk very specifically now to small business owners. You know, when I say small, you know, probably in that six to seven figure a year, you know, annual income territory. They likely have some pretty good assets, but they may have been historically very heavily invested in their company. Maybe it's cash flowing well. Maybe they still have debts. What kind of advice would you generally give to that? Or maybe it's a process, right? A question process. But where do we take this conversation?

8:02So there certainly is a discovery process because every business owner and business is going to be unique and have unique needs. But from a general standpoint, especially in the six to seven figure that you mentioned here, there are probably what we refer to in our industry as key employees. All right. So there are people working for them that not only do they not want to lose them, but in many cases, they can't afford to lose them. All right. So traditionally, what you see a business owner do is, you know, again, they're just kind of maybe your truest rep that you're speaking of, you know, they just kind of shove a 401k plan down your throat.

8:41Hey, this will give you some tax benefits, right? Help your employees and things like that. And there are some tax benefits for programs like that, but I'm not sure that's the best direction to lead your employees, again, because of just the, basically the ticking tax bomb that, you know, you're helping them create. So one thing that we can do is take a different approach to that and get some tax benefits for the business owners for actually protecting their key employees. So whether you call it key man insurance, whether you set up a non-qualified plan for your upper management, that is a big, I should say, something of great interest to a lot of business owners because, you know, in a 401k, you can't discriminate.

9:30I'm not sure if you're aware of that or not. You have to offer it to everybody that meets the certain criteria. So many hours worked and vesting schedules and things like that. But if you have a non-qualified program that you offer to your upper management, let's just, I'll just use myself as an example because we are a family owned and operated organization. And so if I want to offer the plan to my two sons, but I don't want to offer it to, you know, the secretaries and, you know, whatever, janitors, et cetera, I don't have to. And it's perfectly legal. And so and there are tax benefits available for that based upon how you fund those programs.

10:11So there's lots of good opportunities for business owners to lower their taxable income and still help their key employees plan for retirement and ensure that if they decide to walk across the street, there's some money there to go find new talent to replace them. Yeah, yeah. Well, Jonda, tell me about, you know, again, ways that folks work with you, engage with you. Like, what does that typically look like? So from the moment we get a lead, for lack of a better word, we have this discovery process. We do have what we call our client intake form, and that's on our website as well. That gets submitted into us.

10:53And then basically, we're reviewing that, Josh. And I call it looking for opportunities to add value to what you're currently doing. One of the things I take great pride in is if you come in and you are all buttoned up, your T's are crossed, your I's are dotted, I'm going to tell you that. But if I see an opportunity where I can add some value to what you're currently doing, I'm going to share that with you. At that point, you will have an opportunity to say, hey, I want to learn more or, hey, I actually want to move forward with this. And then we actually take an application. You become a client of ours.

11:26Yeah. What does a client of yours mean? You are working with us on either one of two sides of our company or both in some cases. John Deneau's as a corporation has a money management side. We're a registered investment advisor. So if you do want to trade your stocks and your bonds and your mutual funds and things like that, we certainly have that available. But we also have a fixed side of the business, which is the insurance agency side. This is where business owners and consumers alike can get guaranteed income set up for a portion of their retirement whenever that day comes. Yeah. I'm sorry not to interrupt you, but we just, to be clear, we have a full gamut of financial services here.

12:11Consider it like a cafeteria, if you will, and you can pick and choose. I had an individual asked me just last night at our seminar to kind of explain how I work because they were accustomed to a financial advisor who could only offer them, and I won't name them, but it was one company. And that was basically what we call a captioned, excuse me, a captive agent. So that individual is told what they can offer you as a product or service. As an independent agent and owner of my own agency, I don't have that pressure. And we have over 50 different carriers, and we can bring you what makes the most sense for you.

12:52Yeah. Yeah. And Jonda, obviously you have a great media brand too. Do you mind maybe sharing some of the, you know, for folks that have been listening to this and they're like, oh, I like Jonda. I want more Jonda. Where can they get more Jonda? There's a couple of ways. Obviously our website, jondaknows.com, we have completely, a year ago, we completely revamped that. It's pretty vast. I'm actually fairly proud of that. There's a ton of educational information, resources on that website. there's actually a resource tab and you're going to drop that down you're going to see lots of what we call white papers some people call them blog posts but there's a ton of education there there's also resources for um the the books that um i've been published a few times and so you can get information on that we also have something coming up um actually right around the corner after this broadcast from our mobile app is going to launch and you'll actually see on the website, you can sign up to be notified as soon as that launches.

13:49So lots of ways to contact us. The latest book is actually under yourholymoney.com. That's a subsection of our website. So lots of ways to contact us and work with us, Josh. Awesome. All right. Jonda, your website, once again, is, oh boy, I got onto your YouTube channel. It's jondaknows.com. Of course, you are Jonda Lowe, the founder and CEO. Jonda, it's been great having you. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh. It was a pleasure to be here.

14:25Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders, asking them where their best business comes from.

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