“It’s so easy to lose everything and no one’s catching you on the way down. So whether it’s your ego, Wall Street, bad advice, bad investments, a black swan event, personal health issue, a lawsuit, whatever. It’s all around you.”
Mark Kollar, Retirement Income Specialist and Author, The Retirement Navigator
There is a certain kind of terror that belongs only to people who did everything right. They saved. They contributed to their 401(k). They lived within their means. And then, as retirement approaches, a quiet dread settles in: what if it runs out?
Mark Kollar knows that feeling better than most. As the founder of Kollar Wealth Advisors, a registered investment advisory firm, and the author of The Retirement Navigator, Kollar has spent more than 35 years working with pre-retirees and retirees across the United States, from clients worth $250,000 to those worth $80 million. A former trader on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade Futures Exchange, he has watched people make fortunes in minutes and lose everything just as fast. And long before he ever stepped onto a trading floor, he lived through the kind of financial devastation most people only hear about secondhand.
“It’s all around you,” Kollar says. “Please pull your head out of the sand. I’m not asking you. I’m telling you a fact.”
His message is not one of alarm for its own sake. It is, at its core, a call to awareness. Because the forces that quietly dismantle retirement security are not random. They are predictable. And most of them never come up at your financial advisor’s office.
Why Emotion Is the Most Dangerous Force in Your Financial Plan
Before Kollar talks numbers, he talks feelings. That is not what most people expect from a man who spent his early career on the trading floor of one of the country’s most intense financial exchanges. But after three and a half years hosting a radio show on retirement income strategies and decades of client work, he is certain about one thing: emotions drive bad financial decisions far more reliably than market conditions do.
“95% of your listeners are currently going through this, or will go through it shortly,” he said, listing the major emotional triggers he sees again and again: nervousness about running out of money in retirement, chaos and anger during divorce, uncertainty about artificial intelligence and job security, the pain and disgust of being burned by a bad advisor, and the grief and worry that accompany a parent’s long-term care crisis.
Each of these emotional states has a financial shadow. When people feel panicked, they act rashly. When people feel invincible, they overextend. Kollar describes a man who called into his radio show after losing $800,000 in a single day. His net worth had been $1.2 million. He was 62 years old and had planned to retire in a year and a half. “He goes, I’m going to have this one big last trade. I’m going to make 5% in a day and then it’s over. Well, guess what? It really is over.” The ego, not the market, was what finished him.
The single most useful thing you can do with this information is to recognize when you are operating from an emotional state and pause before making any financial decision. This is harder than it sounds. Kollar’s framework for understanding your own emotional triggers around money is a starting point. Name what you are feeling before you act on it.
The Seven Forces Quietly Working Against Your Retirement
Kollar spent years watching clients come to him after the damage was done. From those cases, he identified seven specific forces that erode retirement security. Most of them do their work slowly, which is exactly what makes them so dangerous.
The first is ego. Kollar has a story for this one that is hard to forget. A man who had sold a container business for $25 million came into his office in 2009 looking like, in Kollar’s words, “a deer in the headlights.” He had built his net worth to $62 million, then leveraged heavily across real estate and loans. When 2008 hit, borrowers defaulted, properties stopped generating income, and margin calls came fast. He had lost 80% of his net worth. “What took him down? His ego. His ego.”
The second is what Kollar calls black swan events. These are the things that come out of nowhere and that no one plans for. A car accident that results in a lawsuit. A serious illness. A sudden job loss. He uses hard historical numbers to make the point. If you had $100,000 invested in the S&P 500 at the start of the Great Depression in 1928, it would have taken 24 years just to get back to even, without touching a cent. The oil crisis of the 1970s? Eight years. The dot-com crash combined with 2008? Fourteen years. “How are you going to wait 24 years to buy dog food or to put gas in your car?”
The third is fees. Kollar once reviewed statements for a client who had no idea she had paid $45,000 in a single year in fees on a million-dollar account, to a well-known firm, through layers of advisor fees, trading costs, and fund expenses. “Fees are like rust on your car,” he says. “They’re just going to slowly chip away.”
The fourth is taxes. Kollar describes four tax baskets available in the United States. The red basket is after-tax money growing taxable, like a savings account or a CD. The yellow basket is after-tax money growing tax-deferred. The blue basket is before-tax money growing tax-deferred, but coming out taxable, like a 401(k) or IRA. The fourth is the most powerful: after-tax money growing tax-deferred and coming out tax-free, like a Roth or instruments covered under tax code 7702. “99% of the people we see are not even paying attention” to which basket they are drawing from and when.
The fifth is protecting principal. Kollar offers a simple formula: subtract your age from 100. That percentage is the maximum amount of your savings that should be in what he calls “red money,” exposed to market risk. The rest should be in “green money,” protected assets that are there no matter what the market does. “That green money better gosh darn be there if the market tanks or you get blindsided.”
The sixth is market timing. Kollar is blunt: individual investors who try to time market entries and exits lose over the long run. “There are multi-hundred billion dollar institutions that know way more than you do. And they’re diversified around the world and they’ve got agents and politicians in their back pocket.” Trying to outmaneuver them is not a strategy. It is a gamble.
The seventh is estate planning. This one Kollar takes personally.
When the People You Love Become the Risk You Never Saw Coming
Mark Kollar’s origin story is not a comfortable one, and he does not soften it. When he was in third grade, his father, who he describes as the top periodontist in the world at the time, a man whose chairman clients flew from Japan to Chicago for his care, had a breakdown. Faulty estate planning documents had already allowed tens of millions of dollars to be stolen. Bad investments and reliance on friends who gave poor advice had cost him more. And then came a health crisis, acute familial myositis, that put his father in a wheelchair for 20 years.
“Once money’s gone, it’s gone,” Kollar says. “Making it in this country is hard. Spending it is really easy.” The estate planning failures, the bad advice, the black swan health event: he watched all three destroy his family’s financial security in real time. “That’s why Mark Kollar does what he does. Because I have seen firsthand the generational devastation and people can’t recover.”
The stories he shares from his client files land with particular force because they involve people trying to help the ones they love. A 76-year-old widow put a $220,000 addition on her house and sold it below market value to her youngest daughter as a wedding present, convinced nothing could go wrong. The son-in-law locked her out of her own home. A life estate document, improperly filed by a friend-of-a-friend attorney, left her legally unprotected. She spent $100,000 in legal fees trying to recover the money she had given away.
A 78-year-old woman who had saved $420,000 over a lifetime of working as a grocery store cashier, never finishing high school, building something from nothing. Her grandson was forging checks from her account. A granddaughter had her co-sign a Mercedes and then abandoned it on the expressway. “Guess who had to pay for the Mercedes?”
Kollar’s point is not that families are predatory. His point is that emotion, the deep love of a parent or grandparent, the desire to help and to trust, clouds judgment in ways that no financial plan anticipates. A properly structured trust with a trustworthy oversight mechanism would have caught both situations early. Without one, the damage was irreversible.
The Red Money, Green Money Framework That Could Change How You Think About Savings
One of the most practical things Kollar offers is a mental model for how to think about your assets as retirement approaches. He divides everything into two categories.
Red money is money that is exposed to market fluctuation. It has growth potential, but it can also lose value significantly and quickly. Green money is protected money. It may not grow as fast, but it is there when you need it, regardless of what the market is doing.
The formula Kollar gives for how much should be in each bucket is simple. Take your age and subtract it from 100. If you are 60, you should have no more than 40% of your assets in red money. The remaining 60% should be green. This is not a rigid rule, and Kollar is careful to note that individual situations vary, but it is a starting point that a lot of people are far away from.
“I see too many people have got all this red money and they’re getting their faces ripped off and it’s really sad.”
The green money serves a second purpose beyond protection. It functions as an income bridge. If a black swan event strikes and the red money takes a severe hit, a retiree can draw from green money to cover living expenses rather than locking in losses by selling into a down market. That flexibility is not a luxury. In Kollar’s framework, it is the thing that keeps 24-year recoveries from becoming personal catastrophes.
The Question Nobody Is Asking Their Financial Advisor
Kollar is a fiduciary. He is careful to explain what that means in practice, because the difference between a fiduciary standard and the industry’s broader suitability standard is not widely understood. Under a suitability standard, an advisor who places you in a mediocre investment is legally protected as long as you answered a questionnaire saying you were a growth investor. Under a fiduciary standard, every recommendation has to be backed up and justified, not once, but repeatedly. “These are people’s lives at stake,” Kollar says. “They’ve saved all their life.”
He strongly advocates for second opinions, which he compares to getting a second surgical opinion before a major operation. “Imagine going to a doctor and the doctor says, ‘ You’ve got cancer, we have to operate tomorrow. And you’re like, wait a minute, I need a second opinion.” Most people would not consent to surgery without one. Kollar finds it strange that the same people will hand over their life savings without asking a single hard question.
His book, The Retirement Navigator, includes a questionnaire of 20 questions to ask any financial advisor. “If they balk at any one of those, start running just like that.” He also offers a free report on his website covering what he describes as the seven mistakes retirees need to avoid, accessible at retirementincomestrategies.pro.
For those five or ten years out from retirement who are sitting with that quiet fear, his advice is practical and direct: find a qualified, fiduciary advisor. Load up your 401(k), especially if there is a company match, which he calls “the number one best thing you can possibly do for yourself.” Get your estate planning documents in order now, not eventually. And think of your advisor the way you think of GPS. “Don’t wing it on your own. That’s all I’m telling you. Get your GPS going.
Closing Reflection
What Mark Kollar is really asking people to do is to take the same level of care with their financial future that they take with a vacation itinerary. He makes that point himself, gently: “Guys plan a vacation, and you spend days or hours or weeks. This doesn’t take days or weeks to get the ball rolling.” The risks are real, and they are documented in the client files he has kept for decades. But so are the solutions. The people in Kollar’s practice who weather the worst of what life delivers are not the ones with the most money. They are the ones who planned for the possibility that something could go wrong, even when they hoped it wouldn’t.
The retirement you have worked for deserves a plan built for what comes after the paycheck stops, not just for the decades that led up to it. That is the work Mark Kollar has devoted his career to making possible.
