Tag: Financial planning
Retirement: I’m 60 Years Old with $900K in Savings. Can I Retire Now? What is My Risk Capacity?
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
so you're 60 years old with nine hundred thousand dollars saved and the question is can you retire in today's video we're going to look at a few different decisions that could be made the impact those decisions have on the plan with the overall goal of not running out of money hi I'm Troy sharp CEO of Oak Harvest Financial Group a certified financial planner professional host of the retirement income show and a certified tax specialist in today's case study we're going to look at a situation that's not too dissimilar from what we normally encounter in our day-to-day operations here at Oak Harvest Financial Group so we have James who's 60 years old he comes in and he says Troy I want to spend about seventy thousand dollars and I'm just tired of working I want to to this year to be my last year so I want to spend seventy thousand dollars I think I'm going to live to about 90 years old pretty good health and I want this fifty thousand dollars to increase with inflation over the course of my retirement but for the first 10 years and what I hear you talk about in this go go spending phase I want to spend an additional 20 000 per year bringing that first 10 years of spending up to 70 000 per year then that go go spending goes away and then we have the inflation adjusted 50 000 to plan for from age 70 to age 90.
Hey just a brief Interruption here to ask you to subscribe to the channel now what that does for you is that puts us Oak Harvest Financial Group and all the content we produce in your little TV Guide so you have a much easier way to come back and find it later share this video with a friend or family member and also comment down below I love to respond to the comments now if you have any questions about your particular situation or you'd like to consider becoming a client of Oak Harvest feel free to reach out to us there's a link in the description below but you can always reach out to us and give us a call and have a conversation to see if we might be a good fit for each other James tells us that since he wants to retire as soon as possible he he thinks it makes sense to take Social Security the first time available so claiming at 62 a little more than two thousand dollars a month at twenty five thousand dollars per year he also has that nine hundred thousand dollars broken out to four 401K money of 700 Grand then 200 000 in a taxable account or what we call non-qualified outside of the retirement account very important to point out here that the tax characteristic of these two accounts and the Investments inside them and the interest and dividends and the withdrawals from them are taxed differently so that's part of an overall tax plan now James also has a home that's completely paid for and worth six hundred thousand dollars but he's told me that I don't want to use this to fund any of my retirement goals I've lived in this home for a long time I want to stay in the home but we know from a planning perspective that we do have that in our back pocket if it's needed down the road so James's total net worth here is about 1.5 million looking at the paid off home of six hundred thousand the 700 Grand inside the 401K and the 200 000 of non-qualified or taxable account assets now as part of the process to understand where someone is and where they're trying to get to we have to understand how is the portfolio currently allocated so James tells us that Troy I know I've wanted to retire so I've been investing aggressively and trying to get ahead of the game but here we are in 2022 and the markets have pulled back some so that double-edged sword is starting to kind of rear its rear its head but we see James's 93 stock so one of the questions that we have from an internal planning perspective is if we keep this same level of risk while we retire and start taking income out of the portfolio what does that do for what we call the risk capacity or the portfolio's ability to take on risk while Distributing income in the retirement phase so we have to look at the guard rails and guard rails are essentially a statistical calculation of probabilities of the portfolio returning this much on the high side and a good year and this much on the downside in a bad year if these guard rails are too far apart and we're taking in income out if we run into a bad couple of years that bump up against that bottom guardrail but we significantly increase the risk of running out of money so part of the analysis of the planning is is this an appropriate guard rail for this type of portfolio given the desired income level so with everything we've looked at so far the question is if James continues doing what he's currently doing and retires with the desired spending level the assets that he's accumulated living until age 90 what is the probability that he has success well it comes in at about 61 so that's probably not a good retirement number it's something we want to see if we can work to improve so I'm going to pull up the what if analysis here and start to look at some of these different decisions that we could make and see if we can get this probability to increase okay so now we have the what if analysis where we have two different columns up here on the board right now they're identical we're going to keep this one the same as the base case everything that we just went through but now we're going to start to change some of these variables to see what the impact those decisions have on the overall retirement plan and this is much more of an art at this stage than it is a science because we want to start to explore different scenarios and then see what is most comfortable for you once you understand the impact of these different decisions you can take some time to kind of way think about them weigh the the pros and cons and now we're starting to work together to craft you a retirement plan that gives us increased probabilities of success but also something that you feel very very comfortable with so the first couple of options we have which are the most simple and usually have the biggest impact on the plan is that we can either work longer or spend less so James says no I don't want to spend less I have a specific plan I want to get my RV I want to travel the country I want to play some golf I've done my budget I need to spend that 70 000 for the first 10 years so the first thing we'll look at is the impact of working another couple of years so I've changed the age here to 63 as far as Retirement the only variable we're going to change at this time I don't want to change too many variables at once I want to see the impact of different decisions how they impact the overall plan okay so that gives us a bit of an increase but the next thing I want to look at here is social security so Social Security is a very valuable source of guaranteed lifetime income first it's an increasing stream of income it increases with inflation but two no matter what happens with the stock market that income is always going to be coming in so instead of taking the 62 and having a significant reduction in the lifetime income that we receive because I don't want to change spending we still have the 50 and 20 in here I want to change the Social Security from taking it a 62 to taking it at full retirement age okay so changing the Social Security election day gets us up to 76 we're definitely moving in the right direction here after a conversation with James and he realizing that you know what I do feel really secure with that increased social security income because if the market doesn't cooperate I know I'm still going to have that much higher income later in life so that would lead us down the road to say okay let's look at adding more guaranteed lifetime income if we can get your Baseline income to cover a majority of your spending needs then we don't need the market to perform necessarily as well later in life so now we want to look at the impact of adding more guaranteed income to the plan which has the effect of providing more security later in life because if the markets don't cooperate we know we have a certain level of income being deposited every single month no matter how long we live so if you go to our website here it's Oak harvestfinancialgroup.com com we have up top an income writer quote where this is constantly searching for the highest amounts of guaranteed lifetime income that are available in the marketplace simply input the variables here so in Texas age 60 Ira money income starts we're going to start looking at seven years here and I know the dollar amount I would want to put in 300 000.
The good news here is you can input any of these different variables we don't ask for your information so it's a calculator tool that you can play with on your own Single Life payout and we get quote okay so here's the output screen we have all of these different companies over here when you see the same company twice it's because that company offers multiple different products with the same income Rider so an income writer is just an addendum or an attachment to a contract that guarantees no matter what the stock market does a certain amount of Lifetime income based on the specifications you input so about thirty three thousand dollars here so that's about 11 percent of the initial deposit with that income starting in year seven this is why we call it a deferred income annuity because it gets a guaranteed growth to calculate a guaranteed lifetime income that you then would incorporate into your plan so in this what-if analysis we come down here we I've already inputted so three hundred thousand dollars and then we just calculate these scenarios okay now we're up to 87 percent here so now things are starting to look a little bit better let's make a couple of different adjustments here because remember when I talked about the guard rails that's too aggressive of a portfolio given the income need especially in the beginning years but now that we've added some deferred income into the plan the portfolio's capacity for risk increases later in life and all that means is because there's so much income coming in the portfolio can withstand a bit more volatility later once Social Security and the Deferred income annuity kick on because you're needing to take less from the portfolio so let's make a couple more adjustments here so after retirement we don't want to keep the the current investment strategy let's get a little bit more conservative here go from an aggressive plan to something a little bit more conservative and then you know what let's also say now that we're starting to move in the right direction instead of retiring at 63 what happens if we retire at 62.
Get your retired one year earlier than some of these other numbers okay now we're at 83 percent retiring at 62. I want to look at one more variable here because you may want to get a part-time job James may want to be a starter at a golf course maybe he wants to work in the church and he can get ten thousand or fifteen thousand dollars a year maybe just wants to work two three months out of the year so the next thing I want to look at is if we've done all this now what happens if during this first 10 years of retirement he decides he wants to work three months out of the year or maybe just a part-time job and work one or two days a week so instead of needing twenty thousand dollars per year we just need another ten thousand let's say from the portfolio so really that's only earning ten thousand dollars extra in retirement income you could do that driving Uber many different choices there you know what I'm just going to decrease this no I'll leave it there now with James deciding to maybe work part-time here to reduce that spending need in the first 10 years let's see if we can also get them retired at 61.
Okay so now James has decided that working part-time and hey we're talking 10 grand here so this isn't a lot of money now I want to see what happens if we go back to the original goal that James had of retiring as soon as possible at age 61. so we're going to change this back to his original goal 61 calculate all scenarios and now this gets us up to 94 so we started at 61 if where James was originally at whenever he came in if he kept doing whatever he was already doing we got him up to 94 percent here okay I want to take a minute before we finish the final Concept in this video to discuss some of the adjustments we've made so far to get James from 61 to 94 so first and foremost we adjusted the Social Security election strategy secondly we added that deferred income annuity thirdly James has decided to work part-time to generate ten thousand dollars per year in those beginning years to help reduce the burden of taking out an additional twenty thousand dollars of retirement income and then finally we've brought the guardrails in on the Investment Portfolio which helps to eliminate very bad outcomes that could happen with his original 93 allocation to stocks we haven't totally went to bonds or cash we've just brought those guard rails in by reducing our Equity exposure in the beginning years of retirement we can always adjust that later now last thing I want to do is look at what we call the combined details all of these things together in a spreadsheet just so we can see how these different pieces are working together and then look at what we call different Monte Carlo analyzes so now I want to share with you some of the individual trial analysis that we run just like we would for a normal client to help identify not only where the weak spots are in the portfolio but how these different decisions that we're making impact the overall client balance and it's not just looking at what we call an average rate of return it's looking at a thousand different simulations we're going to look at a couple here and the Order of the return so check out the video if you want to understand more about this concept you can click the link up above and the title of the video is how eleven percent average returns could destroy your retirement and that'll really get home that concept of it's not about what you average but it's about the order in which you realize returns over the course of your retirement during the day distribution phase so here we have this individual trial and we're gonna it's the median scenario out of a thousand different scenarios so I just want to go through this fairly quickly with you and based on some of the adjustments to the portfolio we see the investment return column here so all of this I think averaged out to I think it was about four and a half percent gross returns I can go back and double check that in a second but you see it's it's never four four four four four four four four or six six six six this is what it looks like in the real world so James retires essentially the beginning of 2023 we have the Deferred income annuity clicking on here we've changed Social Security to click on here so if we add these two together come heck or high water there will be minimally 74 000 almost 75 000 deposited into his bank account every single year now if we look at the retirement need it's about sixty one thousand dollars plus the discretionary Go-Go spending is about twelve thousand two ninety nine so about seventy three thousand dollars but what this does is because we're getting so much from these two sources it really reduces the need for the portfolio to perform and if we kind of go out go on out through retirement you see Social Security isn't increasing income so later in life now we're up to about 89 almost 90 000 of income and our ninety thousand dollars inflation adjusted retirement income need is covered by the amount of guaranteed lifetime income that we have in the portfolio which then allows our portfolio balances to stabilize because we're not needing it to support our lifestyle later in life so this is just one example here but we see the ending portfolio value even though it spends down a little bit in the beginning years okay it starts to stabilize because the income provided from the decisions that we've made put us in a situation where we don't have to withdraw so much from the portfolio Okay so now I want to look at a different trial and just to confirm here the 500th scenario was an average of 4.6 but you saw the different order of those returns and how we actually got to 4.6 okay so if we slide this up here let's assume it's a pretty bad scenario this is going to let me change it here find a worse return okay so this brings the average down to 3.05 and we still see in bar graph form here that the portfolio value still is stabilized and it's primarily because that change in the Social Security decision and adding the Deferred income annuity it still puts us into that position to where if the market doesn't perform we have enough income from guaranteed sources that we're not dependent on the stock market to provide us income in retirement especially later in life when we typically are more conservative and most people that I've worked with don't have the same stomach at 80 or 82 to stay invested in Big Market pullbacks as they did when they were 52 or 62.
Now what I want to show you is the comparison to what we just looked at in the individual trial analysis to the original plan that came in at 61 percent with all the original inputs so if James just wanted to retire not go see anyone make any adjustments I want to show you what that looks like on the individual trial analysis so remember in this scenario we kept Social Security at 62 no job so the spending stayed at seventy thousand twenty thousand was that go go spending no change to the portfolio so we still have the aggressive portfolio which brings in the possibility of some pretty bad outcomes and no deferred income annuity here to help stabilize the income generation later in life as well as the volatility impact on the portfolio so when we when we look at this so here we go um had James has a 900 000.
You see we have none of the annuity income here Social Security starts out at about 26 000 for him a little more than two thousand a month now look at the investment returns here because it's a more aggressive portfolio the range the guard rails are increased here and then finally the spending we have the fifty thousand plus twenty thousand increasing for inflation with the Go-Go lasting 10 years so in the first 10 years of retirement we see things are going pretty well even at this spending level because we have some pretty good returns in here even though we have a couple bad years but what happens is the income because of inflation the income need increases later in life and we see it really just takes a couple of bad years here minus 21 minus 12 we go from a million to 755 and then it's pretty much all downhill from there in this particular scenario running out of income except for Social Security which is now only up to about forty four thousand dollars per year compared to the other plan with the Deferred Social Security so full retirement age and the Deferred income annuity we were at I wanted to say it was around 85 88 000 um of income not dependent on the stock market here we're only at 45 in the mid 80s so that means we have to take more out of the portfolio so it's more susceptible to bad returns later in retirement now the big takeaway here is this is what a good retirement planner does it's not necessarily about the investment returns it's about determining how much money you should have in the market when you should take Social Security we didn't even get into taxes here additional benefits could be provided through tax planning but what you should do with taxes and identifying those spending goals and those needs in order to get you retired and stay retired and then staying connected to this plan over time that's what a good retirement advisor does it's not about outperforming the market it's about finding a plan that gets you and keeps you retired just a brief reminder here to subscribe to the channel now what that does is that puts us in your TV Guide here on YouTube so it doesn't cost anything but if you subscribe to the channel you can come back to us much more easily down the road make sure to comment down below and also share this video with a friend or family member that you think could benefit from what we're talking about today [Music] foreign
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Can You Transfer a 401(k) to an IRA While You’re Still Employed?
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning
While most people think about transferring their 401(k) after they leave a job, it's actually something you might be able to do while you're still in that job━and doing so could offer some attractive asset options. Typically, employees move money out of a 401(k) and into other retirement accounts (like IRAs) after quitting a job, losing a job, or retiring. Transferring funds from a 401(k) to an IRA while you're still employed with the 401(k) sponsor is known as an in-service rollover. It lets a current employee shift some or all of their assets from a 401(k) to an IRA without taking what the IRS calls a distribution, which might be subject to taxes. Not all employers allow in-service rollovers but many do. Some employer plans allow a certain percentage of the balance to be rolled out of the plan, and some have a minimum length-of-service or age requirement before you can initiate a rollover. You might consider an in-service rollover because with a 401(k) you typically have limited control over the types of assets you can hold.
Transferring some or all of your 401(k) funds to a personal IRA can open up more options for your assets. For instance, you might be able to put money into alternative assets like precious metals. Furthermore, an in-service rollover enables your personal financial advisor to provide more hands-on help since at least some of your assets are in an IRA that you control and not in a 401(k) that comes with strings attached. Plus, if your 401(k) plan has high annual fees you can minimize your costs by rolling your 401(k) money into an IRA with a lower-cost fund company. On top of that, you might be permitted to make tax-free withdrawals from an IRA that you wouldn't be able to make from a 401(k). Talk to your family and financial planner to see if an in-service rollover makes sense for you. If it does, reach out to U.S. Money Reserve. We can share more about the next steps and your precious metals IRA options.
Click the link in the description to request your free Precious Metals IRA information kit. It's full of everything you need to know about getting started on your Self-Directed Precious Metals IRA today..
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Your Retirement Questions Answered
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
Nobody teaches you how to retire in school, so you might have a lot of unanswered questions as you approach retirement. We're going to talk about some of the most frequently asked questions, including Social Security, health care, how much money you need, and more… So let's start with how much money you need to retire. There are a couple of ways to answer that, and the best and most honest way is that it depends on a lot of factors, including how much money you have saved up, what you're going to earn or lose on that money, and over what period of time you're going to take withdrawals.
Some people want a quicker answer, so a couple of tips for you: one is to use a chart that shows you some basic check points and it make some assumptions that you need to make sure that you're comfortable with and on board with. But you can use this to at least get a ballpark idea of where you stand for retirement. The other way to do it is to multiply the amount you want to withdraw from your savings (this is not necessarily the amount you want to spend in retirement because you might also have income from Social Security and pensions, but the amount you want to withdraw) multiply that by 25 and that can give you a lump sum amount that you might want to have saved or retirement.
This is just based on sort of a rule of thumb, and it's not a perfect number, it's not gonna guarantee anything, but it can help you estimate using the opposite of the 4% rule, how much money you might want to have, so as an example, if you wanted to withdraw $40,000 per year from your savings, we would multiply that by 25 to arrive at a number of $1 million that you would want to have saved a retirement. Again, 40,000 times 25 equals 1 million. That's going to be your goal. Again, neither the chart or the multiply by 25 who are perfect, and we would love for you to actually do a detailed cash flow projection and estimate taxes and all that other stuff, but these can at least give you a ballpark idea, next is when to take your social security benefits, you can claim your benefits as early as age 62, but if you do that, you get a reduced benefit as compared to your full retirement age benefit, so that reduced benefit means you get less money each month, and if a surviving spouse takes over your Social Security income, they are also stuck with that permanently reduced amount, so it can be problematic to claim early, now you can claim at your full retirement age, and that depends on your birthday, or you can delay claiming and wait until age 70 as you delay.
You get effectively about an 8% per year race, it happens every month, so you don't have to do it on your birthday, but you get about an 8% per year raise, and then those increases stop once you reach age 70, so there's not much benefit. And waiting past that, this confuses a lot of people because they might think, Well, if I retire at age 62, I think I wanna start taking Social Security right away at age 62. And that might make sense and that might be the right answer for you, but it's always helpful to do some calculations to figure out maybe you can spend from your assets and delay claiming and get a bigger social security paycheck when you claim later in life by the way in the meantime, they're in between your retirement date and your first social security payment, you might have the opportunity to do things like convert some assets to rot or pre pay some taxes during your very low income earning years.
So a number of strategies you have, in general, for a lot of people, unless you have major health issues, it pays to wait to claim Social Security. Next is How much will healthcare cost in retirement during your working years, your employer has probably been paying a portion were all of your health insurance premiums, and when you retire, that changes and you are responsible for those costs. So if you are age 65, you're typically gonna go on Medicare, and that's fairly straightforward, although you have a couple of options, and we'll go over some rough cost there, but if you're retired before age 65, it's quite a bit more challenging. You might need to get a plan from the exchange, or you might need to use Cobra or your state's continuation program, so that you can keep using your former employer's healthcare for, let's say, 18 months at a maximum unless California.
But that can be quite expensive. So you need to be aware of those costs, you might also be able to switch to a spouse's coverage. So Let's talk about some Medicare cost. If you're a 65 year old woman, you might expect to spend about 7000 on your first year of retirement on out of pocket expenses, and that assumes you have decent health, but one or two issues, and if you have poor health, it's gonna be more expensive than that. A study from Fidelity tells us each year what retirees should expect in terms of healthcare spending for 2020, that number was 295000 of out of pocket costs, and that ignores any potential long term care costs, so this isn't something that you need to write a check for at the beginning of retirement, that full 295000, but it's what two people might spend between age 65 and the end of their life.
Next is a logistical question. People often wonder, How do I actually spend the money that I have saved up? It's in this account, how do I actually get it out and pay whoever I'm paying, and the answer is, oftentimes, you're gonna move your money to an IRA or an Individual Retirement Account, and you can typically link that account, let's say it's an investment account, with a discount broker or with a financial advisor, you can link that account to your bank account and you can just transfer money over electronically, it's very easy, you can also set up automatic monthly payments to kind of replicate what your income was like during your working years, or if you need a lump sum, you can call them up and say, The furnace broke, send me several thousand dollars, whatever the case may be, and you can make that happen and you get the money within a couple of days, so that's typically how the logistics work.
You should be aware that if you're taking withdrawals from retirement accounts, that's gonna generate taxable income for you, so you can't necessarily spend every penny that you have saved in retirement accounts, if you have 100000 in a retirement account, you're gonna have to pay… Who knows, it might be 18 30000 in taxes to the IRS. So you don't necessarily wanna spend every penny of that Talk to your CPA and figure out exactly what that's gonna look like, just be aware for now that you can't spend all that money. The Other thing to know is that you wanna make sure that this money lasts for the rest of your life, we don't want you to outlive your money, so you need to withdraw at a rate that draws down your account balances gradually or slowly enough so that you don't run out of money, a couple of techniques for that, one of them we touched on with that 4% roll above, and you can learn more about that elsewhere.
Next is, when do most people retire, and you can, of course, retire whenever you have the financial resources to stop working, according to the Employee Benefits Research Institute, most people retire around age 62, an interesting fact that is a lot of people find themselves forced into retirement earlier than they expected. So that's about 40% of people, and a lot of times the reason for that is healthcare, you might be experiencing problems yourself, or you might be caring for a loved one, and that takes you out of the workforce, so that creates a challenge in terms of planning for retirement, because you might not work as long as you had initially thought, the other leading cause of leaving the workforce early at an unexpected time as changes in your job, your employer might reorganize, start doing things differently. Who knows what the case is, but that can often surprise people and put them out of the workforce for the rest of their lives, that Leads us to the question of working longer…
Is that beneficial? So if you work part time or if you're looking at your retirement prospects and it doesn't look as good as you want, should you keep working a couple of extra years, and the answer is it typically is quite helpful for you, and here's why. Number one, your Social Security benefits might improve because social security looks at your 35 highest earning years, and if you continue working later in life, you're typically at your peak earning years, you have earned your promotions, you've developed in a career, and you might presumably be learning some of the IS salary you've ever earned in your life, so as you can add more years at that higher salary, that helps your social security… The concept is the same for pensions, many pension systems look at your highest three years of earnings and they're gonna base your pension payout on that, so if you've got higher earnings for more years, that can just help you out.
The Other way it helps is that you might delay taking your Social Security or your pension at a later age, and as you take those benefits later, you tend to get more each month, so again, we said Social Security, you can claim as early as age 62, but you get that reduction. And if you wait a couple of years till your full retirement age, you get more than at age 62, and you can further increase that by waiting until age 70. Another way that working longer helps is that you have fewer years of retirement to fund, this might sound morbid, but essentially we're looking at the period of time between when you stop working and when you die, and we need you to have an income during that period, but if you keep working longer, that puts you closer to the day you die, and that means fewer years of funding that we need to provide, and finally, as you keep on working, you have the opportunity to say more, you have income, so you can set aside some of that money in your retirement accounts and that provides resources that you can spend later.
Next is the question of annuities. Does an annuity make sense for you? This is a huge and complicated world to deal with, and we can't possibly cover it in a couple of minutes here, but what I would say is that the simplest and purest form of an annuity is something where you just give the insurance company some money and a lump sum, then they pay that money back out to you over time, and they typically guarantee that those payments would last maybe for the rest of your life, or maybe for you and a spouse is life, or maybe for at least 10 years, if you are both of you died within just a few years, those are the simplest types of annuities, and those tend to make the most sense. Other types of annuities get extremely complicated, they can be problematic, you wanna be very careful in approaching those kind of annuities, so just be aware that there are different flavors of annuities out there, and I would suggest talking with the only financial planner to evaluate which annuities might or might not make sense for you.
The only advisors don't get any commission, and so that can take the commission piece out of the question, if somebody is recommending an annuity, you wanna know if they're getting a commission and exactly how much that commission is, it is pretty much never clear. You're probably not gonna know that, so you wanna try and get unbiased advice on these questions, next is the question of taxes in retirement, you are going to most likely pay some taxes, so as I mentioned earlier, is you take money out of pre tax retirement accounts, you typically generate taxable income, and you might have to pay taxes on that income, people also wonder about Social Security, so do you owe taxes on that? And the answer is, it depends. If your earnings go above a certain level, and that number can change from time to time, so probably not worth getting into it, but if you go above a certain level, 50% of your Social Security income might be taxable if you go above a higher level, 85% of your Social Security income could be taxable income, so you wanna try and manage what your taxes are gonna be in retirement, there are several strategies for doing that, that can include timing when you take different withdraws from different accounts, it might include strategies like Roth conversions, you just wanna look at all of these different opportunities to manage what you've pay in taxes so that you have as much as possible to spend on things in retirement.
Will social security run out of money? That's always a big question, and I have a separate video that pretty much just talks about this, but the answer is we don't know, but probably not… So the Social Security trust fund, as you've probably heard, was scheduled to run out of money in 2035, but that could be accelerated due to covid 19, more like 20 29. What you wanna know is that Social Security is a pay as you go system for the most part, so about 75% of the money that's needed to pay out beneficiaries to pay retirement income, let's say, on social security, comes from people's payroll taxes each year.
So if the Social Security trust fund just went away and nothing happened, when people might still receive about 75% of what they were promised, there Are several other ways to fix Social Security, and those include just making small tweaks the US, especially as a retiree, probably would not notice, we don't wanna guarantee anything 'cause we just don't know what the future will bring, but it's likely that you'll probably get the benefits that you were promised, especially if you're over…
Let's say 60 years old today, and for those who are younger, probably smart to expect the Social Security will one way or another be less generous than it has been in the past. Next is the question on pensions, so your employer pays you a pension, maybe it's a city, maybe it's a private employer, a company, and what happens if that company goes bankrupt? Well. You might not necessarily be of luck, many pensions are covered by the PGC or the pension benefit guarantee corporation, that is an agency of the US government, but it does have some limits on how much it's going to pay you, so if you are a particularly high earner, you might not get as much after your organization goes bankrupt as you were before, for 2021, the maxim a monthly benefit for a 65 year old with 634 per month, so if your pension was higher than that, you might suffer some losses in the event of a bankruptcy, but if you're below that, you might be relatively comfortable that you wouldn't see major changes… I hope this information has been helpful.
I'd love to help you plan your retirement, if you'd like to chat, please reach you out, we can look at how your retirement years might unfold, we can uncover maybe some opportunities to help you manage taxes or just to improve your chances in retirement. So please reach out, I'd love to talk. Please subscribe to this channel, and you can do that with the little red graphic there in the bottom right now, that does not cost you anything, what it does is helps you stay informed and get more information like this, and it also helps me out a teeny bit so thank you and thanks everybody. Who is already subscribed?.
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Why This Investment System Can Help Retirees Worry Less About Their Retirement Plan
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
I want to share an investment system for retirees to hopefully assist you as you're thinking about and planning for your retirement we're also going to look at how to prepare your retirement for the multiple potential potential economic Seasons that we may be headed into so we want to look at the multiple seasons and then the Easy System that's going to help lower taxes and then lower risk as well now if I haven't met you yet I'm Dave zoller and we help people plan for and Implement these retirement strategies really for a select number of people at streamline Financial that's our retirement planning firm but because we can't help everyone we want to share this with you as well so if you like retirement specific videos about one per week be sure to subscribe so in order to create a proper investment plan in system we want to make sure that we build out the retirement income plan first because without the income plan it's much harder to design the right investment strategy it's kind of like without the income plan it's like you're guessing at well 60 40 portfolio sounds good or you know May maybe this amount in the conservative bucket sounds reasonable you already know and and you feel that as you get close to retirement that goal of just more money isn't the the end-all goal that we should really be aiming for for retirement it's more about sustainability and certainty and then really the certainty of income and possibly less risk than before the last 30 years uh the things that you did to be successful with the financial side are going to look different than the next 20 or 30 years now if you need help defining the the income plan a little bit then look at the DIY retirement course below this video now once you do Define your goals for retirement and then the income needed to achieve those goals then creating the investment system becomes a lot easier and within the investment plan we really know that we can only control three things in all three things we actually want to minimize through this investment system the first thing we can minimize or reduce is how much tax you pay when investing we had a a client who was not a client of streamline Financial but of a tax firm coming to the the CPA firm in March to pick up his tax return and he was completely surprised that he had sixty thousand dollars of extra income on his tax return that he had to pay tax on right away before April 15th and it was due to the capital gains being recognized and other distributions within his investment account and he said but I didn't sell anything and the account didn't even go up that much last year and I got to pay tax on it but he was already in the highest tax bracket paying about close to 37 percent on short-term capital gains and dividends and interest so that was an unpleasant surprise and we see it happen more often than it should but this can really be avoided and here's two ways we can control tax so that we don't have to have that happen and really just control tax and pay less of it is the goal and I'll keep this at a high level but it'll get the the point across number one is the kinds of Investments that you own some are maybe funds or ETFs or individual uh equities or things like that the funds and ETFs they could pass on capital gains and and distributions to you each year without you even doing anything without you selling or or buying but it happens within the fund a lot of times now we would use funds and ETFs that are considered tax efficient so that our clients they can decide when to recognize gains rather than letting the fund company decide now the second way is by using a strategy that's called tlh each year there's many many fluctuations or big fluctuations that happen in an investment account and the strategy that we call tlh that allows our clients that's tax loss harvesting it allows them to sell an investment that may be down for part of the year and then move it into a very similar investment right away so that the investment strategy stays the same and they can actually take a write-off on that loss on their taxes that year now there's some rules around this again we're going high level but it offsets uh you know for that one client who are not a client but who had the big sixty thousand dollars of income he could have been offsetting those capital gains by doing tlh or tax loss harvesting that strategy has really saved hundreds and thousands of of dollars for clients over a period of years so on to the next thing that we can control in our investment plan and that's cost this one's easier but many advisors they don't do it because it ends up paying them less now since we're certified financial planner professionals we do follow the fiduciary standard and we're obligated to do what's best for our clients so tell me this if you had two Investments and they had the exact same strategy the same Returns the same risk and the same tax efficiency would you rather want the one that costs 0.05 percent per year or the one that costs 12 times more at point six percent well I know that answer is obvious and we'd go with a lower cost funds if it was all the same low-cost funds and ETFs that's how we can really help reduce the cost or that's how you can help reduce the cost in your investment plan because every basis point or part of a percentage that's saved in cost it's added to your return each year and this adds up to a lot over time now the last thing that we want to minimize and control is risk and we already talked about the flaws of investing solely based on on risk tolerance and when it comes to risk a lot of people think that term risk tolerance you know how much risk can we on a scale of one to ten where are we on the the risk factor but there's another way to look at risk in your investment strategy and like King Solomon we believe that there's a season for everything or like the if it was the bird song There's a season for everything and we also believe that there's four different seasons in investing and depending on what season we're in some Investments perform better than others and the Four Seasons are pull it up right now it's higher than expected inflation which we might be feeling but there's also a season that can be lower than expected or deflation and then there's higher than expected economic growth or lower than expected economic growth and the goal is reduce the risk in investing by making sure that we're prepared for each and every one of those potential Seasons because there are individual asset classes that tend to do well during each one of those seasons and we don't know nobody knows what's really going to happen you know people would would speculate and say oh it's going to be this or this or whatever might happen but we don't know for sure that's why we want to make sure we just have the asset classes in the right spots so that the income plan doesn't get impacted so the investment system combined with the income system clients don't have to worry about the movements in the market because they know they've got enough to weather any potential season I hope this has been helpful for you so far as you're thinking about your retirement if it was please subscribe or like this video so that hopefully other people can be helped as well and then I'll see you in the next one take care thank you
Pay This Off Before You Retire – Retirement Planning Tips
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
in this video we'll look at what expenses you should think about getting rid of before retiring and a few mistakes that retirees make when it comes to expenses in retirement there's a few things that you may want to say goodbye to before you say goodbye to that wage or that work income we're going to cover this in three parts it's going to look like this first we'll go over needs and wants and then what i'd call highway robbery and then also what to ear mark in retirement we've seen that the retirees that can get rid of these expenses before retiring have a little bit more breathing room and they feel better about their retirement plan because when you're planning for retirement we usually think about really two types of expenses it's the needs which are the essentials the absolute must-haves to just live you know as you think about my maslow's hierarchy of needs those things at the base layer and then there's the wants which are the the nice to have things but then there are other types of expenses that really don't fit into that category of needs or wants those are the things that we need to be done with before retirement and by the way i'm dave zoller and me and my team we run streamline financial it's a wealth management firm focused on retirement planning and we've been helping people personally for 13 years and streamlines been around for 22 years and we created this channel to share what's working with our clients so that you can benefit too so if you're close to retirement be sure to subscribe because i share one new video each week to make your retirement a little bit better i also put some free resources in the description below like my favorite diy retirement planner if you're more of a do-it-yourselfer so let's get into the list and then as you're watching if i leave something out please share it in the comments below i'd love to hear from you and then also i'll try to reply back to depending on how many comments i get so the first two you will probably agree with but you might not be thinking about the other ones and i want to show you ways to prepare and just make sure that your retirement is a little bit smoother by using our retirement planning software the first one which you already know is to pay off high interest debt which i sometimes think of as highway robbery it's when those interest rates are just so high and they're charging people it just seems unfair right that high interest debt i'm referring to is usually credit card debt and sometimes it's student loan debt and you'd be surprised at the number of people who in their first year of retirement they still have a large monthly payment towards credit card payments or student loan debt and this should be the number one thing that we should focus on to really reduce before we say goodbye to that job income or that wage because if you retire with credit card debt and then you get serious about paying it off in retirement then that means you've got this bigger amount that you got to take from investments which could alter your retirement plans i helped a woman recently who's not a client but she was looking at her plan and she wanted some help and she had about 20k of credit card debt she also had over a million dollars and her regular expenses adding on this 20k of a lump sum expense to her plan it really made quite an impact and once we looked at that together it gave her the motivation to work a little bit extra and extra hard to get this debt payment down to zero or get the credit card debt down to zero before retiring because she'd have a greater peace of mind and it would just increase her confidence as she was going into retirement that peace of mind it's key right i'm sure you're feeling the same way i actually want to share a little bit more about how to achieve this before you retire and during retirement and i share that at the end of this video so stay tuned the next ones are expenses that you can either pay early or at least you want to earmark these in your retirement plan and i'll show you what i mean when i say earmark that just means setting aside funds for specific purposes and either not including those funds in your retirement plan or including them but at least showing the specifics within the plan and i'll show you some images coming up of a retirement plan and how to do this number one thing to earmark is any big travel expenses that you're looking forward to that first year of retirement or really the first few years of retirement a lot of people kick off retirement and they'll really have a big special trip that they've always wanted to take or a place that they've always wanted to go to and lots of times that vacation it's going to cost more than the typical vacation that you might take on a regular year it's really that cap to uh ending work and then really doing a bigger than normal trip some clients choose to take one of those european uh river cruises that are pretty popular and they can cost 10 to 20k or more and knowing that this is a bigger than normal expense or a lump sum expense coming soon into retirement you can either pay that ahead of time like actually many of the cruise places make you do or you can at least earmark it in the plan and make sure that it all works with everything and i'll throw it in there as an example coming up soon here's an example of a retirement plan that's based on annual expenses going up each year three percent regular inflation rate and then over on the left side we can add some expenses that are bigger and irregular you know not the regular every year expenses but things we can earmark so that we can see the impact of on the plan before actually spending the money and doing it this way we can add some peace of mind to your retirement plan and your confidence as you're spending money and so you can just feel that it's a good decision and feel good about that vacation or whatever it might be a few other bigger than normal one-time expenses we've seen are related to your adult kids if you have them whether it's final college expenses or maybe a wedding that you want to help out with or future gifts maybe towards a home purchase or something like that for those you're not really able to pay those before you retire because we don't know when they're going to happen so earmarking them is the next best step and setting funds aside to make sure that these potential expenses that you might have in the future are ready and available ready to deploy when needed one mistake that we've seen some retirees make getting close to retirement is not factoring in these one-time expenses and then getting caught a little off guard when it's time to pay for them especially if we're in a market like we are now now you might be thinking one big expense that i did not mention and before i share that one if you enjoyed watching this video so far and you found it helpful please click the like button so this can hopefully spread to other people who are like you and might find it helpful as well so that one big expense that you might be thinking of that i didn't mention yet is paying off your whole mortgage before you retire and this is a big one for many people as you've heard before behind every financial decision there's also an emotional one as well and many people they feel very strongly or maybe adamant on on being debt-free in retirement and that's a really good feeling for for many people for others depending on their financial decision it actually a mortgage could actually make sense in retirement some people see it as a fixed expense which doesn't go up with inflation it actually gets cheaper as everything else increases with inflation and as one dollar can buy less and less over time which is basically what what inflation is it may be at really attractive interest rates as well and some people want to have a little bit more flexibility in their retirement accounts by keeping some funds available in their non-retirement accounts versus using that money to pay off the mortgage the more important thing to to think about when deciding whether this makes sense whether to pay it off or not is try to measure first just the emotional feeling or comfort with debt you know yourself and then also your spouse if you're married and then step two is map out both scenarios what does it look like that plan that we're just looking at over here what does it look like if you pay off debt early or don't pay off the mortgage at all look at the difference see which one's okay lots of times it comes down to the strength of the emotional feeling around debt for one person in the relationship or if it's just you then it's just whatever you prefer when we're thinking about paying off expenses or earmarking things in retirement get help from a financial professional a cfp could be a great place to start but i'd like to hear from you what did i not mention as we're thinking about these different expenses in retirement i'd love to hear your thoughts about these expenses and especially the thoughts on mortgage having a mortgage in retirement and i want to share another video about how increasing peace of mind and making sure that you get both parts needed for a successful retirement the sad thing is that in this industry the financial industry most of the time they focus on one thing but here's a video to watch that'll help you think about and prepare for both sides of retirement so hopefully i'll see you there and if you haven't already subscribe and then i'll see you in future videos take care you
You’re Retiring. Now What? Retirement Planning: A Reassessment [2022]
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
[Music] Consuelo Mack: On WEALTHTRACK, why a reassessment
of retirement planning is in order. Christine Benz: Given how elevated the market
is and low return expectations for fixed incomes securities for stocks, the tricky part is
that people embarking on retirement today need to probably take less than that four
percent, they would probably need to start more in the range of three percent. [Music] Consuelo Mack: Morningstar's personal finance
guru Christine Benz joins us with her checklist on Consuelo Mack WEALTHTRACK. Announcer: Funding provided by ClearBridge
Investments, Morgan Le Fay Dreams Foundation, First Eagle Investment Management, Royce Investment
Partners, Matthews Asia and Strategas Asset Management. [Music] Consuelo Mack: Hello, and welcome to this
edition of WEALTHTRACK. I'm Consuelo Mack. One of the biggest changes of the past year
has been the record number of Americans who are quitting their jobs. It is so pronounced that it has a name. It's called the Great Resignation. The so-called quit rate has exceeded pre-pandemic
highs for months. Millions of Americans have walked out the
door. A sizable number are starting their own businesses. According to the Wall Street Journal, since
the pandemic began, the number of unincorporated self-employed workers has risen by more than
half a million to nearly 10 million, one of the highest levels in years, and the number
of applications for federal tax ID numbers to register new businesses soared to nearly
five million, the highest number on record.
Another huge contributor to the Great Resignation
is the surge in retirement. Since March of 2020, the number of adults
55 and older who retired was nearly two million more than the rate was pre-pandemic. What the Great Resignation means for retirement
planning is just one of the items on Christine Benz’s Financial To-Do List this year. Morningstar's Director of Personal Finance
is joining us for the 4th year in a row to help us get in personal financial shape. Benz, a WEALTHTRACK regular, is an acknowledged
personal finance guru. She has held the title of Morningstar's Director
of Personal Finance since 2008. She writes daily personal finance columns
for Morningstar, does interviews and podcasts, and is the author of several books, including
30 Minute Money Solutions, A Step-by-Step Guide to Managing Your Finances, and The Morningstar
Guide to Mutual Funds: Five Star Strategies for Success.
She has also been named to Barron's List of
100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance for the last two years. I began our conversation by asking her about
the impact the Great Resignation could have on retirement planning. Christine Benz: Well, I think there are a
few things that people who are hanging it up from work need to be thinking about with
respect to retirement planning. One is that there's, sort of, the standard
rule of thumb for thinking about whether you have enough for retirement, and that's called
the Four Percent Guideline. And it basically means, could you live on
four percent of your portfolio plus whatever income sources you might have? So if you're taking Social Security, you'd
have that too. The tricky part is that given how elevated
the market is and low return expectations for fixed income securities, for stocks, the
tricky part is that people embarking on retirement today need to probably take less than that
four percent.
They would probably need to start more in
the range of three percent. So I think people who are looking upon, drawing
upon their portfolio for their living expenses need to use that as a quick and dirty starting
point for assessing the viability of their retirement plans. Consuelo Mack: That's a big drop, Christine. I mean, from the four percent has been the,
kind of, the traditional assumption that you should plan on taking four percent of your
retirement savings, whatever, and that will last you for 30 years.
And, certainly, if you retire early, you're
going to have a longer retirement plan, but you're saying three percent, in general, now
that's the new standard? Christine Benz: Our research concluded that
if you have a 30-year time horizon, a balanced portfolio and you want to have like a 90 percent
probability of not running out of money during that 30-year time horizon, 3.3 percent is
a good starting point, that's probably overly precise I think if you were to be in that
three and a half percent range. But, certainly, people who have extended time
horizons, so people who expect to be retired for 40 or 50 years, and this would apply to
people in their 40s who are retiring today, they'd want to set that withdrawal rate even
lower, probably in the realm of two percent. And there, that starts to begin looking more
challenging in terms of, could you live on that amount? Consuelo Mack: And Christine, as far as the
Great Resignation is concerned and more and more people being self-employed, I mean, that
means they're not going to have a regular paycheck.
So the impact on retirement planning for someone
who's self-employed, what should they be thinking about? Christine Benz: Well, certainly, people who
are embarking on self-employment do have some vehicles that they can use to continue to
fund their own retirements. So IRAs, SEP IRAs for self-employed individuals. Health care, though, is a big wild card for
self-employed people, as you know.
And so I think it does make sense to really
make sure you have a good health care plan. I think that's one big impediment to people
being more entrepreneurial, that they're worried about how they will do for health care coverage. But oftentimes you do tend to see this trend
when people embark on self-employment, investing in their business comes first, and oftentimes
they do tend to short shrift their own retirement. So it's super important to keep that in mind. If you are self-employed, make sure that those
ongoing retirement plan contributions are part of your budget. Consuelo Mack: Christine, thinking about the
new three and a half percent withdrawal rate, there are some more flexible strategies that
you're suggesting. What are they? Christine Benz: Well, the name of the game
is that you want to be able to withdraw less if you happen to encounter a down market,
and that's particularly important in the early years of retirement.
There's this phenomenon that retirement researchers
call sequence of return risk or sequencing risk. And that basically means that you retire and
then encounter a lousy market environment right out of the box. That's the thing you worry about, and one
way that you can protect yourself against that is potentially taking less in those down
markets. So in our research, we tested a number of
different flexible strategies, and that's really a commonality among them. They help new retirees take a little bit more
initially than that 3.3 percent or 3.5 percent that we talked about, in exchange, though,
the trade-off is that as a retiree, you have to be prepared to take less.
So, one really simple tweak to, sort of, the
fixed real withdrawal system that underpins that four percent guideline or the 3.3 percent
guideline in our world is to simply forego inflation adjustments. So forgo inflation adjustments in the year
after your portfolio has endured a loss. We found that that is a really simple strategy
that actually does help enlarge retirees’ portfolios over their lifetime. There are a number of other, more complicated
strategies. Another one we looked at is called the guardrails
system. This was developed by financial planner Jonathan
Guyton and William Klinger, who's a computer scientist. It's a little bit more complicated. It ensures that the retiree takes less in
down markets, but in exchange, he or she can take more when the portfolio is up. So in environments like right now, you'd be
able to get a little bit of a raise because the market has been good. That strategy is more efficient. It means that the retiree consumes more of
his or her portfolio over the lifetime, but it also tends to leave less at the end.
So for people who are really bequest-minded,
such a strategy wouldn't be a great idea. Consuelo Mack: Talking about flexible strategies,
obviously we would take into account if we are eligible, our Social Security income stream,
which is inflation protected. But also, what about annuities, which in the
past have gotten a bad name, but that's another possible income stream possibility that we
should consider, right? Christine Benz: Absolutely. I think job one, even before you start thinking
about withdrawal rates, is to look at your non-portfolio income sources. Looking at Social Security, looking at an
annuity, possibly. And the reason is that we've got more and
more folks who are coming into retirement without the benefit of pensions. So the name of the game is to look at your
fixed cash flow needs, and then try to match them to non-portfolio income sources.
Annuities do have a bad name, and I think
rightfully so in some respects, largely because you've got some incredibly opaque, expensive
products, but there are also some really good annuities that do offer lifetime benefits. I tend to favor the very simple, plain vanilla
annuities that fixed immediate annuities or fixed deferred annuities where there's a lot
of transparency. For consumers, they tend to be lower cost
and you can easily comparison shop.
And I would also say, if you're thinking of
an annuity as part of your toolkit, don't go straight to the insurance company, go to
a fee-only financial planner. Get some objective guidance on whether that
makes sense for you, given your situation. But the important thing about annuities is
that, as an annuity purchaser, you benefit from what's called longevity risk pooling,
meaning that you are in the pool with other people. Some will die younger than expected, some
will live a lot longer. You hope you'll be one of the longer-lived
ones. And in so doing, you'll be able to enjoy a
larger sum of money out of that annuity than will people who die earlier.
Consuelo Mack: One of the criticisms of annuities
recently, even the fixed income annuities, is that interest rates are so low, so the
returns historically are low. Christine Benz: Well, that is a risk factor
that interest rates are very low, so, arguably, you're locking in a fairly low payout. So there are a couple of workarounds, one
would be to do a series of annuity purchases over a period of several years. But one other risk factor that I think does
loom large with annuities is inflation risk, which is certainly front and center for a
lot of people today, especially retirees. Most annuities do not offer an inflation adjustment
in that payout. So if we do see inflation run much higher
than it has historically, that would be a risk factor for new annuity buyers.
The main benefit of annuities is that longevity
risk pooling, and that does tend to elevate payouts from annuities quite substantially
above what you get with fixed rate investments. Consuelo Mack: Talk to us about of how we
protect ourselves and our portfolios against inflation. Christine Benz: Yeah. It's a huge topic today, obviously. I think it makes sense to kind of think of
this problem as two sides of a ledger. So I would start by looking at your expenditures,
and I often think about this column that Jason Zweig wrote probably a decade ago. He called it me-flation, and the idea is that
we don't experience inflation as CPI. We each have our own consumption basket, and
some people might have higher inflation because the stuff they're spending on is inflating
at a higher rate than CPI. Some people may have lower rates of inflation. So, really, take stock of how you're spending
your money.
If you're a homeowner, the nice thing about
that is that at least your housing costs are somewhat inflation protected. You may have sort of ancillary housing costs
if you're paying people to do things around your house or your home heating costs may
be going up, but at least your, sort of, main big ticket housing expense is locked down. Health care costs have historically been inflating
higher than the general inflation rate. The good news is that, right now at least,
health care costs do appear to be running below CPI, which is somewhat rare and it may
— Consuelo Mack: It is.
Christine Benz: — sort of reverse itself. So think about how you're spending your money
and then turn your attention to whether you are protected in terms of where you're getting
your income. So if you are someone who is earning a paycheck
and you're eligible for cost-of-living adjustments, well, those are, at least in part, making
you whole with respect to inflation, they're helping you keep up with CPI. In a worst-case scenario, say you are a retiree
and you're drawing exclusively from a portfolio of fixed rate investments for your withdrawals,
for your income, you're not at all inflation protected.
And you really need to think about, well,
how can I protect this plan? How can I protect my withdrawals from inflation? And that's where I think stocks serve a great
role. They're by no means any sort of direct inflation
hedge, but they, over time, do tend to have higher returns than inflation, which is one
reason why I think even older retirees would probably want to make room for stocks as a
component of their portfolio. Within the bond piece of your portfolio, if
you're retired, especially, I think it makes sense to consider Treasury Inflation Protected
Securities or i-bonds. And these are basically Treasury bonds that
give you a little bit of a nudge up in terms of your principal and in turn your income
when we see inflation running up. Consuelo Mack: Another suggestion, Christine,
that you've sent me on your to-do-list is the fact how essential it is to look at your
portfolio and consider rebalancing your portfolio.
U.S. stocks have done really well, U.S. growth
stocks have done really well and stocks in general have done well versus bonds. Is this a good time to rebalance? Christine Benz: I think it is. I'll keep banging this drum. I think I said that a year ago, too, and yet
we've seen kind of a similar performance pattern. U.S. stocks have performed very, very well,
but I do think that this is a nice way, without having to get too cute about timing the market,
this is a nice way to ensure that your portfolio's risk level stays in line with your targets. Annually, take a look at your asset allocation
relative to your target. If you're retired, I think the good news is
that we've had a strong stock market and your cash flow needs for the next couple of years
are probably hiding in plain sight in terms of your appreciated equity assets. Think about taking some money off the table
there, plowing it into safe investments that you can live on and that will give you peace
of mind, you'll leave a good share of your portfolio in stocks and it will give you peace
of mind to be patient with them if they do encounter some volatility.
Consuelo Mack: We're talking about rebalancing
and taking profits in a highly appreciated asset class and shifting them over to one
that hasn't appreciated as much, but that's going to involve taxes. Christine Benz: Right. Consuelo Mack: So talk to us about the tax
considerations. Christine Benz: It's crucial to be thoughtful
about this and to the extent that you have tax deferred or other tax advantaged assets,
it really does make sense to focus those activities in those accounts because you can trade all
day long. Not that you should, but you could trade a
lot and not incur any taxes, even if you're selling appreciated winners. So the good news is that, for many retirees,
the bulk of their assets do reside in tax sheltered vehicles where they can make those
changes.
They might owe taxes on the distributions
that they take, but the repositioning would not entail any taxes. If you're a younger investor, not yet retired,
focus those rebalancing activities within your tax-sheltered accounts. Also take care with respect to converting
IRA assets, traditional IRA assets, to Roth. You sometimes hear that that's a good strategy. Be careful about doing that when the market
is elevated, because the taxes that you'll owe on those conversions will depend on your
gains, the size of your balance and the amount that you're converting. So get some tax help. Whether you're doing this repositioning to
get your portfolio back into balance or whether you're doing IRA conversions, get another
set of eyes on what the tax implications might be.
Consuelo Mack: And another tax friendly strategy
is, of course, charitable donations, right? Christine Benz: So true. Consuelo Mack: Yeah. Christine Benz: The charitable contributions
of appreciated securities. You can do that at any age. You can actually get a donor advised fund
into the act where you can donate those appreciated securities, even employer stock to a donor
advised fund. And the beauty of that is that you can take
your time and be deliberate about making those charitable contributions. You can direct those contributions over time. Older adults who are required to take minimum
distributions from their IRAs can also use what's called a qualified charitable distribution,
where they donate a portion of their RMDs to charity. There's a little bit of a disconnect with
the ages, you can start the QCD, the qualified charitable distribution, at age 70 and a half.
RMDs kick in at age 72. So if you're 70 and a half, start looking
at this strategy, it's absolutely phenomenal and it is a way to lower your tax bill and
also lower the amount of balance that will be subject to required minimum distributions
down the line. Consuelo Mack: For those still working, you
check your retirement plan contributions. So talk to us about what's changed this year
from last year. Christine Benz: We're seeing a little bit
of an increase in 401K, 403B, 457 contribution limits. So going up to 20,500 in 2022 for people who
are under age 50. If you're over 50, you can take $27,000 in
terms of 401K contributions. So if you haven't revisited those contributions
that you're making, check to see if you're on track to make the maximum allowable contributions.
IRA contributions are staying the same for
2022, but take a look at whether you are on track to max out your IRA contributions. I love the idea of automating those just as
you do with 401K contributions, where you're signing on the dotted line with your IRA provider
to make ongoing contributions. The nice thing is, is that you can just invisibly
make those contributions. It doesn't give you time to equivocate about
whether it's a good time to make those contributions.
They just come right out of your checking
account. Consuelo Mack: We've had a 10 year — longer
than 10-year bull market now. For retirement planning, what are the risks? I mean, are there psychological risks to having
this prolonged bull market? Christine Benz: I think it's a good news,
bad news story. So we were talking earlier about that lower
withdrawal rate that is in order. The good news is it's a lower withdrawal rate
on a larger balance for many retirees. So it may translate into a higher dollar withdrawal
than would have been the case 5 years ago, because if you've been investing, if you've
been in the stock market, you've enjoyed that nice appreciation, but it is a lower percentage.
But I do think the psychological aspect of
this is huge, Consuelo, because a lot of retirees have been through many market downdrafts. And so their risk tolerance, their comfort
level with risk is higher than it will ever be during their lifetime, just as they're
embarking on retirement. The problem is their risk capacity, their
ability to absorb that risk, as they get into drawdown mode, as they get into drawing upon
their portfolios, that's actually diminished a little bit. So it's an odd disconnect, and I think it's
important to keep in mind the distinction between risk tolerance.
It may be high at retirement. Risk capacity is lower because you're going
to be starting to draw upon that portfolio, and you certainly don't want to be drawing
upon a 100 percent equity portfolio. You want to have safer assets that you could
draw upon if a bad market materializes especially early on in your retirement. Consuelo Mack: So the common wisdom is as
you get closer to retirement is to increase your defensive assets, and even though bonds
don't feel like they're defensive, that that's what we should be doing, and cash, certainly,
which has been really criticized and kind of diminished as far as Wall Street is concerned,
its value, but it can be quite valuable. So that type of strategy is still in place
as you get closer to retirement or in retirement is to increase your defensive assets.
Christine Benz: Very much so. The way I think about it is, given how low
yields are, it's not return on capital. You will not get much in terms — Consuelo Mack: Right. Christine Benz: — of a yield or a return
from these investments. In fact, current yields are really good predictor
of what you're able to earn from fixed income assets over the next decade. Well, that's a low return, but it is return
of principle that we know, especially during equity market downdrafts, we know that high
quality fixed income securities tend to hold up relatively well during those periods, and
that's really what you're looking for. You're looking for something that will hold
stable during that period when you're needing to spend from it. So I do think that the rule of thumb or the
thought about de-risking a portfolio as retirement draws close absolutely still holds up Consuelo Mack: One investment for a long term
diversified portfolio, Christine, what would you have us all on some of? Christine Benz: Well, we've been talking about
inflation protection and worries about inflation, and so I do think that people who are looking
at retirement and getting close to spending from their portfolios might consider an investment
in Treasury Inflation Protected Securities.
And one fund I like of this ilk is Vanguard
Short-Term Inflation Protected Securities. It is a very low-cost product. It's very conservative, so your return will
not be great over your holding period, but it will do a good job of defending against
inflation. And unlike some other Treasury Inflation Protected
Funds, it tends to not be very interest rate sensitive, so it invests in short-term Treasury
Inflation Protected Securities. So it tends not to be buffeted around by interest
rates. And that's a good thing, especially if you're
worried about inflation. We often see higher interest rates go hand
in hand with inflation. And so in such a product, in a short-term
TIPS Fund, you'll be relatively protected from some of the interest rate related volatility
that often accompanies longer term TIPS Funds. Consuelo Mack: All right, Christine Benz,
thanks so much for joining us — Christine Benz: Thank you, Consuelo. Consuelo Mack: — with your annual to do list. Christine Benz: It's my pleasure. Consuelo Mack: It’s always our pleasure
as well. Thanks, Christine. Christine Benz: Thank you so much. [Music] Consuelo Mack: At the close of every WEALTHTRACK,
we try to give you one suggestion to help you build and protect your wealth over the
long term.
This week's Action Point is think twice before
joining the Great Resignation Movement. As we just discussed, retirement tends to
be longer and more expensive than most of us realize. Early retirement can really put a dent in
your retirement income. Self-employment is very appealing, but it
does have some drawbacks. Lack of a regular paycheck, benefits and matching
401K contributions, plus all of the backup services we take for granted. Offices, supplies, tech support, etc. are
expensive. It pays to do some hard analysis with family,
friends and advisors before walking out the door. Next week, Social Security guru Mary Beth
Franklin updates us on managing that crucial retirement program and other strategies to
maximize retirement income. In this week's extra feature, what keeps Christine
Benz motivated as the incredibly busy multitasking head of personal finance at Morningstar.
For those of you active in social media, please
follow us on Facebook, Twitter and our YouTube channel. Thanks for sharing your precious time with
us. Have a super weekend and make the week ahead
a healthy, profitable and productive one. [Music].
Maximizing your retirement contributions throughout your career
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
>>> IT IS NEVER TOO EARLY TO START PLANNING AND SAVING FOR RETIREMENT. HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU ARE ON THE RIGHT TRACK FOR YOUR FUTURE AND HOW SHOULD CONVERSATIONS EVOLVE AS YOU GET OLDER? JOIN US NOW TO EXPLAIN ALL OF THIS AND HOW TO MAXIMIZE YOUR SAVINGS IS CAMELIA ELLIOTT. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR JOINING US . LET'S START RIGHT AFTER YOU GET YOUR FIRST REAL JOB AND YOU ARE IN YOUR 20s.
IF YOU LIKE YOU ARE NOT MAKING ENOUGH MONEY TO SEND ANYTHING ASIDE, BUT HOW SHOULD YOU BE INVESTING WHEN YOU ARE IN YOUR 20s? >> I KNOW THAT IT IS VERY DIFFICULT WHEN YOU'RE IN YOUR 20s AND TRANSITIONING FROM COLLEGE INTO SCHOOL. THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS TO START EARLY. ONE THING YOU HAVE AS A BENEFIT IS CALLED COMPOUND INTEREST. IT CAN HELP YOU PREPARE FOR RETIREMENT MUCH EARLIER. IT WILL NOT FORCE YOU TO HAVE TO SAVE A LOT OF MONEY TOWARD THE END OF YOUR WORKING LIFE.
ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS IS TO ENROLL IN YOUR 401(K) PLAN. IF YOU NEED TO START SMALL, START SMALL. WHICH WE TYPICALLY RECOMMEND IS CONTRIBUTING THE EMPLOYER MATCH AND THE AVERAGE IS 4.5%. FOR THOSE WHO HAVE STUDENT LOANS, ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS BEEN OFFERED NOW IS IF YOU CANNOT CONTRIBUTE TO YOUR RETIREMENT PLAN, THEY COULD HELP YOU TO CONTRIBUTE MONEY TOWARD YOUR STUDENT LOAN. IT IS TAX-FREE MONEY TO HELP TO PAY DOWN STUDENT LOAN DEBT. THE LAST IS IT IS A GREAT TIME TO START A BUDGET AND GET ON THE RIGHT FOOT SAVING FOR RETIREMENT . ú>> I WISH THAT I TOOK THAT ADVICE IN MY 20s. LET'S TALK ABOUT LATER. IF YOU'RE IN YOUR 30s AND GOT RID OF YOUR CAR FROM COLLEGE AND ARE LOOKING TO SAVE FOR A HOUSE.
HOW DO YOU MODIFY YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS? >> AVOIDING LIFESTYLE CREEP IS ONE OF THE MAIN THINGS TO AVOID WHEN YOU'RE IN YOUR 30s. THINK ABOUT WHAT IS HAPPENING. YOU ARE BUYING A HOME AND HAVING CHILDREN. THERE'S SO MANY COMPETING PRIORITIES AT THAT TIME FOR YOU . ONE OF THE IMPORTANT THINGS TO DO IS CONTINUING TO SAVE. EVERY YEAR YOU MAKE MORE MONEY YOU COULD INCREASE YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS BY 1%. ALSO MAKING SURE THAT FAMILY MEANS DO NOT OVERSHADOW THE NEED TO SAVE FOR RETIREMENT. >> ONCE YOU SET IT UP AND THE MONEY COMES OUT, YOU DO NOT EVEN MISS IT. >> THANK YOU SO MUCH..
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The 5 Most Important Years Of Your Retirement
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
as a parent when you have your first child there's no shortage of people to remind you just how important the first five years are of your child's development unfortunately there's no similar Network there's no similar information source for us as we retire what are the most important five years of your retirement so I'm gonna hope to break that with today's video let's go for a walk and I'll I'll share my thoughts with you with you having been a fee only financial advisor for over 20 years now and I'll I'll cut right to the chase I think the most important years just like with your child are the first five years and I want to share that you know this is a big transition if you're thinking about retiring if you're getting close to retiring this is a big transition you think about like you know a long time ago maybe when you first left home whether you went to college or you developed a trade and you went off on your own to start quote unquote adulting the transition from high school to college where you put everything you own in a couple suitcases and you say goodbye to the the people that have been nurturing you for for your entire life that's a big big transition I'm sorry that background noise is a train you really can't see it but it's there okay so that's a big transition and the transition to retirement is every bit as big right I mean it's it's the whole world that you've known for a long long time and just like with a teenager uh or a young adult heading off to college your identity is about to change as well so you know the it's a big transition but it's important that you jump in with both feet it's important that you start off on the right track and you know one of the keys is is to understand what your goals are what your hope you know what you're going to stand for what you're hoping to do in retirement not that you have to have a to-do list but you know these are the things that are important to me as I retire and you can update them for instance for me um for me I I kind of when my day comes to retire I'm not retired yet but when my day comes to retire the things that I have thought about that are going to be important to me and are important to me now are number one relationships um you know when you work unfortunately you're not able to spend as much time with the people that you love and you care about so I'm hoping to spend more time with my adult children I'm hoping to spend more time with my wife and with with friends that mean a lot to me that unfortunately right now I'm not able to spend a lot of time with so I want to spend a fourth of my time on relationships I want to spend a fourth of my time on my health having your health is really key once you lose your health you know it's a retirement's gonna look very different for you so doing what I can to eat in a healthy way to work out regularly to keep my health is going to be important then I've always been a lifelong Learners so I want to continue to learn so a fourth of my time on relationships a fourth of my time on my health a fourth of my time just learning I just love learning and then a fourth of my time as a teacher and that's part of what this YouTube channel is is is giving back and and sharing with folks I'm fortunate what I've spent my life my life's work is something that uh brings value to a lot of folks it's not it feels like common sense to me because I've been doing it my whole adult life just like whatever you've been doing most of your adult life probably feels like common sense to you so it's important to jump in with both feet it's important not to be frugal you don't have a financial plan and know what your goals are and you know many regular viewers of my channel right we're good Savers um we're good at identifying what our goals are and saving towards those but I don't want you to be frugal and it's natural I'd say well over half of people you know whatever their budget is whatever their plan says that they can spend they end up you know still saving 25 or 30 percent of that and don't do that right it's it your whole life has been a balance between current you and future you and now this is your future your uh the future you so be sure to spend that money and enjoy it these are your healthiest most active years uh I also think it's uh it's it's good to have a financial plan if you don't have a plan boy it's really hard to know how much money you can spend and you know a lot of people are sacrificing unnecessarily you don't want to do that you don't have to do that so have a financial plan and have a plan a time plan um that I already talked about right think about how am I going to spend my time 24 hours a day is a lot of time right a significant part of our life has been spent at work okay other reasons why the first five years are super important there's some big decisions that need to be made in the first five years let's say you're 60 and um and you're retiring early a lot of viewers of my channel are hoping to do that or you're 62 or 63 you know there's some big decisions that need to be made between you know let's the first let's say 60 to 67 60 to 68 even above that but you know Medicare Medicare is not as easy as just raising your hand saying hey government you know I'm 65 years old now I'd like my medic I'd like my medicare right you have to decide do you want your uh traditional Medicare or do you want what's called Medicare Advantage which is a great marketing name uh traditional Medicare is provided by the government Medicare advantages is provided by a private company and you can change your mind on that but if you go with traditional Medicare uh it has a twenty dollar deductible for Medicare Part B and you can you can buy Medicare gap insurance and normally outside of a few exceptions you have to go through medical underwriting to be approved so if you have a pre-existing condition an insurance company can deny you the meta the Medigap insurance but when you first qualify for Medicare I am not a Medicare specialist but you have a six about a six month window where you don't have to go through the medical underwriting you get an exemption for that so that's a big decision also when you're going to start taking Med uh when you're going to start taking social security is a big decision so the first five years are important another reason is because you've got these big decisions that you have to make and then unfortunately this is just a reality that we all face in the first five years we Face what's called sequence of return risk it turns out that having negative returns having bad stock market returns in the early years of our retirement are have some of the biggest impact as to whether our financial plan is successful or not and none of us know what the first five years are going to be like but that's one of the reasons that the first five years is so important another thing that's important if you're interested in this topic is to watch this video up here that talks about five reasons to uh it talks about I'm sorry average income for retirees and this video down here that talks about five reasons to retire as soon as you can thanks for watching bye bye
How Much Money You Should Have Saved At Every Age | Retirement Savings By Age
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
hey everyone this is lauren mack with hack in the rat race when it comes to retirement and strategies for saving for retirement people often ask how much money should i have saved at every age in order to reach my retirement goals this can be a very difficult question to answer because so much depends on one's lifestyle age in which they want to retire goals during retirement and so on in this video i'm going to talk about how much money you should have saved at every age for a typical american planning for retirement if you stay until the end of this video i am going to share with you a tip that you might be able to use in order to dramatically reduce the amount of savings you will need in retirement and possibly reduce the amount of time you'll have to work in order to get there additionally if you watch this video and think you're behind or maybe you haven't even started saving then i have created a workbook called from xero to retirement which walks you step by step through getting your finances in order and saving for retirement i'll put a link to it in the show notes below so let's jump right in the key to having enough money to live comfortably in retirement is to start saving as early as possible this means starting in your 20s most people in their 20s are just embarking on their careers whether that's freelancing in the digital economy starting a business entering a trade or finishing up college and starting a career either way people in their 20s usually have very little save for retirement and more often not can find themselves in debt due to school loans training startup costs or even entering the workforce and that is okay if you happen to be someone in your twenties who has managed to avoid debt and have money saved then congratulations you are ahead of the curve the best piece of financial advice i could give someone in their 20s is to start creating good financial habits while in your 20s because it will be a tremendous benefit throughout your life at this age there really is no specific amount that you should have saved although the more the better i usually recommend that if you're in your 20s you should at least have an emergency fund of one to two months worth of expenses saved up the reason having an emergency fund is that it can help you avoid falling into the debt trap i actually recommend that people of all ages have an emergency fund set aside that is easily accessible in cash so this is a good habit to begin early speaking of debt many people in their 20s are fresh out of school finally making some good money and it can be very tempting to rush out and finance and purchase a fancy car maybe some designer clothes or even a sweet bachelor pad but avoid the temptation to do that of course when you're just starting out there are necessities such as getting a car to get you to work or maybe suitable clothing for work however it's important to try not to live beyond your means or max out your credit cards many times when you do get your first job one of the benefits offered to employees is a company sponsored retirement account like a 401k oftentimes the company match meaning to a certain percentage the company will match the amount you put in so if the company match is 5 then if you put in 5 they will match your 5 i always recommend signing up for a corporate sponsor retirement account in my videos and i always suggest contributing at least up to what the company will match because this is like getting free money and it's considered part of your compensation package what if you work for yourself as a freelancer entrepreneur or work for a company that simply doesn't offer a retirement account then i recommend opening an ira or roth ira and contributing to the annual maximum limit ira stands for individual retirement account if you want to learn more about the difference between 401ks iras and raw diaries i created a video called roth ira versus traditional ira versus 401k i'll link to it above and in the show notes below to sum it up life in your 20s should be all about establishing good money habits make sure you have an emergency fund of at least one to two months of expenses three to six months would be ideal set up a retirement account either through an employer-sponsored 401k or your own ira or roth ira and lastly make sure to avoid the debt trap live within your means the more you can start investing early on as possible the sooner you'll be able to retire so now let's talk about your 30s by now you've most likely been in the workforce for a while and hopefully things are progressing well with your chosen occupation many experts recommend by the time you reach 30 years old you should have one year of salary saved up so for example if your annual salary is fifty thousand dollars a year then you should have fifty 000 saved up and invested this amount of savings should be in addition to the three to six months of savings that should be tucked away in your emergency fund in order to protect you from falling into the debt trap because of job loss medical bills car repair speaking of debt by the time you reach 30 you really should try to eliminate what i consider bad debt some examples of these are credit card debt car loans student loans etc paying on these types of debt each and every month prevents you from investing the difference and limits your ability to further invest and contribute to grow your nest egg as you saw in the earlier example in your 30s it can be tempting to keep up with joneses and live beyond your means many of your friends and acquaintances will take out large loans to buy an expensive home they'll borrow large sums of money in order to buy a luxury automobile in order to give the illusion of wealth avoid falling into this trap and feel tempted to compete with these people by making the same mistakes 98 of the time these wealthy people are actually highly leveraged and truly broke the best way to get out of the rat race meet your retirement goals and even retire early and wealthy is to live frugally and within your means okay so now you've reached 40 and you've managed to not succumb to the debt trap that so many people fall into in their 30s you should be more financially stable than you were in your 30s so how much should you have saved for retirement by now well most experts recommend that you have three times your annual salary saved up so for example if you make sixty thousand dollars a year you should have a hundred and eighty thousand dollars saved up and invested in addition to this should be maxing out your contributions to your retirement account that we've been talking about that is really important not only to help grow your investment but contributions to your retirement account can decrease your overall tax liability it is also a good idea at 40 to buy a house home ownership is really important because home values tend to rise over time if you buy a home at age 40 with a 30-year mortgage and make all your payments your home will be paid off by the time you're 70 and you've reached retirement therefore reducing housing expenses in retirement once your home is paid off then it becomes an asset this also gives you the option of selling it once you reach retirement downsizing paying cash for a new property that's worth less than the value of your home therefore giving you the extra cash to help you pay for your retirement another benefit of owning a home or rental properties is leverage which is the mortgage if you put twenty thousand dollars down on two hundred fifty thousand dollar house and the value rises ten percent then your returns twenty 25 000 instead a 10 return on 20 000 is 2 000 as you reach 50 years old many people are well established in their career and hopefully have managed to get a few raises over the years and are now making even more money at this point you should save around five times your annual salary so if you make sixty thousand dollars a year then you should have three hundred thousand dollars saved for retirement you should really be noticing the compound interest effects now due to all that diligent savings over the years once you turn 50 years old the irs allows you to start making catch-up contributions to your retirement accounts which means you're allowed to contribute higher limits to the annual contributions so you should be taking advantage of this in order to grow your retirement account quicker and also reduce your overall tax liability another recommendation at this age is to continue to remain debt free live frugally and continue to pay down your mortgage by age 60 now you're getting close to retirement by this age it is recommended to have seven to eight times your annual salary saved up so if you make sixty thousand dollars a year then you should have four hundred and eighty thousand dollars saved for retirement you're probably debt free now and really enjoying watching your savings and investments grow at this point it might be tempting to start dipping into your retirement savings however avoid doing this keep up the study savings pace many people are still working and earning great incomes in their 60s and can really boost their retirement accounts if they have fallen behind in the early years hopefully by now your home is either paid off or close to being paid off which should give you peace of mind as of now you should be eligible for social security benefits but you might want to put that off as long as possible to be able to receive the maximum amount of money you can go to the social security website they have a form where you can enter your information and it will give you estimates of what to expect at different ages i'll put a link to it in the show notes below you'll be able to determine at what point it makes sense to take it out and how much will be added for waiting and if you're just starting out saving for retirement and you're still relatively young don't assume you will have social security benefits when you reach your 60s or 70s many experts debate whether they'll actually be enough money to pay out those benefits in the future now for the bonus tip like i said at the beginning of this video having enough money for retirement depends mostly on your lifestyle cost of living and retirement in america however these days more and more people are choosing to retire outside the united states where the cost of living is dramatically less and they can have a much better standard of living for substantially cheaper than the us the thought of retiring abroad might sound frightening to some people and i get it but i have traveled to over 58 countries and lived all over the world and i can tell you that you might be quite surprised retiring abroad is not unusual in fact many americans choose to either retire early to stretch their retirement savings even further by joining the ever growing list of american expats who are deciding to retire abroad many countries around the world entice retirees by offering retirement visas to come spend their golden years enjoying the beaches golf courses and laid-back lifestyle in their country i personally know so many people who have chosen this option and none of them have regretted it you're probably thinking oh lauren what about the health care overseas it cannot be as good as the u.s well my husband and i have received medical care in numerous countries all over the world including emergency surgeries from countries in southeast asia south america mexico europe and i can tell you that every time we receive medical care it has been as good or better than the care we received in america and the bill was certainly much less expensive if this sounds appealing to you then take a few scouting trips to some countries where you think you may want to live and spend some time checking it out and meeting up with some expats that live there to get their impression of what it's like to retire abroad in the country that you're considering now i want to hear from you in the comments section would you like me to do a video on retiring abroad have you been considering moving abroad to retire if so where let me know in the comments below if you're watching this video and you're thinking lauren i am so far behind or i haven't even started is it too late then watch this video right here
Planning Retirement the RIGHT Way (with Veronica McCain)
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's
so you'll pick me up tonight
at 7 45. yo well no I got a few things to take care of first but
why don't we make a quarter to eight I'm 45. live from Joe's mom's basement it's
the stacking Benjamin show [Music] I'm Joe's mom's neighbor Doug and good news
today is all about getting your way which is my favorite here to help us work out our goals
and find happiness we welcome retirement coach Veronica McCain for our Tick Tock minute we'll
discuss tips on getting your vocab right to succeed in the corporate world in our headlines
why is it that instead of money at the end of the month the month seems to go too many days for
our wallet we'll share an explanation from one popular publication plus we'll throw out the Haven
Lifeline to Lucky stacking Benjamin's listener Jim who wants to know what percentage to put into his
Roth IRA and then I'll share some heartbreaking trivia and now two guys who like to color way
Outside the Lines the Philistines it's Joe and oh [Music] and a happy Monday to you stackers nice open
duck you know given your history I think that was fantastic we got a great show today fantastic
show Veronica McCain is here I can't let that go what do you mean given my history I am Flawless
day after day show after show let what go I don't know what we're talking about Veronica giving
my history great open given my history Veronica McCain is here today she is a retirement coach
and uh oh gee we don't get enough time to talk about just retirement so I'm I'm super happy we
get to do that sweet I'm gonna retire after this Marathon recording episodes podcast for the
last freaking week and a half so you can go on vacation so like yeah by the time people hear
this I've had a wonderful vacation in Spain which meant that uh that yeah we've been talking to
each other a fair amount lately however we got a fantastic show today not only Veronica became
we got a fantastic Tick Tock minute super happy headline today comes to us from the Wall Street
Journal the oh gee sorry the Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal are they like the Ohio
state of newspapers forgot to put the emphasis in the right place and they get angry those Buckeyes
no it's the Ohio State I thought it was just oh no no it's the this is from the personal finance
section it's written by our friend Veronica dagger a Veronica writes why it's now easier to
underestimate your expenses and overspend let's dive in Veronica writes many people have a gap
between what they think they spend and what they actually spend this gaps wide recently is the
financial and psychological effects of higher prices further strain people's budgets Elevate
inflation is rippled through Americans wallets for more than a year now some have cut back While
others have increased their spending to keep up credit card balances were staying relatively flat
for a while but have jumped higher recently oh gee you and I let's take it from here I think
that this is a year where it's crucial to have your finger on the pulse of what your expenses are
you know you hear people joke about eggs you hear people joke about the grocery store of course for
a while there you saw the gas pump that seems to have leveled off at least where you and I live but
I think if you don't have your finger on the pulse you're just gonna have less money at the end of
every month well the availability of credit cards and accumulating that Consumer Debt really makes
it easy to continue to live the life that you want to live even if the cost of living has increased
a little bit because you don't feel the pain of that right away you know it's like that kind of
slow death by a thousand paper cuts type of thing it's like you have a little bit of a balance that
carries over then you have a little bit more of a balance that carries over and a little bit more of
a balance that carries over and so that's a really good really good signal I think is if you if you
go month to month and you're not paying off your Visa bill every single month or if you had been
and now you're not yeah that's a good trigger to go like whoa what changed here that'll snowball
pretty quickly listen to this statistic just to tell you how many people are not paying off their
credit cards Veronica writes in the fourth quarter of 2022 the average household's credit card
balance was nine thousand nine hundred ninety dollars up nine percent from a year earlier nine
percent higher it's a huge big number according to wallet Hub customer Finance website meanwhile
the average credit card interest rate of course rose with spread right yeah uh to record high of
about 20 percent last week according to bank rate those are some there's some big downsides for
not tracking your expenses yeah thinking about the math on that real quick it's like okay ten
thousand dollars at twenty percent you're spending 150 100 you know 200 a month of Interest that's
not going to pay that off if you think okay well I make 80 grand after taxes bringing home you
know 60 after taxes and health insurance and 401ks and all that sort of stuff that's a solid
chunk of your annual budget that's just going to interest payments that doesn't really accomplish
anything for you so if you're one of those people that that balance is increased on I think it's
really important to figure out how to tighten I think one way if you have an accountability
partner a spouse a friend that you're working with I really think this can be way easier than people
think that it is Cheryl and I just have a weekly meeting we meet for 20 minutes it's over wine or
over pancakes depending on what time of day it is it's not complicated we just look through it OG
and I think it can be that simple it doesn't have to be you know you're using what you know I love
the tiller money app I think it's fantastic how it takes a spreadsheet and downloads everything every
day and you've got whatever numbers you want you can plug those into your spreadsheet and get it so
you can slice and dice however you want I like the cube app as well we of course have lots of fans
who use YNAB as a great budgeting tool but it's not really it doesn't even have to be that hard
it just has to be having just a finger on on the pulse like where where's our money actually going
you know it might have been you who mentioned it years ago oh gee it could have been Paula pant but
but a lot of people feel handcuffed when they feel like the advice is look at your budget every
month and decide all the details that you're spending on and I think that's one of the things
that intimidates people or just is a huge Downer against budgets I don't think you have to do it
forever and ever I honestly think you set up a budget we use whatever template you want to use
make your own or use some of the ones that Joe mentioned and then you check in on it for let's
say the first six months or eight months however long it takes you to establish habits for just the
way you live just the normal everyday stuff and then once you've sort of curtailed yourself from
essentially taking out a loan to buy that pair of pants or that whatever that thing is you think you
need uh I don't think you need to check in on that budget that often I think it's I mean honestly
I'm checking in on mine every maybe six months to a year I think that I think the big Point here
Doug with inflation having gone up as quick as it did the point is to have these early warning trip
wires that if you're not going to check it that's fine but you got to have a tripwire that alerts
you then that stuff is real and it's different than it was three months ago because to OG's point
if you don't catch it early this gets Beyond you I mean but Wells Fargo's PR team finally getting
getting ahead of the story here and got themselves in this piece listen to this I like this money
grows much faster than most people expect because interest is not interest says Michael learsh head
of Wells Fargo and companies advice and planning center it's a great quote a similar concept
though applies to inflation prices rise and if inflation remains high prices continue to grow on
top of already inflated prices leaving people off guard quote people get constantly surprised that
their money isn't going as far as they thought it would and in fact the cost of eating out and going
for drinks continues to take Dina lion aback even though the 36 year old married mother of one's
dining out and ordering in far less than she did a year ago some prices still give her sticker
shot she says the difference between cooking at home about ten dollars for nice pasta and quick
sauce from canned tomatoes versus Italian takeout for now 50 bucks is astronomical said Miss line
who lives in Brooklyn I think those trip wires are are what you if you're not going to set it up
Doug well let me ask you this I mean given your history with money how exactly do you set up your
own tripwires so we focused all of our spending on One credit card I have a rough idea every
month of what that that number should look like at the end of the month and if it's significantly
higher I kind of raise an eyebrow and then I start scrolling through transactions and realize okay
those are all legit time to cut it back that's my trip but you know then where to cut well then
I start to it's usually uh the same thing for probably 90 percent of Americans Amazon but uh
Amazon could be anything though I know that's such a brilliant way for them to disguise what you're
buying that it just says Amazon yeah because you're like there's no way I spent forty one
thousand dollars on Amazon last year yeah you did like well what did I buy wouldn't you like to know
right I bought Fruit Loops and a backhoe exactly but yeah then I just dig in a little bit if if
the number is significantly higher usually when that has happened it's because of a couple of
big purchases and I know right where it was and um I know that that big purchase isn't going
to happen again the next month it's you that for me that's usually what it is it's not the
trickle effect of Amazon it's usually some big some big Bill I had but uh yeah that's that's my
tripwire yeah I just know that given your history that we really need to make sure that um people
hear the story you are harshing on me today what is happening what am I doing I don't give up
your history and what then you you yeah yeah harsh on my open what is going on I don't I'm just
saying that given your history there we go again I think we need we need to make sure that people
hear the story like it's a it's a great tale hey uh speaking of great Tales time for a tick
tock minute this is the part of the show where we either have some Brilliance from the people at
Tick Tock or we have hashtag brilliance from those very same people uh Doug which one do you think
we got today this one's legit it's solid yeah well more solid than my backdrop which is just about
fell over I love it how people are about to see they're about to see all the canned goods here
in the basement when your professional backdrop goes bye-bye I think you're correct doug because
oh gee today what we're going to talk about is how to succeed in corporate life how to how to
figure out the right things to say let's listen one of the most important skills you'll need
to learn if you want to be successful in the corporate world is how to speak like an absolute
[ __ ] week and a great way to do this is just to totally ignore the basic principles of
English grammar so first take a random noun and then change it into a verb so a word like
idea becomes ideate then take that new verb and turn it back into a noun so id8 becomes ideation
then take that now and change it back into a verb so ideation becomes ideation Inc finally take the
new verb and change it into a meaningless seven word cluster an all hands Blue Sky ideationing
session then sit back and wait to be promoted right that immediately it's pretty
funny after your blue sky ideation session you're you're good that's pretty
funny brilliant Joe tell them some of the we've got some of that same kind of
corporate phraseology here that that just develops organically just happens we have
we've come up with our own lexicon here uh OG we need to talk to you over by the can
peaches we say that you're getting canned first time Doug got canned he thought it was a big
deal oh God I was remember that yeah I was I I had Joy I mean uh tears in my eyes and when it's nice
outside so you know we want to leave the basement we meet up by the clothesline which we call Doug
getting hung out to dry there it is we didn't need the bump this is serious work OG we're all trying
to get promoted here hey coming up is a woman that I don't think we need to promote a lot because
when it comes to retirement planning people take it way too cavalierly oh gee you know this
better than most people spend more time planning their family vacations than they do planning their
retirement which shows why so many people are not successful at retirement planning well Veronica
McCain worked a full career and then realized that as a second career which we may talk about as well
she was going to become a certified professional retirement coach and a charter retirement
planning counselor after 31 years of Public Service work decided you know what time to do that
other thing that I've really really wanted to do so she founded Savvy retirement coach with the
mission to provide holistic retirement planning Concepts focused on self health and wealth we're
going to talk to Veronica here in a second about doing a better job planning retirement but Doug to
get there I think you've got some history well I think of it as trivia you call it history
tomato well given your history of doing the trivia I think we should just have the trivia now
there's some massive punchline coming I can tell I don't know what it is but okay fine here's
the trivia Joe hey there's stackers on Joe's mom's neighbor Duggan did you know that on this
day in 1956 Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley became a number one hit the Smash Hit was written
by the Queen Mother of Nashville Mae Boren Axton and Tommy Durden Axton played a recording of
Heartbreak Hotel for Elvis at a disc jockey convention in Nashville and the rest is history
so since we're on the topic of hotels I got some hopefully not heartbreaking Hotel trivia for
you my question is if you're evaluating hotels as an investor what is the difference between
these statistics average daily rate ADR versus average published rate or APR I'll be back right
after I asked Joe's mom to celebrate Elvis by making me a peanut butter and banana sandwich
while I tee up Heartbreak Hotel on my Walkman Burning Love Joe's mom's neighbor Doug and we are
commemorating the anniversary of Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel becoming a number one hit on
this day in 1956 with some Hotel related trivia so my question was if you're evaluating hotels as
an investor what is the difference between these statistics average daily rate versus average
published rate in maybe our most thrilling trivia question yet try to stay awake non-hotel
investors the average published rate is believe it or not this is going to be amazing are you
ready I'm just settle down because I know the excitement is building it's the amount a hotel
asks for rooms well the average daily rate are you ready for this I know you've been waiting
by your device all day just trying to figure out what this definition is that is the amount
they're actually getting paid for the rooms if you're a hotel investor this is the opposite
of boring because if those numbers are close together it means the hotel is in demand and
if they're far apart you know maybe not so much maybe I should suggest our writing team retires
So speaking of retirement Let's help you get there permanently it's time to learn how to create
your retirement your way with Veronica McCain and I'm super happy she's here at the card table
with us Veronica McCain joins us how are you that you're here because we're about to talk if
this goes according to plan we're about to talk about all the things that you and I think people
should talk about during retirement but often kind of gloss over because they're you know just don't
get me wrong we're gonna talk about the money too but it's about more than money but as a way to
get there Veronica I've always believed that if you want advice it's helpful to get it from
somebody who's kind of walked that path right when I was a financial planner I had been one
in a long time but when I was the fact that I worked with 200 families and I'd seen retirement
over and over and over again should give people a little bit of comfort that yes you want to do this
once I've done it a bajillion times but but I had not at that point ever retired you have actually
retired tell me about that do you remember the countdown to your retirement oh yeah definitely
I mean I remember when I was working you did you know you do the usual countdown on your calendar
kind of exiting out the days until it actually hits and then that when that day comes I think
you get a overwhelming emotions because then I realized you know I'm leaving my work and my work
was not just work for me I actually had you know work family what did you do by the way I worked
for the federal government so I was a associate director over several various departments within
an agency a very small agency about 300 people but um because you're a small agency you kind of
have to sometimes do a lot so oversaw a lot of different departments yeah so so you have this
flood of emotions where the emotions about loss were they about excitement I don't know is it now
all the above is it purpose yeah I kind of had an idea sort of what I wanted to do so I kind of knew
what path I was going to take once every time I know it's going to go into some type of coaching
field didn't know exactly what way I was going to go with it at first I thought maybe more in the
Executive coaching area but then as I thought about that more it kind of gave me flashbacks for
work so then I decided to get into more of the the retirement because people were asking me so
many questions about you know what do you do and what you retire how do you feel your days and that
kind of thing so um you know as I was approaching looking into the coaching area I did look at
retirement coaching and I said oh this will be an interesting field to pursue because I like to
motivate people to have people get excited about their goals and what they want to do in life and
I like the kind of the financial side as well so um you know that's why I decided to kind of lean
more toward the retirement coaching but getting back to when that final day came yeah I think
it was when I had the actual retirement you know sometimes that work to give you a retirement uh
party and you see everybody and they're like uh say something say something and then when I got up
to say something all of a sudden I started feeling like I was gonna cry yeah I was looking out at
everybody and I was like wow I'm you know this is this is really the end um even though I had
something you know like I said to look forward to going through I didn't expect that emotion to
come over me like that but it did and I think a lot of people experienced that when the final
day comes of their retirement there is like a I don't know I mean it's just morbid but there is
like a death I mean you're it is it is your last cake right right you've been to see other people's
cake but all of a sudden you realize this is your last slice yeah it is that that's exactly what
it is it's kind of you know that you're gonna try to keep in contact with the people that
you work with and try to have some kind of relationship but it does change it really does
because you just you know everything usually that you talk about with people at work is work related
stuff and over time when you retire that kind of goes by the wayside with you so do you feel like
we're too Cavalier about that about that process about the uh you know the fact that we're going
to have these emotions we just think oh I'll deal with it when I get there yeah I think a lot of
people are just so caught up and I'm going to be retired I'm going to be tired I can do whatever I
want it's so exciting or whatever so yeah I think you don't really feel like that you're going to
have those type of emotions I think you just feel like you're going to go to this next chapter
in your life and it's going to be oh this this burst of excitement and it is I'm not saying that
you're not going to have it but I do think there's also a period of of where you kind of adjust uh
to you know what you've left behind in your job and your identity and all that with that and
then going forward pursuing what what you had to look forward to in retirement so it's kind
of a mixed bag those first couple of years you tell your own story but you also tell stories
of a few other people in the workbook one is a woman named Susan Susan seems a little lost
can you tell our stackers about Susan Susan is the one who the days and the walls were kind of
closing in yes yeah yeah she was the one person in the book that I talk about and the people
that I talk about the book are actual people that I coach I just use different names and
scenarios names change to protect the guilty yeah she was kind of diverse and this is a this
is a lot like when you're working you're kind of looking forward to those days that you have off
where you can kind of do some things that you want to do but then when you retire and it's every
day it gets a little daunting if you really don't have an idea of what you're going to be doing to
for your days your day-to-day life I think is the hardest thing that most people struggle with when
they retire they have some huge aspirations maybe of traveling or doing that but once they're
sitting in their house house on a day-to-day basis and in the you know the walls of you know
has kind of quiet and not a lot going on you don't have that routine of going to work anymore
it's kind of like what do I do on a day-to-day kind of thing and that's kind of challenging but
what Veronica separates your workbook from a lot of the retirement discussions I've seen is that
you take this day to day and challenge all of us to think really bigger about our life like I got
this feeling even in the beginning Pages as you're telling the story that well let me just quote
you you wrote a big void needs to be filled in retirement but it should not be filled just with
things to keep you busy like this is not just a March to the Grave this is a whole different
piece of your life and it shouldn't just be about rearranging the salt and pepper shaker every
day or you know figuring out that the dog needs to go for a walk like you challenge us to think
a lot bigger about this period exactly it is an exciting time for you to think bigger about your
life because it's probably the first time in your life that you're actually able to do what you want
to do on your own schedule and hopefully have the finances to do that so I think it's more than just
trying to fill your days with just the stuff to do and I think a lot of times when you first retire
if you don't really have an idea of what path you're going to go down once you retire that's
what you start doing you start trying to just okay let me do this do this and do that and you're
not feeling you're still not feeling fulfilled so I'm hoping in the workbook I give you exercises
to help you because people struggle with like what does this mean purpose meaning fulfillment
or whatever yeah those are I think sometimes big words that we use but I hopefully going through
some of the exercises in the book you will be able to figure that out by going through the exercises
and then trying to say okay well what do I really want to look for as far as my next chapter in my
life of what I want to pursue and what I want to do more than just these little small things that
are keeping you busy I get uh coaching from a group called strategic coach long time stackers
have heard me talk about them before but we have we have a workbook similar to yours with these big
questions about leadership and about coaching but you do the same thing here with retirement and
this is not guys this is not a long workbook but if you're doing this right it may take you months
to fill this stuff out because I could see myself Veronica peeling off maybe two pages and really
because the thought that goes into each page of this is really the important part well let me give
everybody some of the tips from the book that you have early on because you have workbook pieces
and then you have some tips here's some tips early on for when you first get to retirement to
kind of send you on this path while you're filling out the workbook schedule activities you enjoyed
during when you took time off from work journal and reflect on your expectations of yourself as
a retired person I love that word Expectations by the way read books and articles listen to podcasts
and a variety of topics to discover what most interests you now and volunteer for different
organizations to discover how you most enjoy helping people and helping help being out it feels
to me Veronica like you're challenging people also to don't be afraid to explore like go go try
stuff expecting that it might not be a fit exactly that's exactly right Joe I want people to not be
kind of Trapped into thinking they have to have everything planned out to just go out and just do
things that they find intriguing or they interest them and then from there they can determine what
they want to continue to pursue what they don't want to continue to pursue but don't don't limit
yourself on what you what you think you should be doing or how you should be doing it this is a time
for you to be adventurous and explore at different Avenues and things that interest you and a lot of
times that's kind of a hard thing to do for people because they've lived this kind of structured life
up to this point with work and all that and to try to say oh just go out here and do whatever and try
to figure it out it can be a little intimidating like whatever what yeah yeah so I'm hoping that
the exercise in the book gives you clue you know kind of cute used to okay these are some things
volunteering doing some other things that you know she thought about what maybe when you were
younger and didn't pursue kind of go back to those times of those thoughts and and try to figure out
if there's um things that you want to pursue now so yeah it's it it's funny because I I really
went through this crisis where I felt like not just there's a lot of stuff not interest me but
but I'm like okay I want to get involved in my community I want to get involved in organization
but but which ones I don't this could sound very horrible Veronica but I just didn't I just didn't
care about any of them and then I realized that it wasn't about that I need to just go get involved
and when I found out and ultimately at first it was the Arthritis Foundation I got involved
with I found out about juvenile arthritis I found out about all of these things happening in
the arthritis Community I got involved in walking trails around town and I realized how walking
trails uh not only your Healthy Living but beautify a city but they're also very inexpensive
ways for cities to raise property values like I learned it by exploring exactly what you're saying
to do in the book exactly that sounds so great Joe because that's exactly what I'm hoping people
would do once they start retiring just like you said you did you just started going out and doing
things and as you started doing those things you learned so much and it got your interest even more
into whatever activities you were pursuing the one thing that people have to realize when they retire
you have to be just to be intentional you have to go out and do it it's not going to come to you and
a lot of times I think you know when I'm working uh coaching with clients they're like well I don't
know I don't know I'm like well you got to go out and try you can't it's not going to come to you
you've got to go out there and pursue it and once you do and when you know you will see oh okay this
doesn't just me or this doesn't interest me but you've got to go out there and do it can we talk
about that what you just said about you kind of kicking people in the butt and and kicking them
out the door to go you know like my mom used to say don't come back inside until that light turns
on you know we we back when kids went outside side maybe I'm dating myself there but you end
almost every chapter of this workbook with who are going to be your accountability Partners it
seems to me like accountability partners are a big piece of this tell me about how you how do you
find these people Veronica maybe just before you retire yeah and sometimes say you know who they
can be they can be trusted friends and and people that you know I think sometimes there are people
that are asking you questions about yourself and are intrigued about you as an individual but you
do have to find sometimes an accountability person because in retirement there's nothing pushing
you to do anything and if you don't sometimes have somebody that you can hold accountable and
if you can't find someone within your your network I would advise you to look for a coach because
that's because what they can be as well pursue look um for a retirement coach or a life coach
or or someone in that field because they can be your accountability partner but if you're finding
that you're struggling trying to get stuff done and you're not really getting out there or you're
bored and you're restless and you want to not get some pickup and you're like you definitely need
to look into getting somebody to be accountable and help you because I even have coaches that I
work with and I'm a coach yeah yeah me so it's just something that just like I said it helps
you keep you accountable to someone to keep you motivated to do things I think that kind of
like you Veronica I just get this feeling that uh with my coach if I say it out loud to Mary Lou
it means I gotta go do it like that if somebody tells you or if you tell your coach then you
then you have to go do it I want to stick with this theme of uh friends and family a little bit
because those might be some of the people you're bouncing stuff off of but you also say if you're
having trouble finding your sense of purpose that friends and family might be a good Outlet yeah
and that's what I found for me that's why I said I want you know I knew I wanted to go into coaching
I wasn't really sure which way I wanted to go and the reason why I decided to be a retirement coach
is because friends and stuff are saying you're good at coaching and talking about this retirement
stuff or whatever and I'm not like you should do something with that and that's why I pursue
becoming a retirement coach but I think oftentimes friends and family see things within you that you
don't even see yourself they recognize talents and things that you have that you're like oh okay
you're right I do enjoy that you kind of brush it off and maybe not pay attention to where they
might be and I think when you're listening to your friends and family you have a tendency because you
trust them to listen to their guidance a little bit maybe more than somebody else that doesn't
really know you so I say I always lean into your friends and families to help you if you're
trying to figure out maybe you know some things you might want to do they might say well you're
good at organizing or you're good at accounting or you're good at this or whatever and they might
give you some cues to help you figure out where that next chapter is going to be in your life in
retirement so definitely look for them for that I like the fact that you go through a lot of
this first about about purpose and value and meaning before you get to the money in chapter
two because your chapter two then really is structured around okay now that you know that we
can focus on spending money where it's important and saving money where it's not and hopefully I
have an idea there you start off with some good tips you talk about traveling a lot of people
in retirement want to travel uh you say to be a conscientious traveler what is what does that
mean yeah everybody always says when they retire they want to travel and then all of a sudden
they just start going places and not really thinking of where they really want to go and why
they want to go there I kind of had to regroup because when I first retired I kind of I think
everybody does that you go through that I just want to get out and go go go go go go and you're
just going everywhere but you're spending money going everywhere and so you want to kind of
maybe reel that back in it's okay to have that little brief period of doing that but you want to
reel that back in and really think about you know where is it where do I really want to go why do
I want to go there what do I want to experience once I get there make sure you're spending your
travel dollars on things that are value to you and make yourself more conscious of the type
of traveling you're doing I know I did a lot of girlfriend getaway travels you know spy and
all that and that's great but I really want it I want to explore the world that's what I really
want I want bigger trips and so you know you need to just be conscious of what your goal is as far
as you're traveling and where you what you want to see and make sure you're you know you're putting
your money into that type of travel versus just doing things yeah yeah what I really like that
you shine a light on is now that you're retired you can really lean into off season and one thing
that's not in your workbook that I love about off season that Cheryl and I have found because she
is a somewhat flexible job and I could travel whenever man off season you get more of the local
experience because the places aren't full of a bunch of tourists people are more likely to be
able to linger and talk to you like off season is great but to your point you save you save a
bunch of money there too exactly and I travel now that's all I do is try to travel off season
because just like you say as far as you want to make sure with your dollars that you're spending
them in a conscientious way as far as when you're traveling too going off season I feel like those
retirees the best time for you to travel because you really get a feel for everything without
the crowds and like you said the pricing is better you're able to enjoy it in a different
way what are some other ways that new retirees and people that are stackers that maybe are are
getting close to retirement can think about areas where they might be able to save money besides
on discount or off season travel at first I would just look in your budget overall of what you you
know you have developed as far as your I think everybody should be tracking their costs before
they retire and coming up with a overall budget um what they think their retirement is going
to be but some of the things you can look at is cars you know the insurance and things of that
nature look at that to see if there's ways you you can save on that once you retire there's
also lots of discounts and stuff like we were talking about off Seasons but also if you kind of
pursue looking you know if you want to go to Parks or whatever whatever your um interest might be
looking for ways you can get discounts on things of that nature and just be aware of any ways you
can save money with traveling it's just a lot of different ways out there too for other things as
well two big ones I really like that you had uh if you've got two vehicles you might be able to go
to one you know think about what you think about Transportation evaluate your life insurance do
you need it anymore are you financially solvent enough where maybe you could get rid of that and
then a medical one which I really liked was hey this medical thing is going to get expensive
stay healthy which also gets you out of the house I feel like Veronica again you're kicking
people's butt out of the house I definitely with the medical and the exercising and now that you've
got all this time you've done definitely can get a nice physical routine into your everyday life
just simple walking I know I take morning walks every morning and not just for exercise but for
meditation purposes for me as well but yeah we all know the medical cost is a big expense when
you retire and we also know that you get more you know seditary in your way you're not as active as
you were where you were working so I do recommend that you do have a physical fitness routine for
yourself when you retire to keep yourself healthy so you can reduce those medical costs because
a lot of the Medical classes stuff you can prevent yeah and things that you could be doing to
prevent you get but you got to start early on your retirement and start doing things to keep yourself
healthy when we go to the doctors at a certain age you're all getting those oh you're close you
know borderline there's water flush that and stuff it's time for you to really you know we're at that
point you can do things within your health to keep yourself more healthy so yeah yeah definitely I
look at a hamburger now and my cholesterol goes up I just look at it I don't know how that medically
happens but it's crazy that is we all we all know that feeling with people that own their house
you have a section of your workbook to go through Renovations on your house and thinking about
your housing situation this is the number one area in our budget our house what are some of
those key considerations about our housing we should be thinking about yeah a lot of people
like especially if they want to stay in their houses should look in as far as their as I call
Aging in place in the houses and look how well their house is going to be able to support them
once they start aging and look at you know I have a checklist in there of things that you should
look at as far as your stairs and your appliances and just repairs and stuff that you might need
to do to your house as you start getting older those kind of costs if you're not prepared for
them can wreak Haven on your retirement budget so if your house is where you want to stay then
you definitely need to look at it like even the showers grab bars and um stuff yeah steps if
that's going to work as you get older I know with my husband he had had accident he couldn't
go up the steps but it made me start thinking you know as we age you know we're not able to go
up the steps how are we going to do it because we don't have bedroom on our main level so those
are the things that you need to really think about if you're going to decide to stay in your house
so what you need to do and kind of come up with a plan so it doesn't all hit you at once because
sometimes it does you know unfortunately it'll be unexpected like your husband's too I mean there's
no you know Tuesday everything's fine Wednesday the game's changed exactly and you need to kind of
be thinking about that especially like I said if you plan on stay in your house what your game plan
is and start trying to figure out how you can get your house accessible so that as you age it'll
it'll still suit you yes you talk about moving and about a lot of people of course think about
moving when they retire and you also talk about friendships and I'm glad that you coupled the two
of those together because one thing I've always thought and now I know we're here to interview you
Veronica but I'm going to pontificate for just a second no problem because I feel like people think
of moving wait we talked about being too Cavalier with this whole thing this especially to me is
an area where people are too Cavalier I'm just going to move closer to to my kids and what you
find is that your kids are really busy they got a bunch of stuff going on you become a full-time
babysitter but you don't end up interacting with them in the way that they want and all of
these close friendships that you developed over the last 30 40 years I'm a guy who lived for
a decade in Texarkana I moved away to Detroit for two years and Veronica we came back and not
because I have family here in quotes because all my friends are here I see some of my friends
as my friends are getting older you know I find them getting vacation houses that are far away
and we're we never get to see them anymore and I feel like this loneliness this isolation that
we put ourselves into because we think it's great like we're I feel like we're way too Cavalier
about that but anyway I will shut up I'm gonna get off my steps duel what do you think do you do
you're sad at all Joe that is exactly what people do they're very Cavalier they have this idea of
oh I'm gonna live here and it's going to be this great but they have no special connections there
yes or I'm gonna go near the grandkids and the grandkids are getting older the grandkids are
going to grow up they're not going to be here forever be little kids they're gonna grow up and
have their own things or even if they're already older they you know have their own activities and
stuff to do so that's why in the in the workbook I give a checklist you know it just even asked
them oh yeah we want you close by and I say also don't let your only connections be your kids your
grandkids or your kids you know you need to have other social connections outside of them because
a lot of people say I'm a little bit closer for the children and that might not work out so yeah
it's one of those things that I think everybody has this idea of how it's going to be yeah this
grandiose kind of idea so not true so not true and that's why hopefully when you go through
the workbook and you look through the checklist and if you do the exercises that are focused on
that you'll have a clear perspective of whether that's a great move for you or not whether it's
going to work for you and as you retire because I think it's hard harder once you get there to try
to move back so oh agree yeah yeah uh you talked about how I was a retiree now you know you're not
forced to get up and go to work you don't have to now lead the charge like you did in your career
Veronica with your department with your agency time management then becomes really important
then for retirees if you're going to get what value you want out of life so you talk about
morning routine daytime routine idea week again accountability Partners but but I
wanted to end by talking about this time management system for retirees you call it uh
postek p-o-s-e-c can you walk us through that one of the things that people struggle with
the most and I kind of alluded to that before is you had a routine when you were going to
work once you retire that routine is no more and I find a lot of times with new retirees
especially that's where they feel the most lost is there's no structure to the day anymore they're
kind of and all you know all over the place and don't know how they can spend time sometimes just
Milling around not doing anything or whatever so I want you to I you know sometimes when I tell
people you know structure they kind of you know like that's why I'm not working anymore I
don't know why not I don't like yeah well easy easy there all right if you want to try to
put me back at work with destruction my name is this is the whole purpose of retirement I thought
for me to just kind of Mill around and not do anything but I thought we find that when people
do that they get very bored so I just ask that you just think of your days and more how am I
going to start my mornings how am I going to get up in the morning get started and get going
through the day I think once you get that start up in the morning of what you're gonna do it kind
of guides you through the rest of the day but you do need to think about how am I gonna just get
my day started you know when you don't have an alarm clock to get you going every morning so yes
the workbook is is my retirement my way it's a workbook for the newly retired it's funny the way
that you go through goal setting like a 30 year old would just reminds me the purpose is important
no matter no matter where you're at in life and uh the book's available everywhere correct yes it
is yes well thanks so much Veronica for helping our stackers get successful with their retirement
it's funny we talked to a guy Wes moss in Atlanta about his book what the happiest retirees know
and it's so funny how it lines up so well like if you read that and do your workbook you're
gonna implement this and you're more likely to be one of those happy retirees so thanks for
this work no thank you thanks for having me this is Daryl from Pennsylvania when I'm not busy
arguing with a four-year-old um stacking Benjamins oh gee I love that we can talk to Veronica
for over 25 minutes and uh the concept of asset allocation doesn't even come didn't make it
doesn't make the cut we're so busy talking about what about my efficient Frontier it's all going to
change I mean not the efficient Frontier but just your emotional landscape I totally agree with her
you see it all the time you go through this this metamorphosis when you hit retirement and even get
close to it that I think most people are way too wait I guess they're not expecting it's a whole
different world I mean if you've been successful in your entire life this is the transition I
mean just inside the money concept not not all the other stuff that she was talking about right
like time and energy and all that sort of stuff but just the money piece of it transitioning from
being a good saver your entire life to being a good spender for the rest of your life in and of
itself is a difficult change so hard to make that switch and it's even harder when you don't really
know what you want yeah you're much more likely to just hold on to the money and the thing that you
underestimate is time you don't have forever to decide what you want to do would you rather have
Charlie munger's money at uh 90 or his wisdom at uh or you know what is he a hundred or something
like that is his you want to trade places with him basically no nobody would trade places with
Charlie hunger right now for all the money in the world well what if Charlie Munger likes what
he's doing I understand that I'm just saying like nobody would trade places with him because
of the time you know because he's 90 something oh like he's got billions of dollars so it's not
it's not necessarily always about the money I see what you mean but so you so to Joe's Point you'd
end up with a really really happy last two years of your life yeah that's right well it's our
it's our friend uh doc G's book about hospice you know about these people who spent their
whole life chasing dollar bills or people that spent zero time chasing dollar bills they
spend all their time going no I don't need any money and then they realize if I would have
had some I could have had better family time that's a good book hey let's throw out David
lifeline and tackle some of life's most important questions our friends at Haven life insurance
agency Doug they put what you value first I tell you what uh white breasted nut hatches white
breasted nut hatches yeah what is that that's a bird and it's also a realization that you've
become old because one day you're joy riding your frat brothers brand new car to Florida when
all he thought was you were like driving around the block and you're like we're going to Florida
and the next day you're getting out your bird ID app because some Bird shows up outside your
window what is that at least it's an app and not a book yeah true but uh and then I also spotted a
fairly rare for my area a brown merger [Laughter] both of those are fantastic names for birds and
I saw them both this morning but you know you know number one thing OG is it's an app on his
phone but the thing that makes him proudest is that it's his most used app on his phone like he
gets that report from Apple and they're like you open that Bird app a lot well thank you next
to his uh walking step counter app and the one that monitors his blood pressure he's he's also
the continuous glucose monitor blood pressure number of steps in the New Balance app
I don't see a problem with any of this to order new shoes every six months given his
history Anything Could Happen hey uh speaking of anything happening we should uh go ahead and
throw a Paving Lifeline because the answer that question Doug was your loved ones in your time
with a bird app it's why they've made buying quality term life insurance actually simple more
time to catch the brown and merger beeping out of the hole hey stackabenjamins.com havenlife now
please go there and then fast forward this 15 seconds to get us out of this bird discussion
their application's simple getting us to cover his decision their parent company Mass Mutual is
more than 160 years old so you know that they've done this before hey uh today we we I I love
Karen repine our show Runners notes for us this is uh Jim from Wisconsin calling in and Karen
says Jim from Wisconsin a real person not Doug thanks we actually have a real Wisconsin
idea is that was is it wisconsinite or is it just cheese head do you just
say cheesehead yeah I think that's the preferred term it's in their
state either Constitution hey Jim hey guys Jim here and I actually am from
Wisconsin I have a question about what percentage to contribute to my traditional 401K
versus my Roth 401k I'm five to seven years away from retirement maxing out my 401k contributions
I read somewhere that when you have saved six times your annual income you should move all
your future contributions to the Roth option what's the thought process in deciding how much
to put where I'll be looking for that shirt thanks Jim thanks for the call thanks by the
way for proving that you're really from Wisconsin uh Burton from Minnesota needs to
learn from Jim he's got to put some Midwest on that uh yeah if you're listening
from last week take a note from Jim it's a good effort Jim I'll give you that
I mean you made a You made an attempt but [Music] it didn't you don't
think Jim really talks like that but that is not a Wisconsin accent oh not
as good as yours was is that what you're saying I don't know what you're talking
about not as good as the interloper yeah Jim thanks for the call oh gee have you heard
this uh rule of thumb that he's using six times nope six times what six times something I've
never heard that gym next time something I've never heard it yeah the answer to when should I
put money in a Roth 401k versus a regular 401K is largely determined by your ability to pay the
taxes today you know you think about it if you're making a hundred grand and you're contributing
the maximum to your 401k you're putting 22 000 in your 401k this year which if it's pre-tax
is going to lower your taxable income to 78 000 before your deductions and all that other sort of
stuff that roughly is going to save you maybe four or five thousand dollars in federal taxes because
of that contribution not including any state taxes if you switch to the Roth side then that deduction
doesn't appear in your W-2 so you effectively are going to have a four or five thousand dollar
additional tax withholding throughout the year so it's you know back to our discussion at the
beginning of today your budget is going to be affected by call it 400 bucks a month if you can
afford that if you can fold that into your budget and not go into credit card debt or not have to
borrow more money for cars or student you know like if you can deal with it then obviously it's
better to pay your taxes today well not obviously but it makes most sense I think to pay your taxes
today because it's a known thing you know in the future all of that money becomes tax-free forever
and there's no there's no government requirements of withdrawals there's no government requirements
of those distributions that you have to take once you are retired it's all in all the roths side
is way way better but it comes at a cost which is that 500 bucks a month well and I think I would
think OG you know he talked about doing the Roth later in the pretext earlier I would think that
to pay that cost and to make it even more worth it because of the fact that you are prepaying the tax
you need those assets to grow much much much more so I would think that at the very least flipping
that around and doing the Roth first makes more sense like the further you are away do the Roth
don't don't do pre-tax first and then switch to Roth I would do Roth as early as I can and switch
to I mean if I'm choosing one or the other which you and I know this most people that listen to
this don't we haven't had this discussion a long time we don't think either one of these is right
we think you should be doing some of each because you don't know what the future is going to hold
but certainly or Roth first approach versus the other way around it doesn't make more sense
if you're thinking about it from the kind of historical context of your earnings you're going
to make the least amount of money early in your career and the most amount of money on the back
end right like usually that's how it works you your income continues to increase throughout
your career so if you have to pay your taxes I would rather pay them at a lower rate if possible
versus when I'm 50 and I'm making 200 000 a year maybe that's the time to use the pre-tax bucket
because of the fact that most 401ks come with company matches and those matches are also pre-tax
I think that if you can start out doing a Roth early in your career and continue to do it your
entire career you'll end up with a good enough balance of Roth 401k and pre-tax because of the
company matching contributions being pre-tax but if you're really trying to optimize tax brackets
and that sort of thing you can kind of manipulate it as you get toward those higher tax brackets
the problem with all of this of course is that we're taking a very big guess at what tax rates
are the day you withdraw the money how do we know whether or not this worked pre-tax versus
Roth well if you put the money in a Roth 401k and you take it out in the future you're betting
that today's tax rates are better than tomorrow's tax rates you're saying I'd rather pay taxes today
than in the future because the future I think are going to be higher that's what you're saying and
the vice versa is also true if you put the money in pre-tax today you're saying I think I can take
this money out at a better tax rate in the future then I can pay it today so I'm you know I'm at
a high tax bracket today I think I'll be in a lower tax bracket in the future the only way that
you know whether or not you're right is after you know that you're right because we don't have
the chart that says what are tax rates in 2037 because if we did then we would be able to
calculate it and say with certainty this is a better choice based on the circumstances
all we're saying is I think I might have a lower tax rate in the future or I think
tax rates might be higher in the future the one thing that I can say is that if Congress
doesn't change any of the rules Roth contributions Roth growth and earnings are 100 tax-free forever
so I don't care what the tax rates are in 20 years from now when I take the money out because it's
tax-free yeah if I'm gonna lean I'm leaning toward pay the taxes today be done with it that said
slots approach too by the way which is to say you got the cash today pay it today so that you
don't look at your IRA and go I've got a million bucks in my IRA it's like no you don't you have
500 000 in your IRA because half of it is for the government Doug I think this is really important
uh stuff for you I mean given your history with taxes and I have no history with taxes so I'm
good well maybe that's the point you gotta earn something to pay taxes maybe that's the point big
thanks to you Jim for the call if you would like to call and ask a question you know what we will
send you a Haven life stacking Benjamin's greatest money show on earth circus t-shirt and Jim from
Wisconsin really from Wisconsin is getting one cent his way slash voicemail gets you the shirt
and we're happy very happy to send it to Jim as I stare ready Doug as I say that I don't know why
I'm staring at Doug as I said Jim well he sounds hideous what are you talking about well it's
just I mean it's like a fiction just thing right this gym it's like the the State Farm guy that's
who you're talking to I know I think it's Jim I think somebody's having a tough day there OG well
before we say goodbye today time for our community calendar man we've got a great week over on the
stacking deed show where Crystal Hammond and Alan Corey dive into real estate Alex e Edwards is
a guy who helps uh has helped a lot of people in the southeast part of the United States
get out of intergenerational poverty through real estate teaching some real estate helps them
learn how to buy houses how to learn to do it in a responsible way he's going to be their guest on
tomorrow's show over on stacking Deeds of course our other sisters show the earninginvest podcast
doc G always has guests who dive deep into Allah into some some topic that is uh always exciting
and a fantastic and a fantastic discussion he has a friend of ours Fritz from the retirement
Manifesto coming up on Thursday Fritz is a guy who retired young documented his retirement an OG
to Veronica's Point earlier in today's show Fritz has really done it right this guy is so busy but
now doing that second career I think he serves on a couple of boards he Volunteers in the city of
Asheville in a couple different capacities one is working with animals he's always out in his
wood shop this guy has so much going on he's not sitting there wondering what he's going to do
so if you're interested more in in retirement Fritz will be over on earn invest of course here
on Wednesday the draft the NFL draft is Thursday so we've got Rob Welch he and a former NFL player
wrote a book together about going pro with your money we're going to talk Wednesday about no
matter what you're trying to go pro in how do the pros treat their money A lot of pro players about
to get a big payday on Thursday and as we already know a lot of them don't do the right thing with
that sudden money OG it goes in the wrong place that's what's coming up this week thanks so much
for hanging out with us today if you're somebody that's my kind of person and will leave a
review for people that they only know via podcast or maybe you've hung out with this
on one of our social media channels please leave a review of the show that helps us so
much helps new stackers realize what they're getting into a little different take on money
than maybe some of the other shows out there thanks to everybody who's done that Mom puts those
on her refrigerator if you're not here though to hang out with us on social media you're not here
just for Doug's trivia you're here because of the fact that you're worried about the economy you're
worried about your money and and how it works together and as a lot of those fears begin to ramp
up for people you might be feeling anxious to make some moves in your finances what I'd like you
to do instead is check out this free guide that OG and his team have put together that'll help you
plan more and panic less no matter what the market does it has some great insights on what you should
be doing and smart questions to ask yourself so that you make financial decisions your future self
will thank you for head to stackybenjamins.com guide that's stackybenjamins.com guide to get that
free guide from OG all right that is what's going on in the community man a lot of takeaways today
but Doug what are the top three man well Joe first take some advice from our guest Veronica McCain
and create your own unique roadmap to retirement second take a memo from our Tick Tock minute
to up your vocab game and Excel above the competition I'm sure you'll get promoted in no
time but the big lesson turns out five times in a row is the limit to singing Heartbreak Hotel
at the top of your lungs after that Joe's mom starts to get irritable and make threats now that
I think about it probably was the hip thrusting thanks to Veronica McCain for joining us
today you can find her book my retirement my way a workbook for the newly retired to
create meaning set goals and find happiness wherever finer books are sold we'll also include
links in our show notes at stackingbenjamins.com this show is the property of SB podcasts LLC
copyright 2023 and is created by Joe salsi High our producer is Karen rebein this show was
written by Lacey Langford who's also the host of the military money show with help from me Joe and
Doc G from the earn an invest podcast Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics
covered on each episode in our newsletter called the 201 you'll find the 4-1-1 on all things money
at the 201 just visit stackingbenjamins.com 201 Tina eichenberg makes the video version of this
show Once We bottle up all this goodness we ship it to our engineer the amazing Steve Stewart Steve
helps the rest of our team sound nearly as good as I do right now want to chat with friends about the
show later mom's friend Gertrude and Kate Younkin are our social media coordinators and Gertrude is
the room mother in our Facebook group called the basement so say hello when you see us posting
online to join all the basement fun with other stackers type stackingbenjamins.com basement
not only should you not take advice from these nerds don't take advice from people you don't
know this show is for entertainment purposes only before making any financial decisions
speak with a real financial advisor I'm Joe's mom's neighbor Doug and we'll see you next time
back here at the stacking Benjamin show foreign [Music] the after show this is uh the part of
the show that doesn't exist if you're new here what happens in the after show stays
in the after show getting back to your clothes I think that singing Heartbreak Hotel at the
top of your lungs just you know given your history might not be might not be great well
since my baby left I find a new place to dwell they're down at the end the lonely streets
called speaking of speaking of Doug's history um there's unfortunately OG a doctor
out there who has violated HIPAA rules and um got us audio from Doug's latest therapy
session and uh well I thought that as long as they broke the rule we didn't we should probably
play it look at the look OG can't wait for this he is so excited about that well I think
this is bad I think doctor shouldn't be doing this but as long as they have let's no
this is this is Doug's latest therapy session you what well you had waffles for dinner and you had waffles for breakfast so we're
gonna eat something else oh I oh I don't know sounds like you're obsessed now
you're really crying pretty good there now everybody is thinking about waffles like that
brain worm is in there and you're going to be thinking about it now for the rest of the
day well I I think I I mean I I really think that uh you shouldn't be thinking about waffles
given your history you're begging for me to ask I've resisted this whole time I'm not gonna
ask I'm not gonna ask why you keep harping on my history so OG and I saw this uh this video
that these guys said that that if you really just want to mess with somebody just end as many
sentences as possible when you talk to them with given your history just say it over and over
and see what happens and watch them watch Doug unravel the entire show they melt it is surgically
effective like it has just been driving me crazy I said it's Alyssa I don't even
remember what it was about but I just you know she was like brushing her
teeth or something and said well you know given your history and she's
like what is that supposed to mean you know just totally like around everything
to a halt just like you said yeah I think that is a bad marital move I said this will work
well with Doug I would not yeah I would not do that right before bed because you are not
sleeping that night stackers you may or may not want to try that your results May Vary but
ours ours I thought today were pretty good Doug didn't know what the hell was going on
actually now that I know it's actually more impressive that you found a way to
dodge my question the whole the whole episode you know given your history of course
yeah I'm not not enjoying your company anymore
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