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The Ultimate Retirement Plan | Wade Pfau | Ep 63

[Music] welcome to the market call show where we discuss what's happening in the markets and the impact on your Investments tune in every Thursday on Apple podcast Google play Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts hi Wade how are you doing I'm doing great thanks for having me on the show you know I'm so happy to have you here if you're in the retirement income planning business or if you're a financial advisor or a money manager somehow managing money in the space for retirement income planning everybody has heard your name you've been around in this field for a long time and as I was looking through your uh resume from various sources it's like okay well what are we going to exclude you know there's because there's so many things that you have done but I thought I would just kind of just fill in for viewers that don't know you a little bit about you um you know you're an active researcher and educator about retirement income strategies you know you do a lot of speaking I know you're going to be speaking here in Denver uh pretty soon uh you are a professor are you still a professor of retirement income at the American College of financial services I am currently yes and the director of Retirement Research for McLean asset management and in-stream uh you did your PhD in economics from Princeton and you did interestingly you did a dissertation on Social Security reform which we hopefully we'll talk a little bit about later uh you're also a fellow CFA Charter holder like myself um and you've got lots of AD you know accolades and some great books in particular one that I really like that you've done is a retirement planning guidebook uh 2021 uh and then you have that safety first retirement planning how much can I spend in retirement etc etc you've done some stuff on reverse mortgages The Unwanted stepchild that actually is a useful tool for many people yet not quite known by many so uh with that said I I was just curious tell me a little bit about your background where did you grow up so uh well I was born outside of Detroit I lived there until I was 15 moved to Iowa after that my my mother is originally from Southwest Iowa so I graduated high school in Des Moines Iowa and then went to the University of Iowa after that so pretty much midwesterner lived a number of different places afterwards including New Jersey Pennsylvania Tokyo Japan for 10 years and then now I live in Texas you live in Texas now yeah actually these pictures behind me and all are all the places I've lived over the years so it's so so you so you grew up in Detroit mostly it sounds like but moved all traveled a lot um how did you go from you know studying what did you study Finance initially when you were in college in undergrad economics and finance economics okay so how did you go from economics and finance to just being so focused it seems like you're focused on retirement income planning well yeah I mean uh financial planning as an academic field is still pretty new and even I entered the PHD program uh in 1999 and actually Texas Tech University started the First Financial Planning PhD program in the year 2000 so it wasn't even an option at that time but academic economics is very mathematical and theoretical and I was always looking for ways to apply to more real world type activities and that's ultimately how I made my way into financial planning indirectly you mentioned the my dissertation on Social Security reform that was testing how in the early 2000s there was a proposal to create personal retirement accounts to carve out part of the Social Security tax and put that into like a 401k style account and I was simulating how that might perform and ultimately that's the same sort of thing I've made my career on at this point which is just writing computer programs to test how different retirement strategies perform in looking for ways to get more efficiency out of one's asset base for retirement now that was during the bush 2 Administration if I remember correctly wasn't it and so and uh what were your findings in that what was your general thesis or not thesis but your general conclusion well at the time what I determined was that it could be made to work but it wasn't obviously a better approach and now in hindsight I realize more and more that there's so little in the way of protected lifetime income that carving out more of Social Security which is that inflation-adjusted protected lifetime income and exposing that to the market as well uh probably would lead to worse outcomes for many people than we do need some risk-fooled income and so now that traditional pensions are going away Social Security is one of the last holdouts and so it probably wouldn't be the best idea to private or not privatize but uh create personal the defined contribution 401K style accounts out of those Social Security contributions very interesting and we'll we'll touch a little bit more I have a lot a few questions on Social Security uh in general um you know from a macro perspective and also a micro perspective personally for uh people so um one of the things that I really like about what you've done is that you kind of take more of a approach that I'm kind of used to like more of an asset liability management approach when you think about funding ratios rather than the traditional way that you hear financial planners talk about it I really like your overall framework and one of the things that I I think is very helpful is your retirement income style protocol your resubm Matrix can you explain a little bit uh to the viewers about your ideas there and and what how that helps an individual determine their overall approach to how they should tackle their retirement income plan yeah absolutely and that's really one of the the confusing aspects of retirement income is there are different strategies that people can use and unfortunately just there's a lot of disagreement and arguments about one strategy is better than all the others and and by what I mean by that is you have What I Call Total return which is just a you build an Investment Portfolio and you take distributions from it throughout retirement you have different bucketing or time segmentation strategies and then you also have strategies that will focus more on having protected lifetime income through annuities or other tools to cover your Basics before you start investing on top of that and they're all viable strategies at the end of the day and that's an important point that Advocates of Investments only don't appreciate how powerful the risk pooling that annuities can do to offer more income how that is competitive with anything that the stock market might do and so people really have options about what they're most comfortable with and that's what the retirement income style awareness is about developing a questionnaire to help guide people in the direction as a starting point which of these different retirement strategies resonates best with your personal Outlook and preferences you may not ultimately choose the the strategy coming out of that but at least it gives you a starting point to say okay it seems like I might look here first as a way to build my retirement strategy and ultimately if that helps me connect to a strategy that resonates and that I can stick with through thick and thin in retirement that can help give a better outcome because they're all viable strategies but where a strategy doesn't work is if you're not comfortable with it and you don't stick with it and you you bail on it during a market downturn or something like that that that's what the retirement income style awareness is really designed to do is just provide that initial talking point on which kind of approach might work best for me to to think about as a starting point yeah I like that because what it's doing is it's basically more holistically looking at how you would can solve the problem and typically you'll find advisory firms that will will overweight if you will one over the other they're like I'm a Time segment guy or I I hate annuities it's all Total return annuities are a scam or uh you know I will never buy an annuity or uh you know Etc et cetera and risk pooling is is something that's really important but it's also very complicated and I think that's why a lot of people have shunned annuities and annuities have changed a lot over the years um and you know coming from my background you know which is more of a total return approach that's great if you have a lot of money but in in other cases you know I think that you can you can you can look at the problem from a optimal way of doing it or you can look at the problem from a way that's actually going to get implemented and work and what I like about Risa is it's practical pretty much all the stuff that you're doing is practical it's not completely theoretical one problem though with that is that you can have somebody who has a safety first for example mindset but their situation is such that if they have a Safety First with 100 of their Capital that they're very unlikely to be successful can you can you expound a little bit upon how you would think about that in terms of giving advice to people in that scenario yeah so that scenario is probably more they do have a safety first mindset but they've been pigeonholed into a total return strategy but they're ultimately not comfortable with the stock market and therefore maybe most of their Holdings are in cash or in bonds which doesn't support a whole lot of spending power and that's you kind of there's three basic ways you could fund a retirement spending goal the first is just with bonds or with cash not really offering much yield on top of that and then to try to spend more than that the um the probability base perspective is invest in the stock market and the stock should outperform bonds and that should allow you to spend more throughout retirement the safety first approach is more now let's build a floor of protected lifetime income that then brings in with an annuity the the risk pooling the the support to the long-lived helps provide more spending power than bonds alone as well and people have that option and it's when the safety first person gets pushed into a total returns probability based strategy and just doesn't invest in the stock market they're ultimately left with bonds which which is the least efficient way to fund a retirement spending goal over an unknown lifetime very true and you know I guess a lot of people did take that approach probably when I first got in this business 20 over 20 years ago there was a lot of people that were doing that who were retired back where the municipal bonds were paying it was it was conducive the market was conducive for that we had high interest rates that were in the long-term secular decline so you had capital appreciation from those bonds he also had reasonably good uh tax-free interest yields that were working for people and inflation was falling um and so now we potentially could be in the opposite inflation Rising who knows how yields are going to work themselves out but um it when you're looking at this um you you bring up this concept of some of the retirement risks and and you have like these uh longevity sequence of returns spending shocks Etc of of the risks that you're seeing out there which one would you say has had the largest impact negative impact on people that they really need to solve for you know longevity sequence of returns spending shocks and surprises well longevity in a way it's the overarching risk of retirement and it's misnamed because it's a good thing it's if you live a long time it's just as an economist will point out that the longer you live the more expensive your retirement becomes just because every year you live you have to fund your expenses for that year so the cost of retirement grows with the length of retirement and then it's when you live a long time not only is there that issue that you're having to fund your budget but then there's just more time for all those other types of risks to become a problem as well with the macroeconomic environment with changing public policy with inflation even a lower inflation rate still is slowly eating away at the purchasing power of assets and then the spending shocks are things like big Health Care bills helping adult family members having to support a long-term care need to to pay for care due to declining cognitive or physical abilities and so forth and so so it's really that longevity is if you don't have longevity there's not really time for the other risk to disrupt your retirement too much and that's why longevity usually gets listed as the primary risk of retirement interesting I hadn't thought about that so a lot of the other risks are kind of correlated to the longevity element um so so really tackling that that that could be one of the biggest parts of all the surrounding risks around that you you talk a little bit in your book a retirement planning guidebook you talk about quantifying goals and assessing preparedness and I I had mentioned before that I like that you're taking your approach more like a Alm or asset liability management type of of an approach which basically that's what it is um and uh and I don't think the average person thinks about it that way they tend to think about it as like I have so much money and I'll be able to with draw so much from it sometimes there's unrealistic expectations about it but one of the common things that I've seen is that most people are not spending the time they need to do on budgeting really to actually even come up with a number or help come up with a number of what your present value of assets need to be to be prepared do you have any kind of practical tips for people and their advisors on how they can actually think about and execute a good budget not only just you know come up with one but actually implement it well now that technology can really help with that and so if people are comfortable with some of the the different websites or software that Aggregates all of your different expenses different credit cards and so forth into one Excel spreadsheet that's a very easy way to to start budgeting now for people who mostly pay in cash that can be a lot more complicated these days I don't use a lot of cash so I just simply when in the rare case that I have an ATM withdrawal I'll just kind of call that a household expense for that time period and not worry about breaking that down much more but uh when you start having those credit cards or debit card type expenses now the the software may not categorize them in the way you desire and so I usually try to not more frequently than once a month but maybe once a month once a quarter download the expenses while I can still remember well enough if I have to change some of these categories and so forth to then be able to keep track of all my expenses and know exactly then pretty much to the scent almost what I spent that year and then to start thinking about well were there any anomalies of course there's always going to be anomalies and to make sure you budget in that sort of thing but that really once you have a few years of expenses down and once you think about bigger Big Ticket items like car purchases and things that can really give you a foundation to start projecting ahead at what your expenses may be in the future as well and then then you have a way to start thinking about well how much do I need to fund those expenses and that's the whole idea of that asset liability matching do I have the resources necessary to fund your expenses are just your liabilities and do you have the resources to be able to fund that with a level of confidence that you feel comfortable with hmm interesting so I I had a meeting with a client actually who was forced into early retirement and a former engineer and keeps meticulous records has for years and uh he gave us the actual numbers for the last three years and I I figured out what the compounded rate was and it was a lot higher than the inflation rate reported by the bl by the government so um I I think there's some disconnect there between you know how we model and reality um you know uh when you look at financial planning software and you look at the assumptions that are the number of assumptions that are involved in the financial software and you know even if you're not taking Point estimates if you're doing Monte Carlo or whatever stochastic process it's very difficult to come up with a robust plan so I'd like I'd like for you to give me some and I know this is kind of a big general question do you have any general tips to people who are doing this modeling on how and for and for clients actually for for individuals and how they can make their retirement more robust to be able to deal with all the changes that can happen in the world like you said public policy changes Market changes Etc yeah you will have to revisit things over time and and as you get new information about your spending make revisions to the budgeting but uh it's still just a matter of when you're like round up your expenses or be conservative with some of your projections there's some categories that are challenging as well like healthcare and when someone switches to MediCare at age 65 that could lead to an entirely different set of health care expenses and with all your expenses on Health Care in the past you might have to completely upend that and and and do a reset there so it is challenging but if you're trying to build in conservative projections the default is usually whatever you believe your expenses will be you just adjust that for inflation every year and most people don't really do that they tend their expenses don't tend to necessarily keep up with inflation over time now that can get complicated but the way I describe it in the retirement planning guidebook is you'll have one particular budget through ajd and then you'll have another lower expense budget after ajd but also building in what if there's a long-term care event and so forth how much additional Reserve assets would I like to have set aside for out-of-pocket expenses that sort of thing and then it's not going to be perfect and it's going to need revised over time but I think you can start to get fairly confident like I've sort of done these exercises I'm still far away from the retirement date and of course I may be wrong but I I think at this point I have a sense of what my expenditures will be or what they can be at least uh over the longer term Horizon of course subject to new technologies new inventions everything else that can happen uh that would change your expenses but at least roughly speaking I think you can start to figure these things out yeah um I guess I'm coming from a practitioner who's been doing it for you know 25 years and seeing the the the conventional wisdom by the best experts at each point in time and looking at how people have actually fared without advice and what I've found consistently is that changes in in particular with government policy has led to uh sub-optimal choices for people who are trying to optimize to the typical cfp advice so and let me let me uh back that up a little bit with with uh some some examples um education planning what was optimal has changed in my career probably four or five times um let me just put it this way I I have put more emphasis in tax diversification and diversification and stuff in how you do things now because what if you if you over optimize in these scenarios it's sub-optimal does that make sense right if like if you designed everything to handle one particular public policy and then it changes on you like right now Roth IRAs or Roth accounts are incredibly attractive to have Assets in but something could change it could just be not that they might necessarily ever tax a Roth distribution but they could add a required minimum distributions or they could count it in the modified adjusted gross income measures used to calculate taxes on Social Security benefits or to calculate higher medicare premiums and so forth and so if something like that happened and you'd been doing all these Roth conversions to get everything into the Roth account yeah that would be overdoing it and subjecting you to that particular risk so I do think tax diversification is is quite important so that you still have flexibility and options because the the uncertainty is the rules will change and we see that every couple of years we just in late December 2022 secure act 2.2.0 came out and that has changed a number of different public policy matters related to retirement income it's gonna and that will continue to happen over time so so be flexible and part of that is just not overdoing things making sure you stay Diversified with with how you're approaching planning yeah in today's environment what we see a lot is is people that have taken the advice of Max 401K uh you'll get a lot of tax deferred and and what's happening is is they're coming to retirement with a large very large 401K plans and things like that and then they just get nailed in taxes and in fact I'm finding a lot of people pay more taxes when they're retired than they did in some cases than when they were not retired um and uh and and it becomes an issue it becomes a real issue then they have estate planning issues and things like that so um uh I just I'm glad that you said that about the the tax diversification I think more than ever especially given our our current you know country's economic condition there's a lot there's we're going to have lots of changes and they could be very large changes uh in particular if you considered quote unquote rich um so I'm sorry I put my little uh two cents in there but getting back to your book uh you have this concept of the retirement income optimization map um again going back to the assets and liabilities and all of that and when you're you when you're you talk about optimizing that's that's why I brought up the the concept of optimizing I I think there's optimizing within ranges one of the concepts that I've kind of looked at and you talked about you talk about different people's retirement styles um one of the issues that you can look at is like matching the duration of your expected liabilities up for a certain period of time so let's say you have a certain percentage of your portfolios in a total return portfolio and then and then another percent that you're you're cash matching or your duration matching matching for one to five years or whatever uh I think some people call that time segmentation you can call it many different things if forget about psychology and how somebody feels if you are just a rational investor a rational person what would you say the optimal length of time is on average for somebody retiring 65 say to cash match or to duration match uh you know their near-term expenses at one year is it five years is it 10 years I know that's a a loaded question but if you forget about forget about psychology and just go pure rational mm-hmm well pure rational the the total return investing approach which has less emphasis on trying to duration match uh can work and also if you then use a an income protection or wrist wrap type strategy you you have that income floor in place that is lifetime so it's already kind of duration matched to your liability so time segmentation is certainly a viable strategy in terms of my personal preferences it's my least favorite strategy so the whole behavioral point about time segmentation is if I have five years of expenses in in cash or other fixed income assets I don't have to worry about a market downturn because I feel confident that the market will recover within five years and I'll be fine and that that story that's a behavioral story and it just doesn't resonate with me personally I I can understand it resonates with others but it doesn't resonate with me personally and therefore I don't necessarily think about what sort of like front end buffer you need in place too to somehow be rational or optimal also that's where something like a reverse mortgage can fit in in a really interesting manner because if you set up the growing line of credit on a reverse mortgage that can be the the type of contingency fund that you can draw from so that you don't necessarily need to have as much cash or other assets sitting on the sidelines to fulfill that role so I would look more at some other of course you need some some cash but I tend to say less rather than more and maybe look at some other options as well about how to have that liquid contingency fund that's great so so basically the in in the guaranteed income sources plus plus reverse mortgage could uh provide a buffer provide a floor so that you could have uh less cash and and you're generally getting a higher expected rate of return on the annuity than fixed income securities and your at at least at the present time a reverse mortgage line of credit grows at a faster rate than the cash which can be used tax-free when you need the money uh so you can see that Evolution that Carol davinsky is one of the famous planners and researchers in this area and in the 1980s he talked about the five-year Mantra which was have five years of expenses in cash now cash you create drag on you're not able to get as high of potential returns with the money you have in cash so he gradually lowered that down to two years in cash and then when he came across reverse mortgages and in subsequent research and and descriptions he talked about having six months of cash alongside a reverse mortgage growing line of credit so I think that's an example of I I think something like that sounds pretty reasonable that's that's that's that's really helpful so and I want to Circle back to reverse mortgages here but before we do if you don't mind I'd like to talk a little bit more about social security uh so we're kind of getting into the realm of the the guaranteed side of things not the total return side of things um or or I more more knowable income sources um I was just looking at the kind of the statistics right now total debt in the United States is really huge um we're running very large deficits project to be like 2 trillion we have a Pago system right now in Social Security and even if we taxed it's been argued by many people even if we taxed every billionaire 100 that would barely make a dent in our current situation so we have huge unfunded liabilities off balance sheet uh type unfunded liabilities how can we really expect Social Security to keep up with inflation and will it be there for quote unquote you know what I'm saying well it will need reforms it's very unlikely to Simply disappear for my own personal planning I I assume I'll get 75 percent of my presently legislated benefits but for people who are younger as well further away from their their 60s uh the social security statement they receive assumes the zero percent average wage growth as well as zero percent inflation and the reality is there's probably going to be a positive real wage growth over time so you're presently legislative benefit could be a lot higher than what your social security statement is implying and therefore when you offset a benefit cut with the uh the wage growth that can be expected over time you may not have that much less in terms of what you're going to plug into your financial plan but yeah I certainly we don't know how the reforms will shake out but if nothing is done sometime in the 2030s Congress would have to legislate a benefit cut and to keep the system so that enough payroll contributions are coming in to cover exist current benefits that cut would have to be somewhere in the ballpark of 20 to 25 percent so I just simply assume I'll get 75 percent of my presently legislated benefit as part of my financial plan is is it fee Is it feasible feasible to actually get Social Security in a funded situation or is it gonna is it most likely going to stay Pago in your if you had a crystal ball oh it yeah it's always been pay-as-you-go and right so the buildup of the trust fund was an effort to just build up some reserves in anticipation of the changing demographics where there's more and more retirees relative to the workers paying contributions uh they try to keep Social Security funded over the 75-year time Horizon and so it's never permanently funded but yeah with a 25 20 to 25 percent benefit cut that would be sufficient to get the system to be expected funding funded fully over the subsequent 75-year time Horizon that's that's really helpful um thinking about it that way in terms of just potentially a 25 less is a reasonable way to look at it I think um the that part of it's not so hard what's harder to understand or to get a grasp on is whether or not that's going to be what that means in real terms for for a retiree um if we continue on a certain path and inflation is is in a different scenario in the future how how do you think about scenario when or inflation when you're when you would set up a plan or a retirement plan what how would you what kind of what kind of uh of Monte Carlos if you will would you put on on your inflation expectation so I do well I tend to just try to think of everything in today's dollars so that the inflation's factored out of it but I the way I think about long-term inflation is the markets tell us what they expect inflation to be if you just look at the difference between a treasury bond and then a tips treasury inflation protected security with the same maturity uh the difference between those two is what the markets expect inflation to be in if they thought it would be different they would invest in one or the other to get that aligned inflation is coming down now and even over the next five years at this point markets are only factoring in an average inflation rate of about 2.1 to 2.3 percent so it seems like markets really expect inflation to come over to come under control even over 30 years right now the markets are building in about a 2.3 percent average inflation rate which is below historical numbers and in terms of if I'm building a Monte Carlo simulation right now I'd to be a little more conservative there I'd base it around a two and a half percent inflation rate with historical volatility and inflation is around four percent so so you're basically an average of 2.4 or 2.5 and then uh standard deviation is like four basically okay so uh that that sounds reasonable um I I guess what is interesting about that is I guess if you assume that we have typical real rates of return for different asset classes that that all works itself out if you put it in present value terms um but if that's not the case and and it should stay that way ultimately it should stay that way but you could have major moves in markets in people's uh time Horizon when they retire which leads us to sequence of returns conversation uh when people retire you can have these you can have these big shifts in markets things things are rough right when somebody retires uh we uh remember I told you about that engineer we had a conversation with forced into early retirement right when the market topped uh the good news is is he had two types of annuities that worked out perfectly for him in the sequence return can you explain sequence return risk for listeners and and what it means and how to you know strategies to mitigate that a little bit more and just one quick last comment on the inflation too like if you thought when I said these low inflation numbers that that's ridiculous inflation would be much higher well then you'd benefit from investing in tips because they'll provide you a real yield plus whatever inflation ends up being and so they'll perform better if inflation is higher and they've already discounted that that was one of the best performing uh fixed income markets uh in the last couple years so but anyhow but but yeah a sequence of returns risks so that's it whenever you have cash flows going in or out of a portfolio the order of returns matters and it's when you start spending in retirement that it matters a lot more so it's like the market could do fine on average over the next 30 Years but if the market goes down at the start of my retirement I'm not having to sell more and more shares to meet my spending needs and sell a bigger percentage of what's left to meet my spending needs such that when the market subsequently recovers my portfolio doesn't get to enjoy that recovery and so it can dig a hole for the portfolio and the the average return could be pretty high but if you get a bad sequence of market returns right at the start of retirement it can really disrupt that retirement and lead to an implied much lower average rate of return than what the overall markets were doing over your retirement Horizon yeah so and in terms of actually uh let's say you're coming up on retirement so this is a common scenario you're retiring in 10 years or five years what should an investor be thinking about doing to transition from that accumulation to distribution phase to kind of mitigate that sequence of return risk so when people start thinking about retirement I think that's where the first step take that retirement income style awareness to get a sense of what sort of retirement strategy might work for you because that's where you then have um different options if you're more of a total return investor that's the whole logic of the target date fund and so forth is just start lowering your stock allocation but still investing in a diversified portfolio as part of that transition into retirement if your time segmentation the easiest way to think about the transition is instead of holding those Bond mutual funds you start exchanging those in for holding individual bonds to maturity like if I'm 10 years before retirement every year for the next 10 years I could start buying a 10-year bond and then when I get to my retirement date I have the next 10 years of expenses covered through these maturing bonds if you have more of an income protection or risk draft strategy the the options would then to be thinking about well if I have an income gap I'm trying to fill where after I account for Social Security or any pensions I'd really like to have more reliable income to meet some basic expenses well you could start looking at purchasing annuities that would turn on income around your projected retirement date as a way to have that transition into retirement and so they're all viable options and it's just a matter of taking the the route that you feel most comfortable with very good that's really really helpful um now I I guess at least is a little bit into the what I would call the traditionally unloved unwanted stepchildren annuities and reverse mortgages uh you know they've gotten a bad a bad rap for so long but they're so useful in in as tools I would say probably the reverse mortgage is the least understood and uh and and one very helpful um tool I think maybe because of just the history of them and how they used to be structured versus how they're structured now um can you give me a sense about how to think about reverse mortgages for people is it only for people who are you know can barely get their their plan together with their assets or or does this also work for people who have a cushion but they should still do a reverse mortgage more yeah I mean the conventional wisdom a lot of times is that the reverse mortgage is a last resort consideration after everything else has failed and maybe then just a way to Kick the Can down the road a little bit but ultimately that retirement wasn't necessarily sustainable since about 2012 that really the focus of the kind of research retirement planning financial planning type research was looking at how reverse mortgages can be used as part of a responsible retirement plan and so it's not that a lot of advisors may just think the reverse mortgage is only for someone who's run out of options but but that's really not the idea it's we have different assets and it's back to that real map the retirement income optimization how do we position those assets to fund our goals and the reverse mortgage provides a lot of flexibility about how to incorporate our home equity asset to help fund our retirement plan and it can lead to a lot more efficient outcomes than just simply say leaving the home sitting on the sidelines and saying well I've got the home if I have long-term care needs I'll sell my home to fund the long-term care something like that otherwise I'll just leave the home as a legacy asset for my beneficiaries there's much more efficient ways to incorporate home equity into a retirement plan and that's what the whole discussion around reverse mortgages is how can I I use a reverse mortgage to help build a more efficient retirement plan and not as a last resort but as part of a responsible well-funded retirement plan it's just another Diversified tool to a source of source of of assets that you can use that's not just sitting there I just had a conversation with a client yesterday that is about to retire in a few years and uh that is exactly what he said that other property that I have in that other State uh I'm just gonna keep that as a that'll be my I'll sell it if I need to you know there was a conversation about health care contingency and um uh long-term care and things like that and that was his rationale um and and in discussions with clients there has been a a ton of resistance you've been really good at putting out information that shows why it makes sense to have it as a potential use so can you explain a little bit about the the line of credit portion of it and how that how use how that could be advantageous yeah and it really it goes back to this idea of sequence of returns risk and if you look at a reverse mortgage in isolation it may look expensive or whatever else but it's how does it fit into the plan and by reducing pressure on the Investments it can help lay the foundation for a better outcome and the the growing line of credit is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the reverse mortgage and I think it was partly unintentional and it may sound too good to be true in a way it probably is and we saw in in October 2017 the government put some limitations on the growing line of credits so it was incredibly powerful before then it still quite powerful not as powerful as before for new uh anyone who opened a reverse mortgage before October 2017 was protected to have those Provisions in place for the entire life alone but if you wait and then after October 2017 you still have the growing line of credit it's not as powerful but but the idea is I believe the government assumed people would open reverse mortgages because they want to tap into the funds but financial planners realized with the variable rate not with a fixed rate but with a variable rate home equity conversion mortgage you do have to keep a minimal loan balance of say 50 to 100 dollars but otherwise the rest can be left as a line of credit and that line of credit grows at the same way the loan balance would grow and so you can understand why if you borrow money the what the loan balance will grow over time well it just happens to be the case that the kind of neat planning trick is if you open the reverse mortgage and 99 of it is in the line of credit the line of credit is growing over time at the same rate that the loan balance would have been growing and ultimately this improves the odds dramatically of having a lot more access to funds over time if you open it sooner and let the line of credit grow versus just waiting to open it at the time you might actually want to start spending from it yeah how has it been limited uh limited versus the way it used to be what what are the limitations well they increased the initial mortgage insurance premium which is not directly to the line of credit but then every every so often used to be more frequently we're now getting overdue at this point with it's been over five years but they revised the tables that determine the principal limit factors of what percentage of the home value can you borrow and so as part of that 2017 change they uh lowered the the borrowing percentages and also they lowered I mean this this part's a good thing but they lowered the ongoing mortgage insurance premium that would cause the loan balance to grow at a slower rate but it also in turn caused the line of credit to grow at a slower rate so it before that change I was running simulations where if you opened a reverse mortgage at age 62 there was like a 50 chance that within 20 years the line of credit could be worth more than the home and that's no longer the case it's still there's still a probability that the line of credit could grow to be worth more than the home but it's not nearly as dramatic as what I was Finding before the rule change that's very interesting because the line of credit growth rate is tied to interest rates and home prices have somewhat of an inverse relationship to interest rates to some degree but it's basically positively skewed so it's not it's hard to know but uh uh but yeah that's that is a great planning tip and it's interesting because we have had a lot of friction with this discussion with uh clients uh mentioning to them because they just have it in their head that I'm going to lose my home and I'm going to there's all these things that can go wrong and then you have to explain it's a big education process and of course they are required to do education as well no we don't sell reverse mortgages but we always you know if we if we you know we mention it to people as a source and you know having it there makes a lot of sense uh and and the same thing with the annuities um you know I have a love hate relationship with annuities but I'm becoming to love them more and let me tell you why before it was all commission driven you know and we're fiduciaries we don't do commission stuff now with the Advent of finally the insurance companies have really gotten to the point where there's at least enough of them now doing products that make sense with the guarantees I mean there was always companies out for a long time there's companies out there like Americas Etc that had just pure plain vanilla uh va's variable annuities that had just lowered your expenses and maybe eliminated a surrender or something but the guarantees is where the real there were folks too much on tax deferral and not enough on guarantees what were the guarantees is really really what we're really looking for here uh and the only way you could even get them you guarantees would be if you did a commissionable product so we'd be handing you know we would be referring people to Insurance guys who were selling commissionable products and then sometimes you don't know what's going to happen after that happens uh with that client so now thank God we have uh we're in a scenario now where the where the financial industry has finally caught up to what needed to happen with annuities yeah the only annuities yeah yeah the only annuities and there's it still has a lot more to be done it's it's you shouldn't be overlooked and I think what happens one of the reasons that I think they're so helpful uh for people is that risk tolerance is time variant people say their risk tolerance is X and then as soon as you have a market decline then their risk tolerance is all all of a sudden why which is more conservative and and uh these annuities can help people psychologically overcome that right you can always look to something that is either staying equal or growing and you can also have growing income streams during the Gap we see that a lot there's a gap between uh when they get Social Security and when they retire and it kind of fills that Gap and it's funny when I was when I was I actually had my assistant who's also a CPA excuse about my financial planning system I had to read this book first and she uh she said it sounded like like you uh were like in the room with him uh because there's so much stuff in here that you and I agree with it's amazing uh before not even knowing you so and I think it might have to do more with the approach of taking things more from uh your academic background and your CFA background it gives you a different perspective than what kind of the traditional financial planners had who had come more from a sales background and now what's happening is is we have uh the whole industry is now moving in the I think moving in the right direction and I think you've been a big uh reason why that's happening so I I really want to thank you for that all your work is really making a difference I want to talk a little bit about Medicare if we can and health insurance this is probably one of the most the hardest part is the medical the medical discussions in some ways um people don't want to think about long-term care people don't want to think about health costs I was looking at some of the statistics you know long-term care statistics is how much it costs it's a big number how would you how would you model the contingency planning you know for let's just start with long-term care how would you model that would you model it as a present value number or would you try to put it as a as something that's over time how how would you how do you approach that yeah actually so I did try to make the retirement planning guidebook as comprehensive as possible and and so I as part of that developed a long-term care calculator and the the basic logic of it is develop a scenario that you would feel comfortable that if you could fund that scenario uh you'll feel like okay things things will work out whether that's three years in a nursing home whatever the case may be but develop that scenario where you're saying okay at age 90 I will spend the next three years in a nursing home right now in the United States the average cost for a semi-private room in a nursing home is a little bit under a hundred thousand dollars I'll say in today's dollars a hundred thousand dollars a year but then I'm gonna plug in the the math gets complicated but you've got what's the inflation rate in long-term care what's the overall inflation rate and then back to this whole idea of the asset liability matching like what's the investment return discount rate you're comfortable assuming as well and also recognizing that if I do go into a nursing home I don't have to also fund my entire budget of a like if I thought I was going to spend 80 000 a year well I'm not going to be going on any sort of trips I don't have to go to restaurants or anything uh a lot of my other expenses would reduce not not 100 but they would reduce so plug it in what I think is a reasonable reduction to the rest of my budget and then you get calculated a present value of here's how much money I'd have to have set aside as a reserve asset to feel comfortable that I would be able to fund this long-term care need and and be able to have a successful retirement and for people who are worried about and who may be paying out of pocket for long-term care that could be several hundred thousand dollars to be blunted on average that's what it comes out to I actually had a coffee with a gentleman and he said uh what is it just tell me what the number is I said well it depends on your age he says no just tell me what the number I said it's roughly about 300 000 roughly on average it could be more it could be less uh you know uh okay and and there's there's there's different ways you can fund it right you can do long-term care insurance uh traditional Standalone you could do um you know life insurance policies that have embedded features you could do if you can't like qualify for um you know you know get a policy you can maybe get it embedded in an annuity of some sort you can sell fund um so it's not an easy thing that you can uh solve it with a quick answer um but but it's important to have in a plan and I and I like the fact that that uh you've emphasized that a lot in your work um it's just it's just great that that people are thinking about it from that perspective I want to switch gears a little bit um and talk a little bit about tax efficiency uh you know taxes are such a huge part of the impact of a plan and there's so many different angles to it and and the tax rules change so much um I'll tell you one of the challenges that I have asset location the concept of balancing you know where you put a certain asset according to us is tax efficiency versus keeping an asset allocation in line right up you know operationally keeping it in line with the objectives and then as money is being spent taking it from the right place it's a challenge even with excellent software and then sometimes I'm finding that it doesn't actually work out as planned so can you can you give me some practical tips on how to deal with asset location well the the basic logic of asset location but yeah I mean in practice it gets incredibly complicated as you're spending from these accounts to think about also rebalancing and making sure you're keeping the right asset allocation between stocks and bonds and the NASA location is where do you keep these things but generally just is a basic guideline your taxable brokerage accounts of course you want some cash there for your liquidity but otherwise that's your most tax efficient stock Investments so if you own stock index funds and so forth the on a relative basis they're most likely to be best off in your taxable account because a lot more of their returns will be those long-term capital gains that get the preferential tax treatment then with like your tax deferred IRAs and 401ks that's more of a place where less tax efficiency so bonds and so forth maybe lower returning type asset classes and then for your Roth accounts the Roth IRA and so forth that's where less tax efficient but higher expected return type asset classes could go the Emerging Market funds and small cap value and that sort of thing and that does also work with distribution ordering as well because the Roth will be what you tend to spend last and so also having these uh riskier asset classes that may have more growth prospects over the long term that can be a good place to set them aside since you're not likely to be spending from those accounts until later in retirement okay yeah it I think for a lot of people it's a little bit of a daunting thing and in practice it can be with contingencies and things like that can be hard to to do correctly and keep managed and I know there's good news is there's good software now that that helps with that um as far as tax efficiency the other you mentioned the order of withdrawals I mean traditionally you know you have the you know your traditional order of withdrawal that you would you would uh do in in the past a lot a lot of recommendations has been you know you want to take from your taxable accounts first right let those tax-free tax deferred accounts grow and then and then you start taking from those other sources but you make a really good point that that's not always the best thing to draw that taxable account down too fast can you expand upon that a little bit well the yeah the the basic tax efficient distribution is spent down taxable assets than tax deferred like IRAs and then tax exempt like Roth against last but you you can do better and so the the better approach is to have a blend of taxable and tax deferred until the taxable account depletes and then a blend of tax deferred and tax exempt after that and as part of that blend you can do rock conversions to in the short term pay higher taxes if that can better position you to pay less taxes over the long term and to have a higher Legacy value from assets over the long term yeah and then getting more specific than that it's there's no you really got to run the the individual numbers on a case-by-case basis but generally there's the opportunities to sustain your assets for much longer by having a more tax efficient distribution strategy that digs into that taxable plus tax deferred and then later tax deferred plus tax exempt exactly and and that's why it's important while you when you're an accumulation phase make sure you have some tax diversification if you can yeah have Assets in all those different types of accounts yeah so that you're not nailed so bad uh later on uh and then there's a lot of complexities that can happen with happen that we see quite a bit with concentrated stock positions and things like that which is probably outside the scope what we're talking about today so um and lastly here last last topic here non-financial aspects of retirement this is a huge huge huge thing uh it's funny it was the last towards the end of your book and I'm glad that you talked about it uh because uh there's I can't tell you how many times um you know you see people think that they're going to be happy sitting on the beach and then they they do that and they're miserable uh or or spouses that wind up hating each other for some reason can you tell can you give us some ideas about um like what should people be doing like say they're five years into retiring or ten years into retirement retirement What should people be thinking about doing to kind of get their their overall lifestyle satisfactory when they actually do retire yeah and and that's this is in some ways more important than any other Financial stuff because with the finances it's easier to adapt but work does so many things in a person's life it's not just that it provides a salary and you need a way to replace all the other aspects of work such as structure to the day camaraderie feeling part of a team feeling like you're creating value for a society all these different aspects that you need to be able to replace with something that gives you motivation to wake up in the morning in retirement and so to say simply it's not the best starting scenario if you retire because you hate your job you want to be able not to retire away from something but to be able to retire to something you want to have and it gives you purpose and passion and meaning to give you the motivation to wake up and and have something be active each day because in all too many cases people just they start doing passive things like watching too much television or surfing the internet too much and that can lead to a really miserable and unsatisfactory retirement wow that's huge that's interesting have something to retire to so uh and and start figuring that out sooner rather than later right not don't wait till the very end and go yeah what am I doing uh and sitting there staring at your wife or your husband yeah that's the idea that there's all these things you you want to get done but you just think well when I retire then I'll have more time to do it well if it's something you've been holding off on doing for the past 40 years it's not likely that just having more time in retirement is what you need you may just simply either not be interested if it's a hobby like oh I want to go back to playing the guitar or something if you're waiting for retirement to do that sort of thing there you go that retiring may not be enough and then people might start feeling bad that you no longer have the excuse and that's where if that sort of bad feeling compounds it can create a spiral like a downward spiral where people just become less engaged and less positive and it can even impact Health which then in turn makes it harder to be engaged and involved and and can lead to downward spirals it's really important to try to avoid that and as part of that not waiting for retirement to to consider all these other aspects of your life outside of work but making sure you're nurturing relationships and having hobbies and having things outside of work so that it will then be easier to transition into the retirement yeah that's great so is there anything as we close here is there anything that you're really excited about that you're working on right now that you want to share or is there at all right now I am just trying to get the updates done for the retirement planning guidebook and where we're doing the best we can to build out that retirement income Styles ideas uh something that people can benefit from and uh the other main research area is with the tax planning as well that I think this will be a Hot Topic and I've already done a lot of work in that area but it is such a complicated area that just trying to push forward as well about like Roth conversion strategies and and how to best Implement those in a most of the work in that area just assumes a fixed rate of return and with the reality of not fixed rates of Returns on your Investment Portfolio that also dramatically complicates some of those tax planning decisions so I'm continuing to push ahead in those areas interesting so more stochastic modeling in your future yes stochastic modeling and now you're probably going to be uh that Technology's got to be in there somewhere too any plans uh that you want to announce or share with new technology that you're going to be coming out with or software programs or anything like that or I mean I just have this Vision in my head if I were you I'd be doing something like that but I mean I'm just saying yeah don't Envision creating tax planning software but uh the retirement income style awareness that's where I'm putting on my efforts in terms of having software and that's an easier problem than the tax planning problem definitely yeah there's a lot of changes always yeah you'll be coding to your uh blue in the face all your staff would be so uh the uh it's interesting I I I'm actually going to be diving into that that profiling software that you have um I had a conversation yesterday about that so that's very good so where would people uh would you like people to send you see learn more about you um anything that you're up to oh yeah uh so my website retirementresearcher.com all one word retirement researcher and if you go there you can sign up every Saturday morning we send out an email with different articles and things and then my retirement planning guidebook is on Amazon or any other major book retailer and also I do have a podcast as well they're retire with style podcast with Alex mergia who's my a co-co-researcher and and co-founder of the retirement income style awareness excellent all right Wade thank you so much appreciate you coming on it's been a pleasure thank you the information in this podcast is informational and General in nature and does not take into consideration the listeners personal circumstances therefore it is not intended to be a substitute for specific individualized Financial legal or tax advice to determine which strategies or Investments may be suitable for you consult the appropriate qualified professional prior to making a final decision wealthnet Investments is a registered investment advisor advisory services are only offered to clients or prospective clients where wealthnet Investments and as representatives are properly licensed or exempt from licensure [Music] foreign

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How to Plan for Early Retirement: Exclusive Retirement Calculator

When someone says the word Retirement, what comes to your mind? Is it the age at which you would probably retire or is it the bank balance that you would have or the abundant time you will have to do whatever you like doing. I think it's a combination of all three. Because all these three require lots and lots of money. Yes, in today’s video we will talk about how you can retire successfully and can generate enough corpus that your lifestyle does not get affected at all. Hi, I'm Samarth, for the past 11 years, I have been working in the finance industry and I'm currently the investments lead at wint wealth. Retirement, it should essentially mean financial freedom. In today’s example we will assume that you started your job or career at 22 or 23 years of age. And as of today, your age is 30 years. For the next 20 years, we are assuming that you'll continue your active line of work, essentially meaning that you will retire by the age of 50. Wait, wait, wait! I know you might be wondering that this video was for early retirement.

See the idea is to let you know that what should be the method for retirement calculation. If you are a little aggressive on that, you might retire by 40 itself or by 45. It all depends on your consistency and your persistence. For the time being , we have calculated this on a very conservative way and hence 50 has been considered as the retirement age. So now we'll be focusing on the example and for this we will be looking at the excel sheet. By the way, this Excel sheet that you can see on the screen can be downloaded using the link in the description and also help us know in the comments if you found this Excel sheet to be useful.

Infact, you can also download sheet right now and use it live while watching the video. You can change the numbers and see if it is suiting you and how it can help you to achieve your retirement. We have assumed that your current age is 30 years. And you started your work life or your career or your job around 22 or 23 years of age. You want to retire at the age of 50 years, your life expectancy is around 80 years. Now because you have already worked for around 7-7.5 years, we are assuming that you have saved roughly two to two and a half lakh per year, so your total savings as on date would be 16 Lakh Rupees. How is this split? Majority portion of investment is done in mutual funds. I too personally, when I started my career, so majority savings (up to 80-90%) I used to do in mutual funds. And I used to split them into growth mutual funds and a small part into dividend mutual funds.

After that since you are doing a job, you will contribute towards EPF. So we have assumed that this is around three lakh rupees. For emergency fund, you have kept some money into FD or bank balance, which is around two lakh rupees, and then remaining money, you have explored another debt option that is public provident fund and under this you have invested two lakh rupees. Basis our assumption and calculation, on this entire corpus of 16 Lakh Rupees up to the age of retirement, that is for the next 20 years, you will generate 10% returns.

So this 16 Lakh Rupees will get converted to 1.15 Crore Rupees. Yes, You heard it right. Believe me, if you do the savings consistently and in a discipline way, your Corpus becomes massive slowly. By the time I had completed five years in my job, I had enough money to pay for my car all in cash. But does that mean that mean, I did so? No. By the way, if you want to know if it makes sense for you to buy a car or use services like Ola and Uber, please watch this video. Now we are assuming that your monthly take home salary is one lakh rupees. And out of this 60,000, that is 60% of your take home salary is spent by you. After that how much would be your savings? 40,000 Rupees. Now if you keep saving this monthly, consistently in a discipline way, then you can easily generate the amount of corpus such that during your retirement life, you can manage your lifestyle very easily and won’t be financially dependent on anyone.

Next assumption which we have taken is that on your salary you will get an increment of around 8%. I know you might be feeling that the 8% figure is too high but you must also consider that although there might be years when you get only 5% or 7%. I really wish you never get so low increments, but there will be years when you will switch your job or get promotion, when your increment might be 20%, 25%. During your pre retirement age, that is up to the age of 50 years we have assumed that years care, return 10% on the amount which you're investing and on the corpus, which you already have save.

Then after retirement this figure drops to 7%. I know you must be thinking this is low, but considering that after retirement your priority will be to save capital and also beat inflation to maintain your lifestyle 7% is a very healthy number. One very important assumption that we have taken is that after retirement there will be a lot of expenses that you won't be incurring. For example, your petrol and traveling expense will reduce substantially. Then it is also true that services like internet where you require a speed of 1 GB currently, will come down to 100 or 200 MBPS then. So that will reduce your expenses. And there are many other such expenses. Okay. So we have assumed that there will be reduction of around 20% to your expenses post retirement.

All these expenses have been adjusted against inflation at the rate of 6%. There are many such expenses which are incurred once or twice in our lifetime. One of them being expenses for sending your child for higher education. If on today’s date, you send your child for higher education so may be you will spend around 30-32 Lakh Rupees, to send the child at a very good institution. This we have assumed that when you will be 52 years old, this expense will occur and at that time, considering the inflation of 6%, this will be around 96 lakh rupees. Now that you have sent your child for higher education, then after he gets settled, probably he or she will get married.

Right? We have assumed that if today you got for their marriage then you will end up spending around 25 Lakh Rupees. According to your assumptions, this event will occur when you will be 60 years old. At that point of time, you will be spending around 80 Lakh Rupees. So this also has been built in, in this model. Last but not the least and definitely one of the most important is: medical expenses. As and when you age increases, simultaneously your medical needs will also probably increase. I really wish, this doesn’t happen but it is quite possible. So on a conservative basis, we have assumed that by the time you turn 65, you might end up needing a medical expense budget of around 50 lakh rupees. Right? Which up till then will be around 1.6 Crores, right. 35 years from now, it would be around 1.60 crores. So assuming all of this if you see all this calculation, then you will find that you would probably end up needing around 8.25 Crore Rupees as your Corpus so that you can retire comfortably.

If you are able to generate this corpus by investing around 40% of your salary basis the following assumptions, month to month, year on year in instruments, which help you generate good returns like mutual funds and corporate bonds for the early starters, and then slowly and slowly moving towards more of conservative investments, where you can easily generate 9.5-9.7%, then you'll be able to achieve this corpus and basis this calculation, that you can see in the third sheet post retirement, you will see that even after you turn 80 years of age around around one crude Rupe, you will still be left with. So if you save in a disciplined way, start investments, then you can easily achieve your retirement. Under this sheet, you can also put your other additional expenses basis your age.

If you will see we have provided Additional 1 to Additional 8 blank spaces, as when you enter there it'll automatically get calculated and you will keep getting the results. The larger your retirement corpus, easier will be your retirement life, the more you will be able to afford to give to your family and enjoy the moments with them. This is why Savings are important. This is why retirement planning is important. And if you're worried to know how you can make your portfolio stronger and better in this video, we have discussed few revenue streams, which will help you generate passive income along with maintaining the safety of your portfolio until you meet next time. Happy Winting!
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Things We Wished We Knew Before Retirement

Well it's great to be with you all again it's 
another video day for us – It is – So things that   we wish we knew before we retired almost 
sounds like a country music song there Tina   – And I guess you must be feeling lucky 
today Norm – Oh yeah got my lucky shirt   on so because we're filming been to 
Costco – Got the great deals haven't we   – We have so one of the things that we wish we knew 
before we retired was how free it is how stress   free no longer having to get up and go through the 
morning ritual of preparing yourself to go to work   and being accountable to somebody else all 
day long it's wonderful to be accountable to   your own self and your partner that's it 
you're your own person and it's such a freeing   feeling and we saw that with Tina when she gave 
up work the amount of stress we hadn't realized   until a few years after retirement just how 
different she was she'd lost all that stress of   meeting quotas and all that good stuff – And I think 
I'll just add Norm that when you're actually doing   the job you actually don't think it is stressful 
you don't think you are under all this   stress until you stop it do something else and 
you think wow this is a lot better we like this   it's great so just being accountable to ourselves 
we love it don't we – It is totally life changing   – One thing that we do think is very important 
before you retire is you do need to have a   discussion with your partner as to what it is 
that the ideas that you're both thinking you   have when you're going to retire you do need to 
have some goals about, do you want to travel do   you want to garden or do hobbies do you want 
to stay home you really do need to have that   conversation to make sure you're both on the 
same page – I think it is it is important and   we hear a lot from some comments especially 
married women who are saying that their husband   their frightened the husband will get under their feet 
because he'll be hanging around all the time in   retirement but that really isn't the case – Not 
for us is it – We've been secure as a couple for   the longest time and retirement hasn't changed 
how we feel about each other and about what   our expectations of each other is it's not as if 
we've all of a sudden being locked up together in   retirement (no) so it is important to figure out 
what you both want out of retirement and to have   that discussion a few years before you actually 
do retire (yeah) one thing to bear in mind is   the first few years of your retirement you'll 
be your most healthy so just use that health and   strength that you do have in the early years 
to achieve some of the goals that you want   – Yeah and if you want to be traveling do it while 
you've got that – Don't think about traveling if   that's on your list just do it right away – Yeah 
absolutely and that's what we've done isn't   it when we retired we just traveled everywhere 
didn't we it was great – About two years before we   retired we had an inspector come to the house 
for I don't even remember what it was but it was   some form of home inspection that we had to and 
so we got chatting with him because he was a few   years older than us but not that much and he told 
us that he had a house very similar to ours that   he had sold and now he was living an apartment 
and he went through the whole process of them   and how they moved to the apartment and how 
it was such an improvement on their life   and it was something we'd never ever considered 
– This was big news to us wasn't it we never even   thought about renting an apartment – We had been 
homeowners since we were 19 years old so to rent   we had that preconceived idea that it was throwing 
money away but the more that we looked into it so   after he left the next couple of days we spent 
many hours thinking about this we did a budget   of how much it cost to keep our mortgage free 
home – Yeah crunched all the numbers – And what the   rent would be and if we had sold the house and it 
made more and more sense to us to sell the house   to downsize into an apartment bank the money 
from the house live off that as an investment and   that's what we did – And that's what we did didn't 
we – But had that guy not come to our house we might   never have come up with that idea – No because 
originally we had thought that we would just   buy a smaller house didn't we – That's right yeah 
– So part of our decision when we had actually now   decided that we were going to rent and we realized 
that would take care of we wouldn't have all this   maintenance and stuff like that to do we decided 
after we started looking at apartments that if   we moved to a cheaper area could we benefit by 
getting the same as what we wanted in an apartment   but would it cost us less money so the more 
we looked into it we did have a family member   who lived in a cheaper place so we looked 
at the equivalent of renting an apartment   in this new place and it was so much cheaper 
wasn't it Norm – Because we initially thought   we would just sell our house and stay in 
the same area so we started shopping for   apartments to find out how much they cost and the 
availability and we were pretty surprised that   at the expense of them but we were prepared 
to pay that (yeah) and then we came to a what   you would call it a small town that's cheaper 
(yeah) we came to visit a family member here and so   we started looking around at the apartments here 
and they were substantially cheaper about $800   a month cheaper than where we were initially going 
to – Yeah and not only that Norm there was a lot of   extras with it wasn't that we got there was 
underground parking and what else a swimming pool   – And laundry facilities in the apartment – And that 
was one thing the gentleman had told us he didn't   have on-suite laundry he had it in a laundry room 
so we wanted that – But coming to the cheaper town   it wasn't just the rents that were 
cheaper everything was cheaper   the Tina's hairdresser as we've 
said in the past was cheaper it just permeated everything so our budget became 
so attainable (yeah) by moving – That gave us a lot   more money to be able to travel didn't it because 
we thought if we can save money on a daily basis   and it worked perfect didn't it – It did it was 
great, take a look at that if you do have family   that live in an area that might be cheaper or 
just consider going not knowing anybody – No it's   like a new adventure isn't it a new chapter in 
your life because we've made friends here and   they don't have any family just here but they've 
made it a new place for them haven't they – A lot   of people have moved out of the big cities to a 
small town because it's it's far more conducive to   retirement (yes) and friendlier another 
thing that you really need to consider   is where your friends are going to come from 
in retirement because once you leave work   those friendships tend to wither away because 
the only common bond you have was your job   your workplace so we've never 
really had lasting friendships from   work colleagues they've always been outside 
of there so it's it's critically important   to continue looking for friendships in retirement 
and being outgoing and prepared to speak to people   Tina when we moved to this apartment building 
they did have a social room and they did a coffee   morning and so she would go down there and we 
found out so much information about the town and   businesses to use – It was great wasn't it – It was – It 
was kind of my mission wasn't it to find out   new information and to try and make new friends 
which we did and we made some fabulous friendships   – Well in particular there was one couple that Tina 
made struck up a friendship with and they in turn   have introduced us to another couple yeah and then 
they in turn have introduced us to another couple   so that's how it goes – Yeah so now we've got 
a group of really close nice friends that we   socialize with don't we – And the thing that we have 
in common isn't an employer it's being retired   – It is isn't it – It really is so don't be afraid 
of striking out to a new city a new town   because it's relatively easy to make friendships 
– Yeah you just have to push yourself out there   a little don't you and be confident to going to 
things and it's very exciting isn't it so we hope   that everybody is staying safe – And keeping 
well – Until the next time bye bye, bye bye

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👉Retirement Planning At 60 in 2024 – 6 Tips💥

imagine this you're approaching your 60s and starting to think about retirement you've worked hard all your life and it's time to enjoy the fruits of your labor but before you kick back and relax it's time to get laser focused on your retirement plan in this video we'll cover six important tips to help you plan for your retirement at 60. tip one assess your financial situation Jane has a woman who's been working as a nurse for 30 years she's always been Frugal and saved as much as she could but she's not sure she's accumulated enough for a comfortable retirement to assess her financial situation she makes a list of all her assets and her expenses she realizes that she needs to save more if she wants to maintain her lifestyle in retirement tip two explore different retirement options Bob's a 62 year old man has been working as an engineer for the last 40 years his employer has a 401k and he's been contributing to it for years Bob also explores other retirement options such as an IRA to maximize his retirement savings tip three diversify your Investments Mike is a 65 year old man who's been retired for a few years he Diversified his portfolio by investing in many different stock and bond index funds by diversifying his Investments might minimize risk and ensure a stable retirement income tip 4 plan for health care costs Sarah is a 63 year old woman who's been working as a teacher for the last 35 years she's healthy now but she knows health care costs can be expensive in retirement to plan for health care costs Sarah bought long-term care insurance to cover any medical expenses that could arise in the future tip five consider your Social Security benefits Tom is a 64 year old man's been working in construction for the last 45 years he's not sure when to start receiving his social security benefits he decides to wait till 67 to start taking his social security so he'll get a higher benefit which will give him a more comfortable retirement tip six have an actual retirement plan in place Lisa is a 61 year old woman has been working as a sales manager for the last 25 years she has a plan in place that includes a budget for her retirement expenses and a plan for Hospital spend her time in retirement Lisa plans to travel volunteer and take up a new hobby in retirement to stay active and engaged following these tips and learning from the experience of others you can ensure a comfortable and fulfilling retirement it's a great idea to consult with a good financial advisor click on the link in the description if you'd like to set a time to talk with us

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Things We Wished We Knew Before Retirement

Well it's great to be with you all again it's 
another video day for us – It is – So things that   we wish we knew before we retired almost 
sounds like a country music song there Tina   – And I guess you must be feeling lucky 
today Norm – Oh yeah got my lucky shirt   on so because we're filming been to 
Costco – Got the great deals haven't we   – We have so one of the things that we wish we knew 
before we retired was how free it is how stress   free no longer having to get up and go through the 
morning ritual of preparing yourself to go to work   and being accountable to somebody else all 
day long it's wonderful to be accountable to   your own self and your partner that's it 
you're your own person and it's such a freeing   feeling and we saw that with Tina when she gave 
up work the amount of stress we hadn't realized   until a few years after retirement just how 
different she was she'd lost all that stress of   meeting quotas and all that good stuff – And I think 
I'll just add Norm that when you're actually doing   the job you actually don't think it is stressful 
you don't think you are under all this   stress until you stop it do something else and 
you think wow this is a lot better we like this   it's great so just being accountable to ourselves 
we love it don't we – It is totally life changing   – One thing that we do think is very important 
before you retire is you do need to have a   discussion with your partner as to what it is 
that the ideas that you're both thinking you   have when you're going to retire you do need to 
have some goals about, do you want to travel do   you want to garden or do hobbies do you want 
to stay home you really do need to have that   conversation to make sure you're both on the 
same page – I think it is it is important and   we hear a lot from some comments especially 
married women who are saying that their husband   their frightened the husband will get under their feet 
because he'll be hanging around all the time in   retirement but that really isn't the case – Not 
for us is it – We've been secure as a couple for   the longest time and retirement hasn't changed 
how we feel about each other and about what   our expectations of each other is it's not as if 
we've all of a sudden being locked up together in   retirement (no) so it is important to figure out 
what you both want out of retirement and to have   that discussion a few years before you actually 
do retire (yeah) one thing to bear in mind is   the first few years of your retirement you'll 
be your most healthy so just use that health and   strength that you do have in the early years 
to achieve some of the goals that you want   – Yeah and if you want to be traveling do it while 
you've got that – Don't think about traveling if   that's on your list just do it right away – Yeah 
absolutely and that's what we've done isn't   it when we retired we just traveled everywhere 
didn't we it was great – About two years before we   retired we had an inspector come to the house 
for I don't even remember what it was but it was   some form of home inspection that we had to and 
so we got chatting with him because he was a few   years older than us but not that much and he told 
us that he had a house very similar to ours that   he had sold and now he was living an apartment 
and he went through the whole process of them   and how they moved to the apartment and how 
it was such an improvement on their life   and it was something we'd never ever considered 
– This was big news to us wasn't it we never even   thought about renting an apartment – We had been 
homeowners since we were 19 years old so to rent   we had that preconceived idea that it was throwing 
money away but the more that we looked into it so   after he left the next couple of days we spent 
many hours thinking about this we did a budget   of how much it cost to keep our mortgage free 
home – Yeah crunched all the numbers – And what the   rent would be and if we had sold the house and it 
made more and more sense to us to sell the house   to downsize into an apartment bank the money 
from the house live off that as an investment and   that's what we did – And that's what we did didn't 
we – But had that guy not come to our house we might   never have come up with that idea – No because 
originally we had thought that we would just   buy a smaller house didn't we – That's right yeah 
– So part of our decision when we had actually now   decided that we were going to rent and we realized 
that would take care of we wouldn't have all this   maintenance and stuff like that to do we decided 
after we started looking at apartments that if   we moved to a cheaper area could we benefit by 
getting the same as what we wanted in an apartment   but would it cost us less money so the more 
we looked into it we did have a family member   who lived in a cheaper place so we looked 
at the equivalent of renting an apartment   in this new place and it was so much cheaper 
wasn't it Norm – Because we initially thought   we would just sell our house and stay in 
the same area so we started shopping for   apartments to find out how much they cost and the 
availability and we were pretty surprised that   at the expense of them but we were prepared 
to pay that (yeah) and then we came to a what   you would call it a small town that's cheaper 
(yeah) we came to visit a family member here and so   we started looking around at the apartments here 
and they were substantially cheaper about $800   a month cheaper than where we were initially going 
to – Yeah and not only that Norm there was a lot of   extras with it wasn't that we got there was 
underground parking and what else a swimming pool   – And laundry facilities in the apartment – And that 
was one thing the gentleman had told us he didn't   have on-suite laundry he had it in a laundry room 
so we wanted that – But coming to the cheaper town   it wasn't just the rents that were 
cheaper everything was cheaper   the Tina's hairdresser as we've 
said in the past was cheaper it just permeated everything so our budget became 
so attainable (yeah) by moving – That gave us a lot   more money to be able to travel didn't it because 
we thought if we can save money on a daily basis   and it worked perfect didn't it – It did it was 
great, take a look at that if you do have family   that live in an area that might be cheaper or 
just consider going not knowing anybody – No it's   like a new adventure isn't it a new chapter in 
your life because we've made friends here and   they don't have any family just here but they've 
made it a new place for them haven't they – A lot   of people have moved out of the big cities to a 
small town because it's it's far more conducive to   retirement (yes) and friendlier another 
thing that you really need to consider   is where your friends are going to come from 
in retirement because once you leave work   those friendships tend to wither away because 
the only common bond you have was your job   your workplace so we've never 
really had lasting friendships from   work colleagues they've always been outside 
of there so it's it's critically important   to continue looking for friendships in retirement 
and being outgoing and prepared to speak to people   Tina when we moved to this apartment building 
they did have a social room and they did a coffee   morning and so she would go down there and we 
found out so much information about the town and   businesses to use – It was great wasn't it – It was – It 
was kind of my mission wasn't it to find out   new information and to try and make new friends 
which we did and we made some fabulous friendships   – Well in particular there was one couple that Tina 
made struck up a friendship with and they in turn   have introduced us to another couple yeah and then 
they in turn have introduced us to another couple   so that's how it goes – Yeah so now we've got 
a group of really close nice friends that we   socialize with don't we – And the thing that we have 
in common isn't an employer it's being retired   – It is isn't it – It really is so don't be afraid 
of striking out to a new city a new town   because it's relatively easy to make friendships 
– Yeah you just have to push yourself out there   a little don't you and be confident to going to 
things and it's very exciting isn't it so we hope   that everybody is staying safe – And keeping 
well – Until the next time bye bye, bye bye

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The Ultimate Retirement Plan | Wade Pfau | Ep 63

[Music] welcome to the market call show where we discuss what's happening in the markets and the impact on your Investments tune in every Thursday on Apple podcast Google play Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts hi Wade how are you doing I'm doing great thanks for having me on the show you know I'm so happy to have you here if you're in the retirement income planning business or if you're a financial advisor or a money manager somehow managing money in the space for retirement income planning everybody has heard your name you've been around in this field for a long time and as I was looking through your uh resume from various sources it's like okay well what are we going to exclude you know there's because there's so many things that you have done but I thought I would just kind of just fill in for viewers that don't know you a little bit about you um you know you're an active researcher and educator about retirement income strategies you know you do a lot of speaking I know you're going to be speaking here in Denver uh pretty soon uh you are a professor are you still a professor of retirement income at the American College of financial services I am currently yes and the director of Retirement Research for McLean asset management and in-stream uh you did your PhD in economics from Princeton and you did interestingly you did a dissertation on Social Security reform which we hopefully we'll talk a little bit about later uh you're also a fellow CFA Charter holder like myself um and you've got lots of AD you know accolades and some great books in particular one that I really like that you've done is a retirement planning guidebook uh 2021 uh and then you have that safety first retirement planning how much can I spend in retirement etc etc you've done some stuff on reverse mortgages The Unwanted stepchild that actually is a useful tool for many people yet not quite known by many so uh with that said I I was just curious tell me a little bit about your background where did you grow up so uh well I was born outside of Detroit I lived there until I was 15 moved to Iowa after that my my mother is originally from Southwest Iowa so I graduated high school in Des Moines Iowa and then went to the University of Iowa after that so pretty much midwesterner lived a number of different places afterwards including New Jersey Pennsylvania Tokyo Japan for 10 years and then now I live in Texas you live in Texas now yeah actually these pictures behind me and all are all the places I've lived over the years so it's so so you so you grew up in Detroit mostly it sounds like but moved all traveled a lot um how did you go from you know studying what did you study Finance initially when you were in college in undergrad economics and finance economics okay so how did you go from economics and finance to just being so focused it seems like you're focused on retirement income planning well yeah I mean uh financial planning as an academic field is still pretty new and even I entered the PHD program uh in 1999 and actually Texas Tech University started the First Financial Planning PhD program in the year 2000 so it wasn't even an option at that time but academic economics is very mathematical and theoretical and I was always looking for ways to apply to more real world type activities and that's ultimately how I made my way into financial planning indirectly you mentioned the my dissertation on Social Security reform that was testing how in the early 2000s there was a proposal to create personal retirement accounts to carve out part of the Social Security tax and put that into like a 401k style account and I was simulating how that might perform and ultimately that's the same sort of thing I've made my career on at this point which is just writing computer programs to test how different retirement strategies perform in looking for ways to get more efficiency out of one's asset base for retirement now that was during the bush 2 Administration if I remember correctly wasn't it and so and uh what were your findings in that what was your general thesis or not thesis but your general conclusion well at the time what I determined was that it could be made to work but it wasn't obviously a better approach and now in hindsight I realize more and more that there's so little in the way of protected lifetime income that carving out more of Social Security which is that inflation-adjusted protected lifetime income and exposing that to the market as well uh probably would lead to worse outcomes for many people than we do need some risk-fooled income and so now that traditional pensions are going away Social Security is one of the last holdouts and so it probably wouldn't be the best idea to private or not privatize but uh create personal the defined contribution 401K style accounts out of those Social Security contributions very interesting and we'll we'll touch a little bit more I have a lot a few questions on Social Security uh in general um you know from a macro perspective and also a micro perspective personally for uh people so um one of the things that I really like about what you've done is that you kind of take more of a approach that I'm kind of used to like more of an asset liability management approach when you think about funding ratios rather than the traditional way that you hear financial planners talk about it I really like your overall framework and one of the things that I I think is very helpful is your retirement income style protocol your resubm Matrix can you explain a little bit uh to the viewers about your ideas there and and what how that helps an individual determine their overall approach to how they should tackle their retirement income plan yeah absolutely and that's really one of the the confusing aspects of retirement income is there are different strategies that people can use and unfortunately just there's a lot of disagreement and arguments about one strategy is better than all the others and and by what I mean by that is you have What I Call Total return which is just a you build an Investment Portfolio and you take distributions from it throughout retirement you have different bucketing or time segmentation strategies and then you also have strategies that will focus more on having protected lifetime income through annuities or other tools to cover your Basics before you start investing on top of that and they're all viable strategies at the end of the day and that's an important point that Advocates of Investments only don't appreciate how powerful the risk pooling that annuities can do to offer more income how that is competitive with anything that the stock market might do and so people really have options about what they're most comfortable with and that's what the retirement income style awareness is about developing a questionnaire to help guide people in the direction as a starting point which of these different retirement strategies resonates best with your personal Outlook and preferences you may not ultimately choose the the strategy coming out of that but at least it gives you a starting point to say okay it seems like I might look here first as a way to build my retirement strategy and ultimately if that helps me connect to a strategy that resonates and that I can stick with through thick and thin in retirement that can help give a better outcome because they're all viable strategies but where a strategy doesn't work is if you're not comfortable with it and you don't stick with it and you you bail on it during a market downturn or something like that that that's what the retirement income style awareness is really designed to do is just provide that initial talking point on which kind of approach might work best for me to to think about as a starting point yeah I like that because what it's doing is it's basically more holistically looking at how you would can solve the problem and typically you'll find advisory firms that will will overweight if you will one over the other they're like I'm a Time segment guy or I I hate annuities it's all Total return annuities are a scam or uh you know I will never buy an annuity or uh you know Etc et cetera and risk pooling is is something that's really important but it's also very complicated and I think that's why a lot of people have shunned annuities and annuities have changed a lot over the years um and you know coming from my background you know which is more of a total return approach that's great if you have a lot of money but in in other cases you know I think that you can you can you can look at the problem from a optimal way of doing it or you can look at the problem from a way that's actually going to get implemented and work and what I like about Risa is it's practical pretty much all the stuff that you're doing is practical it's not completely theoretical one problem though with that is that you can have somebody who has a safety first for example mindset but their situation is such that if they have a Safety First with 100 of their Capital that they're very unlikely to be successful can you can you expound a little bit upon how you would think about that in terms of giving advice to people in that scenario yeah so that scenario is probably more they do have a safety first mindset but they've been pigeonholed into a total return strategy but they're ultimately not comfortable with the stock market and therefore maybe most of their Holdings are in cash or in bonds which doesn't support a whole lot of spending power and that's you kind of there's three basic ways you could fund a retirement spending goal the first is just with bonds or with cash not really offering much yield on top of that and then to try to spend more than that the um the probability base perspective is invest in the stock market and the stock should outperform bonds and that should allow you to spend more throughout retirement the safety first approach is more now let's build a floor of protected lifetime income that then brings in with an annuity the the risk pooling the the support to the long-lived helps provide more spending power than bonds alone as well and people have that option and it's when the safety first person gets pushed into a total returns probability based strategy and just doesn't invest in the stock market they're ultimately left with bonds which which is the least efficient way to fund a retirement spending goal over an unknown lifetime very true and you know I guess a lot of people did take that approach probably when I first got in this business 20 over 20 years ago there was a lot of people that were doing that who were retired back where the municipal bonds were paying it was it was conducive the market was conducive for that we had high interest rates that were in the long-term secular decline so you had capital appreciation from those bonds he also had reasonably good uh tax-free interest yields that were working for people and inflation was falling um and so now we potentially could be in the opposite inflation Rising who knows how yields are going to work themselves out but um it when you're looking at this um you you bring up this concept of some of the retirement risks and and you have like these uh longevity sequence of returns spending shocks Etc of of the risks that you're seeing out there which one would you say has had the largest impact negative impact on people that they really need to solve for you know longevity sequence of returns spending shocks and surprises well longevity in a way it's the overarching risk of retirement and it's misnamed because it's a good thing it's if you live a long time it's just as an economist will point out that the longer you live the more expensive your retirement becomes just because every year you live you have to fund your expenses for that year so the cost of retirement grows with the length of retirement and then it's when you live a long time not only is there that issue that you're having to fund your budget but then there's just more time for all those other types of risks to become a problem as well with the macroeconomic environment with changing public policy with inflation even a lower inflation rate still is slowly eating away at the purchasing power of assets and then the spending shocks are things like big Health Care bills helping adult family members having to support a long-term care need to to pay for care due to declining cognitive or physical abilities and so forth and so so it's really that longevity is if you don't have longevity there's not really time for the other risk to disrupt your retirement too much and that's why longevity usually gets listed as the primary risk of retirement interesting I hadn't thought about that so a lot of the other risks are kind of correlated to the longevity element um so so really tackling that that that could be one of the biggest parts of all the surrounding risks around that you you talk a little bit in your book a retirement planning guidebook you talk about quantifying goals and assessing preparedness and I I had mentioned before that I like that you're taking your approach more like a Alm or asset liability management type of of an approach which basically that's what it is um and uh and I don't think the average person thinks about it that way they tend to think about it as like I have so much money and I'll be able to with draw so much from it sometimes there's unrealistic expectations about it but one of the common things that I've seen is that most people are not spending the time they need to do on budgeting really to actually even come up with a number or help come up with a number of what your present value of assets need to be to be prepared do you have any kind of practical tips for people and their advisors on how they can actually think about and execute a good budget not only just you know come up with one but actually implement it well now that technology can really help with that and so if people are comfortable with some of the the different websites or software that Aggregates all of your different expenses different credit cards and so forth into one Excel spreadsheet that's a very easy way to to start budgeting now for people who mostly pay in cash that can be a lot more complicated these days I don't use a lot of cash so I just simply when in the rare case that I have an ATM withdrawal I'll just kind of call that a household expense for that time period and not worry about breaking that down much more but uh when you start having those credit cards or debit card type expenses now the the software may not categorize them in the way you desire and so I usually try to not more frequently than once a month but maybe once a month once a quarter download the expenses while I can still remember well enough if I have to change some of these categories and so forth to then be able to keep track of all my expenses and know exactly then pretty much to the scent almost what I spent that year and then to start thinking about well were there any anomalies of course there's always going to be anomalies and to make sure you budget in that sort of thing but that really once you have a few years of expenses down and once you think about bigger Big Ticket items like car purchases and things that can really give you a foundation to start projecting ahead at what your expenses may be in the future as well and then then you have a way to start thinking about well how much do I need to fund those expenses and that's the whole idea of that asset liability matching do I have the resources necessary to fund your expenses are just your liabilities and do you have the resources to be able to fund that with a level of confidence that you feel comfortable with hmm interesting so I I had a meeting with a client actually who was forced into early retirement and a former engineer and keeps meticulous records has for years and uh he gave us the actual numbers for the last three years and I I figured out what the compounded rate was and it was a lot higher than the inflation rate reported by the bl by the government so um I I think there's some disconnect there between you know how we model and reality um you know uh when you look at financial planning software and you look at the assumptions that are the number of assumptions that are involved in the financial software and you know even if you're not taking Point estimates if you're doing Monte Carlo or whatever stochastic process it's very difficult to come up with a robust plan so I'd like I'd like for you to give me some and I know this is kind of a big general question do you have any general tips to people who are doing this modeling on how and for and for clients actually for for individuals and how they can make their retirement more robust to be able to deal with all the changes that can happen in the world like you said public policy changes Market changes Etc yeah you will have to revisit things over time and and as you get new information about your spending make revisions to the budgeting but uh it's still just a matter of when you're like round up your expenses or be conservative with some of your projections there's some categories that are challenging as well like healthcare and when someone switches to MediCare at age 65 that could lead to an entirely different set of health care expenses and with all your expenses on Health Care in the past you might have to completely upend that and and and do a reset there so it is challenging but if you're trying to build in conservative projections the default is usually whatever you believe your expenses will be you just adjust that for inflation every year and most people don't really do that they tend their expenses don't tend to necessarily keep up with inflation over time now that can get complicated but the way I describe it in the retirement planning guidebook is you'll have one particular budget through ajd and then you'll have another lower expense budget after ajd but also building in what if there's a long-term care event and so forth how much additional Reserve assets would I like to have set aside for out-of-pocket expenses that sort of thing and then it's not going to be perfect and it's going to need revised over time but I think you can start to get fairly confident like I've sort of done these exercises I'm still far away from the retirement date and of course I may be wrong but I I think at this point I have a sense of what my expenditures will be or what they can be at least uh over the longer term Horizon of course subject to new technologies new inventions everything else that can happen uh that would change your expenses but at least roughly speaking I think you can start to figure these things out yeah um I guess I'm coming from a practitioner who's been doing it for you know 25 years and seeing the the the conventional wisdom by the best experts at each point in time and looking at how people have actually fared without advice and what I've found consistently is that changes in in particular with government policy has led to uh sub-optimal choices for people who are trying to optimize to the typical cfp advice so and let me let me uh back that up a little bit with with uh some some examples um education planning what was optimal has changed in my career probably four or five times um let me just put it this way I I have put more emphasis in tax diversification and diversification and stuff in how you do things now because what if you if you over optimize in these scenarios it's sub-optimal does that make sense right if like if you designed everything to handle one particular public policy and then it changes on you like right now Roth IRAs or Roth accounts are incredibly attractive to have Assets in but something could change it could just be not that they might necessarily ever tax a Roth distribution but they could add a required minimum distributions or they could count it in the modified adjusted gross income measures used to calculate taxes on Social Security benefits or to calculate higher medicare premiums and so forth and so if something like that happened and you'd been doing all these Roth conversions to get everything into the Roth account yeah that would be overdoing it and subjecting you to that particular risk so I do think tax diversification is is quite important so that you still have flexibility and options because the the uncertainty is the rules will change and we see that every couple of years we just in late December 2022 secure act 2.2.0 came out and that has changed a number of different public policy matters related to retirement income it's gonna and that will continue to happen over time so so be flexible and part of that is just not overdoing things making sure you stay Diversified with with how you're approaching planning yeah in today's environment what we see a lot is is people that have taken the advice of Max 401K uh you'll get a lot of tax deferred and and what's happening is is they're coming to retirement with a large very large 401K plans and things like that and then they just get nailed in taxes and in fact I'm finding a lot of people pay more taxes when they're retired than they did in some cases than when they were not retired um and uh and and it becomes an issue it becomes a real issue then they have estate planning issues and things like that so um uh I just I'm glad that you said that about the the tax diversification I think more than ever especially given our our current you know country's economic condition there's a lot there's we're going to have lots of changes and they could be very large changes uh in particular if you considered quote unquote rich um so I'm sorry I put my little uh two cents in there but getting back to your book uh you have this concept of the retirement income optimization map um again going back to the assets and liabilities and all of that and when you're you when you're you talk about optimizing that's that's why I brought up the the concept of optimizing I I think there's optimizing within ranges one of the concepts that I've kind of looked at and you talked about you talk about different people's retirement styles um one of the issues that you can look at is like matching the duration of your expected liabilities up for a certain period of time so let's say you have a certain percentage of your portfolios in a total return portfolio and then and then another percent that you're you're cash matching or your duration matching matching for one to five years or whatever uh I think some people call that time segmentation you can call it many different things if forget about psychology and how somebody feels if you are just a rational investor a rational person what would you say the optimal length of time is on average for somebody retiring 65 say to cash match or to duration match uh you know their near-term expenses at one year is it five years is it 10 years I know that's a a loaded question but if you forget about forget about psychology and just go pure rational mm-hmm well pure rational the the total return investing approach which has less emphasis on trying to duration match uh can work and also if you then use a an income protection or wrist wrap type strategy you you have that income floor in place that is lifetime so it's already kind of duration matched to your liability so time segmentation is certainly a viable strategy in terms of my personal preferences it's my least favorite strategy so the whole behavioral point about time segmentation is if I have five years of expenses in in cash or other fixed income assets I don't have to worry about a market downturn because I feel confident that the market will recover within five years and I'll be fine and that that story that's a behavioral story and it just doesn't resonate with me personally I I can understand it resonates with others but it doesn't resonate with me personally and therefore I don't necessarily think about what sort of like front end buffer you need in place too to somehow be rational or optimal also that's where something like a reverse mortgage can fit in in a really interesting manner because if you set up the growing line of credit on a reverse mortgage that can be the the type of contingency fund that you can draw from so that you don't necessarily need to have as much cash or other assets sitting on the sidelines to fulfill that role so I would look more at some other of course you need some some cash but I tend to say less rather than more and maybe look at some other options as well about how to have that liquid contingency fund that's great so so basically the in in the guaranteed income sources plus plus reverse mortgage could uh provide a buffer provide a floor so that you could have uh less cash and and you're generally getting a higher expected rate of return on the annuity than fixed income securities and your at at least at the present time a reverse mortgage line of credit grows at a faster rate than the cash which can be used tax-free when you need the money uh so you can see that Evolution that Carol davinsky is one of the famous planners and researchers in this area and in the 1980s he talked about the five-year Mantra which was have five years of expenses in cash now cash you create drag on you're not able to get as high of potential returns with the money you have in cash so he gradually lowered that down to two years in cash and then when he came across reverse mortgages and in subsequent research and and descriptions he talked about having six months of cash alongside a reverse mortgage growing line of credit so I think that's an example of I I think something like that sounds pretty reasonable that's that's that's that's really helpful so and I want to Circle back to reverse mortgages here but before we do if you don't mind I'd like to talk a little bit more about social security uh so we're kind of getting into the realm of the the guaranteed side of things not the total return side of things um or or I more more knowable income sources um I was just looking at the kind of the statistics right now total debt in the United States is really huge um we're running very large deficits project to be like 2 trillion we have a Pago system right now in Social Security and even if we taxed it's been argued by many people even if we taxed every billionaire 100 that would barely make a dent in our current situation so we have huge unfunded liabilities off balance sheet uh type unfunded liabilities how can we really expect Social Security to keep up with inflation and will it be there for quote unquote you know what I'm saying well it will need reforms it's very unlikely to Simply disappear for my own personal planning I I assume I'll get 75 percent of my presently legislated benefits but for people who are younger as well further away from their their 60s uh the social security statement they receive assumes the zero percent average wage growth as well as zero percent inflation and the reality is there's probably going to be a positive real wage growth over time so you're presently legislative benefit could be a lot higher than what your social security statement is implying and therefore when you offset a benefit cut with the uh the wage growth that can be expected over time you may not have that much less in terms of what you're going to plug into your financial plan but yeah I certainly we don't know how the reforms will shake out but if nothing is done sometime in the 2030s Congress would have to legislate a benefit cut and to keep the system so that enough payroll contributions are coming in to cover exist current benefits that cut would have to be somewhere in the ballpark of 20 to 25 percent so I just simply assume I'll get 75 percent of my presently legislated benefit as part of my financial plan is is it fee Is it feasible feasible to actually get Social Security in a funded situation or is it gonna is it most likely going to stay Pago in your if you had a crystal ball oh it yeah it's always been pay-as-you-go and right so the buildup of the trust fund was an effort to just build up some reserves in anticipation of the changing demographics where there's more and more retirees relative to the workers paying contributions uh they try to keep Social Security funded over the 75-year time Horizon and so it's never permanently funded but yeah with a 25 20 to 25 percent benefit cut that would be sufficient to get the system to be expected funding funded fully over the subsequent 75-year time Horizon that's that's really helpful um thinking about it that way in terms of just potentially a 25 less is a reasonable way to look at it I think um the that part of it's not so hard what's harder to understand or to get a grasp on is whether or not that's going to be what that means in real terms for for a retiree um if we continue on a certain path and inflation is is in a different scenario in the future how how do you think about scenario when or inflation when you're when you would set up a plan or a retirement plan what how would you what kind of what kind of uh of Monte Carlos if you will would you put on on your inflation expectation so I do well I tend to just try to think of everything in today's dollars so that the inflation's factored out of it but I the way I think about long-term inflation is the markets tell us what they expect inflation to be if you just look at the difference between a treasury bond and then a tips treasury inflation protected security with the same maturity uh the difference between those two is what the markets expect inflation to be in if they thought it would be different they would invest in one or the other to get that aligned inflation is coming down now and even over the next five years at this point markets are only factoring in an average inflation rate of about 2.1 to 2.3 percent so it seems like markets really expect inflation to come over to come under control even over 30 years right now the markets are building in about a 2.3 percent average inflation rate which is below historical numbers and in terms of if I'm building a Monte Carlo simulation right now I'd to be a little more conservative there I'd base it around a two and a half percent inflation rate with historical volatility and inflation is around four percent so so you're basically an average of 2.4 or 2.5 and then uh standard deviation is like four basically okay so uh that that sounds reasonable um I I guess what is interesting about that is I guess if you assume that we have typical real rates of return for different asset classes that that all works itself out if you put it in present value terms um but if that's not the case and and it should stay that way ultimately it should stay that way but you could have major moves in markets in people's uh time Horizon when they retire which leads us to sequence of returns conversation uh when people retire you can have these you can have these big shifts in markets things things are rough right when somebody retires uh we uh remember I told you about that engineer we had a conversation with forced into early retirement right when the market topped uh the good news is is he had two types of annuities that worked out perfectly for him in the sequence return can you explain sequence return risk for listeners and and what it means and how to you know strategies to mitigate that a little bit more and just one quick last comment on the inflation too like if you thought when I said these low inflation numbers that that's ridiculous inflation would be much higher well then you'd benefit from investing in tips because they'll provide you a real yield plus whatever inflation ends up being and so they'll perform better if inflation is higher and they've already discounted that that was one of the best performing uh fixed income markets uh in the last couple years so but anyhow but but yeah a sequence of returns risks so that's it whenever you have cash flows going in or out of a portfolio the order of returns matters and it's when you start spending in retirement that it matters a lot more so it's like the market could do fine on average over the next 30 Years but if the market goes down at the start of my retirement I'm not having to sell more and more shares to meet my spending needs and sell a bigger percentage of what's left to meet my spending needs such that when the market subsequently recovers my portfolio doesn't get to enjoy that recovery and so it can dig a hole for the portfolio and the the average return could be pretty high but if you get a bad sequence of market returns right at the start of retirement it can really disrupt that retirement and lead to an implied much lower average rate of return than what the overall markets were doing over your retirement Horizon yeah so and in terms of actually uh let's say you're coming up on retirement so this is a common scenario you're retiring in 10 years or five years what should an investor be thinking about doing to transition from that accumulation to distribution phase to kind of mitigate that sequence of return risk so when people start thinking about retirement I think that's where the first step take that retirement income style awareness to get a sense of what sort of retirement strategy might work for you because that's where you then have um different options if you're more of a total return investor that's the whole logic of the target date fund and so forth is just start lowering your stock allocation but still investing in a diversified portfolio as part of that transition into retirement if your time segmentation the easiest way to think about the transition is instead of holding those Bond mutual funds you start exchanging those in for holding individual bonds to maturity like if I'm 10 years before retirement every year for the next 10 years I could start buying a 10-year bond and then when I get to my retirement date I have the next 10 years of expenses covered through these maturing bonds if you have more of an income protection or risk draft strategy the the options would then to be thinking about well if I have an income gap I'm trying to fill where after I account for Social Security or any pensions I'd really like to have more reliable income to meet some basic expenses well you could start looking at purchasing annuities that would turn on income around your projected retirement date as a way to have that transition into retirement and so they're all viable options and it's just a matter of taking the the route that you feel most comfortable with very good that's really really helpful um now I I guess at least is a little bit into the what I would call the traditionally unloved unwanted stepchildren annuities and reverse mortgages uh you know they've gotten a bad a bad rap for so long but they're so useful in in as tools I would say probably the reverse mortgage is the least understood and uh and and one very helpful um tool I think maybe because of just the history of them and how they used to be structured versus how they're structured now um can you give me a sense about how to think about reverse mortgages for people is it only for people who are you know can barely get their their plan together with their assets or or does this also work for people who have a cushion but they should still do a reverse mortgage more yeah I mean the conventional wisdom a lot of times is that the reverse mortgage is a last resort consideration after everything else has failed and maybe then just a way to Kick the Can down the road a little bit but ultimately that retirement wasn't necessarily sustainable since about 2012 that really the focus of the kind of research retirement planning financial planning type research was looking at how reverse mortgages can be used as part of a responsible retirement plan and so it's not that a lot of advisors may just think the reverse mortgage is only for someone who's run out of options but but that's really not the idea it's we have different assets and it's back to that real map the retirement income optimization how do we position those assets to fund our goals and the reverse mortgage provides a lot of flexibility about how to incorporate our home equity asset to help fund our retirement plan and it can lead to a lot more efficient outcomes than just simply say leaving the home sitting on the sidelines and saying well I've got the home if I have long-term care needs I'll sell my home to fund the long-term care something like that otherwise I'll just leave the home as a legacy asset for my beneficiaries there's much more efficient ways to incorporate home equity into a retirement plan and that's what the whole discussion around reverse mortgages is how can I I use a reverse mortgage to help build a more efficient retirement plan and not as a last resort but as part of a responsible well-funded retirement plan it's just another Diversified tool to a source of source of of assets that you can use that's not just sitting there I just had a conversation with a client yesterday that is about to retire in a few years and uh that is exactly what he said that other property that I have in that other State uh I'm just gonna keep that as a that'll be my I'll sell it if I need to you know there was a conversation about health care contingency and um uh long-term care and things like that and that was his rationale um and and in discussions with clients there has been a a ton of resistance you've been really good at putting out information that shows why it makes sense to have it as a potential use so can you explain a little bit about the the line of credit portion of it and how that how use how that could be advantageous yeah and it really it goes back to this idea of sequence of returns risk and if you look at a reverse mortgage in isolation it may look expensive or whatever else but it's how does it fit into the plan and by reducing pressure on the Investments it can help lay the foundation for a better outcome and the the growing line of credit is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the reverse mortgage and I think it was partly unintentional and it may sound too good to be true in a way it probably is and we saw in in October 2017 the government put some limitations on the growing line of credits so it was incredibly powerful before then it still quite powerful not as powerful as before for new uh anyone who opened a reverse mortgage before October 2017 was protected to have those Provisions in place for the entire life alone but if you wait and then after October 2017 you still have the growing line of credit it's not as powerful but but the idea is I believe the government assumed people would open reverse mortgages because they want to tap into the funds but financial planners realized with the variable rate not with a fixed rate but with a variable rate home equity conversion mortgage you do have to keep a minimal loan balance of say 50 to 100 dollars but otherwise the rest can be left as a line of credit and that line of credit grows at the same way the loan balance would grow and so you can understand why if you borrow money the what the loan balance will grow over time well it just happens to be the case that the kind of neat planning trick is if you open the reverse mortgage and 99 of it is in the line of credit the line of credit is growing over time at the same rate that the loan balance would have been growing and ultimately this improves the odds dramatically of having a lot more access to funds over time if you open it sooner and let the line of credit grow versus just waiting to open it at the time you might actually want to start spending from it yeah how has it been limited uh limited versus the way it used to be what what are the limitations well they increased the initial mortgage insurance premium which is not directly to the line of credit but then every every so often used to be more frequently we're now getting overdue at this point with it's been over five years but they revised the tables that determine the principal limit factors of what percentage of the home value can you borrow and so as part of that 2017 change they uh lowered the the borrowing percentages and also they lowered I mean this this part's a good thing but they lowered the ongoing mortgage insurance premium that would cause the loan balance to grow at a slower rate but it also in turn caused the line of credit to grow at a slower rate so it before that change I was running simulations where if you opened a reverse mortgage at age 62 there was like a 50 chance that within 20 years the line of credit could be worth more than the home and that's no longer the case it's still there's still a probability that the line of credit could grow to be worth more than the home but it's not nearly as dramatic as what I was Finding before the rule change that's very interesting because the line of credit growth rate is tied to interest rates and home prices have somewhat of an inverse relationship to interest rates to some degree but it's basically positively skewed so it's not it's hard to know but uh uh but yeah that's that is a great planning tip and it's interesting because we have had a lot of friction with this discussion with uh clients uh mentioning to them because they just have it in their head that I'm going to lose my home and I'm going to there's all these things that can go wrong and then you have to explain it's a big education process and of course they are required to do education as well no we don't sell reverse mortgages but we always you know if we if we you know we mention it to people as a source and you know having it there makes a lot of sense uh and and the same thing with the annuities um you know I have a love hate relationship with annuities but I'm becoming to love them more and let me tell you why before it was all commission driven you know and we're fiduciaries we don't do commission stuff now with the Advent of finally the insurance companies have really gotten to the point where there's at least enough of them now doing products that make sense with the guarantees I mean there was always companies out for a long time there's companies out there like Americas Etc that had just pure plain vanilla uh va's variable annuities that had just lowered your expenses and maybe eliminated a surrender or something but the guarantees is where the real there were folks too much on tax deferral and not enough on guarantees what were the guarantees is really really what we're really looking for here uh and the only way you could even get them you guarantees would be if you did a commissionable product so we'd be handing you know we would be referring people to Insurance guys who were selling commissionable products and then sometimes you don't know what's going to happen after that happens uh with that client so now thank God we have uh we're in a scenario now where the where the financial industry has finally caught up to what needed to happen with annuities yeah the only annuities yeah yeah the only annuities and there's it still has a lot more to be done it's it's you shouldn't be overlooked and I think what happens one of the reasons that I think they're so helpful uh for people is that risk tolerance is time variant people say their risk tolerance is X and then as soon as you have a market decline then their risk tolerance is all all of a sudden why which is more conservative and and uh these annuities can help people psychologically overcome that right you can always look to something that is either staying equal or growing and you can also have growing income streams during the Gap we see that a lot there's a gap between uh when they get Social Security and when they retire and it kind of fills that Gap and it's funny when I was when I was I actually had my assistant who's also a CPA excuse about my financial planning system I had to read this book first and she uh she said it sounded like like you uh were like in the room with him uh because there's so much stuff in here that you and I agree with it's amazing uh before not even knowing you so and I think it might have to do more with the approach of taking things more from uh your academic background and your CFA background it gives you a different perspective than what kind of the traditional financial planners had who had come more from a sales background and now what's happening is is we have uh the whole industry is now moving in the I think moving in the right direction and I think you've been a big uh reason why that's happening so I I really want to thank you for that all your work is really making a difference I want to talk a little bit about Medicare if we can and health insurance this is probably one of the most the hardest part is the medical the medical discussions in some ways um people don't want to think about long-term care people don't want to think about health costs I was looking at some of the statistics you know long-term care statistics is how much it costs it's a big number how would you how would you model the contingency planning you know for let's just start with long-term care how would you model that would you model it as a present value number or would you try to put it as a as something that's over time how how would you how do you approach that yeah actually so I did try to make the retirement planning guidebook as comprehensive as possible and and so I as part of that developed a long-term care calculator and the the basic logic of it is develop a scenario that you would feel comfortable that if you could fund that scenario uh you'll feel like okay things things will work out whether that's three years in a nursing home whatever the case may be but develop that scenario where you're saying okay at age 90 I will spend the next three years in a nursing home right now in the United States the average cost for a semi-private room in a nursing home is a little bit under a hundred thousand dollars I'll say in today's dollars a hundred thousand dollars a year but then I'm gonna plug in the the math gets complicated but you've got what's the inflation rate in long-term care what's the overall inflation rate and then back to this whole idea of the asset liability matching like what's the investment return discount rate you're comfortable assuming as well and also recognizing that if I do go into a nursing home I don't have to also fund my entire budget of a like if I thought I was going to spend 80 000 a year well I'm not going to be going on any sort of trips I don't have to go to restaurants or anything uh a lot of my other expenses would reduce not not 100 but they would reduce so plug it in what I think is a reasonable reduction to the rest of my budget and then you get calculated a present value of here's how much money I'd have to have set aside as a reserve asset to feel comfortable that I would be able to fund this long-term care need and and be able to have a successful retirement and for people who are worried about and who may be paying out of pocket for long-term care that could be several hundred thousand dollars to be blunted on average that's what it comes out to I actually had a coffee with a gentleman and he said uh what is it just tell me what the number is I said well it depends on your age he says no just tell me what the number I said it's roughly about 300 000 roughly on average it could be more it could be less uh you know uh okay and and there's there's there's different ways you can fund it right you can do long-term care insurance uh traditional Standalone you could do um you know life insurance policies that have embedded features you could do if you can't like qualify for um you know you know get a policy you can maybe get it embedded in an annuity of some sort you can sell fund um so it's not an easy thing that you can uh solve it with a quick answer um but but it's important to have in a plan and I and I like the fact that that uh you've emphasized that a lot in your work um it's just it's just great that that people are thinking about it from that perspective I want to switch gears a little bit um and talk a little bit about tax efficiency uh you know taxes are such a huge part of the impact of a plan and there's so many different angles to it and and the tax rules change so much um I'll tell you one of the challenges that I have asset location the concept of balancing you know where you put a certain asset according to us is tax efficiency versus keeping an asset allocation in line right up you know operationally keeping it in line with the objectives and then as money is being spent taking it from the right place it's a challenge even with excellent software and then sometimes I'm finding that it doesn't actually work out as planned so can you can you give me some practical tips on how to deal with asset location well the the basic logic of asset location but yeah I mean in practice it gets incredibly complicated as you're spending from these accounts to think about also rebalancing and making sure you're keeping the right asset allocation between stocks and bonds and the NASA location is where do you keep these things but generally just is a basic guideline your taxable brokerage accounts of course you want some cash there for your liquidity but otherwise that's your most tax efficient stock Investments so if you own stock index funds and so forth the on a relative basis they're most likely to be best off in your taxable account because a lot more of their returns will be those long-term capital gains that get the preferential tax treatment then with like your tax deferred IRAs and 401ks that's more of a place where less tax efficiency so bonds and so forth maybe lower returning type asset classes and then for your Roth accounts the Roth IRA and so forth that's where less tax efficient but higher expected return type asset classes could go the Emerging Market funds and small cap value and that sort of thing and that does also work with distribution ordering as well because the Roth will be what you tend to spend last and so also having these uh riskier asset classes that may have more growth prospects over the long term that can be a good place to set them aside since you're not likely to be spending from those accounts until later in retirement okay yeah it I think for a lot of people it's a little bit of a daunting thing and in practice it can be with contingencies and things like that can be hard to to do correctly and keep managed and I know there's good news is there's good software now that that helps with that um as far as tax efficiency the other you mentioned the order of withdrawals I mean traditionally you know you have the you know your traditional order of withdrawal that you would you would uh do in in the past a lot a lot of recommendations has been you know you want to take from your taxable accounts first right let those tax-free tax deferred accounts grow and then and then you start taking from those other sources but you make a really good point that that's not always the best thing to draw that taxable account down too fast can you expand upon that a little bit well the yeah the the basic tax efficient distribution is spent down taxable assets than tax deferred like IRAs and then tax exempt like Roth against last but you you can do better and so the the better approach is to have a blend of taxable and tax deferred until the taxable account depletes and then a blend of tax deferred and tax exempt after that and as part of that blend you can do rock conversions to in the short term pay higher taxes if that can better position you to pay less taxes over the long term and to have a higher Legacy value from assets over the long term yeah and then getting more specific than that it's there's no you really got to run the the individual numbers on a case-by-case basis but generally there's the opportunities to sustain your assets for much longer by having a more tax efficient distribution strategy that digs into that taxable plus tax deferred and then later tax deferred plus tax exempt exactly and and that's why it's important while you when you're an accumulation phase make sure you have some tax diversification if you can yeah have Assets in all those different types of accounts yeah so that you're not nailed so bad uh later on uh and then there's a lot of complexities that can happen with happen that we see quite a bit with concentrated stock positions and things like that which is probably outside the scope what we're talking about today so um and lastly here last last topic here non-financial aspects of retirement this is a huge huge huge thing uh it's funny it was the last towards the end of your book and I'm glad that you talked about it uh because uh there's I can't tell you how many times um you know you see people think that they're going to be happy sitting on the beach and then they they do that and they're miserable uh or or spouses that wind up hating each other for some reason can you tell can you give us some ideas about um like what should people be doing like say they're five years into retiring or ten years into retirement retirement What should people be thinking about doing to kind of get their their overall lifestyle satisfactory when they actually do retire yeah and and that's this is in some ways more important than any other Financial stuff because with the finances it's easier to adapt but work does so many things in a person's life it's not just that it provides a salary and you need a way to replace all the other aspects of work such as structure to the day camaraderie feeling part of a team feeling like you're creating value for a society all these different aspects that you need to be able to replace with something that gives you motivation to wake up in the morning in retirement and so to say simply it's not the best starting scenario if you retire because you hate your job you want to be able not to retire away from something but to be able to retire to something you want to have and it gives you purpose and passion and meaning to give you the motivation to wake up and and have something be active each day because in all too many cases people just they start doing passive things like watching too much television or surfing the internet too much and that can lead to a really miserable and unsatisfactory retirement wow that's huge that's interesting have something to retire to so uh and and start figuring that out sooner rather than later right not don't wait till the very end and go yeah what am I doing uh and sitting there staring at your wife or your husband yeah that's the idea that there's all these things you you want to get done but you just think well when I retire then I'll have more time to do it well if it's something you've been holding off on doing for the past 40 years it's not likely that just having more time in retirement is what you need you may just simply either not be interested if it's a hobby like oh I want to go back to playing the guitar or something if you're waiting for retirement to do that sort of thing there you go that retiring may not be enough and then people might start feeling bad that you no longer have the excuse and that's where if that sort of bad feeling compounds it can create a spiral like a downward spiral where people just become less engaged and less positive and it can even impact Health which then in turn makes it harder to be engaged and involved and and can lead to downward spirals it's really important to try to avoid that and as part of that not waiting for retirement to to consider all these other aspects of your life outside of work but making sure you're nurturing relationships and having hobbies and having things outside of work so that it will then be easier to transition into the retirement yeah that's great so is there anything as we close here is there anything that you're really excited about that you're working on right now that you want to share or is there at all right now I am just trying to get the updates done for the retirement planning guidebook and where we're doing the best we can to build out that retirement income Styles ideas uh something that people can benefit from and uh the other main research area is with the tax planning as well that I think this will be a Hot Topic and I've already done a lot of work in that area but it is such a complicated area that just trying to push forward as well about like Roth conversion strategies and and how to best Implement those in a most of the work in that area just assumes a fixed rate of return and with the reality of not fixed rates of Returns on your Investment Portfolio that also dramatically complicates some of those tax planning decisions so I'm continuing to push ahead in those areas interesting so more stochastic modeling in your future yes stochastic modeling and now you're probably going to be uh that Technology's got to be in there somewhere too any plans uh that you want to announce or share with new technology that you're going to be coming out with or software programs or anything like that or I mean I just have this Vision in my head if I were you I'd be doing something like that but I mean I'm just saying yeah don't Envision creating tax planning software but uh the retirement income style awareness that's where I'm putting on my efforts in terms of having software and that's an easier problem than the tax planning problem definitely yeah there's a lot of changes always yeah you'll be coding to your uh blue in the face all your staff would be so uh the uh it's interesting I I I'm actually going to be diving into that that profiling software that you have um I had a conversation yesterday about that so that's very good so where would people uh would you like people to send you see learn more about you um anything that you're up to oh yeah uh so my website retirementresearcher.com all one word retirement researcher and if you go there you can sign up every Saturday morning we send out an email with different articles and things and then my retirement planning guidebook is on Amazon or any other major book retailer and also I do have a podcast as well they're retire with style podcast with Alex mergia who's my a co-co-researcher and and co-founder of the retirement income style awareness excellent all right Wade thank you so much appreciate you coming on it's been a pleasure thank you the information in this podcast is informational and General in nature and does not take into consideration the listeners personal circumstances therefore it is not intended to be a substitute for specific individualized Financial legal or tax advice to determine which strategies or Investments may be suitable for you consult the appropriate qualified professional prior to making a final decision wealthnet Investments is a registered investment advisor advisory services are only offered to clients or prospective clients where wealthnet Investments and as representatives are properly licensed or exempt from licensure [Music] foreign

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Retirement: I’m 60 Years Old with $900K in Savings. Can I Retire Now? What is My Risk Capacity?

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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Mastering Retirement: Crunching Numbers on a $1,000,000 Nest Egg

is a million dollars enough to retire on I'm Clark adbury I'm a financial adviser for the last 30 years I've been helping individuals and families manage their Investments and plan for their retirement if you've accumulated a million dollars in retirement savings congratulations well done you've done some serious retirement planning in this video I'm going to answer the question is a million dollar enough to retire on let's talk about it in order to answer this question we have to address a few variables what's your cost of living going to be in retirement have you got a retirement budget have you factored into your retirement budget potential future expenses like medical expenses not covered by Medicare or long-term care expenses also depending on your investment strategy for retirement your Investments may have different rates of return don't forget to factor in taxes to the equation for example if you were to say to me Clark I want to take out $5,000 a month from my retirement accounts is that 5,000 before taxes or 5,000 after taxes let's take a look at a few different scenarios to tile this together to help you understand what's a safe withdrawal rate how much can you take from your retirement savings and not run out of money during your lifetime in all these scenarios and illustrations we're assuming a retirement age of 65 but if you can retire sooner all the better if you were to say to me Clark our retirement budget is $7,000 per month next thing we want to look at is your other sources of income let's assume you have social security of $2,000 per month if you subtract the $2,000 a month from your $7,000 per month retirement budget that leaves you with $5,000 per month you need to be able to take from your retirement Savings in this illustration we're taking up $5,000 per month from your retirement savings we not giving you a cost of living adjustment in this scenario that means $5,000 a month at 65 and $5,000 a month at 85 we're assuming a 3% rate of return and under these circumstances the money erodes over time and last till about age 88 one big problem with this first scenario is that it does not give you a cost of living adjustment if you're really taking the same monthly income at 85 that you were taking at 65 you're going to have a tremendous drop in your standard of living your purchasing power will have eroded due to inflation so let's run another scenario in which you do give yourself a a 3% per year cost of living adjustment that's to keep up with the long-term average rate about 3% per year for inflation let's see what happens then in this scenario we're taking out $5,000 per month initially we are giving you a 3% perear cost living adjustment each year this still assumes just a 3% per year rate of return because of that cost living adjustment the fact that we're taking out more each year for your retirement savings we see that the money erods more quickly and this case runs out at age 82 but again that's with only a 3% rate of return let's look at another scenario where we have a higher rate of return and also have that cost of living adjustment in this scenario we're taking up $5,000 per month initially giving you a 3% per your cost of living adjustment the difference in this one is we're earning 6% as opposed to 3% that you're earning in the last scenario and this time instead of the money lasting at only 82 because we're earning 6% the money lasts until age 88 that was at a 6% rate of return on your retirement savings let's run it again this time using an 8% rate of return in this scenario we're starting out with 5 ,000 per month we're giving you a 3% Pere cost of living adjustment but this time instead of 6% we're earning 8% as you can see now the money lasts all the way until age 97 let's look at one more scenario in this one I work backward to see how much we can take out safely from your retirement savings and not run out of money before you're 100 years old in this scenario we've gotone back to a 6% per year rate of return and your retirement savings we're still giving you 3% per year cost of living adjustment we want the money to last to to 100 we find that you can take out $5,300 per month and give yourself 3% per year raise every year and have the money last all the way until you're 100 if you're do it yourself I hope this has been helpful to you if you're the kind of person likes help with your investment management and retirement planning well that's what we do for our clients reach out to us if we can help for nine great reasons to retire early and one to maybe not watch this video next

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Retirement: I’m 60 Years Old with $900K in Savings. Can I Retire Now? What is My Risk Capacity?

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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How Much Money You Should Have Saved At Every Age | Retirement Savings By Age

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

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