Ep.143 – Wine Down – Retirement Planning Options

If you want to start securing your retirement, then it is time to be aware of the types of retirement planning options available for you. 

In this episode of the Secure Your Retirement podcast, we talk about retirement planning options and our strategy at POM over a glass of Brickyard Wine. We explain the three types of financial advisors and what they offer.

Listen in to learn more about our comprehensive retirement planning strategy and why we believe it’s beneficial.

In this episode, find out:

●     The type of financial advisor that helps you as just an investment manager.

●     The type of financial advisor that helps you create a financial plan but not necessarily how to implement it.

●     The one-stop-shop financial advisor – creates and helps you implement a financial plan.

●     Our comprehensive retirement planning – investment strategy, income planning, taxes, and estate planning.

●     How we built a foundation to establish if retirement is possible while looking into the different scenarios that might occur.

●     How we developed relationships with CPAs to provide tax strategies to our clients.

●     Mur’s on his experience working for POM for 10 years and the benefits of the continued growth.

●     How we continue to evolve through growth and putting out education.

Tweetable Quotes:

●     “We have a structure to do all things in one particular place where a person doesn’t have to go to multiple locations.”– Radon Stancil

●     “If you don’t continue learning or adding services, then eventually you’re going to be left behind.”– Murs Tariq

Resources:

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement!

To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast.

Here’s the Full Transcript:

Radon Stancil:	Welcome, everyone, to our very first Wine Down of 2022. Can you believe it? 2022 Wine Down.
Murs Tariq:	It’s already here somehow.
Morgan Dunn:	It is.
Radon Stancil:	So Morgan, you picked our very first wine for 2022. What is it?
Morgan Dunn:	I did. This one is called The Brickyard. It’s an NC State University tribute to the Hallowed Places collection. And this is from a local vineyard, it’s called Shelton Vineyards, out of Dobson, North Carolina. It’s in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina. And it’s a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Malbec. The label for The Brickyard was actually designed by a graphic design student from NC State University. So they’ve tried to incorporate as much NC State University as they could. And, they did a good job, I like it.
Radon Stancil:	They did. I like it too. It’s really good.
Murs Tariq:	Yeah.
Morgan Dunn:	It’s very tasty.
Murs Tariq:	Go Wolf Pack. The Brickyard, if you’ve ever been on the campus, or if you’ve heard of it, right off of Hillsborough Street, by the library, it’s pretty well known. That’s a big open space area that’s just full of bricks. And the story that NC State has just always… used to be, what some would say, an uglier school because there’s bricks all over the place. But over the years, pretty much ever since I left back in 2010, they’ve done a ton of renovation and made it a really beautiful campus. But the Brickyard is still alive and thriving, from what I hear.
Radon Stancil:	All right, well, good, we got the wine going. So I want to just tell everybody, everybody knows that our podcast format in 2022, we updated it. And we updated it so that we would have one show a week. So every Monday we have a show come out, and that show, the podcast can be what Murs and I call our retirement in action. It could also be an interview. And we are going to continue to do the last Monday of the month to be a Wine Down. But because we’re only doing four, what we talked about was this idea of the Wine Down… Now, we could still do an interview on the Wine Down, but we do still, as we’ve promised you, want to bring good content. So we’re not just trying to do a fluff show. This is not a fluff show. This is not something to fill a day.
Radon Stancil:	And it’s not even to say we’re going to not have fun, but we also want to make sure we carry a topic. So here’s our topic for today, our topic is, what are the different types of financial planning firms or financial institutions that could help you for retirement planning? Now, we’re going to tell you about how ours is set up, but we’re also going to discuss others. And I just want to set this up that this is not a commercial. This is not something to say ours is the best. I am a humongous advocate, I say it to every person that ever is coming in our doors to talk to us to be a client, I say, “Look, you need to be with what you feel is good.” And there are different things, there’s different options. So as we explain them, we’re going to let you know which one of those we are. We’re going to explain how we’re set up, but we’re also going to explain how other firms are set up.
Radon Stancil:	And this is very much what Murs and I do when we’re talking to somebody, is they say, “I don’t even know. I don’t know what the different options are, so I’m out here exploring.” And many times people are talking maybe to one, two, three, and some aggressively, five different financial firms trying to get the feel of the different firms that are out there. So I’m going to turn it over to you now, Murs, I’m going to ask you the question. You’re talking to, now, everybody listening to the podcast, and they ask the question, “Hey, give me the lay of the land. What are the different types of things that I could expect if I were going out and I was going to interview maybe three or four or five different firms? What are some things I might run into and what are the different types of places?”
Murs Tariq:	Yeah, so I think we can start with something that everyone would find somewhat relatable, is, at some point you get into investing, in your life, whether that’s when you’re younger and you set up your first account and you buy a stock, whatever that stock is. That’s a pretty easy transaction to do. You set up the account, you put money in the account and you buy the stock and watch the stock go up or down. And then your next step typically is with maybe your work, and you have a 401k that you can start putting money away into. And maybe that’s at a Fidelity or a TD Ameritrade, or wherever the retirement plan is all set up. That’s your really next big taste of how investing works. But then you get down the line a little bit and you say, “Hey, I might actually start needing some help with my investments and building out my financial future.” And that’s where these financial advisors come into play.
Murs Tariq:	And like Radon said, there’s a bunch of different ones out there. And it really just depends on what you’re looking for and what you’re trying to accomplish. I would break it down into, I guess three categories. We can add as many categories as we want, but I think three high level ones is, there’s an advisor out there that’s there to help you really invest the money. So you say, “I’ve done some stuff on my own, but I really would like some professional help and I would like someone to help me manage a portfolio.” So you give them some money and they go and invest it based off of whatever they think is best in the markets and based off of a risk conversation that you may have, but that’s kind of it. That’s what they’re really there for, is to help you take the money and grow the money, ideally, over time. But if you ask them questions around maybe taxes, or if you ask them questions about your overall estate plan, or something like that, they’re really not there to answer those. They’re really there just to be that investment manager for you.
Murs Tariq:	The other type of financial advisor could be someone… And this works really well for some people, doesn’t work for others, is, you may have more of a mentality of, “I like to do things myself, but I also like to know that I’m going in the right direction.” Maybe getting a second set of eyes on how you’re doing things. And that’s really someone that’s there to create a financial plan for you, but not necessarily help you implement that plan. So you have a sit-down with them, you talk, and they learn about your scenario, what your goals are, when you want to retire, and all that. And they take all that, put it together, and put together a very nice financial plan for you, that you just pay them really a one-time deal. Could be $1,000, could be $5,000 just depending on the amount of work. And then they say, “All right, we put this plan together. Now you, Mr. Client, you go and run with it. You go buy the asset allocation we came up with, you go get your paperwork done. You go save the way that we said that we’re going to save in the plan.” And so it’s all back again on the client.
Murs Tariq:	And then, my third category is one that’s really going to be, in all essence, what we’ve tried to create here, is a one-stop shop. That you can do pretty much everything that you would like to do in the sense of, not just limited to investments. We handle the investments, we also help with building out that plan and implementing that plan. And then also a bunch of other things that come with that. And we’re always looking and searching, and seeing what is needed out there, and how can we bring that into our firm? So that has grown into tax strategy, that’s grown into estate planning, Medicare, long-term care, insurance options. And so we look at that… And the industry looks at that as more of a wholistic approach, to be able to take care of as much as possible in one area.
Murs Tariq:	So you’ve got three categories, and Radon or Morgan, you can add to this as well. But to summarize there, you’ve got three categories. One, you’ve got an advisor there that’s really just there to help you invest the money, grow the money. The second is an advisor that’s there to help you build the plan, but you take the plan and you go run with it. And the third is really the one that is going to help you with everything, and also implementation of everything.
Radon Stancil:	Yeah, I think about it this way. There’s people who like to do their taxes, there’s people who like to do a part of their taxes, and there’s people who don’t want to have anything to do with their taxes. Everybody gets that, right? I’m the third category. I want to do as least as possible when it comes to mine. I want to understand it, but I don’t want to do any parts of it. I’d like to hand that off to another professional. Now, Murs did a nice job of explaining that. I’m going to just tell you what we are, and clearly say it. I think Murs said it too, but I want to reiterate it. We are the comprehensive planning firm. So for the person… If a person ever comes in our office and they are what we call a do-it-yourself-er, and I do not say that in a negative way at all, but many times people come in and they’re great money managers.
Radon Stancil:	They’ve been doing their own thing, they’re very good at it, been doing it for 30 years. They’re fantastic at it. We sit down with that person and they go, “Yeah, I want to do this. I like doing this. I like spending a few hours a week reading and figuring out where I’m going to buy and all that.” We tell them right up front, “We’re probably not the right fit, except for two categories. One, you’re looking to build a relationship to be able to have someone maybe be a little bit more conservative than what you are in your investment approach. Or number two, you are trying to set up a relationship for maybe a spouse or a partner that does not want to do all that.” And every time we say that, they go, “That’s exactly what I’m trying to do,” one of those two things. So what I do want to do, though, is to expand a little bit, and again, I just want to preface, this is not a commercial. This is just simply to explain what we do.
Radon Stancil:	And then I think what this does is it allows people to go, “I like that. That sounds like a good approach.” That doesn’t mean you’re going to work with us. It means you might go out and find somebody else, but you know what questions to ask. You may say, “I want to go and I want to look for a firm that looks like this.” So I’m going to kind of give you some overview of how we’re set up. Now, Murs talked about this wholistic approach, and we have worked really hard to do that. So we attract people who want to not worry about it, they just want everything done for them. And sometimes we get good responses.
Radon Stancil:	So, I’m going to divert every now and then. Morgan, could you share with us maybe some of your … Now, Morgan, just for everybody listening, obviously is not a financial advisor, she is our director of operations. So she is in complete contact with the client, she gets to hear them, and talk to them, and interact with them, and become friends with them. So, maybe you might give us a little bit of your perspective of what it means to be a part of a comprehensive retirement planning firm, and maybe some of the comments you hear from clients?
Morgan Dunn:	Right, I’m also not a sommelier. I mean, I don’t know if I fooled anybody into thinking that over the past couple episodes. Some of the communications we’ve gotten too, are not just geared towards what our services are that we offer, what we do for the client. But one of my favorites is how we’ve developed this podcast over the past year. And some of the feedback we’ve gotten is, “The podcasts cover a wealth of topics, many of which I probably would not have known or heard about from other sources,” is what one of our clients said. So I appreciate that we offer not only great services, but we offer a resource.
Radon Stancil:	Yeah. And I want to say on that particular topic, by the way, we’ll just break in here and say this. If you are a listener of the podcast and you think, “Man, I’d love for you guys to cover this topic or that topic,” please reach out to us. There’s a couple ways you can do it, but the main, easiest way is to go to our website, which is pomwealth.net. You can go there to the top right hand corner, you can click on a button that you can schedule a 15-minute phone conversation. We’d love to hear your feedback. We’d love to hear you tell us, “Hey, this is what we’d like for you to cover more of in that particular topic.” So let me give you an overview of what we have built out to be a comprehensive retirement planning firm.
Radon Stancil:	So, we know that people are thinking about getting ready for retirement or getting close to retirement. So we believe that the thing that we have to do first is build a retirement-focused financial plan. So, that’s the first thing we do. Once we do that, then we have a foundation. And from that foundation we can now start to look at investments. We can start looking at an income plan. We can start looking at taxes and an estate plan. That’s our core. So think about that again, you’ve got money management or investment strategy, you’ve got income plan, you’ve got taxes, you’ve got estate planning. We have basically structured that so that all of that can be done in one particular place, where a person doesn’t have to go to multiple locations. And we’ve got the resources and the other advisors that we’ve partnered with within that world. And so they’re able to have all of those things in one place. They’re not having to go to all these different locations.
Radon Stancil:	Doesn’t mean that a person doesn’t come to us and already have a CPA, but if they do, they can bring that relationship in and be able to have all that looked at. So I think what would be good is, at this point, Murs, if you could just give us a pretty brief description though, because I just said the foundation is a retirement-focused financial plan. Maybe give us the elements of what that looks like, not the detail, but the elements of what that looks like.
Murs Tariq:	Yeah. Which is, we put a lot of weight on the retirement financial plan because it helps us start the conversation, gather all the information that we need to be able to start making recommendations and understand someone’s scenario. But basically what we’re looking at is, “Hey, where are you at today? What are your goals for retirement? How many years out? What have you accumulated? How much are you going to continue to accumulate while you continue to work?” And then another big part of it, sometimes we get so caught up on how much have we saved, the other big part of it is, what is our lifestyle going to be like in retirement? Which really translates into, how much are we going to spend, and can we afford to spend what we want to spend to support that lifestyle? So that’s where we start to… Really, that picture gives us really everything we need to start having really good conversations around, is this possible? If it’s not, when is it possible, as far as retirement goes? Is there going to be anything left over, which translates into an estate planning type of conversation. Do we need to structure things in a certain way?
Murs Tariq:	As far as income, how are we going to take income, where are we going to take it from? Which assets are we going to utilize? And then you’ve got the bigger conversations that everyone is very curious about, is, “Well, if I retire at this age, when do I take Social Security?” Or, “If I have a pension, how do I handle the survivorship question?” Which is, survivorship is, “If something happens to me, does anything continue to go on to the surviving spouse?” So building out that initial foundation of a retirement financial plan gives us a baseline, and then we can start to play around with it and say, “What if this happens? What if that happens?” And it can be for good or it can be for bad.
Murs Tariq:	What if there is a long-term care scenario? Are we okay? What if there is a spouse that predeceases the other? Is that surviving one going to be okay? And we take this and we roll with it. And every single year we’re able to update it to reality, and then have all kinds of conversations that stem off of it. From the investment side of things, how are we going to achieve this rate of return and how is that going to help us live happily in retirement? And then also the fun stuff. What if we want to buy another house and really enjoy retirement, is that even possible? So, having a good foundation lets us really have some pretty meaningful conversations throughout the whole period.
Radon Stancil:	So, this brings me back to you, Morgan. So, as we think about this, we’ve had people comment, I know you get to hear these comments. You get to read these comments about their feelings around this. So could you share with us maybe another thought about what maybe somebody has said around this idea of having it, for what they’re attracted to, this wholistic approach?
Morgan Dunn:	Well, they’ve named it a one-stop shop. One comment that we’ve received was, “Radon and Murs have established a sort of one-stop shop for all of your retirement investment needs and information regarding the same.” So they’re very pleased with that approach and the service that we provide in that area.
Radon Stancil:	Okay. So now here’s my little disclaimer, because I said this is not… The purpose of this episode is to give you a variety of different things. So Murs broke it down at the very beginning. This is not to say that you should change if you think that, “Hey, I like this other approach.” That’s okay. Maybe you like the approach of working… They have these things now called robo-advisors. A robo-advisor is where you go on and you just put your wishes of what your risk tolerance, all that kind of stuff is, and a computer manages your portfolio. And you might go, “I like that.” We are 100% on board to say that’s good for you. We are only sharing with you what we’ve built. And you might say, “Hey, that’s attractive,” or, “not attractive,” and that’s okay.
Radon Stancil:	Maybe this episode’s something that you go, “I don’t need to listen to this because I’ve got my thing that I’m doing.” We’re just trying to explain what we do, because obviously this is over 100-some-odd episodes, and we say, “Hey, this is how we operate.” So I just want to be clear, we’re not trying to say this is what you should do. This is what we’re saying, this is what we do, and it might be attractive. I do want to hit on one topic, though, that we decided consciously a few years back, and we’ve gotten better, and better, and better at it because we realized it was such a key element to retirement planning, and that’s taxes. What we found was that many people were like, “You know what, man, this tax situation, I am so scared of it. Because even if I make a good rate of return, if I don’t have something in place to deal with the taxes, I could lose a lot of it. I could diminish my returns. A lot of it could go away because of that.”
Radon Stancil:	So we developed a relationship with a few different CPAs, and for every one of our clients we now provide tax strategy. We do that through those relationships. So we think it’s important to understand, should I do a Roth conversion? Just so you understand, a Roth means I’m converting my money from a traditional IRA that’s tax deferred and I’m going to go ahead and pay the taxes today, and then I’m going to put it over into a position where it grows tax free. I can get the money out tax free, my children can get the money tax free. It’s just a really good vehicle. But it might not make sense, and so we need CPAs in order to help us to make those decisions. And we have developed those relationships.
Radon Stancil:	And I will tell you, many, many, many of our clients love the fact that they can call a CPA, they can have a conversation, they can go through that strategy at no additional cost to them, because we’ve put the system together. So I believe that’s huge. I’m a big person who, I don’t like to pay… nobody likes to pay taxes. I’ve never met a person that goes, “You know what I’m excited about? I’m excited that it’s April 15th and I get to settle up with the tax man.” Although we might have things that we understand we need to pay taxes for, nobody’s really that excited about it. And so we want to pay our fair share, as some say, but we just don’t want to tip the government. That’s the idea behind it. At least most people don’t.
Radon Stancil:	So Murs, tell me this. What would you say… You’ve been doing this type of business for little over 10 years. What would you say, from your opinion, that you like about… I guess you had an opportunity to see different structures before looking at this structure, and we’ve grown in this structure in the last 10 years that you and I have been together. So what would you say is probably the part of it that you think you see the most benefit to the client, maybe even to yourself?
Murs Tariq:	Yeah. I have very much so enjoyed working for Peace of Mind, and really, for me, a lot of it has been the relationships that we’ve built. I know there’s a comment that we’ve received recently about us, as Peace of Mind, making a client kind of feel like family. And that is the ultimate goal, is that we do work so closely. And one of the ways that we can do that is because we’re not a big major firm like a Wells Fargo or a Morgan Stanley. We actually do know all of our clients individually, and we’re able to treat them individually. So, that’s a big part of it. But you are right, over the last 10 years, if you asked me to have that Roth conversion type of conversation eight years ago, that would have been a little bit difficult. But we saw the need for it and we have brought on certain things that help us have that conversation, because we know that that is a big thing when it comes to taxes.
Murs Tariq:	Let me say it this way, we are way more equipped today than we were eight years ago to handle pretty much any situation that comes in our door. And that just makes me feel very comfortable with all the advice that we’re giving out to our clients. This world is ever evolving, and the reason is because the investment outlook is always changing. And the tax situation, definitely everyone knows is always changing. The economy’s always changing. And if you don’t roll with it, if you don’t continue learning, if you don’t continue adding services, then eventually you’re going to get left behind. And I know that we have not done that. So the continued growth and education that we put out there, I think is one of the biggest things that we do.
Radon Stancil:	All right. We’re going to bring this back to you, Morgan, for a second. Tell me, for you, obviously you’ve been working with us now for quite a few years as well, and you get to see some of the different aspects. What has been your take-away, and maybe another comment or something that you’ve heard that makes you go, “Man, I like this approach”? Whether or not it’s the best one for everybody, it might not be. What would you say?
Morgan Dunn:	Well, my background is customer service and client relations, and that’s kind of what drew me to Peace of Mind, is that I get to do it on a smaller scale and really get to know who our clients are, and who our friends are. And so when they do reply or they do comment that, “We’ve grown as clients and we really value that relationship, but even more so, our friendship.” And that just… it gets me.
Radon Stancil:	Yeah.
Morgan Dunn:	So I like that. And I like when you take a phone call, the first couple minutes is just catching up with everybody. So I really enjoy that about what we do, is that we really do build relationships.
Radon Stancil:	All right. Well, I want to close with this. Here’s what I want to close with, if you’ve listened all the way through this, is that you might be a person who likes a particular strategy. You like to do it yourself. Maybe you like the idea of having a financial plan and you institute it, or you like being able to turn the money over to an advisor, but you are okay doing the rest of the planning. Or maybe you are a person who likes just turning it over to somebody, and then they just make your life simple. And then you can just go on and do what you want to do in retirement. Either one of those has its place. We are not telling you that one of those is better or worse than the other. We just wanted to share with you a little bit about our situation and what we do, as well as give you the perspective of others in a very positive approach.