Ep. 242 – Reviewing 2023 in your Retirement

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In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs highlight some different episodes throughout 2023. These episodes’ topics are significant resources for retirement planning and would greatly help if you went back and listened.

Listen in to learn the different episodes with information about what you need in retirement, including a power of attorney, estate planning, retirement income strategies, and more. You will also learn about the episodes on long-term care planning options, plus the basics of continuing care retirement community (CCRC).

In this episode, find out:

• Episode 193 – the elements we discuss to help you navigate the decision to retire now or work longer.
• Episode 197 – understanding the power of attorney and why you need it in retirement.
• Episode 201 – an interview with our partner on things to think about when it comes to a trust.
• Episode 204 – an interview with a consultant about social security spousal benefits in retirement.
• Episode 208 – maximizing tax benefits by bunching charitable contributions strategy.
• Episode 217 – how to create an income in retirement by restructuring assets and buckets strategies.
• Episode 219 – things to consider when choosing to do CDs or annuities.
• Episode 224 – understanding long-term care planning options in retirement.
• Episode 223 – protecting against cybersecurity threats and why the episode is super important.
• Episode 226 – we walk you through our integrated wealth experience in retirement strategies.
• Episode 231 – an interview with our in-house taxation expert on how social security taxation works.
• Episode 234 – an interview with an IRA expert to help you understand the Roth IRA: 5-year rule.
• Episodes 236 & 238 – an interview about continuing care retirement community (CCRC) basics.
• Episode 235 – the art of a Risk-adjusted Portfolio in Retirement with four major elements.
• Episode 239 – an interview with our partner around simplified estate planning in retirement.

Tweetable Quotes:

• “If you’re concerned about long-term care and don’t know what to do and which direction to go in, episode 224 could be a good starting point for you.”– Murs Tariq
• “If you’re taking social security and just want to understand how it works or you’re trying to plan for when you take social security, episode 231 is a great episode to go back and listen through.”– Radon Stancil

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 Secure Your Retirement Podcast. We are excited to be able to talk to you. This is the last episode of the year of 2023. So the next time we’ll be talking to you, it will be 2024. And what we like to do, because we have these podcasts come out every week and sometimes throughout the year, we get new listeners and maybe not knowing exactly where to go find information, we like to do an episode where we highlight some different episodes throughout the year so you know where to go find them. Okay? Now, if you were using iTunes, for example, you have to click on a name in order of the podcast in order to find the actual number, but it’s pretty simple. So what we’re going to do on these podcasts that we’re going to highlight and tell you a little bit about them, so that way if you want to go find them, we’re going to give you two points of information or three points of information.
Radon Stancil:	One, the title of the podcast, two, the date that it came out, and then the actual podcast number. So depending upon where you’re listening or how you listen, whether it be on the website, iTunes, Spotify, any of those places, you’ll be able to find it. So the first one that I’m going to highlight and then Murs is going to highlight one and we’ll talk about them together a little bit. It came out on January 16th and it was episode 193, 193. And the title of this podcast was Navigating the Decision to Retire Now or Work Longer. So really what we always have is we have folks that we’re talking to. We know we have folks that are listening, people that are coming in to see us, and they’re trying to figure out when that retirement date would be. In fact, one of the common questions that we ask if we’re planning for retirement is we’ll say, “What’s your goal for retirement?”
Radon Stancil:	And usually people will say, “I would really like to retire no later than…” And they’ll say a number, 65, 67, whatever that is, and they say, “But if I could retire prior to that,” I’d like to know that number as well. And so what we do in this episode is walk you through the mindset of what you need to think about what numbers you need to have in order for a financial advisor or us to help you make that decision. And then we talk about how to build all the what ifs around that. So for example, we might have somebody come into the office and they’ll say, “Hey, could I retire at 62? Not say I’m going to, but there’s some weird things going on in the company and I just want to have the confidence to know that I could tell them I don’t want to work anymore.”
Radon Stancil:	So we sit down and we say, “Okay, can we retire at 62?” And if the numbers work at age 62, they’re likely going to work at 64, 66 or a later date. So this is a really good episode if you’re anywhere in the idea of what do I need to even think about if I’m getting ready for retirement?
Murs Tariq:	Okay, the one I’m going to spotlight is it aired on February 13th. This was episode 197, and the title is 10 Reasons Everyone Needs a Power of Attorney in Retirement. I’m sure there’s more than 10 reasons, but there are all kinds of things that can happen. And this year has been one of those years where we’ve seen some issues, we’ve seen some disability, we’ve seen some incapacity with clients, and so understanding what a power of attorney is, particularly a durable power of attorney, understanding what it is and why you would need one when it comes to taking care of your loved ones or making sure that you have things in place that if something was to happen to you that you are well taken care of.
Murs Tariq:	It gives someone the power, the ability to sign off on your behalf to make financial decisions, maybe even healthcare decisions and keep things moving when you are not in a place to keep things moving. So understanding that document, how to get it, why you should have it, all the reasons they’re in this episode, and it is very, very important. It’s up there in the list of documents that you need to have when it comes to making sure you’ve got a will, power of attorney, HIPAA authorizations, things like that. This is a very important piece. So if you haven’t listened or you don’t know what a power of attorney is, go listen to episode 197.
Radon Stancil:	All right, I’m going to talk about the one that aired on March 13th, episode 201, Do You Need a Trust in Retirement? Now there’s a couple of different ones we did throughout the year on this type of topic, so I’m going to probably highlight them all because I think estate planning is so important. It’s so important that we’ve put together some really good partnerships where we help provide that. In fact, for all of our clients that we have there, they have the availability, the ability rather, to go and get their documents made and created and they can do it at no cost to them.
Radon Stancil:	We take care of all the costs of that. So that’s extremely important. But this one is do I need a trust in retirement? On this one, we actually interviewed one of our partners, Andres Mazabel, and he walked through the whole what should we think about in that area? And so I would encourage you to go listen to that if you’re even thinking, does a trust make sense or not? Now again, I’m going to talk about another episode where we do it again in a different way so you can listen to both. It’ll just give you a lot of insight.
Murs Tariq:	Okay, I’ve got one that we aired on April 3rd. This was episode 204 entitled Social Security Spousal Benefit in Retirement. And I think this is a key one to understand. Social security has a lot of complications, and for that reason we work closely with a consultant and her name is Heather Schreiber. So we brought her onto this podcast to help us understand how the spousal benefit in retirement or for social security planning works. And there’s some rules that you need to understand and how they come up with the calculation. But I’ll never forget a client story of ours where we were sitting, I think this was back before the pandemic or maybe in the middle of it, and we were doing some retirement planning for them and he was the income earner and she was really the one that stayed at home with the kids and raised the family.
Murs Tariq:	And when it came to talking about their social security benefits, he was thinking that well, he would get his and she would get nothing. And it was such an eye-opening moment for them to understand and for us to tell them, “Well, actually there is a spousal benefit.” And all of a sudden she went from thinking she was getting nothing from social security for the rest of her life to getting something around 1,700 a month because of the ability for the spouse to draw off of the higher income earner as a spousal benefit. So it’s something very important to understand, especially if you are close to social security age or at that time where you’re thinking about retiring. It’s a strategy you want to fully understand. So episode 204 is a good one.
Radon Stancil:	Okay, let’s move on here to May 1st, episode 208, May 1st, episode 208, and here was the title, Maximizing Tax Benefits by “Bunching” Charitable Contributions. This has been a strategy that we’ve used with a few of our clients this year that are charitably inclined. And the reason why this is so important is it allows us to actually bunch together charitable contributions so that we can get above the standard deduction, which gives us a bigger tax benefit. And we’ve had clients save hundreds of dollars, I think a couple thousand dollars in taxes by bunching those contributions together. So we use qualified charitable contributions to do… No, no, I said it wrong.
Murs Tariq:	Qualified charitable distributions.
Radon Stancil:	No, that’s one idea. This right there I’m talking about is donor advised funds.
Murs Tariq:	I’m sorry. Yes, go ahead.
Radon Stancil:	I apologize. Donor advised funds and that’s just what helps us do that. So make sure you listen to this episode. We do say the right term in there in the episode, so don’t worry about what we just said there. So anyway, let’s go onto our next one.
Murs Tariq:	Okay, I’m going to pick episode 217. This was aired on July 3rd, and the title is, You Have Enough to Retire, but How Do You Create an Income? So what we talk a lot about in this episode is that there’s two phases of life when it comes to finances. You’re in the accumulation phase of life where all you’re trying to do is save away as much as you can and invest it properly, and you’re just trying to grow your nest egg. Well as you approach retirement, the strategy is no longer save and invest and while we still want to invest, the strategy becomes how do we de-accumulate properly? How do we come up with a withdrawal strategy that is going to be comfortable, it’s going to be reliable and somewhat predictable? And so we talk a bit about how we could potentially restructure assets to make that a bit more possible.
Murs Tariq:	Some of you have heard of us talk about the buckets and putting assets into various buckets when it comes to cash and safety and income and then our growth bucket. And so we strongly believe in that strategy. We talk a little bit in this episode about this thing called sequence of returns risk, which I think is important to understand as you do go into retirement of, well, what if I walk into retirement and the market falls off and all my money’s in the market and is it possible to recover and we want to avoid the stress that comes with that type of scenario. So understanding that is I think key. You work so hard, you work so long, you want to get it right when you enter into retirement.
Radon Stancil:	All right, I’ll jump to July 17th, episode 219. And this one was just this year, last year or so, interest rates have jumped so high. A lot of people all of a sudden CDs were looking attractive and they are attractive, but we had questions about should I do an annuity or should I do a CD? Because by the way, interest rates also were very positive for the annuity side, just like where they were for the CD side because of their structure. So this is just a quick little episode that says, “What should I consider there between the two? Is there an advantage to one over the other?” Just give you a little back and forth on those two topics.
Murs Tariq:	Okay, on August 21st we released episode 224. That was all about long-term care planning options in retirement. So long-term care, we can go in a bunch of different directions. There’s the expensive premium paying route that some of you may have had in the past or you still have and you’re noticing it’s getting more and more expensive. What we talk about is alternatives to that where you’re not paying in monthly and you’ve heard the phrase, if you don’t use it, you lose it type of scenario. We’re saying, “Well, what if there is a way to just restructure assets so that we don’t lose it if we don’t use it?” It has a purpose. It’s been recharacterized to be there for long-term care, but maybe it also has a cash value benefit to it or a life insurance benefit to it. So if you’re concerned about long-term care and you don’t know what to do and which direction to go in, episode 224 could be a good starting point for you.
Radon Stancil:	All right, I’m going to go back for a spot here to August 14th, episode 223, Protecting Against Cybersecurity Threats. And here’s why I’m going to go back. I just want to reiterate this. What we are told is around this time of year, it really ramps up for whatever reason, these emails and texts that we get that could threaten us. And if we are smart and we just employ a few things, we can cut down that threat tremendously. So I encourage you, this is something, in fact, we have to do cybersecurity training all throughout the year to make sure that we are protected against this. So I encourage you to go check this out if you did not get a chance to listen to it. And even if you did, go back and get the reminders.
Murs Tariq:	All right, episode 226 on September 4th, Integrated Wealth Management Experience in Retirement. I think this one’s important. Obviously if you’re a client of ours, you understand all the different things that we bring to the table. But if you’re not a client of ours, and you’ve never heard of this phrase of an integrated wealth management experience, we walk you through and inside our practice as far as all the different facets of wealth management that we bring to the table when it comes to managing risk in the market, when it comes to income strategies, income planning, tax strategies, estate planning, like those wills and power of attorney documents. And then on top of all of that, we’ve got options and avenues to figure out long-term care. We have a social security expert consultant that we work very closely with. Medicare is something that we’ve provided for a while, but we’ve actually come January.
Murs Tariq:	So in about a week or so from this episode airing, we are bringing on a Medicare expert in-house. We had a great resource before it was good enough to say we need to bring this in-house. So we’ve got that starting in January. And then all the other things, life insurance needs, even trying to understand the cost around going into a continuous care retirement community. What we’ve tried to build here is something that could be as much of a one-stop shop and a wealth management experience as possible. So episode 226, we’ll walk you through all the facets of what that really means.
Radon Stancil:	All right, I’m going to take you to October 9th, episode 231, Social Security Taxation – How it Works. This one, we actually had our own in-house enroll agent who is a specialist in tax returns and taxation come on and explain. And this was the title, Social Security Taxation – How it Works in Retirement. Taylor in our office came on that episode with us and just really walked us through all the different aspects of what we have to consider, how the math works, what part of how do we know whenever we’re going to be taxed on social security. So again, i you’re taking social security, you just want to understand how it works, that’s one thing. Or if I’m trying to plan for when I do take social security, this is a great episode to go back and listen through.
Murs Tariq:	All right, episode 234, which aired on October 30th. It’s entitled Roth IRA – 5-Year Rule – Your Retirement – Part 2 with Denise Appleby. The reason this is a part two is because the previous episode, Radon and I, we tried to explain the five-year rule of what a Roth IRA is, and we probably did an okay job, but we realized there’s things that we left out. There’s things that we know could be explained better. So we brought in an expert, she’s an IRA expert that we tap into quite a bit throughout the year. Her name is Denise Appleby. And with draw and the excitement around Roth accounts and also as we are in the end of the year, Roth conversion strategies and things like that, you want to understand the five-year rule because that is pretty important, especially if you’ve never had a Roth account before in your life and you’re starting to do Roth conversions, you definitely want to understand them. So episode 234, Denise walks us through it in a nice and easy manner and it’s very educational.
Radon Stancil:	All right, I’m going to take you to two episodes. The first one, November 13th, episode 236. And then the next one was November 27th. So two weeks later, November 27th, episode 238. And this was an interview we did with Rae Dawson and here was what the title was, The Basics About a CCRC in Retirement, and CCRC stands for continuous care retirement community. Rae Dawson teaches a class through Duke University where it’s a very big popular class that she teaches, but everything, excuse me, everything that we need to know about what do I got to think about if I’m going to try to go into a continuous care retirement community? What’s the best age to do it? How do I get charged? What’s better? Doing an upfront large sum of money or do just a rent only? She walks us through that. It is a part one, part two type scenario. So that’s why I gave you both episodes. But it is fantastic. She does a great job of walking you through and helping you with those considerations.
Murs Tariq:	All right, the last one I’ve got on my list was on November 6th. This was episode 235 and it’s called The Art of a Risk Adjusted Portfolio in Retirement. And so what we talk about in this episode is a lot of us, especially when you’re accumulating in the 401(k)s, you don’t have a lot of options. You’re typically buying in and you’re buying and holding and you’re riding the waves of the market. Eventually you get to a place where you can maybe do something different than just invest in your 401(k) or you retire and you say, “I want to do things differently because I’m done walking through 2008’s where the markets fall 30 and 40% or experience that type of loss.” And so we walk through how we do it in a risk adjusted manner.
Murs Tariq:	And when it comes to portfolio construction, we talk to clients all the time around there’s four major elements to our portfolios. There’s the core, the tactical, there’s structured notes, and then there’s fixed income. Putting all those together is how we can adjust risk inside of the market. And we also talk about how we can add in something that’s outside of the market to compliment the risk of what the market brings. We marry all of that together and that’s what provides risk adjustment as well as predictability and reliability in our income and retirement.
Radon Stancil:	All right, here’s the final one we’ll do for this review. December 4th, so not very long ago, Anne Rhodes, and this was the other one I was telling you about for estate planning. Anne Rhodes is another partner we have through wealth.com that they work with financial advisors like us to provide an opportunity and a platform for us to be able to get this estate plan and estate planning documents to clients. I mean, Murs and I are not attorneys, obviously, we’re financial advisors, but the name of this episode was Estate Planning in Retirement – Simplified. And it is a simple process. Again, this is one of the resources that we use so that any one of our clients can get those documents in place. We want that. You can make easy updates. It is just a nice easy way to get that estate plan done. So go check that out, December 4th, episode 239.
Radon Stancil:	We hope this has been beneficial. We look forward to 2024 being able to have another good year of bringing good information. We have these episodes come out every single Monday. It’s 52 episodes a year that we get to share with you information. I will tell you a little bit of a format update next year is that we’re going to go to where we have one episode every month that is going to be dedicated to financial planning and we’re going to bring on another certified financial planner. And then we’re going to do one on taxes and we’re going to bring on another certified financial planner, Taylor, who’s also the enrolled agent.
Radon Stancil:	And then we’re going to do one on Medicare every month and that’ll be our new Medicare specialist that we’ll bring on and give tax, I’m sorry, tips around Medicare and then Murs and I will have a random episode that we do around things that we see going on in the marketplace. So anyway, we always love to have your feedback. Please let us know if you ever want to have a conversation, go to the website, top right-hand corner, click on schedule call. Our calendar comes right up and you can hop on a call with us and we’ll be able to talk to you to try to walk through whatever situations you might be wanting to consider. Thank you very much. We’ll talk to you again next year.