Ep. 315 – The Peace of Mind Pathway – Step 2 – Implementation
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In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss the second step in the Peace of Mind Pathway—Implementation. This is where the planning becomes reality. After building your personalized retirement roadmap, it’s time to put your financial planning for retirement into motion. From investment transitions to estate documents and tax strategy retirement planning, this episode walks you through what happens after you say, “I’m ready.” It’s not just about moving assets—it’s about building a solid structure to retire confidently and comfortably.
Listen in to learn about the intentional and methodical approach used at Peace of Mind Wealth Management to ensure your retirement income strategy, healthcare coverage, long term care planning, and retirement tax planning are all set up efficiently. This step-by-step retirement planning process also includes evaluating your current estate plan, understanding your Medicare and retirement options, and implementing a bucket strategy for retirement that aligns with your comfort level and goals. Discover how implementation isn’t a one-time task—it’s the beginning of a lasting, flexible retirement journey.
In this episode, find out:
- What happens when you decide to move forward with your retirement plan.
- How asset transfers are managed through trusted custodians like Schwab or Fidelity.
- Why implementation is paced over months to ensure thoughtful decision-making.
- The key components of investment strategy for retirees, tax efficiency, and legal documentation.
- How the Peace of Mind Pathway supports retiring comfortably through long-term care and Medicare strategy.
Tweetable Quotes:
“Implementation is not a one-and-done step—it’s the launchpad for long-term retirement success.” – Radon Stancil
“We take baby steps with purpose, so every element of your retirement plan gets the attention it deserves.” – 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:
Welcome to Secure Your Retirement podcast. We are very, very happy to share some
information with you today and talk about things that we feel are very, very
important. Just so you know, this is part step two of what we’re, what we are
talking about, which is our peace of mind pathway. So, if you did not hear the last
episode and you’re just tuning in to us for the first time on this episode, we’re
going to walk you through, um, what we are calling implementation. And if you don’t
want to know what that means, go back and listen to the last episode and then
that’ll catch you up and that’ll, this episode will make a lot more sense. However,
if you did listen to last week’s episode, I want to remind you of a few things,
just so you’ve got the picture of where we are right now. We talked about the
peace of mind pathway. And in the last episode, we really tried to help you to
imagine why you need any kind of thought process around this pathway. We gave you
the visual. A pathway is kind of think it, the journey. I’m trying to get from
where I’m at today, wherever I’m at today, all the way through retirement,
Successfully and without so much stress and we talked about this idea that sometimes
you go down a path You’re trying to go somewhere your own erode you get to an
intersection and there’s decisions to be made Do I go to the left? Do I go to the
right? Do I go straight? Where am I trying to get to can I do I have enough gas
in all essence to get to the end of my destination or how do I refuel?
Where do I refuel all those kinds of questions? and that’s why we call our process
the peace of mind pathway. So, this peace of mind pathway, we got to navigate all
these different things. In order to get this figured out, there’s three major
elements of what we walk people through. One is building a roadmap. That’s what we
talked about for you on the last episode. We said, how do we do it? What does it
look like? And we took you through the entire process of Building, constructing,
strategizing a roadmap. Again, if you did not get that last episode, I encourage you
to go back and listen because we covered all the beginnings. So now this is where
we left off last time. So, here’s where we are today. An individual at this point,
they, we know their goals. We know exactly where they’re located. We have talked to
them about where they want to go. We’ve talked to them about their dreams. We’ve
talked to them about their family. We’ve come back together, and we have built out a
complete roadmap so they know I can hit all of those goals, or I need to make some
adjustments, whatever that might be. And then we came back, and we had built out
some preliminary strategies that say here are some things that we need to think
through and that we might be able to employ to make all this work. So, all of
that’s been accomplished at this point. And now imagine you’re here and we’ve got,
you know, you’re sitting in front of us, and you go, guys, I love what I’m seeing.
This all looks good. I’d like to work with you. We now got the next phase, which
is implementation. But what does implementation look like? What’s the process?
if you want to kind of open us up and take us through really kind of how this is
going to look if somebody’s in this this phase of the going down the pathway. Yeah,
so, implementation is getting the ball moving, right? We’ve taken a bunch of time to
understand you and we’ve taken a bunch of time to propose strategies and
everything like that. Implementation is exactly that. Now we are deciding to move
forward at this point. You’re agreeing to start a relationship where we are agreeing
to start a relationship together. And the first step is a transition of assets,
not to immediately go into implementation as far as shifting strategy.
The first and most important thing is we have to get assets under our roof, which
is really the custodian. I was going to say, just so that it’s clear, it’s not us
roof, not roof, not peace of mind. In most cases, advisors are going to use a
custodian. So, you may be at Fidelity or Vanguard or Morgan Stanley or wherever it
- For the bulk of our assets, we kind of work within Charles Schwab and Fidelity.
So, depending on what works best for you, we’re going to be moving assets to that
house, and not in two piece of mind itself. And so, once we,
that process happens and we have a team that monitors that entire transition, we
know you just made a big decision. We don’t take that lightly and we want to make
sure, that we pay attention and also keep you in the loop the entire time as this
asset transfer is happening. What that truly is we’re assigning paperwork to open
up the accounts. So, it could be IRAs, it could be brokerage accounts. And so we’re
getting assets or accounts open that now we can sign another document to get the
transfers happening. A common question on transfers is how is it going to happen?
And in most cases, it’s in kind. I actually had this question today with a new
client that’s coming on board. And he said, It looks like the market’s kind of
coming back a little bit. I don’t want to miss out. Well, the assets are coming
over however they are structured in most cases at the other firm. So, if you’re
invested over there, it’s all coming over. So, you’re not missing out. If the market
recovers, on the flip side, if the market goes down, you’re a part of that too. So
it’s like you didn’t make any changes yet. The assets or the stocks or the funds,
however, it is, are coming over. Once they come over and now it’s under our purview,
we can actually see them through our logins to our custodians. Now we’re in a place
where we really want to kind of get back together and finalize the investment
strategy for us to now go and implement. We’ve had conversations in general about
what we think the investment strategy is going to look like. Now that we have it
in a place where we can actually see the assets live up to date. Now we can make
some final decisions and start filling up those buckets that we talk about, the
growth bucket, the stock market, the safety bucket, alternatives, all those different
things that are going to make a very well risk -designed profile for you.
We now have the ability to start putting that to work and getting things moving for
you and going to work for you. But the first step is kind of opening those
accounts, getting them transferred over, and that allows us now to bring you back in
and finalize the investment strategy, which was really the first step of
implementation. Yeah, and then that, I just want to reiterate what Mercia said,
that is just the beginning. We know that in order for us to be able to make it
down the pathway, we’ve got to have a good investment structure. That’s kind of our
gas, right? Without the Yes, it doesn’t matter what all those other things are,
to be honest with you. So, we gotta make sure that we are efficient and that we’ve
got a system in place to continue to feed financially the plan.
But the financial part is just one piece. And that’s why in this implementation
phase, we are going to, you know, year one is going to be a lot. And then it kind
of goes into this next phase that we’re to talk about in the next one, which is
the nurture. But in the next thing that we’re going to do, we’re going to tackle,
most of the time is, what, now I say most of the time because we are going to
gauge a couple of these things based on the need. So, I’m going to give you a
couple of examples. Let’s say that a person comes in and we are implementing,
we get the investment strategy figured out and they do not have an estate plan in
place. They don’t have a will; they don’t have a trust. They don’t have legal
documents. That is always going to take precedent. We’re going to tell you that is
the next step. So, let’s pretend that I don’t have an estate plan.
The very next thing we’re going to do in our implementation is we want to help you
get your estate plan in place. Now, the nice thing about what we’ve tried to build
here is that that’s a part of our system. You don’t pay anything extra for that.
That’s a part of what you get in this relationship. So, we’re going to immediately set
you up so that you can start building that plan. You’re going to get that and its a
very easy process. This is not overly complicated. The next beautiful part of the
way we work when it comes to helping our clients build an estate plan is that I
tell people you don’t have to overthink it because a lot of times you think if
you’re working in some venue or some situations, if I don’t have this all figured
out, they’re just going to charge me again and again and again to make tweaks, not
NARS. You get on, you can make it. If you find out six months later that you
named the wrong person as a beneficiary or as an executor,
we can change it. All that’s going to require is a new set of signatures and
notarization, right? that’s always going to take precedent. Now, the other side of
this is my next part could be, which is right there neck and neck. And that’s why
I said, let’s say you’ve got your estate plan in place, then the next thing is
going to take precedent, which is the tax strategy. So, we think taxes are extremely
important. We think that that requires a lot because it can be one of the most
expensive things in a retirement. And so, I want to make sure that I’ve got a good
tax strategy in place. And when I say tax strategy, that is a before December 31st
deal. After December 31st, it’s just basically dealing with what’s already done. So
we have an in -house enrolled agent. Her main focus in this area is to help you
determine are there things you can do today that can help you long -term save and
taxes. We talk about a couple that, you know, Frank and Lily, Frank and Lily came
in and we had our tax strategy meeting. We did a simple little process of coming
up with a five-year Roth conversion strategy. We looked at all of the variables,
but the projection over their lifetime in retirement, just that one tweak we did was
going to save them over $300 dollars in taxes. Think about it. That’s a pretty big
deal when it comes to retirement plan. Merce, I’ll let you take it from here. What
are some other things that we help people with on the tax strategy side in
particular? Yeah, on tax strategy and the, the EA that Raiden mentioned, you’ve
probably heard her on this podcast before. Her name is Taylor Wolverton. She kind of
heads up tax strategy for our firm and she’s coming up with some pretty cool ideas
just based on your situation. So, Roth conversions are a hot topic. People are
concerned about where taxation is going. People want to leave money behind in the
easiest way to inherit, which is tax -free. That’s what Roth conversions are all
about. But outside of that, it could be as simple as, I say simple, but it’s
pretty complex for most people is kind of understanding, hey, if I’m going to take
money, how am I going to be taxed? How do I get my withholdings in line? So I’m
not surprised, come April 15th, the following year that I didn’t withhold enough or
I didn’t pay enough tax along the way. Our tax team is going to home in on that
so that every withdrawal is taken care of from a tax perspective.
Charitable giving is another big common one. There are a couple major ways that
charitable giving can be done more efficiently depending on your situation. Some
people just write a check to the charity out of their checking account. That works,
but is it maximizing our deductions, and in most cases, it’s not. So, there’s two
that apply. We’ve done podcasts on them as well, Qualified Charitable Distributions,
and also, donor buys funds. Those are two of the more common ones that we are
utilizing and talking about and seeing, does it make sense? What’s the true dollar
value savings here? And tax strategy, the thing about it is it goes on and on year
over year over year, Because the way we withdraw could be changing from year to
year. Tax law can change. We know that very well. And so we want to be making
sure, that we’re paying attention to that. Another big piece of implementation, then
after we’ve hit those higher priority topics like getting the investment strategy in
line, making sure the estate plan is their tax strategy. Another big piece is
thinking a little bit through health care as far as where we are today for health
care. So, if you are approaching Medicare age, there’s important things that we need
to think about. So typically, we’re setting you up with Sean, who has also been on
this podcast just to get more educated around what Medicare is going to look like
for you and some of the decisions you’re going to have to make around parts, you
know, ABCD and the list goes on there. there. If you’re retiring early,
Sean helps you think through what medical is going to cost from the private
insurance side and how that all works. We also make sure we put that in the plan
from cost estimates. Then a future conversation or a future worry of a lot of
people is, what if I have long -term care issues? Mom and dad, when it had long
-term care issues, then they didn’t have insurance and it of exhausted their assets,
right? That’s a scenario we don’t want to be in, or being a burden on our kids is
a phrase that we hear all the time. So how much risk do we want to cover from
the perspective of long -term care insurance? That space has evolved considerably.
It’s way more attractive than it was, say, five years ago. Rates are really good
right now. So those conversations are being had with clients. Again, it’s not the
high priority, but it’s something that we do want to try to accomplish within that
first year to see do we even want insurance and how much insurance do we want. So
those are some of the key steps when it comes to implementation and it doesn’t
happen overnight. So, in our first year together, we are meeting rather frequently
because we want to make sure implementation is done right and to your expectations
so that we start off on the best foot possible. – All right, so now you might have
a couple of questions. You’re thinking about, as you hear this, because it might
feel, I don’t know, a certain way when you hear all these different things. So
here’s a common question. How long does this whole thing take, implementation? So,
MERS, how long does it take? – Yeah, yeah, so implementation takes a little bit of
time and that’s by design. We are a firm that believes in taking baby steps so we
can make good decisions on subject as we as we educate around them.
So just think from a from the perspective of hey, I want let’s work together,
right? We’ve all decided the actual asset transition from wherever you are to
wherever we’re moving it to takes typically about, you know, seven to 10 business
days. A lot of times we can move things electronically to get accounts open and
transferred. There are some assets that we will utilize that take a little bit longer.
that may take two to three months before they’re fully transitioned as part of the
investment strategy. We’re getting back together, typically when the investment strategy
is done and implemented, we’re getting back together to make sure you can see that
right around day 45 or so that you’ve got your logins, you understand what you’re
looking at, we give you a one -page plan of here’s my bucket system, here’s my
investment strategy show. And then we, then we go on to the next high priority
issue. So, if you don’t have that estate plan in place, we get that rolling for
you. And if you already have that in place, but you need updates, we table that
and let’s talk tax strategy. And we, we do the updates on the estate plan later.
So, all in all, the whole process, the beginning process takes a few months. And
then we start to kind of chip away at the things that are still important, but a
less of a priority throughout the remainder of the year. And we do this on purpose.
We want to be very thoughtful about your roadmap and putting that into action. And
so, and we want to also make sure that everyone at the table kind of fully
understands how this all works, why we’re doing what we’re doing, and also the
expectations on both sides. – All right. Another question that people ask is,
can I change my situation or can I change my decisions or change my routing. And
the answer to that is absolutely. It’s very, very flexible. There’s, you know, we
always tell people, look, we’re building a plan and building a roadmap that’s a
sometimes 30-year roadmap. There’s no way you’re going to make every decision based on
the next 30 years today. We want to make sure that we’re headed in the right
direction, but there’s going to be things that we’re going to need to tweak. And that
leads us right to the next episode that we’re about to have. And it’s the next
phase of going down this pathway, just a recap, we built the roadmap,
we designed the roadmap; we went through all those things. Now we’ve implemented a
lot of these different elements and now we’ve got this third one, which is called
Nurture. I want to nurture this plan. I’ve worked hard to put together, I’ve worked
hard to implement it, I to take care of it. So, in the next episode, we’re going
to walk you through what that looks like to nurture the plan. So, I hope that
you’ll hang with us and come back on for the next episode. If you have questions
though, at any time, always feel free to reach out to us. You can go to our
website, top right-hand corner, click on schedule call. Our calendar comes right up
and we are more than happy to hop on a phone call, talk to you about anything
you’d like to talk about in these topics, we certainly find it a privilege to do
- We hope you have a great week. We cannot wait to tell you about the nurture
plan next week.