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The Peace of Mind Pathway – Step 3 – Nurture

In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss the third and final step in the Peace of Mind Pathway—Nurture. After creating a retirement-focused plan and implementing key strategies, nurturing your plan is what keeps it strong and adaptive for the long haul. Much like maintaining a car on a long road trip, your financial plan needs regular checkups, updates, and care to remain effective. This episode walks through the structure and purpose of your ongoing financial advisor meetings, and how regular reviews help you manage changes in income, required minimum distributions (RMDs), risk tolerance, and personal goals.

Listen in to learn about the critical components of an annual retirement planning process—including the Roth conversion strategy, retirement tax planning, and long-term care considerations. Radon and Murs outline the cadence of two core strategy meetings each year: the Financial Plan Review and the Tax Strategy Meeting. You’ll also discover how their team supports clients with proactive retirement education, timely updates, and a collaborative, team-based approach to financial planning for retirement.

In this episode, find out:

·      Why nurturing your plan is essential to retiring comfortably.

·      What happens in the Financial Plan Strategy Meeting and how it supports your evolving goals.

·      The value of the Tax Strategy Meeting and how it aligns with your retirement tax strategy.

·      How long term care planning and beneficiary reviews are integrated annually.

·      The importance of communication and ongoing retirement education to keep your plan on track.

Tweetable Quotes:

“Building a retirement plan is just the beginning—nurturing it ensures you stay on track through every stage of life.” – Radon Stancil

“Strategy meetings are not just check-ins; they’re where proactive planning meets real-life updates to secure your retirement.” – 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 trancript:

Welcome to secure your retirement podcast We are very happy and excited to talk with

you today We are continuing a conversation around the peace of mind pathway.

So, I just want to tell you, if you’ve been listening to the podcast, you’re going

to know we’re on part three or step three of how we navigate this pathway. If you

have missed the last two episodes, go back and start back on part one or step one

of this peace of mind pathway. It’ll help you realize what some of the things we’re

talking about today. But I just want to recap what if you’ve listened or not, just

so, you understand where we’re at right now in the process. Just to kind of give

you the high level, uh, we created what we call the peace of mind pathway and

vision, the fact that you’re out, you’re on a journey. Our journey is we’re getting

ready for and we’re living through retirement and we’re going down this thing. We’re

going down this path and we come to some, some scenarios where we just don’t know

which way to go. We don’t know if we’ve got enough gas to get there. We don’t

know if it, if it’s viable that we’re going to make the trip. And so, we want to

take some things and look at that. And so, we need a roadmap. We need a Peace of

Mind Roadmap. Something that’s going to help us feel good. And so, in episode one,

we talked all about that roadmap. How do you start?

You start by the goals; you start by the dreams. Then you say, okay, well then can

I do it? Well, we build a map, and we say, Yeah, you can build, you can actually

do this trip and you’re going to be able to do everything you want, or there’s some

adjustments that need to be made. And then we, after that, we’re going to have some

strategies to say, how do we do it? And that’s all in just getting that roadmap

built and refined. Then in the last episode, we talked about implementation.

How do we implement all these things? because there’s a lot of things to implement.

I mean, we’re not just looking at one thing, it’s not just investments. Investments

is one piece. We begin by building our retirement focus financial plan. That’s going

to lead to investments. That then is going to lead to tax planning and tax

strategy. Then we’re going to move on to estate planning. Then we’re going to move

to healthcare. Then the charitable giving, if that’s something that we want to do.

All of that has to get implemented and that takes a little bit of work. So now

think about it. We’ve built the roadmap. We’ve implemented it. It’s taken us times,

many months in order to get all of that done. And now we’ve got it. We want to

make sure we don’t lose it. That brings us to the third part of this piece of

mind pathway. And it’s the nurturing, meaning you just don’t go out there and head

out on the road and say, well, I got enough gas. Don’t worry about it. No, I got

to do maintenance on the car. If I’m in the car, I got to do maintenance. I got

to change the oil. I got to make sure my tires are good. And sometimes my tires

are going to get a little slick and I’m going to have to replace the tires. So, I have

to do maintenance on the plan. We call it nurturing. We’re going to nurture the plan.

We’re going to make sure everything stays intact. And so, we have to do some checkups.

We have to check in and say, is everything going well? We call them strategy

meetings. We’re going to look at the strategies. We have two significant meetings a year

to do this nurturing, to make sure everything’s on track, to make sure everything

feels good. And this is good too, by the way, when you start to go through

turbulence in the markets, turbulence in political scenes, turbulence in geopolitical

issues, you want that checkup, you want that strategy meeting to say, am I okay?

So, Murs, can you just start off here and let’s take them through, and not that

everybody becomes a client of ours at a certain time of year. But once you get

into that normal cadence, we’ve really got two major meetings. So, we’ll kind of take

the first half, second half of the year. Yeah. And I just got to say hearing you

kind of summarize the last two episodes of the roadmap, what all it takes to do

that implementation, you know, that’s a lot of stuff. And, uh, and so if you’re

listening to me like, man, that’s a lot and overwhelming. And it is a lot. And,

And the nice part about it is that we do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

People come and work with us because they don’t want to do it all themselves. You

can go do all the research. You can spend countless hours keeping up with all the

changes that happen when it comes to retirement planning. Or you can partner with

someone like us that does all the heavy lifting for you and together we collaborate

and simplify that life for you. Nurture is a big part of the retirement plan and

those two meetings that we talk about really the first in the first half of the

year the goal is that we’re sitting down with clients and talking through their

we call it the financial plan strategy meeting strategy because we’re always thinking

through what can we do what’s going on what do we need to implement in this year

so, a common meeting or a common occurrence in that meeting is, you know, we’re

walking through the financial plan that we have put together. And it’s a bit of

a retest of that plan to make sure it’s kind of staying on track for the goals

that we’ve put in place, you know, whether that’s the travel budget that we’ve

set or that saving or, you know, getting ready for that second home purchase,

whatever it is, we want to make sure that we’re staying on track for it. So, we

revisit the plan, and also try to understand, hey, are there any alterations to the

plan? Are there any big things that may be coming up this year, like the car is

not working? Well, we feel like we’re going to need to get a new car this year, or,

hey, we’ve got our first grandchild, and we want to start saving for their college and

we want to talk through 529 planning and college savings for grandkids. Life happens in

good ways and not so good ways. And so, taking some time to walk through the

financial plan and adjustments that are happening in it are going to be key. Also,

in that meeting, we’re really walking through your cash flow needs, right? If you’re

retired at this point and we’re walking through the plan, we got to be withdrawing

money because Social Security is not enough for most people and not many people have

pensions anymore. So, it’s, you know, we’re, we’re tapping into the assets that we’ve

worked so hard and saved for. And so how much do we need to withdraw? How much do

we need to withhold on those withdrawals? How, what’s the taxation going to look

like? Uh, and then also when we get to a certain age, which is, uh, 73 or 75,

we have to make sure we’re taking our required minimum distributions. We actually did

a recent episode on that not too long ago with Taylor Wolverton, our EA, and tax

strategies. If you want to go back and listen to what an RMD is, it’s a big thing

and you don’t want to mess it up. So, in the financial plan strategy meeting, we’re

walking through what RMDs are. How do they work? Let’s make sure we take what we

got to take. And also, if you’re not of RMDAs, we’re thinking through that future

as well. And do we want to attack this potential future problem of RMDs that you

may have.

We’re also thinking through and making sure that beneficiaries are in place.

Oftentimes, think about it. You know, when you set up an account and you set a

beneficiary or you choose not to, and you never look at it again, we’re looking at

beneficiaries every single year because we want to make sure that who you want to

get the money actually gets the money and there was no confusion there or there was

a lack of attention to an account that never got updated. Those are some of the

major things, but the financial plan strategy meetings can go all over the place. A

big piece of it too is investment and risk and how do we feel sitting here in

2025, people don’t feel too good about the investment space and the economy in

general. So, we’re having those deeper conversations around risk and making sure that

our risk, what maybe we set up a plan five years ago around risk, but now we feel

differently today about around risk just because we’re five years older and yeah,

we’re more worried than we were five years ago. So, we’re making adjustments and

reallocations and talking through rebalancing conversations. And maybe five years ago,

we didn’t want to talk about long -term care, but now we went through a scenario where

one of our friends went into long -term care and they didn’t have a great plan in

place. I want to make sure I have a good plan in place. Can we revisit the topic.

So those are just a handful of items that the team goes through with you in those

financial plan strategy meetings, and they’re well worth it. And the thing is, is

that we have part of nurture is we don’t just have that conversation once we’re

having that conversation every single year, typically in the first half of the year,

because we know life changes, goals change, and people are born. And so, we want to

make sure that we’re staying on top of your life in the best way possible. The

second meeting of the year, I think, has just as much weight to it, if not more,

which is the tax strategy meeting led by Taylor and the tax team.

So, you want to kind of walk them through the importance of that and what all goes

into it, Radon? I would say that this one is, I agree with Merse. It’s a very,

very big meeting and a lot, a lot of work goes into it. And we have had so many

good, much good feedback around this particular meeting. The way it works is that

prior to the meeting, we’re going to look at your last year’s tax return.

Taylor, she takes the lead in this. She is really our lead financial planner and

tax strategist. So, she takes the lead in making sure that she looks at everything.

She looks at where you were last year. She looks at what income you’ve taken this

year. Every year she does an analysis to determine does a Roth conversion make

sense? She makes sure that she is looking for things. Are you able to do you

qualify to do charitable contributions right out of your qualified charitable

contributions, right out of your IRA? She looks and says, does it make sense to do

donor advice funds. And by the way, I’m just telling you these things she looks

for. We’ve done episodes on all of these different topics. So, we’re not here trying

to describe all those. I just want you to know she’s looking for it. She’s looking

to make sure, have you done enough withholding so that you don’t have a big tax

bill what’s next year comes. She’s looking to say, did you withhold too much?

Many times, she’s told people don’t withhold anything else for the rest of the year

because they’ve had too much withheld. If you do quarterly contributions, have you

done those correctly? Are you up to speed? One of the things I love is I had a,

one of our clients came out of a meeting and she said, when she did, she goes,

man, you know what? I have no stress now when it comes to next year because I

know exactly what I’m going to pay in taxes. I know I’m completely well. And imagine

she found this out in September. Most times people are not finding this out until

April of the next year. And there’s a lot of anxiety. She did not have any of

that anxiety. So, when people walk out of the meeting, they have gotten strategy.

They’ve gotten clarity. Uh, they are no longer scared of the tax man, right? That

because they know now, they don’t want to pay any more taxes than need to, but they

know exactly where they are. It is completely organized. It makes the first part of

the year completely stress free because they know every moving part. So, I will tell

you this meeting to come down the pathway and doing it with peace of mind, having

this tax issue figured out optimized, extremely important.

Now there’s another thing of what we do in helping nurture this for a lot of our

clients, we give ongoing education throughout the year. So, Mers,

you want to talk a little bit about that as far as some of the topics that we

help people with? Yeah, so the education, to us,

it’s very important for people to kind of understand different strategies and always

be learning, right? Even Radon and I, as advisors, we’re always learning and this

space is always developing. So, as we hear about cool new things or there’s

strategies that we want to implement for our clients, we want to educate on it.

This podcast has really resulted that to give us that medium. But we do in -person

events for our clients on a quarterly basis. Some of the topics,

you know, a hot topic right now that we’re going to be talking about here and

there is all around tariffs. And what could that mean for your retirement. We’ve

done topics around long -term care planning strategies and different elements and

different things that are out there in the long -term care space to help educate

people around it. We’ve done topics on different types of investment strategies,

and so, the idea here is that we want to keep people engaged. We like educating,

we lead with education, and I think it just makes everyone a little bit happier

knowing that we’re paying attention and also passing that along your way as well.

Another big thing that we have been doing for a very long time now is, you know,

and it’s been a little bit all over the place. We’ve gotten on a real nice

cadence, you know, way back, way back when we first started this, it was a, we

started, we wanted to communicate to clients on a regular basis as far as the

markets and the portfolio and what’s going on in there because one of the number

one complaint that I think people have with their advisor is there’s just not

enough communication. So, we made it a mission to try to start over communicating in

a way to our clients around things like this. So today the way it sits,

it’s every other Monday; we send out a market update to our clients.

So, we’re talking about relative or relevant issues that are happening in the market

so that you don’t necessarily have to turn on your TVs and hear all the noise. You

can just listen to us every other Monday as far as what’s going on in the market,

what drove the market over the last couple of weeks. And then also we let people

know what’s going on inside of the portfolios and any changes that have been made

to the portfolios and the active monitoring that we are doing of And I think,

you know, we’ve gotten a tremendous amount of feedback there as well. That really

goes out every other Monday. At one point during the pandemic, we were doing it

every single day because people, us included, were very nervous and uncertain about

how things were going. So, we wanted to over communicate, and we got tremendous

feedback from that too. So, keeping people in the loop, keeping people educated as

the world develops, that’s a be part of what our mission is. All right. So, it’s a

lot, uh, we know that, but that’s why we’re here. That’s why we had the team that

we have. There’s no way I could do it by myself. Merce could do it by himself. It

takes a team of people to help people through this whole process. I hear sometimes

people say, I do this myself and I go, I don’t have any way, uh, understanding of

how they say that they do it themselves. And typically, what we find out is when a

and says they do it themselves, they are missing opportunities. They are missing out,

they’re not getting some of the benefits because there’s no way I could do it for

myself and I do this full time for a living. So, it’s a lot, but you know,

if you think that this is something that you would like more information about, you

would like some clarity, we always encourage you to go to our website, top right

-hand corner, click on schedule call. We are more and happy to have a conversation

with you. We hope that this has been beneficial. I’ll say it again, if you didn’t

listen to the last two episodes, go back and listen to those. It’ll make this will

make a lot more sense. We hope you have a great week. We’ll talk to you again

next Monday.