In this episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Murs and Nick discuss why retirement stress and retirement anxiety don’t disappear when the account balance hits a certain number, and what it actually takes to plan for retirement with real confidence. Joined by Senior Wealth Advisor and Certified Financial Planner Nick Hymanson, they walk through the fears and financial stress that show up most often in client meetings, from losing the paycheck to navigating market volatility, long-term care planning, and the weight of protecting a surviving spouse. Whether you are retiring comfortably or still working toward that goal, this conversation gets honest about the gap between having money and having a plan.

Listen in to learn about the five critical areas of retirement income planning that form the foundation of a secure retirement, including tax strategy for retirement, healthcare costs in retirement, estate planning, and how to build a financial checklist that actually prepares you for what retirement looks like day to day. Radon, Murs, and Nick explain how financial planning strategies like Roth conversions in retirement and a structured bucket approach to market volatility can shift retirement planning from something that keeps you up at night to something you trust completely.

In this episode, find out:

• Why retirement anxiety hits even high-net-worth retirees, and how the loss of a paycheck changes the entire structure of a retirement plan
• How market volatility creates sequence of returns risk in the early years of retirement, and what tax strategies for retirees can do to protect against it
• What long-term care planning and healthcare costs in retirement look like inside a complete financial checklist, and why waiting too long to address them is one of the costliest mistakes in planning retirement
• How Roth conversions in retirement and other proactive tax strategy tools can reduce your lifetime tax bill, especially in the years between retirement and required minimum distributions
• Why estate planning and protecting the surviving spouse belongs inside every retirement plan, and how the Peace of Mind Pathway™ addresses all five critical areas under one team, one plan, one fee

Tweetable Quotes:

“The only way you overcome these fears is you talk about them. And the only way you get comfortable and confident is there’s a plan around it that you can reference and revisit.” – Murs Tariq

“How do we structure things so there’s less risk in the plan and things go the way someone wants them to go? That’s what retirement income planning is really about.” – Nick Hymanson

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 back and thank you for joining us on this Monday on the Secure Your Retirement podcast. 

We’ve got a great one for you today. Next to me, if you’re watching on YouTube or Spotify, 

unfortunately, if you’re watching on Apple, you just have to listen, but you’ll hear. His voice, 

you probably know his voice, is Nick Hymanson. He is a certified financial planner on our team, 

as well as a senior wealth advisor. And I would say he is in the trenches when I say that. 

He’s in the meetings and really kind of seeing and understanding what the families that we serve 

are going through, the questions that they’ve got, the concerns and anxieties. on a daily basis. 

And so, there’s no one better to be in the room with me as we talk through what we’re going to talk 

through today, which is why so many retirees feel financially stressed, even with millions saved up 

for retirement. So, Nick, thanks for being here. Yes, good to be here. All right. So how we’re going 

to tackle this episode really is to talk a little bit about the issues and the stresses and the 

anxieties that we see. as people are heading into retirement, planning for retirement. 

And I think it’s really when you think about retirement, you build up this picture in your mind of 

what you want it to be. And sometimes we ignore the processes that need to happen and the decisions 

that need to happen to make it be the way that you want it to be. And if we neglect that, that’s 

where the stress starts to come in. If we don’t feel confident in what we’ve done to plan and 

prepare for retirement, that’s when the anxiety kicks in as well. 

Nick, let’s start this way because I know that you’re in these meetings and you hear and see a lot 

about what and how people are feeling. So, let’s talk about why retirement feels different than 

someone expects it to be as they walk into it. Yeah, so some of the things that I hear all the time 

are, you know, things around, well, I’m not getting a paycheck anymore, so how do I deal with that? 

Things like, well, I would like to continue working, but… don’t necessarily. 

Well, I would say I hear a lot about I would like to keep earning money and make sure I have enough 

for those bigger expenditures like vacations, new cars down the road, even home improvement 

projects, things that people want to do. But I don’t necessarily want to keep working to be able to 

afford those things. So how do we do it efficiently? How do we structure things efficiently? Do not 

only take away the. um the stress about not getting a paycheck but structuring things properly 

so that you don’t have to work an extra year or two to cover that new car, or you don’t have to do 

that to cover that vacation you want to go to, that home improvement project. So, taking some risk 

off the table sometimes is the right way to do it, or just having a conversation of structuring 

things in a certain way so that there’s less risk and really less liability when transitioning to 

retirement. So those are some of the high-level things that I hear just as we discuss that 

transition and that big decision to retire. But there’s a whole bunch of different factors that 

come into it, like market volatility. So that’s a big thing this year. It has been the previous 

years and it will probably continue to be a factor in terms of investing and making sure that a 

plan is stable and reliable. So how do we plan for market volatility? It’s never fun to retire and 

then something happens where the market has a correction or there is a recession down the road. 

How does that affect someone’s retirement plan? Do they have to go back to work? Ideally, 

no, we don’t want that to happen. One of the worst things that could happen, 

so how do we structure things properly so that there’s less risk in the plan and that things go the 

way that someone wants it to go? So those are some of the things that we’re talking about. Market 

volatility, uncertainty, just having that paycheck removed. How do we get over that hurdle of, 

well, there’s no longer income coming in the door, but… a whole bunch of assets here that have 

been saved. Now let’s structure it properly to create a reliable retirement plan. Yeah, 

I think when it’s been thought through, you know, just knowing that it’s been thought through and 

that someone’s watching over it or you’ve had the conversations immediately starts to build up the 

confidence that, hey, this can work and, you know, I can go on some of these vacations. And 

speaking of vacations and like the emotions that comes with just the idea of not really knowing or 

having thought about. Money aside, what do I really want out of my retirement? What do I want to 

do? Whether that’s picking up hobbies or traveling or spending time with the kids and grandkids, 

this identity shift that occurs because for a lot of you, it’s been your career. And so, what am I 

going to do when I do retire and fill the time? And that’s a big one emotionally too. But there’s 

also, this psychological side of almost like a headwind that feels like it’s always coming at us in 

this world. of retirement and then that creates different types of fears that we have to deal with 

as well that can become overwhelming too. So, let’s talk through some of those. I hear a 

few different fears kind of on a recurring basis, fears around making changes. There’s a big fear 

about, I have been doing this thing of saving into my 401k and saving into… 

accounts for decades now. And making a change just isn’t something that is comfortable. And, 

we completely understand that. It’s like Merce said, a psychological hurdle of going from 

earning money and saving for years and years and years and being in that habit to then going and 

saying, I’m going to retire, not have a paycheck anymore, and then live off of what I’ve saved. So 

that’s one of the biggest hurdles and biggest things that we have conversations on. And along with 

that comes a decision or basically a fear of making the wrong decision. 

If we have this tendency, I think a lot of times to stay in the position that we’re used to and 

just kind of riding that out and seeing what happens. And so, what we try to talk to our clients 

about a lot is, well, you’ve been doing this for so long, but the big decision here is retirement. 

And so, with retirement changing a lot of goals, changing now the structure of things without an 

income being in play a lot of times, how do we… maximize what you do have saved and then 

structure it so that there are as little risk as possible in terms of not having to worry about 

making a bad decision because all of that is kind of proactively planned for. So just structuring 

things in a certain plan, we’ll get into a little bit more detail about how we do that, makes it so 

that you’re not as worried about making a wrong decision because you’ve proactively planned for 

anything that can come into play. So those are some of the big things as well. Other things like 

longevity risk and health care concerns are a big topic. So, we all kind of know health care costs 

continue to go up and in the future, they will most likely continue to go up. So how do we plan for 

that, whether that’s long-term care planning? Also, longevity concerns people are living longer. So 

how do we make sure our money lasts? How do we make sure for a surviving spouse that they have 

enough money and income to live off of? A lot of times I’m having conversations with. um a spouse 

who is receiving more social security than the other and they also maybe have a pension um and in 

some certain in certain circumstances that person’s pension does not go to the other person or a 

smaller percentage goes to them and then the surviving doesn’t get both social securities, they get 

the higher of the two. So, there’s a reduction of income there. How do we plan around that? There’s 

conversations of life insurance, other things that just protect the surviving spouse, which is a 

big topic and something that I think is a very important thing to talk about. So, protecting the 

surviving spouse, the beneficiaries passing on tax-free assets, but also… taking care of long 

-term care expenses down the road are something that is not going to go away, and I think it’s 

something that’s going to be even a bigger topic in the future. So, there’s all these things around 

retirement planning, not only when we’re planning for retirement, but down the road as well and 

being proactive about planning for all these things just makes the process a whole lot smoother. 

Yeah, so we’ve done enough of talking about the anxieties and the stresses and the… 

you know, making you nervous about retirement planning. And the reason we do that is because we see 

it all the time. And what we’ve done over the years is create systems and processes and gain 

knowledge and experience in a lot of different areas to help people make these decisions and kind 

of overcome some of their fears that Nick just talked about. And really the only way that you 

overcome them is you talk about them. And I think that is not financial only. I think just talking 

about any fear that you have makes it less scary. And kind of getting more acquainted with this 

life shift that’s about to happen if you’re about to retire, what that’s going to look like. But 

the only way you get comfortable and confident in it is that there’s a plan around it that you can 

reference and you can revisit. And that continues to build you confidence. So, what we did, Radon and I wrote a book called The Peace of Mind Pathway. And that book, 

we’ve gotten tremendous amounts of feedback that it really helps tell the story of what we do. And 

it was good enough to where it actually became an Amazon bestseller, which we weren’t anticipating 

at all. But it was a very nice thing to see that it was trending in the financial services section 

of book purchases on Amazon. But really, in a nutshell, what that book is all about is it is in the 

pathway. There’s three. three elements to the pathway. We have the roadmap, 

we have the implementation phase, and then we have the nurture phase. The roadmap phase is really 

building that plan. We liken it a lot to a GPS when you get in your car and you want to get to a 

destination. You type it into your GPS, and then it’s going to tell you the turns, the distance, 

the mileage. If you’re driving an electric car, it’s going to tell you if you have enough gas. 

Well, if you have a regular car, too, you know if you’re going to have enough gas or not. So, it 

helps significantly getting us to our destination. If there’s roadblocks in the way, if there’s 

construction, if there’s an accident, it typically is going to reroute us. We believe the same type 

of mentality and logic works in the financial planning world as well, but just do a really well 

-done retirement-focused financial plan. That incorporates all of the income, the assets, the 

expenses, inflation, the what ifs, the markets, the growth rates, all those different things in one 

area where you can see it all flow and you can play with it too to see, well, what if I did buy a 

second home? Or what if I did want to spend a little bit more on a vacation this year? And it helps 

give you answers at the end of the day. So that roadmap element of the pathway is huge. 

Once you have the roadmap built, then we go into implementation phase where our team now goes and 

puts those, quote unquote, quote, assets in the place, whether that’s, you know, the building build 

out of the financial plan or the scenarios that we want to run. But then also the investment 

strategy that’s going to accompany the financial plan. We talk about buckets a lot to help mitigate 

risk, but also still maintain growth potential. The tax strategy that’s going to keep more money in 

our pockets. And so, we’re maximizing deductions and also utilizing these things called Roth 

conversions for tax free in our future and tax-free inheritance. Medicare and medical and long 

-term care planning. You’ve heard of Sean in our office today. He handles all of those 

conversations. So, making sure our medical portion of our financial plan is taken care of so there’s 

no big surprises, even as health care costs rise on us. And then the last is the estate plan piece 

of it, making sure that that is all in a good spot too. So that’s really implementation. We want to 

put all of those assets into place. And then the final piece is the nurture piece, where just like 

when you have a plant in your house, you need to water it, you need to provide it sunlight, 

and whatever type of food that plant may need, you need to take care of it for it to continue to 

grow and thrive. We believe the exact same thing when it comes to a financial plan. And really, to 

boil it down, we believe that there’s five critical areas to retirement success. And it’s all kind 

of built out in this pathway book that we have created, the Peace of Mind pathway. Those five 

critical areas are making sure that we’ve got our risk management in place. We’ve optimized our 

income. We’ve talked through and understand how to have a unified health care plan. So that means 

pre-Medicare, Medicare and long-term care. We’ve talked through tax strategy and we feel good 

about tax strategy, ongoing tax strategy. And then our estate plan, if we’re leaving money behind, 

where’s it going? Is it getting where we want it to go? And is the legacy benefiting from it or are 

they paying a bunch of taxes on it? So, we believe if we have those five critical areas taken care 

of and we feel confident about them, then you can feel extremely confident about your retirement 

plan and your retirement success. One way that we… kind of make sure we stay on top of these five 

critical areas are through a handful of meetings that we curate every single year for the families 

that we serve. The first is what’s called a financial planning strategy meeting. And it’s in the 

first half of the year. And then as it sits right now, we’re walking into the second meeting of the 

year, which is called tax strategy. Nick and the team kind of curate all of these meetings. And so 

he’s the one that’s sitting in all of these, hearing all these conversations. So, you know, I know 

there’s plenty of clients listening that know exactly how this goes and they see the value and the 

benefit of having these meetings year over year as life changes. But for those not listening, Nick, 

if you could kind of give a breakdown of the two meetings and the purpose behind each and kind of 

the outcomes of all of those. Yeah, so I’ll start with the financial planning strategy meeting 

that’s in pretty much the first half of the year. And so, we utilize that meeting as primarily a 

baseline financial planning meeting. So, we will take our clients through their updated financial 

plan for that year. We’ll talk about. the investment strategy. We’ll talk about cash flow, making 

sure, that they have enough income for expenses. And we’ll talk about, hey, what do you want to do 

this year? Is it vacations? Is it vacations plus a car purchase or a home improvement project or 

something happened with this and I need to change that withdrawal strategy. So maybe we were taking 

withdrawals from one account previously. Now it makes sense to take a withdrawal from another 

account for tax reasons, maybe required minimum distributions have started. And so that’s a big 

topic for someone when they turn 73 as of this year. So… are some of the topics that we’re going 

into and kind of implementing into someone’s income plan and overall retirement plan. But that 

financial planning meeting is the broadest meeting we have throughout the year. So, it can cover 

pretty much any topic around the five critical areas, whether that’s estate planning, income 

planning, taxes, health care. We can even bring Shawn in, or we can set up another whole meeting with 

him to talk about health care planning as well. So, it’s the broadest meeting. It sets us up to 

make a significant amount of very important decisions, not only that year, but in the future. And 

so that’s what that meeting is really looking at, setting up for us for a baseline on how we can 

see things right now and what the goals are in the future. And then we can make decisions based off 

of that. The second half of the meeting or the second half of the year, we have the meeting called 

the tax strategy meeting. And that one is primarily all around how do we efficiently manage taxes, 

not only leading into retirement, but also in retirement. There are a lot of milestones when it 

comes to taxes, specifically. A big change in someone’s tax bill typically comes when they retire, 

but also, when they reach required minimum distribution age. So, a big opportunity for many people is 

the years in between. So, if someone retires at 65 and their required minimum distributions, which 

is basically required distributions out of someone’s IRA account, starts at 73, there’s eight years 

there to then optimize taxes and implement tax strategies to maybe really the goal would be long 

-term tax savings over someone. lifetime. So, there’s a whole bunch of tax strategies that we go 

into in those meetings where I think most clients get the most benefit out of these advanced tax 

strategies, but also things like Roth conversions, qualified charitable distributions, all of these 

different things that can help in certain circumstances based on someone’s individual situation. 

So, there’s a lot of topics that we go into in that tax strategy meeting. Again, most important is 

how do we reduce someone’s tax bill over their lifetime? And then another part of that meeting is 

looking at their tax projection for the year. so, we’ve had a lot of questions in the past of  

what does my tax situation look like how do i optimize it or at least how do I get to tax filing 

and make sure I’m not surprised when i see that i owe money or that I’m getting a refund so what 

these tax strategy meetings do is make sure that we have certainty It gives us an expectation of am 

I doing things right during the year to make sure that I get that refund that I want or break even 

or, you know, make sure that I don’t run into underpayment penalties, but I’ll owe some at the end 

of the year when I file my taxes. So, we can curate someone’s tax return and based on kind of what 

they want in terms of tax payments or refunds in that meeting as well. And it just gives a lot of 

certainty. And clients really appreciate that when it comes to time to file their taxes. 

I would say with those two meetings, we were able to cover quite a bit throughout the year, 

regardless of what’s coming at you that year. And the feedback that we get is they want one that 

they end up. knowing more than they did when they entered into the meeting or entered into the 

relationship with us. Because a lot of what we do is coaching and education. It’s not necessarily 

telling them how to or how they should be spending their money. It’s more of just us becoming that 

sounding board with a lot of expertise and a lot of different areas in this retirement planning 

focus. And so, you know, at this point, you may be… 

a little bit overwhelmed or stressed and if you are one of those ones as we’re going through some 

of the fears and anxieties that we do see that’s feeling that way or you hear us talk about a 

roadmap or a financial plan and you don’t have one and you and you feel like you need one or just 

got questions or concerns about when you can retire you know these are all things that we are happy 

to handle and we would love to have a conversation with you and so if you’re feeling the need for 

it head over to our website plmwealth.net And through that website, 

you’ll be able to schedule a introductory call with one of our advisors. And then we’re happy to go 

from there, kind of tell you how we operate, if we would be a good fit at all for you. We’re very, 

very good and upfront about wanting to make sure that we can add value and that you’re going to be 

able to see that value. And so, we talk about what that looks like as well. But if you’re interested 

in that, we would love to have the conversation with you. But for now, thanks again, Nick, for 

hopping on with me. And thank you, everyone, for tuning in on this Monday. We’ll talk to you again 

next week. Take care.