In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss what really happens during an evaluation appointment, the first Financial Advisor Meeting most people have when they start exploring what it actually takes to plan for retirement. They break down the five critical areas that determine Retirement Success, known as the ROUTE to Retirement: Retirement Risk Management, Retirement Income Planning, Medicare Planning and Long-Term Care Planning under one unified healthcare umbrella, Retirement Tax Planning, and Estate Planning. If you’ve ever wondered what separates a real Retirement Financial Plan from a portfolio review with a nice title, this episode lays out exactly where most plans quietly fall short.

Listen in to learn about why a simple one-to-ten risk question reveals more about your Retirement Readiness than any account statement ever could, how a written Retirement Investment Strategy and a real Social Security Planning conversation change decision making for the better, and why Retirement Tax Strategies put in place before the calendar year ends can outweigh almost any other move you make on the road to retiring comfortably.

In this episode, find out:

• Why the risk scale used in every evaluation appointment skips the number seven, and what your honest answer reveals about your true Retirement Readiness
• How a written retirement income plan and clear Social Security Planning turn a stressful guessing game into a Retirement Financial Plan with actual data behind it
• Why Medicare Planning and Long-Term Care Planning are treated as one Unified Healthcare conversation, and what a dedicated Medicare specialist changes about that experience
• Why most people’s Retirement Tax Planning happens too late to matter, and how proactive Retirement Tax Strategies executed before December 31st can beat any adjustment to an investment strategy
• What a five-year-old estate plan gets wrong, and the real story of a client who needed updated documents in a single week before leaving for a cruise

Tweetable Quotes:

“Retirement planning is a bunch of knobs, and if you turn one, you’re turning all the others.” – Murs Tariq

“It’s something people don’t want to talk about, and it’s easy to procrastinate on it because, hey, I’m good, I’m healthy.” – Murs Tariq

Whether you’re years from retiring or already retired, this episode doubles as a retirement checklist for anyone planning retirement who wants a second look at whether their plan for retirement actually holds up across all five areas. Retirement isn’t one decision; it’s five connected ones, and this episode walks through exactly how those five come together to help you secure your retirement with real confidence instead of a guess.

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:

You know what I think is one of those things that people wonder about when they’re talking to a 

financial advisor, Murs, is, you know, what really is that first appointment and what does it look 

Like, how does it feel? You know, we kind of have broken down our process of how we talk to 

people into what we call two key meetings, an evaluation meeting and a verification meeting. 

But I thought it would be nice just to kind of like talk about what an evaluation meeting is. 

And what’s the purpose of it? Some advisors might call it a discovery meeting. 

They might call it all kinds of things. We call it an evaluation meeting. But if you were 

describing it to somebody, how would you describe what an evaluation meeting is? 

Yeah. You know, I think a lot of times when someone is going to meet with an advisor for the first 

time, they… They feel this sense of nervousness because of the types of questions they’re going 

to get asked. And they feel like they have to give out a lot of personal information and everything 

like that, which I think is valid at times. But when we do our evaluation meetings, 

we want to make it so much more about not just the numbers, but also kind of understanding the pain 

points in someone’s life. around their finances and things that are keeping them up at night at the 

end of the day. Because if we can get to the root cause or the root issues, then we can kind of do 

the backwards math into how we solve some of these issues. And so, we revolve around this acronym 

called ROUT. And that covers a lot of areas when it comes to a really good financial plan. 

So, what we believe is that there’s, we tell everyone this, there’s five critical areas that are 

going to determine retirement success. And that first being the R in route being around risk 

management. How are we managing our risks? And are we comfortable with that? Or is that one of those 

things that’s keeping us up at night? And then the next one being the O, which is optimizing our 

income. And is our income optimized? Do we have a financial plan? And then the other critical areas 

around unified health care. So do we understand what health care is going to look like for us if we 

retire early, if we retire later, into Medicare, you know, all those different options, long-term 

care planning, things like that. And then T being around taxes, which is a big pain point for a lot 

of people. A lot of people feel like they’re overpaying in tax, or they don’t understand the tax. 

And then the final one being estate planning, making sure those documents and those wishes and 

those goals are all in a place where things can transition in a nice way. 

And that in itself, while it seems like five letters, right, I mean, the amount of conversations 

that you’ve had with people, that is a big conversation. And so, kind of, 

you know. Tell me, from your perspective, in these evaluation meetings, what are you seeing and how 

are people reacting to some of these conversations? I think what I see the most is when we walk 

them through, and one of the things that we do, I think that’s interesting, is let’s just take 

risk. And so, if I were to ask somebody how they feel about their overall exposure to risk right 

now, so I would say, right now, how do you feel you would… portfolio would operate if we had a 

market downturn. And a lot of times when people think about that, they think about a 2008 type 

scenario, right? Where you’ve got a 50% decline and the markets are crashing. Like if you were to 

describe it right now and you said, I feel very comfortable that if we had a major downturn in the 

market right now, my portfolio is good. And we always ask people to rate themselves on a scale of 

one to 10. And we do a little joke with them that we say we don’t have a seven on the scale because 

seven doesn’t tell us much. And so, what we say is eight, nine, 10 says my portfolio is sound. 

I know exactly what it’s going to do. I feel comfortable with it. It would not bother me. I would 

not stay awake at night if we had a downturn in the market because I am comfortable. One to six 

says, yeah, I’m probably not going to sleep well. I’m probably going to have some stress. 

And so what we do is now when that person comes in, because we have that conversation prior to them 

coming in about them rating themselves. So then when they come in and we’re actually having the 

evaluation meeting, whether it’s on Zoom or in the office or whatever, and the person, let’s say 

the person says, you know, I’m a five, I’m a four, whatever it might be. Then our objective in that 

is to say, well, let’s talk about that. What is it about the portfolio that makes you nervous right 

now? And a lot of times what people are going to say in there is, I don’t know what’s really in my 

portfolio. I really don’t know how the investment strategy works. It’s not something that I’ve been 

talked to about. People say, I’ve got this scenario where my advisor told me I’m moderately 

conservative, but I don’t know what moderately conservative means. And so, in the evaluation 

meeting, we’re trying to really make sure that do we understand the pain, like you said, the pain. 

And if that person says, yeah, I don’t know, then. We’re noting that. And then we’re like saying, 

okay, well, let’s talk a little bit about what the assets are. And then what’s going to happen once 

we know that just taking risk, we now get to go to work to do the verification on that and say, 

let’s verify, is this portfolio too risky? And we actually do a deep dive analysis where we 

actually run it in our software. But that’s just an example of risk. 

I think that is a big one. People are concerned. The number one concern people have is running 

out of money. But I think the next one, which is the O in route, 

which is an optimized income, is really big. Because if you think about it, 

people work for decades. They get income from either their employer or their self-employed. 

And then they don’t have one anymore. And so, one of the big questions we ask people is, 

do you have a written income plan? I’ll ask you, Murs, when you’ve sat down now with hundreds of 

people and asked this question, do you have a written income plan? How many times have you had 

somebody come in and say, here’s my written income plan? Yeah, not so common. It’s not 

so common. I think a lot of times they’ve got some thoughts in their head or maybe they had a 

conversation with their advisor around, you know, general rules of thumb around. how you do this 

when you do actually retire. But what we find is that that does not alleviate anxiety at all. 

Being able to see it on a screen, being able to update it and play with it a little bit to kind of 

understand all these different what-ifs that are in people’s minds changes things. 

When it comes to confidence, I think the more information you have, while it could be a thing where 

I’ve got information overload, but there’s also this element of the more information I have. the 

more confidence I have in a plan or the more confident or the more, I guess you could say, 

understanding I have a plan that I need to make some tweaks to, right? So, to us, 

optimizing income is so much more about this kind of this idea of we talk about the GPS all the 

time, right? Here’s where I am in the stage of my life, whether that’s I want to retire in five 

years, I’m retiring next year, I’m already retired, wherever it is, and here’s where I want to go. 

which for I think a lot of people is I want to have a successful stress-free retirement. And so 

what are all the things I need to be doing in between to optimize my income? And I tell this to 

everyone is that retirement planning, while we could be talking about income, it’s a bunch of knobs 

that if you turn one, you’re turning all these other knobs without. And if you’re not paying 

attention to all those other knobs, then you could have significant issues, or you could miss out on 

things or you could have scenarios where we didn’t have efficiency in place. So that idea of having 

a financial plan that’s put together and that’s it. optimized yearly through strategy and 

understanding of goals and withdrawals and how much money we’re going to need this year versus next 

year, understanding our fixed income sources, making decisions around Social Security and pensions 

that are out there, all those different things. Well, it seems like a lot, but as we do it kind of 

step by step, confidence starts to go way, way up, right? And decision making becomes so much more 

easier because there’s a lot of data behind it. So, you know. that’s a long-winded answer to your 

question, but a lot of times people don’t have that, and they want that and they don’t know how to 

get it. So, every conversation that we have really revolves around that idea of starting with, 

Hey, the first, actually, in fact, when, when we bring on someone to start a relationship with us, 

the first thing they do is not having a meeting around investment strategy is the meeting to build 

out their financial plan first. Because we got to understand how that plan is going to operate to 

make decisions around investment strategy and withdrawal strategy. So that’s why it’s very 

important. But a lot of times what comes hand in hand there are thoughts around income planning. 

And then you’ve got these things around health care that often comes up. Running out of money is 

the number one for sure. stressor for people as they think about retirement, but usually a top two 

or the top three are around healthcare. And so that’s why what we talk about is making sure our 

healthcare is unified. So that’s the U in the ROUD acronym. So, talk to me about that. 

What types of questions do you get there? What is unified healthcare? Well, I think that a lot of 

times what people are concerned about is we go through life working usually with a company. We’ve 

got a company plan. And then when we turn 65, we go to this thing called Medicare. And people are 

excited about going on Medicare, but Medicare comes with an alphabet of problems. And so, there’s, 

you know, the A, B, C, D, E, F, G and different plans and people are confused about it. 

And I’ll be very honest, 25 years ago, I started helping folks with Medicare, but I went for, 

you know, I did that for a few years, and I’ve not done it now for probably 20 years. And I would 

tell you, I get confused about it. And so, I will tell you what we did to unify it is to make sure 

that we have a specialist in place. And so, we actually have a person in-house who meets with every 

one of our clients when they get to Medicare age. And he walks them through. And I will tell you 

the number one thing we get back from clients about this or individuals is they say, 

you know, his name is Sean Southerd. And Sean is like a great educator. And he walks people through 

and helps them to identify. We do have clients, though, that retire at 60, 62, 

and they have that bridge to get to 65. So, we do help people with pre-Medicare health care as 

well. And then I would say a third area in this unified health care is long-term care. 

People are concerned about, like, hey, what if something happens to me? I think if I, because I was 

doing long-term care for a while back, too. And if I go back 10, 15 years ago. A lot of people were 

like, yeah, I don’t think I’m going to need long-term care. My kids have told me that today, 

people are like, yeah, no, my kids are not going to do it because my kids live all over the 

country. And what used to be that families were together in one place; that’s not the case anymore. 

We’ve had people here in North Carolina who said, “I moved to North Carolina to be with my kids. And 

they say, guess what happened? They got relocated, and now they’re in another part of the earth. 

And they go, but I like North Carolina. I’m not leaving. 

This idea of needing some long-term care to say, I want to be able to take care of myself, and I’m 

not going to have the family scenario for that. I’ll tell you from me. I personally would not want 

my children to have to have that responsibility. If I had to have it, I had to have it. But I would 

rather say, hey, guys, I’ve got it taken care of. And that’s a big one. But I will tell you the 

next one in the route, the T in that, is the biggest one, and that’s taxes. And we made a decision. 

a few years ago, to really bring tax planning, tax strategy, and tax filing in-house and to become, 

I would say, a tax specialist. Can you just speak a little bit about our structure around that and 

then what people are concerned about around taxes and maybe even what their current scenario is 

when it comes to taxes? Yeah. So, let’s go backwards, right? the current scenario. 

A lot of the current scenario for most people when it comes to tax planning or tax strategy is in, 

say, February or March of the year, what they’re doing is seeing if there’s things that they can do 

to help out their tax return. And while there usually are one or two things you can do, 

whether it’s a contribution to a traditional IRA or putting money into your Roth, 

there’s no tax benefit there, but there’s a long-term benefit of that type of account. But there’s 

not much else you can do, maybe an HSA contribution. But that’s about it when it comes to tax 

strategy after the calendar year has flipped over. That’s what most people are doing. 

What we find and we know a lot of the strategies that work really well must be accomplished by 

1231. And if you miss that window, then you miss the ability to make your tax life any better. 

And so that’s what a lot of people are doing. And they work with CPAs and a lot of times. when we 

talk with the person about the relationship with the CPA, they say, well, they’ve been great for 

me, but they’re really just tax filers. They just kind of put it together. I pay what I owe, and 

then that’s it. We wash words repeat every single year. But when we started talking about, 

well, there’s got to be a better way to do this, and there’s got to be a better… 

efficiency that we can put in place for true tax strategy which again is prior to the calendar year 

flipping over so we created this thing called tax strategy meetings now just like we have Shawn 

being our Medicare guru and pre-Medicare guru we’ve got Taylor on our team who has really kind of 

shaped our firm’s thinking in a lot of ways around tax planning so she’s a certified financial 

planner she is what gives her that designation to say that she’s really good about 

taxes and so with her, and I’m sure a lot of you, if you’re listening, know that name because we 

bring her on all the time. She has a wealth of knowledge. But with her, she has basically put us in a 

place where we can run meetings that are, in most cases, hour-long meetings that start really the 

middle of the year all the way through the end of the year. And it’s just talking about someone’s 

tax situation, running a projection as far as what their taxation is going to look like for the 

year. And then once you have that projection, then you… what ifs off of that of saying well what 

if we did this or what if we did that like a different type of charitable contribution or if we did 

a Roth conversion what’s it going to cost us all these hot topic tax strategies that people are 

talking about but they’re not getting answers for this whole system that we’ve created around tax 

planning has created an avenue for the conversation does it mean that everyone needs to be doing 

all this stuff it doesn’t but we want to be talking about it and seeing what fits each family 

individually in the best way possible and then the coolest part about that, the feedback I know 

that we get is we’ve just made a bunch of tax recommendations and tax strategy and they see the 

dollars that are going to be saved. But then you got to close that loop and actually file the tax 

return comes April. And because we’re in that scenario of making those recommendations, 

well, we’re also in a place where we can coordinate the taxes being filed, and it all becomes one 

big piece of the package. I’ll be kind of close with this. When I talk to people about what we do, 

a lot of times I tell them that I think there’s two major reasons as to why anyone has a 

conversation with us. The first is because those five critical areas for retirement success that I 

mentioned, we handle all of that. But the second and almost equally as good as number one is 

because we are tax forward when it comes to planning and thinking. And people really want that 

because it’s that most advisors don’t have the capacity to or just are not in a place where they 

want to be doing that type of tax planning work. So, I know that’s a lot there, but it deserves the 

time because taxes are big and it’s a big problem. Future requirement of distributions, you know, 

people paying more tax than they were when they were working. And then and then this idea of 

potential tax rates are going up in our future. It’s a big concern of people right there with running 

out of money. And then, you know, the last one in our acronym rating is the E, 

which stands for the estate plan. And I know you’ve got stories, I’ve got stories, 

we could talk about this forever, on estate planning and how important it is and, quite honestly, 

how often it gets neglected. Because it’s something people don’t want to talk about and it’s easy 

to procrastinate on it because, hey, I’m good, I’m healthy. So, what do you see there and, 

you know, what types of things have we put together in the program there? Yeah, I think that, you 

know, we’ve got a good number of people that come in here in their 60s, 70s, and they go, 

I don’t have a will. I mean, and that’s a no brainer. We’d also have people that come in and they 

go, I’ve got a will, but it’s 15 years old. Either one of those, 

we don’t feel optimal. And so, we really did take it on and said, 

we want to make sure that we have an avenue for people to be able to get their estate plan 

implemented and updated. And so today what we have is we have a process that allows people to get 

the essential documents, which are your Will, your adorable power of attorney, 

your health care power of attorney and your HIPAA forms. And then for anybody who wants and anybody 

who feels it might be necessary to do a revocable living trust as well. And the thing that we 

believe because of the way our system works, because it’s built into our price structure, we don’t 

have you not had any extra costs. We like those documents to be five years old or younger. 

Right. So. If my documents are older than five, would they work? 

Yeah, they’ll probably work. But if I got them fresher than that, 

I know I don’t have a problem legally. And I just think that’s such a key element. And sometimes 

we’re not changing a lot. We’re just making sure that we get the updated legal language. And so we 

think estate planning is extremely important, and we want to make sure everybody has one. Yeah, I 

got a quick little story on that one on the estate planning side. Um, actually today someone called 

us up, a client of ours called us up and said, we’re going on this big week-long cruise and we 

realize that while we do have our documents, so this is one of those scenarios where they’ve got 

them, but they feel like they need to be updated and they’re nervous about going on the cruise. And 

so they wanted to get some power of attorneys updated and their wills updated before just in case, 

you know. And in most scenarios, you would have to kind of get in the queue with the attorney to 

see if you could get squeezed in and then the paperwork. You just can’t do it in a week. But 

because of our system. You know, they said, can we pull this off? And we said, yeah, you can. 

There’s some work that needs to be done, but it’s very doable. And then they’re going to schedule 

equipment to come in and get some stuff notarized with us. So, I think, you know, that’s a pretty 

cool scenario where now they can go off onto their crews knowing that if something was to happen, 

they’ve got everything documented and their wishes documented so that, you know, the best foot 

forward can be there. Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, what I wanted to do today in our little 

chat was to make sure that people understood what an evaluation meeting looks like, what we do. 

It’s not a fluffy meeting where you’re just kind of like coming in and saying, 

oh, I want to get a second set of eyes. We are evaluating what we say again, five critical areas 

that we think are essential for people to understand where they rate themselves, 

where they are right now, if they’re going to have a successful retirement. And so I just think 

this is such a key element. And I want to just kind of close out and let people know that if you’re 

listening to this podcast and you are thinking, man, I don’t think I’ve gone through those five 

critical areas. It’s, I think, a very valuable meeting to go through. And if you wanted to do that, 

it’s pretty simple. All you have to do is go to our website. which is pomwealth.net, almost on any 

page. You can just go schedule a call. It will take you right over to contact us. 

You’ll fill out a quick little form, and our calendar will actually come up, and you can schedule one 

of those meetings where we’ll go through that with you. And so, if you’d like to do that, just go 

visit our website and we’d love to be able to have a conversation with you. Well, thanks, Murs. 

Hope you have a great rest of the day and appreciate you coming on and chatting about this. All 

right. Awesome. Thank you.