 Welcome to the Bogle Heads chapter series. This episode was jointly hosted by the Tampa Bay and South Florida chapters and recorded April 27, 2021. It features Mark Zoral, plan vision founder, and colleague Jason Lynch, discussing a variety of topics. Bogle Heads are investors who follow John Bogle's investing philosophy for attaining financial independence. This recording is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. All righty, so welcome everybody to the Tampa Bay and South Florida chapters joint meeting. We're pleased to have Mark Zoral, the founder of plan vision joining us this evening along with his colleague Jason Lynch, CPA, and they're going to be presenting two topics. We'll take time following each of the topics for question and answer sessions. And without further ado, I'll turn this over to Mark and Jason. Great. Thanks, Alan. And by the way, I started plan vision in 2012, it seems like it's been 20 years now. So I have a list of eight different topics or subjects that we're going to go through as we talk about the considerations and instruction your investments before and after retirement. Really, it's not necessarily just the investments, it's the whole idea of planning and preparing for retirement. What are some of the important considerations that you would go through? And then we'll talk about the technology as well. But I, Jason is involved in these as well. I do, at this point, about 17 retirement plans a week. And so these concepts that we're going to go through are very much a part of not all the reviews that I do and we do with our clients, but many of them. So very relevant concepts that we go through. So we'll just get started with the first one and that is how to think about your health care costs as you approach retirement, because this is one that seemingly scares so many folks. First of all, I want to go through how you will buy health care or how you can shop for that and think about when you turn 65, you will be eligible for Medicare for the most part, unless you're working for an employer, have some employer coverage, or maybe you have coverage through the military. But you'll buy a Medicare supplement. But many people retire pre-65 and a lot of people have not shopped for health care on their own. They've got it to their employer in the past and they're just used to the process of getting it that way or maybe through their spouse's plan. But when you're going to start buying health care on your own, a few of the options that you have, the first one for many people is they can buy Cobra through their employer. So that is the option where you can get health care, has an extension of your employment with your employer that you left. You can buy it and pay the employer's side of that. Many people are familiar with that and will elect to go with that. On the other hand, and many people, at least some of the people that we worked with, are not familiar with how to buy health care on their own. They haven't done that before. Depending upon the state that you live in, your state may offer an exchange. We have one of those in Minnesota and I've been buying my health care since 2012 on the exchange. So I go there and I shop for health care. Or you can buy it on the federal exchange. I believe there are some states that do not offer a state exchange. But anyways, you go on there, you shop for it. I think in most cases, eligibility is in November, December for the following year. Anyways, the important point about this is that it's worth your time. If you're going to be going out, if you're going to be retiring and no longer get employer-sponsored health care, it's worth your time. If you've just assumed that you will use your employer's coverage to shop for health care on the exchange in the state that you live in. Now, it is likely that many people will say, oh, but it's expensive. Yes, it's likely going to be costly, particularly for those folks that will say things like, gosh, I've had great coverage for years and they've been paying a small premium or just haven't had to pay that much. It may be a bit of a sticker shock when they actually have to shop for health care. On the other hand, what has developed the last several years with the Affordable Care Act is that many people, even those people that have significant wealth will qualify for an ACA subsidy. And what that means is that instead of buying or using Cobra insurance from your prior employer, you may save quite a bit of money by buying your health care through the exchange. The federal government offers a subsidy on the premium that you pay. So I wanted to raise that as a point that we discuss with our clients, and we certainly have come across people who are very experienced investors, have done a good job of planning, but just simply weren't knowledgeable about how to shop for health care and didn't even realize that the ACA subsidy was available. So that would be the first point that I would want to mention as you think about the transition for retirement upcoming is how do you want to get or where do you want to get your health care from? And a great place to go to to get an idea of how much it's going to cost is just go to your state's website and you can log in and you can price out some of the premiums that will be available. Now I've been buying it for years, as I mentioned, and I buy a high deductible plan, which means my out of pocket deductibles up to $13,000. And those are the least expensive policies. So and for many of the people that we work with that have accumulated wealth, they're going to want to buy a high deductible policy. So that's the first consideration. Now at this point, I wanted Jason to provide some thoughts and he's got, he does a wonderful job with our clients and going through how they may qualify for the ACA premium and some of the tax implications from that. Right. Okay, thanks Mark. So, right, Mark alluded to, if you're shopping insurance, you may want to take a look on the, you know, the health care marketplace because the ACA premium subsidy, the premium tax credit as its own, have been kept for households that earn that have income of over 400, 400% of federal poverty level. If you're over that threshold, the ACA credit disappears completely instead of a phase out. That is known as the ACA subsidy cliff. And it's dramatic. You could get a subsidy if you're within the income threshold. And if you go $100 over that limit, you don't get the credit anymore at all. You've fallen off the cliff. So for a two person household, that amount is about $69,000. A four person goes up to about $104,000. And as Mark mentioned, some clients, some people that have wealth don't have a lot of high income. They don't have much income anymore because they've required now and they're managing their cash flow. Now, it's important to note that the American Rescue Plan, the plan that was signed last month, removes that cliff and it simply caps marketplace health insurance premiums at no more than eight and a half percent of household income in 2021 and 2022. Okay, great. But what does that mean? What that means is if your household income is already more than 400% of federal poverty level, you're not going to get an FPL for a household of four people. If your bench, if the benchmark plan premium in your area, in your zip code is less than eight and a half percent of your income, you won't qualify for the credit anyway, regardless of there was a cliff or not. But if the benchmark plan in your area is greater than eight and a half percent of your income, your knowledge of eligible credit, and this will benefit many people who might not have otherwise been able to take advantage of it. And here's why. In the great state of Michigan, in Monroe, Michigan, in my zip code, 48166, a 54-year-old couple, both 54, with 120,000 modified AGI for this purpose, would get a monthly credit of $230. Okay, not a huge amount, 2800 for the year. But they're friends in Bloomington, Illinois, zip code 61701, they're identical. They modified AGI would get a monthly credit of $951, which is almost 12 grand. But their cousins who live in Charleston, West Virginia, also have $120,000 modified AGI would get a monthly credit of $1,500, almost $19,000 against their premium. It's all, now I cherry-picked these, of course. These are all based on your zip code. And I've been using, it's called the healthinsurance.org calculator. And we'll be able to have show notes for that so that you can look at it. And one of the main point is that don't assume that this premium tax credit doesn't apply to you. And that's for 2021 and 2022. Yeah, all right. Thanks, Jason. Yeah. It's, I guess, a weird outcome of this law that we have clients with $5,000,000, they're getting a subsidy on their healthcare premium. Moving on to the next topic. I'm going to discuss how to think about withdrawing money from your account. Mark and Jason, if I could, we have a handraiser, Jody M. Okay. Has their hand raised if they have a question. And so. No. Folks, unless it's something that's really critical, relevant to what they're talking about, let's try to hold questions until after they're done with. Okay. I'll go ahead and move on. So the second thing I was going to talk about was how to think about taking money out of your account. And certainly a lot of people will think, well, gosh, I spent all my life accumulating this money. How am I going to live off this? And this can intimidate people. So I'm going to, I'm going to talk about some considerations on your investments. And how to structure those and then, and then a bit of just the mechanics of how you go about doing it. First of all, when I, when, when, when I work with, with our clients and we talk about the structure of their assets, I basically break down their assets. Into three different compartments. One would be their, what we call their qualified money, IRAs, 401ks, 457 deferred comp. That is pre-tax. Any money that they have, which is tax-free. And some people have pretty large Roth IRAs or they plan on doing Roth conversions. That's the other bucket. And then the final one would be their budget. And then the final one would be their brokerage accounts. And I would throw cash in there as well. So the way that I view how they will invest or allocate their money is when are they going to need to take that money out. For many people it is likely going to be wise. And of course these are generalizations. It's likely going to be wise for them to take money out of their brokerage account in their cash first and allow their Roth IRA. And they're qualified money to grow tax-free or tax deferred longer. For many people also one thing about their Roth money, depending upon how their plan looks, their Roth money is money they're never going to touch. Now they may end up using it, but for many of them it can just be a part of their estate. They just have enough of their assets where they're not going to need to dip into their Roth money. And then the retirement money or the qualified money may be somewhere in between. They may start taking the retirement money out in three years, seven years, 10 years. They may not take it out until their required minimum distributions that begin at age 72 at this point. So an important concept when you think about that is when I think about the investments from my clients, because you know that's what Bogle had to think about is, oh, I got to have the perfect asset allocation or otherwise I can't sleep at night. So a lot of times what they do is they'll look at their portfolio as a whole. And that kind of drives, I mean personally it drives me like nuts to think that way because then you have to, you have to massage these portfolios to get the right percentage in this account and though and so on. So I've evolved in my thinking a little bit where I would focus more on the compartment of money and how soon are you going to need to access that money. So my point would be if you have a Roth and an HSA and you may use your HSA really has a long-term plan and that's a long-term then you may want to just have that be 100% in stocks if you're comfortable with that. Really regardless of the size of the Roth. The retirement assets if they're going to be the second in line you can still be maybe relatively aggressive with that whatever that means to you. If that's 90, 10, 80, 20, 70, 30 some asset allocation mix like that and we do plans with retirees where they're retiring at 55, 58, 62 and it's clear from their plan that they're not going to need to take their money out to RMDs and then when they get to the RMDs they're only taking it out because they have to. So they can still afford if they're comfortable to be relatively aggressive with their qualified money. So then that just leaves their cash or their brokerage account and that is money that frankly I would encourage my clients to think seriously about how aggressive they want to be with that money because that's money they may end up relying or using fairly soon. So the point about this that I'm making is if you think of the the money in your brokerage account and I know this is somewhat heresy to some bogal heads is that you might want to actually have that in bonds or more stable oriented assets. I know it's not tax efficient but still you've got to think through when would you take the money out. And so I think that's an important consideration for people that are getting close to the point where they're going to start drawing on the money because that's how I kind of think of their assets is the different compartments that they can take money from. So that was something I want to talk about when we think about withdrawing money. Now another area is just that there are a lot of people that actually don't know how they're going to take money out from their accounts and it has gotten to be relatively simple. We'll talk a little bit about this on the technology area or the how we think technology is going to impact things. But yeah you can you can have if you have mutual funds you can get set up for automatic distributions on those where they come out every monthly or you can do them once a year or twice a year or quarterly and you can just have the money set right to your right to your bank account. So when you think of taking money out of your account it is actually really simple to do that these days. I find that my clients as they get older they tend to want to simplify things. And so they'll just say look just send me the money in January to withdraw. I don't care if it's too much of whatever the case may be. Jason do you have any thoughts that you want to add in this area or not on the withdrawing of the funds and the asset allocation? No I think you covered it pretty well. Okay so we're going to get to another one. The third one here is the social security decision and some considerations about that. And that's a common one we run different we will run different scenarios for our clients on on on when might when they may think they want to take out the social security or begin to receive social security. And for a lot of people the default is oh well I'll just take it later because I'll get more money when I take it later. So that's a natural way of thinking for many folks here here's what I've learned over the years since I've worked with my clients about the socials about the decision on when to take social security. Now I've run a lot of scenarios on these just a lot of them. And in many cases gosh the dollar differences by the time you're 90 or 92 in when you take social security it's really a rounding error. I mean it's now it's $80,000 $100,000 now that was a big number when you were 25 and 30 but in a plan where the assets get to be four million five million dollars that literally is a rounding error in the plan. So many times there can be very little difference in the actual amount of money that you have when based upon the when you take social security. But here's what comes into play on social security. As you're getting closer to social security we tell a lot of a lot of our clients they're 55 5862 they want to do they want to know well when's the best time to take social security. And I'll tell them look that's going to be more of a game time decision as you get closer you're going to you know that will come into play. But I think someone's got to quit that we actually don't have any slides. So you will kind of figure out your socials when you want to take social security kind of how it goes. If you have a change in your health that will that may motivate your interest in taking social security early clearly happens to people where they may become more skeptical about their longevity and so they're going to take social security earlier. If your assets are not performing well when you're 64 6566 you may say to yourself look I just want to get this guaranteed paycheck coming in let's just start getting social security now. Another factor which I think may impact people more in years ahead will be if we develop more cynicism about social security and how much it's going to pay. I think that may motivate people to begin to take social security earlier as well look let's just lock it in I don't know if they're going to start getting social security in the future but the biggest single factor in my experience in when people take social security or the reason to take it instead of deferring it to 70 is because they want the money. It's really that simple. The benefit of taking social security later means that you're going to have more money when you're 84 8587 the problem is when you're 87 you're 85 again and so that is a realization that a lot of people have where they kind of look past the numbers with social security and they'll say look there are things we want to do now we want to spend more healthy now we're going to travel and spend time with our family spend money on our family and social security is a way for them to simply have more money now and by the way I've I have done plans with people kind of the early retiree the 50 57 58 year old where depending upon their spending level and the amount of social security they're going to get if they take it early and when I mean early I mean 62 or 63 that actually improves their assets over the long run because it allows them to avoid dipping into assets from 62 to 67 that doesn't happen that much but we've had enough scenarios where I can say that it is a legitimate outcome Jason did you have anything you wanted to add on social security because Jason gets involved in these as well with our clients. I'm on the side of the fence that although it is a rounding error I agree with Mark. You know social security right now is the only inflation adjusted annuity we can buy and we buy that by waiting. And it goes back though to personal choice because look how many of us have a two and a half or three or three and a half percent mortgage. Does it make sense to pay it off early? Well that's personal preference. Some people want to pay it off early pay off the mortgage early even though they could afford to write the check. Other people don't want to pay it off early because it's such a great rate they think they can do better in the market even though they have assets to do that. So personal choice with social security some people want to take it. That's great it's really not going to affect people on the high end of the spectrum because we have a lot of assets. Now it will mess up when we're trying to do growth conversions because you're bringing in more income you're in that really goofy social security tax bubble where even though yes you're in the 12% tax rate based on how things go you may be paying 18 to 20 to 40% for every additional dollar of social security based on the way that the bubble works. For people that are clearly past that level. Again it's personal choice. I believe in delaying it longer rather than sooner especially if one of the spouses is younger and if that younger spouse is a female you typically want to delay in order to get the survivor to have as much as a benefit as they can get. I do have a couple of slides that I'm going to pop up real quick. They're not designed to have a lot of issues. They're just a couple of slides I want to show up to show graphically. The first slide I have to give credit to where it came from. I went to a CPE class put on by the AICPA and Ted Spronsky well known in this area he's a great presenter. He did a whole two hour production and I described a couple of slides. The first slide I want to show is the same age for a couple the same benefit and the different bars are the colors starting at age 62 early full retirement and then delaying to 70. Also both dying which probably won't happen together at 75, 85 and 95. The color coded is down here at the bottom where the dark we started 62 66, 70. If you know when you're both going to die it's easy we know that but because we don't know when we're going to die that's why this question is a big deal when should I start taking it. The main thing that I've learned is take it when you want to. If you don't need to take it then you can think about if you want to delay or not. If you're going to die early yeah take out as soon as you can. If you're going to live to about your life expectancy you know it doesn't matter if you get it full retirement age or you delay because it's close it's when you live longer obviously that you'll get more but you may have to spend on other assets again this is inflation adjusted that's a huge benefit one more slide I want to show this is the bigger deal if one of the couple is a low or no wage earner married to somebody with a full retirement benefit of $2000 and the lower no wage earner is actually older in this case no matter when you die you probably want to take it as soon as you can and that's just pure math we went through like I said a large presentation on this but I thought these will graphically show sometimes there's not a lot of difference when you wait so I'm going to go on to the next topic here now this one is fun for me and it has to do with this decision about when you're going to retire and this involves being honest with yourself and having some introspection and kind of evaluating your aspiration and it's the decision about actually leaving your profession you know and I've run into this one a lot and so I've had to ask some of my clients and I'll acknowledge with them this is for those out there that have not retired yet do you really have the courage to quit your job because once you leave for the most part you're not coming back and then you got to figure out what you're going to do with your time and man that can really impact you personally can impact your relationships with those close to you so it takes a lot of courage for people to retire I did this podcast because I kept on getting this complaint a comment from my client they used to say this to me and I had to do a whole podcast on this oh well I can't retire because of health care cost so they've got three and a half four million dollars they're going to spend about 80, 90,000 a year they got social security, got a pension but they're going to keep working they actually have to pay for health care and I would say to them I don't really think that's why you're not retiring I think you're rationalizing why you can't stop working and they kind of agree with that and so many of the folks that I work with and maybe some of you out there it kind of it's a tough call to leave work forever and so we can run the numbers for folks and they're going to look pretty great for many people that we do these plans but man that transition involves a lot of courage for many folks and as a kind of an addendum to that or an additional consideration for many people that we work with many people here many people you know they are successful planners successful savers they've arrived at a good place and so they're ready to transition or they are transitioning to retirement but man they have difficulty spending money they can't do it and it's really a shame I had a meeting with a guy this last week and this is what he said and we were talking about his investment allocation I didn't use the word greedy to him but actually that was kind of going through my head and what he what we were talking about was his investment allocation and so and I would and kind of a default comment I have to my clients is that and it will be me at some point because I will retire eventually were it me I would opt for more stability and give up growth so that would be kind of how I would want to transition on into retirement so I would have a more conservative portfolio and in this guy's particular case he was comfortable being about 85% stocks and his comment was well if the markets don't cooperate which for many people is like the biggest thing that they think about is how is my portfolio going to do I will live off my money if the markets go down and his comment was if the markets don't cooperate then I'll just reduce my discretionary spending for a few years and I said really so between the ages of 62 and 65 you're not going to like do much really you got one life and so that just means you're going to have more money in your 85 or 90 but man you weren't able to do things when you were in your 60s which is really when you wanted to do things and so that was a part of my point was that if you've been thinking about your future for so long and planning for retirement or maybe not even thinking about it but it was a methodical part of your process and now you're there and if you are successful gosh I would be I wouldn't be hesitant about spending your money it's okay to blow through some of your money as a retiree so and that is a difficult mindset for some people to get into but man it's just going to be a shame if you've done the right things but can't pull the trigger on and I'm not talking about spending $250,000 a year getting a nicer taking a longer vacation spending more money on your family whatever is important to you so I want to talk about that as you begin to think about this transition for retirement or if you're already there and are thinking about how to spend your money now this is kind of related to this one it's something that has always been a part of my conversations with the people that we work with and it's about how you should think of your expenses when you think about your aging years now the way that I view retirement is that for most people depending upon when they retire they're going to have a period of time whether it's 5 years, 10, 15, 20 years or more money but there's also going to be at some point in another a drop-off in their spending, their consumption and in some cases it will go down dramatically so when you think of the future I would not be intimidated by the idea of spending down some of your assets I think it's perfectly fine to do that but I would think of your expense spending pattern has kind of a trajectory where it steadily goes up and then it drops down in some cases it drops down dramatic and I share with my clients my father he's a great example of this my dad's 89, he'll be 90 this summer he still lives in his house by himself and his health is generally pretty good as good as it can be for somebody his age but what is he going to do? he can't spend money he goes to the diner and he watches the ballgame that's kind of what dad does he cuts the grass and he socializes with neighbors he spends about $28,000-$29,000 a year now when mom was alive four years ago they had cut down spending even before before she passed they were spending about $35,000-$36,000 a year and in their heyday as it were they were spending about $65,000-$70,000 a year so even with inflation which is the next one I want to get into their consumption had gone down so I don't think it does you any good when you're planning for your future to simply say oh well we're spending $95,000 this year so when we're 88 we'll be spending $165,000 like that's just not the way people behave it's not how their lives unfold so that's an important consideration when you think about your expenses over time in a moment we're going to talk about long-term care insurance and how to think about long-term care as well but that's an important consideration in how we do plans with our clients in fact we have a category we call initial retirement and we suggested our clients use it it's for a period of time 10, 15 years where you just have a larger number and even for travel we usually only do the travel budget for maybe 10, 15, 20 years as a part of their plan which leads me to the second point about inflation and I've done some rants about inflation on my podcast and I've really ran into clients about that but when we do our projections for our clients and we have these different graded expenses I like to use 1.2% as an inflationary factor I know that there are many models that talk about the importance of inflation and the real rate of return on your investments and the nominal rate of return but gosh I'd be very careful about using significant inflation numbers when you think about your plan and trying to figure out if you have enough money to retire because if you run a plan let's just say a base return of inflation of even 2% or 3% and you add that into your expenses and then you start to make decisions about when you can retire and when you can't retire you're going to be looking at some massive expenses when you're 85 so I would recommend using a much more modest inflation number in your planning purposes and that actually fits in with that prior comment I was making about where we even have recommender clients that they have different expense categories over time but I don't fear inflation at all I certainly would fear inflation if we start getting rampant inflation in our economy but just in day to day consumption expenses inflation for retirees that's not a concern that I have which leads on to the next point which is long-term care insurance or long-term care cost and how you might want to consider that and Jason will talk about this as well do you need long-term care insurance I actually am a proponent of people getting long-term care insurance if they are in the right situation meaning that if they if their assets are enough or I think that they're in jeopardy if your assets are pretty low maybe less than 300, 400,000 I'm not sure long-term care insurance makes sense just because you don't have enough to insure maybe you can just spend on your money and then at that point you just qualify for medical assistance on the other hand on some level some certain level 2 million maybe whatever it happens to be at that point if your numbers project really well I think you can definitely self-insure also for many their home is a pretty big asset their home may be valued at $700,000, $800,000, $900,000 and that's nice to have in your back pocket so if you end up needing or the last surviving spouse ends up needing care they can sell that property and take a lot of those proceeds that will help pay for their care with regards to long-term care insurance or long-term care in general I don't know if you've ever been to one of these long-term care seminars but we certainly have used to have these trainings when I worked in a conventional distribution system but the statistic is two out of every three Americans at some point in their life need long-term care and my mom needed long-term care she was in a transition transition care facility for about 60 days went back home went back into another one again for a couple weeks then she went to a group home and passed away there and so long-term the long-term care sales industry will use that as a ploy I guess to get people interested in long-term care insurance I've seen a couple of other studies two others though that talked about your real risk has an American over the age of 65 of having an extended long-term care event which is when it's really going to get costly and that's less than the area of 10 that's less than about 10% of people that are going to have a significant costly long-term care event if you're going to now but I would definitely encourage people if they are interested to shop for long-term care in my experience kind of the sweet spot to look at it as your early to mid to latter 50s of course if you talk with a long-term sales person it's like whenever you talk with them that's the right if you're 10 that's the right time to take out a long-term care policy and some concerns and they do certainly raise an important point in that if you get diagnosed with a condition they go maybe I should go get a long-term care policy then you're going to damage your ability to receive a policy once you get diagnosed with some sort of condition which would possibly indicate a higher likelihood of needing long-term care so yes that's a bona fide factor in the consideration but I think early to mid 50s, latter 50s is a good time to shop for long-term care insurance why would you get long-term care insurance even if you have significant wealth there are people that do that and I do it in my experience for two reasons one is they're simply sensitive to long-term care insurance maybe they dealt with it with their parents a family member they're very aware of the cost of it and they simply want to take that take that off the table and for some it kind of frees them up they feel like they can spend more money because they got rid of that one big giant potential thing that could happen to them even though it's not really going to devastate their estate the other reason that long-term care insurance is just to preserve their estate if you are going to get long-term care insurance and you're shopping for it people say well I looked into it and it was pretty expensive well if you can get a long-term care policy it's going to be expensive if it's going to be a good policy because long-term care is expensive so you can expect to pay I don't know four to six to maybe $8,000 a year you can also get these upfront pay policies where you pay a lot up front get all the premiums out of the way out of the way but like other insurances that we buy when you buy long-term care insurance you can do a fair amount of cost sharing with the insurance company they have things called an elimination period which is the period of time before the care policy kicks in 90 days, 180 days, maybe 365 days they have a daily benefit and that's the amount of pay the amount of cost that the policy will pay on a daily basis so you could look at a policy where you might say look we can afford to pay for 30% each day we just want somebody to help with the majority of the cost so you could have some you'd be willing to pay on some of the daily benefit another big variable in the long-term care policy would be the inflation writer these things come with an inflation writer it's either simple or compound which means that the money the benefit that you're going to get is going to grow at a faster rate than a simple inflation writer but it costs a lot more that's a much more expensive policy so you can massage the premiums or the cost of these policies by doing some cost sharing with the insurance companies so there's some thoughts on long-term care Jason did you have anything you wanted to add on long-term care and your thoughts on that maybe the insurance carriers just a couple of brief comments so long-term care when it came out 20 years ago maybe two years ago it was a novel concept and it was affordable I mean people are talking about in their 40s go ahead and lock in a plan now but what happened is the actuaries were not able to model the cost and over a short period of time many carriers got out of business and or jacked up their rates to cover because the actuaries could not model these cost it wasn't like the risk associated with early premature death or disability that they've had decades of research and decades of experience modeling and doing the actuarial numbers ended up they were wrong so it has become very expensive and the danger is if you buy it for a number of years decades maybe you can't afford it right before you actually need it so you have to be cautious and really think about how much you're going to rely on it we definitely want to buy it and we don't want to use it because it's like buying house insurance if your home burns down you're glad you have it but you hope your house never burned down well what if your house insurance just got higher and higher and higher and higher to where you had a debate should I continue to buy well house insurance does not go up and the reason being is because the actuaries have it nailed down pretty well long term care insurance I agree with Mark if you don't have a lot of assets you don't need it if you have a lot of assets you can self insure and the odds of running through your money are much lower than the industry would lead you to believe it is there though no doubt about that thanks also I've talked to a few clients and shared this experience it's interesting how people feel about their long term care policies like when they buy it when they're 55 alright I got approved we'll write the check for this thing they buy it with reluctance they're 65 you know it's more regular part of their budget when they're 75 they're glad to have it and when they're 85 man that's the one thing they don't want to miss the payment on their shares so they want to make sure they get the money out of it so a couple of other concepts I want to go into which are more general concepts one is the idea of how to handle your investments in general as you get closer and I mentioned this earlier for those that have been of course Bill Bernstein has the famous comment about if you've won the game why keep playing I'm not sure if he literally means take everything and just put it in cash but I think what he's implying here is why expose yourself to unnecessary risk if you've already been a successful saver in your retirement setup and that is a comment I would share with my clients as well is if you're already there you've won you have a successful plan you've got to figure out where you're going to go with this thing and if we're at me and again it will be me at some point I hope to retire I'm going to take I'm going to be a much more conservative much more cautious investor even without regard to the interest rates I would move my portfolio into more of a stable portfolio whatever that means 40, 60, 50 50, 55, 45 or some sort of asset allocation like that and I would encourage people to try to the extent that you can really do this and I know this is hard but go through a bona fide thought exercise where you've retired and we go through a really horrible apocalypse not something that lasts for six months and then the market goes back up again or nine months or a year and a half but something that scares everyone to death markets go down by 50, 55% whatever the intervention is that whatever that whomever is doing is not working because you can't get away from that when it happens you know whenever the markets go down like the last bad one we had was March of last year two worst weeks ever here we go again they shut down the markets three days we actually had an email exchange with some buddies of mine where we were trying to pick the low of the dow and we started to get really cynical I was like you know one whatever it's going to go and of course it settled down but it went right back up again what if that doesn't happen for two, three, four years and you're still 80, 20 are you really going to begin to stop doing things enjoying your life when you only get one retirement so it's a good thought exercise to really think it was a good thought exercise I don't like about it it's just a thought exercise it's not really what's happening at the moment now the final thing I'll mention about planning for your retirement is when I have sessions with our clients sometimes I feel like I'm pulling them out of this pit of weeds where they're so bogged down in things that never matter that they've lost track of the big picture so don't lose perspective on what you've accomplished and where you're at has your thinking about your future and what I mean by that is I would not grind over these numbers unless you kind of enjoy that kind of thing and some people actually do are you making changes in your portfolio or thinking about changes to just do it it's probably spinning wheels more than anything else so I'd really try to take a few steps back and focus on the big picture and where that really comes in handy is if you are hamstringing yourself from spending money on yourself or your family or things that are important to you because you're concerned about your plan when you've lost the perspective of how good your plan actually is so that's kind of the topics that we wanted to cover I got distracted those are the topics that we wanted to cover for we wanted to cover for some considerations in structuring your investments now Alan did you want to have questions on this before we moved on to the technology and our technology comments will actually be more brief so did you want to have a Q&A here if there were any yes so why don't we take a little break and have some Q&A here if you guys can submit questions by the chat if people are not on camera and don't mind having their name pop up I'll keep recording this for the time being so please submit your questions if you want to ask a question in person raise your hand using the raised hand icon do you have Larry Alexander had his hand up I don't know if that was intentional lady geek you had a question yeah I just wanted to mention that during the choice of medical insurance what helped me greatly was to use a medical insurance broker and he helped my parents out especially when you have to mix it with Medicare that's not for me right now but for my parents it was he went through every plan he came to the door and I know they take a commission but it's no cost to you and they signed on the spot because he spent like half an hour 20 minutes a long time with them and just said what's your situation I'm actually using one now I'm actually also on Cobra I retired last year and I found out that Cobra for me was cheaper than the marketplace because of my age maybe you should mention that the premiums go with your medical the premiums of your employer go by the average age of the workforce since I'm an older person it's actually more expensive if I go to the private market so by going on Cobra which actually is paying 102% I still save nearly half of what it will cost me out on the marketplace so when my insurance expires in October I'll call my broker and say just set me up so I think that just saves a lot of work and I'll do my own research but I just want to mention that use a broker to help you they do this stuff every day yeah definitely I want to follow in on what Lady Geek said is that there are some really good people out there they work in this day in and day out they know which plans and yeah they're going to make a commission but it's not untoward anybody they're actually doing a good thing out there so yeah good point and make sure that's not the same as a life insurance agent it's a separate agency that does medical don't slope to the provincial or med life for any of those normal websites you see on TV it's a medical insurance broker and that's all they do okay I'm done yeah it's a bit of a you know it's a specialization here in Minnesota we have brokers from U-Care and Medicare or Medica and Group Health that can provide quality guidance to to consumers in fact we did an hour long interview with I can't remember her name but she works for a national Medicare broker from out of Dallas so we put that on our podcast all right Martha you had a question perhaps I may have seen some questions in the chat is that where they're going Martha I think you're on there you go sorry Jason I missed why there was such a difference with the zip people living in different zip codes on the subsidies is it because of the way the states went into Obamacare yeah that's a big part of it so it has to do with the what the average what the rates are in that particular county because if you are shopping for health health exchange marketplace health care it's based on the county on the zip code that you live in on how the plans are priced so that's exactly it that's why I picked those zip codes I mean I picked mine and it happens to be a very low number but West Virginia is notorious for having high plans in particular Charleston California is one of the highest way higher than Hawaii and ocean side California so it just depends on where you live if it makes sense to use especially with the removal of the cliff there are a couple of chat questions here from Robert I guess maybe this is just for the participants how many clients I guess participants limit their adjusted gross income by Irma Thresh holds I didn't hear that Jason would know more about that one did you hear that question Jason was it a poll question or content question I think it was just asking one of our participants is asking other participants about how many of them limit their adjusted gross income or I should say manage it based upon Irma Thresh holds I know for one I tend to do that to some extent with Roth conversions at least to factor that in it's probably an individualized decision weighing the pros and the cons yeah I can jump in with a quick comment on that I've had a couple of discussions with Mark and I'm going to share a slide here for everybody it's in to look at another slide okay so this comes right off the source of the Medicare website and what this is for 2021 generally we know that the part beef is 148.50 per month so for a couple that each have Medicare they're going to be paying about 300 bucks a month 3600 a year for heartbeat coverage great well what if they hit Irma which Irma ends up being additional premiums it's called income related monthly adjustment amount and if you are married filing joint if you're over 176,000 up to 222 look you're paying about what another 60 bucks each per month per year so it's not life changing it does start to add up you know when you get up to more than 222,000 up to 276 you know and here we're talking about getting sick into the 24% tax bracket you're doubling part B again not the end of the world the numbers do start to add up after a while don't forget to that's part B part D if you have a part D plan drug description plan there's also an Irma effect if you're over 176,000 it ends up being 1230 per month on top of whatever you're paying for your drug plan 25 bucks a month more for a couple on Medicare so again not plan busting but the numbers add up after a while in the 24% tax bracket you know when you get up over 222 you're looking at $63 plus the amount of your drug plan so if you're aware of it and definitely if you're close to it and can keep under the next threshold sure do that but you know don't go without income, spend your money as Mark was saying earlier because as I like to say you know go first class because your errors definitely will true Dan had a question keep taxable account in equities and replace them with equities in your IRA or 401k at the same day that way you were actually selling bonds and not taking the ordinary income taxes in your brokerage account yeah well yeah a lot of strategies you have to be careful though you could have watch sales but no I mean it's a strategy for sure because you're maintaining your asset allocation you're trying to sell strategically tactically yeah that's a good idea there was another one that just popped up there Alan okay if you can read that well let me I gotta I gotta figure out how to use this well okay why not okay okay if you don't think you spend okay if you don't think go ahead if you don't think you'll spend all you have accumulated is there any problem okay I'm laughing is there any problem taking the mindset that this is your grandkids money you can do whatever you want with your money whatever your mindset happens to be and so I think that's perfectly because I think what you're talking about is either given the money away while you're alive or just investing it in a way where it's really for your grandkids which would typically mean you would invest aggressively there's nothing wrong at all with that that's long as if you make that decision when you're 80 or 79 or whatever if when you're 90 you don't sit around they're always I think how did I possibly end up with 100% equities so as long as you can maintain that perspective then yeah that's perfectly fine you know we do plans with people that and they're in this group like people and not like I mean these are representative of people in this group maybe there are some people we've done this plan where they can't they haven't come to grips with how much money they have like they can't they don't understand the numbers are too big and so they don't you know it's they've lost perspective on that one thing I'll throw out relating to long-term care a personal anecdote my 89 year old mother and my father who passed away about 28 years ago sold insurance in the end selling long-term care insurance I didn't know much about the details of that but I think he was he was honest and tried to work in his client's best interest but he before he passed made sure my mother had an excellent long-term care insurance policy and she's paid the premiums every year for 25 plus over 28 years and now her insurance company is in Solvent it's based in Pennsylvania it's in rehabilitation I've read through the current legal filings and they basically are millions of dollars in the red yeah and now we don't know what percentage of the benefit she'll get she'll get something because the guarantee association for each state then steps in but it's really up to the state to decide how they fund that and that's another consideration even though she started off with an extremely highly rated insurance company it got sold and then resold and purchased and acquired by somebody else until they went in Solvent probably some legal shenanigans that went on there I suspect but that's another consideration is the strength of the insurance company and even if they are strong on paper currently what will it be in 20 30 years down the line that's a good point if I could expand on that here a little bit because I hate the word guaranteed you know who I worked for in 2008 I worked for Valak that was owned by AIG we had people not it's happened twice we had a little tiny office in Edina Minnesota corner office two people came into our office threatening our staff you may not remember what was going on at that time but AIG was vilified in this country and before that though AIG I think was one of the seven or eight companies and I don't really remember this stuff but but had the most sterling ratings from the rating agencies here in America from all of them and we would promote that when we would go give presentations to one of the seven companies that have had a great rating for 80 years and if you were to go read the Morningstar report and the ratings reports about AIG they talk about the wide and all the businesses and how this is the most financially stable company in a matter of a weekend right I mean that's not how long it took to happen but basically AIG collapsed over one weekend so I don't know how to do that analysis Alan where you would come up with an answer about the financial where with all these companies in the future but it's a legitimate point if you're going to buy long-term care insurance you know that risk is out there so I think there's a quite can we give an example of what you mean by big or what is considered average that may be in the context of large assets I think that I would relate the size of the asset to the amount of spending people have so if you are people that or if you're a person or a couple where you kind of like to go to Greece for three months and you're going to have a really nice place there and then you're going to go to Hawaii or wherever you're going to go and you're going to spend $350,000 a year for the first seven years of your retirement we don't have any clients like that if you're going to spend that kind of money then your portfolio if it's $3 million is in jeopardy unless you're getting like a really big pension you're going to have to have bigger assets most of our clients are like that so if the question is what does the term big mean gosh many people can get by on social security and they $1 million $1.2 they're fine you don't just don't do that much you know so I guess I would compare the size of the to determine if it's big because yeah that can be a very you know that can mean that's a term that can mean something to one person is entirely different to somebody else actually I have something about long-term care insurance if I look at our family most of the most of the family members would not have benefited from long-term care insurance because you know it would not have kicked in before they passed away or they simply did not need to be in a home let's say care in their own home and the policy didn't cover that or they had dementia and the policy the old policy some of them didn't cover that we had one family member who did have Parkinson's from many many many years and actually ran out the long-term care insurance for him it worked it was it was critical it was very very important but for most of our family members it you know they could have afforded the they could have made it without the long-term care insurance yeah you're right I think that's the reality for most by the way a comment I would make when we're talking about thinking about paying for long-term care I'm uncomfortable with the strategy of giving away assets and going on medical assistance and that's getting harder to do I know in various states because they have look back periods another but I think an important consideration on that too is simply the idea that you don't have any more money and just giving it all away and you're losing some of your dignity when you do that and frankly you're losing control of your you know over what your options may be in the future so for those that have wealth they can consider doing it but I consider that to be a fairly risky strategy and something I would have a hard time advocating could you expand on that for people with wealth are you talking about shall we say your average Bogle head I know what you mean you know it's sufficiently a nice retirement gosh what do you mean by spending down how would we spend it down if we have social security if we have investments and I have a pension how would I even spend it down well do you mean give it away for the long-term care no you were talking about spending it down and are you referring to spending it down so that Medicaid comes into play oh I'm sorry I'm sorry yeah yeah so let's just say that somebody um I was talking about giving it away I'm sorry yeah and people will try to do that they'll give away their wealth to their family because they'll say things like I don't want the nursing home to get my money so I'm going to give it away and how do they what do they do if they're not if they're not in a nursing home then well they're out of money at that point so well they may have enough to they may have a pension or social security to pay the bills but they're not spending that much money anymore okay but yeah I don't know if anybody's had any family members that could chime I don't know anybody personally that's ever done that but I mean that I know I know clients that have done that over the years so well actually I am saving my money because we do not have long-term care insurance and that I worry about um because I've seen with our family that when we get older if we do need assets for to make our life more comfortable uh you know for example a hospital beds yeah we did a hospital bed and the only type that Medicare would pay for was the crank type of hospital they would not even pay for an electric hospital bed they would raise him up and raise him down if the push of a button and so I said well who's going to you know who's going to crank it up well he has to get out of bed to do it or you have to have aids there to do it in other words we have to think ahead and have I always felt and have enough money in the bank to pay to make our life you know easier and more comfortable and in firm yeah go ahead I would say basically self-funding you know it has to be factored into the retirement plan having sufficient assets to provide for that self-insuring in essence and making sure you have enough to fill the gap alright any further questions on proceeding conversation topic if not I guess we can move on to the next topic which should be Chris in our technologically advancing world yeah I do have Zoom meetings with my dad who's 89 so things are changing and this will be brief more brief but Jason and I chatted a little bit about some of our views on how we see technology impacting financial planning our business model clearly based upon using technology efficiently that's what our clients do like Alan you did and so on in how you use video to support getting going with this but it's this idea of financial planning which is a part of what we do it is my suspicion that in the future there will be apps that will essentially make a lot of these decisions for us right now they're not they're not there yet and I think it's going to take quite a while to be able to integrate the different moving parts together or at least a firm hasn't figured out yet if they invest a lot of the money that would be required to do this that they're going to get paid on this yet money is a competitive you know it's one of the more competitive products in the financial advisor space money guide pros another good one and some other ones and these tools are really good at doing planning and they have a lot of functionality and right now they're used through firms like plan vision and other advisory firms to work with their clients but I would guess that in the future there's going to be tools where consumers can go directly to the app themselves and we'll be able to do a lot of their own financial planning themselves artificial intelligence I assume will be some part of that the challenge may be the interpretation of some of the information or the data which actually still a lot of what we do we have these collaborative sessions with our clients they've kind of moved all the way along and we're just helping interpret a lot of the information and providing comments on what they're seeing but I certainly think that consumers are going to be able to take a lot more ownership over their financial plans in the future and this process of looking at your assets how are they going to play out am I going to run out of money and have to go over and look at your investments and say well okay based upon that I got to make this decision and then I should structure my assets I think that's going to be integrated a lot better in the future so an example of where this might go would be for younger people people that have debt in their 20s and 30s there may be a point where the technology will essentially make that decision for them on whether or not they should pay off a loan early or invest their money and that might be a model that might change based upon the dynamics of the markets and that kind of thing so that's one area where I see technology improving that and our firm is trying to be on the front of that too in how we use technology but basically allowing people to do their own financial planning for the most part and some of you probably use your own some of these online calculators which are getting better all the time and allow them to do quite a bit this process of taking money out of your account I would suspect that that would be simplified as well the distribution mechanism it is somewhat simplified right now I would guess there are some people here that are getting automatic payments right now on their retirement plans they don't really have to think about anything it just comes out automatically for them but my guess is that distribution management in what account you take money from and which actual asset you take it will be taken care of in the future and as a part of that the tax implications of that as well again this is all kind of tied into financial management or financial planning management as well but more on the distribution side that the technology will be developed to integrate all this information together so that the consumer needs to make less decisions about where to take money from and when to take it so I would suspect that there's going to be improvements in distribution management as well and I guess a part of that as well um if I didn't say this is tax management too um that taxes will be much more automated in the future than they are right now I mean Jason you worked at was it TurboTax yeah I worked at TurboTax and I was a tax expert with them yeah TurboTax is fantastic you know the internal revenue code built in and merely by asking questions asking the right questions the software walks you through there can be some very complicated returns that people are able to do if they answer the questions correctly um you know the decision though on what to do the AI has to come a lot further along but as far as actually yeah I mean it's phenomenal what the big firms do TurboTax, H&R Block all the software so there's a ways to go and actually we are we use Salesforce for those that use Salesforce man that's an awesome program and that's integral to how we manage our business but we're having some initial discussions with our Salesforce developer on how we can have more interactive data gathering sessions with our like I mean the Salesforce tech system in gathering information from our clients integrating that into our system and providing them with advice so that's a form of artificial intelligence I guess even though it's somewhat it's somewhat crude at this point I joke to some of my clients that hopefully someday I won't have to meet with them but so those are you know we'll see where this thing goes but the financial services industry managed to escape the dot com craze and all these advisors that thought they were going to lose their jobs oh they're still around they still want to talk to us but slowly it's encroaching on the industry and there's more pressure on them my gosh with the Robos who I think are a much a much better an option for people than going to you know sit in some advisors office and charge you 1% a robo really compress that fee and now it's coming down to 30 basis points 25 20 and you know you can if you just want a simple fund you can go to target date fund which is what I use so a lot of pressure on the investment management side of this but I think you're going to see a lot more pressure as well just on financial planning and guidance with artificial intelligence and the kind of the ability for programs like money to be done at the at the consumers level yeah definitely and to add on to that younger generations are far more willing to use apps on their phones to apply for mortgages look you can do your tax return kind of complicated your tax return on with it with an app you take a picture of your W2 and documents the program will upload them you have to review it of course but younger people not me younger people are willing to do a lot with apps that that's older folks we want to sit across the desk or or the zoom call but but they're doing you know ai is going to get there where you can do a lot more they can do a lot more with the app so technology is clearly rolling forward yeah so anyways those are just some thoughts not not too much to add there you know but I think there's going to be a lot of pressure even on the financial planning side now maybe a ways down the road in the financial services industry where bubbleheads won't have much left to talk about but we'll still talk there's always oatmeal and Costco chicken invest in international funds exactly so we open it up for questions lady geek has her hand up yeah okay technology and a site administrator perfect confluence okay also I'm also you know I promote the broke I'm a wiki admin but one thing you everybody you're using the magic words of artificial intelligence and that's something I'm a little bit more familiar with but what I don't hear are the magic words in financial planning to start because you're talking about investments you're talking about taxes what I don't hear is an app that basically follows the financial planning article in the bubbleheads wiki which is first an emergency fund are you paying off your debts what app can you give to a new person like high school college that look basically is going to load in a ton of your financial information so that's a privacy thing but something that takes into can everything you're doing right now what's your salary can you meet a monthly budget budgeting personal capital but can you are you ready to invest you go okay you go to betterment yet because you don't have six months of emergency what's in your bank account well I can I can sort of be chicken this week so you I don't I don't hear the words to tell a new person or a person just getting on their feet to say no no don't get a mortgage you're running is fine you know where is the app that follows what I tell people in the bubbleheads forums getting started finance is the finance that go into the search box financial planning planners and see those basic steps so I mean I know more you know it's beautiful applications and know your tools and everything it's helping you run your business and do helping people but I don't hear the words well first I'm retired and I'm in a good situation here but I don't hear the words to tell a person you're not ready that says don't invest I don't hear the words it's you know here's how to save are you meeting your budget so let me give they say vocal heads we're very vocal and but I want to I'm trying to help point things in that that approach apps are focused on investing apps are focused on taxes where's the app that puts everything together like a super app or you know I can give all kinds of terms for that but let's start is this a question is there a question I also give a lot of it's just something maybe you hit a trigger point in me but that's what I'm trying to actually have I have the answer to that lady geek okay it's not an app yet but I have to give a shout out to William Bernstein because this is what I show lady geek and all the vocal heads this is what I show to our new many of our new clients especially the younger ones and I say look take an hour to read this if you don't live in the U.S. ignore the references to the U.S. tax code but the five hurdles will apply to you and it's not an app maybe I should write the app and and split it with Mr. Bernstein but this is what you're talking about we just needed an app form yeah it's a free download yeah so yeah I know but I got to show them a beautiful picture before I got to them so you say that's what I said Barry it's just that I hear different things I guess everybody has a different perspective and I like to work from top down my background is just an engineering so I retired so I work at a big picture level and try and flow things down so I want to get to get these people off on the right in the right on the right path before you send them down the path that's all I was trying to do and maybe there's something that has this existing that's that's fine I yeah that's what I would kind of what I'm alluding to is that there would be some sort of tool that some firms will begin to develop that would be based upon where you're at in life and so if you're 21 and you start your financial planning that it would say well you don't have enough money in the bank and you can't invest because you have you know a four and a half percent student loan you'll deal with that first that's my assumption of where this is all going but technology is that upon where you're at in life and it'll you won't have any like I'm being glib here but you won't have any decisions to make you your thing will just say to you oh what are you doing you don't need to be doing that you can't spend that money get back in your house yeah okay yeah and one other aspect of financial planning actually includes estate planning I like to encompass everything should you think about this about when you're 25 that'll be quite an app yes it will and it's huge but should you be thinking about a state fund oh yes yes especially for the people that have children because if you don't have your guardians you have no business to even open an account because you know that's critical yeah so I agree yeah okay I feel much better now thank you there's a gym posted a URL there for a flow chart I think it's for younger people as well to walk through some of these decision points one thing I'm curious about us bogelheads as a rule are generally financially savvy otherwise we wouldn't be here wanting to be but we represent a small minority of the average population so even with artificial intelligence and apps I still think there's going to be a tremendous need for advisors like yourself if not in person for hand holding and explaining and coercing people to follow the recommendations yeah the notion that there's just like some sort of an orb that describes your financial life for you and you carry around with you and it hovers and tells you that might be 250 years away like way out there but yes there's I think there's always financial guidance at some level or another for many folks you know it's interesting but I who is it Bill Gross the PIMCO guy he's the CEO it's a funny story but PIMCO guy yeah but when I was at Valic they brought in to speak his financial advisor the guy had a financial advisor so I think there's a role for financially however you want to characterize that person or the role for individuals for many people whether they're Bogle heads or people that aren't Bogle heads well I want to add we're continuing the recording for anybody who let's just go ahead and you can raise your hand or ask questions in the chat if you want to be on camera and want to maintain privacy you can turn off your video and or change your name but I think the recording will be worthwhile for other people to watch and what is interesting to finish the thought Allen about that because some of the folks are chiming in there about you know the role of professional it is it is personal finance is very personal gosh we'll talk with I will have meetings back to back with people that have attitudes that are 180 degrees different about their investments and how they're going to spend their money and they may have an entirely different set of situation or questions even though their financial situations might even be relatively similar we have a question on web based financial services that integrate a person's investment accounts has there been any significant security breaches in these services resulting in the compromise of the investment accounts well I'm not aware of any if you're talking yeah if you're talking about like the personal capital of the world maybe companies like e-money I'm not aware of any breaches that have occurred doesn't mean it hasn't happened but it hasn't gotten it hasn't gotten news to the level that I would have heard about it Mark I'm curious since you have the option for most of your clients to for them to connect to the aggregator in e-money what percentage entered in manually versus actually connect I would say probably I don't keep track of that Allen but I would probably say it's between 10 and 20 percent that manually type them in and you know our program e-money and the other ones too probably they're actually pretty easy to use if you type in your stuff manually it doesn't really take that long once you do it a few times of course a lot of people like the the updating feature so both can work fine alrighty further questions folks well Jim Kay wanted to know why he had to establish an emergency fund before going with GameStop well I hasn't I don't know if it's an aside but we actually a very good friend of mine runs a hedge fund right as it were and so I interviewed him and he's a podcast on our site to talk about this because man when that was going on I thought to myself there is so much being made about this there's not a lot of depth to this whole thing and it was if to me it was almost like watching a Netflix show you know unfold you have these crazy folks in the Reddit website that are you know going after going after a hedge fund so it's just kind of a weird dynamic but I don't think there's a lot of substance to it but it's certainly got a lot of attention I've got a question I think by fidelity actually so you're dependent upon their developers to add capabilities I'm just curious from your business perspective how much feedback are they getting from individual advisors asking for additional you know capabilities being added as much as you'd like it to be or hand cuffed by whatever they decide to put in no they're always they're always doing updates both software rollout recently they in fact just now they're rolling out what they call a modernization modernization of their report format just to make it much cleaner but there's a a request that advisors can put in and if the request is already in you just can vote it you upvote it if you think yeah that's a great idea they need to add that here's an example E-Money has almost not quite an unlimited number of types of retirement plans but the 457B is not actually an option so when I contacted them they said oh yeah that's a popular request we are working on it so just go into the survey click on upvote to put more votes behind it and by popular opinion or popular demand E-Money does direct improvements based on what the advisors are requesting and Alan to add on that I'm very impressed with E-Money their internal support is awesome and they're they do a really good job I think with their technology so they're great to work with from a vendor's perspective I've generally been impressed with it I use personal capital also which has some surprisingly robust tools for the individual DIY it's very helpful I hope that all these platforms we just the Chicago virtual society Jim's chapter has been exploring a number of various tools available and they had the new retirement folks on as well which is interesting of course they're developing that totally in-house probably don't have the resources that Fidel and E-Money have but it's nice to see multiple different platforms being developed and hopefully the competition will continue to push each one to a higher level there was a question here about the podcast we have just been doing the podcast for our clients only but it's we're going public now and so we're right now on iHeart radio and Spotify and we're trying to get out like whoever does our distribution is trying to that's actually the website Alan they can't get the podcast there okay yeah so Jason put a note there do we just I'm not kidding like in the last four days we went on iHeart radio and then before that Spotify we'll be on Apple and yeah Apple's the big one iTunes and then Google and then there's another one so we'll be on five podcasts soon but it's just it's plan vision I don't know how I don't use podcasts much so I don't know how you find them but I think you just type in the name I suppose and we'll pop up there yeah it's interesting with all the podcasts and now a lot of them people are getting saturated I think with content and it's hard to sort it all out yeah you're right but I've listened to a number of your the private podcast for your clients and they're excellent and they're short and sweet which is nice little snippets of good information you know I did that I did that because when I was well the last six years of my life I said I work so much I don't have time for anything else so I thought well let's do the short podcast because that's what I could listen to Lee a client of ours for clients who have worked with you for a while what have they said they would do differently if they could retire again does that mean like would they retire later if they could or retire sooner I don't know I guess just the vibe I get from some of my clients is some of them don't feel prepared for retirement and I don't mean financially I mean they're they're not ready to not work anymore they're scared of it some of them man best thing they ever do stop working right but for retiring for people that have been working for 20 30 40 50 years you know retirement is part of your identity and the psychologists say do not retire from something the job that's grinding you down you need to retire to something and be emotionally committed to whatever that is and it might be volunteering it might be teaching it might be another job it might be crocheting at home whatever it is you have to be emotionally engaged and be excited to get out of bed to do whatever it is you're going to do people have the opportunity a great thing to do is have a practice retirement where if you're able to slow it down a little bit and devote more time to those pursuits that you think you want to continue with to see how it how it goes and be flexible I know I thought I knew exactly what I was going to do during retirement and I had a whole list of things and I've probably only done 10% of them but I've added 90% of other things I hadn't anticipated of course forced by the pandemic but you have to be flexible I think that's the key regardless and creative yeah I've been very inspired by many of the people that I've interacted with over the years who are still working in fact one of the clients I met when I still had a group business was this gosh he's got to be 75 now but they hired him when he was a 71 year old former judge from Hennepin County here in Minnesota to be the executive director of a small nonprofit so I interviewed this guy and one of the things he the staff can't keep up with him and he said he's very insecure about his his job and he said he feels like he has to justify to the board all the time why they hired this old guys what he said I got to keep on you know busting my ass so they can justify why they hired me so but a lot of people like that just very inspiring people that continue to work in some capacity or other folks that leave really find something that they enjoy that kind of re-energizes them and reinvents them a bit and one of the one of the gratifying parts of the work that I do is Jason does is to interact with these folks it's pretty cool everything that you've said to be very accurate it was very difficult for me to retire and I didn't for many years for that reason and my husband went back to work so after we do have another question what is the name of the insurance calculator the Jason reference oh that's right yep I did put that up there it's right oh I see okay 933 okay and that's they just updated it to account with the change with the ARP the American Rescue plan they did update it and again it is a tool it's not the be all and all but it's pretty remarkable if you plug in your zip code hey I want to make a comment about this whole retirement talk because this has happened several times in my career even before I did plan vision I was doing financial advising with Valek one of the benefits of doing going through the exercise of doing a plan pre-retirement whether it's eight years six years five years to kind of get some clarification on the numbers things change at work your health might change culture might change new boss you wake up one day and the world looks different and I've had several people that send me an email and say you know I'd like to go over the numbers again because I think I want to go something happened and that's you know the plans change so that's on the early side was that you Miriam that's saying you had difficulty leaving oh yes it was impossible for the reason you said that you are identified with your profession with your job with what you do it is what 32 years 34 years of my life also I felt that I had so much to offer I had so much knowledge so much experience I was good for the world if I kept working it was good for you know it was just a good thing to do and why would I waste my education and my all my experience to retire and yet it was time so did you end up working 234 years longer than you needed to or felt like you should have I worked until I was aged out oh I worked until I was aged out my husband but then went back and he still works yeah I was very impacted by a speech I heard in the late 90s by a hospital administrator from a small town in Minnesota and it's hard for me to not get emotional thinking about this but he was he had retired he came back to talk and he came back to talk about his retirement but he was relating the story about his first week and his month and his first three months of not doing his job anymore and how devastated he was you know he was the hospital administrator in a small to mid-south town in Minnesota and so he knew everyone and he was a part of everyone's life and nobody called him anymore for his help anymore and it just did yeah it just demoralized him he knew so much he could have done so much good for so many more people for such a long time and yet now he's not doing that yeah feeling of like it just you know the song blowing in the wind it's all just blowing in the wind now of course and when people for some people when they do this transition now they're getting old you know preparing this for my parents exactly by the way for those that haven't come across this guy before some of you may one of the best speakers I've ever seen and Ken is the founder of Age Wave and he's been speaking on the baby boom generation their influence on our economy but he's a wonderful speaker and a very influential speaker on how people age and what aging is now as opposed to what it was 30 years ago and 60 years ago and 90 years ago wonderful speaker and you can go to YouTube and search him by name and watch some of his speeches they're very moving he's a big big buck speaker but man he is powerful but he talks about how people's attitudes you know have such a big impact on their quality of life as they age and he gives great examples of my gosh these people that are part of our popular culture that are still 75 and 85 and they're still you know they're still significant and making a difference I'm curious about something with amongst your clients do you have any that have embraced the fire movement or at least the achieving financial independence part and what are your thoughts on that you mean that cult so actually they're wonderful I mean you know that's one of the things about how the web hasn't impacted personal finance is that it's been a way for a lot of these people to kind of get together and realize oh there are other people that want to do this as well and of course you have a lot of the bloggers like Mr. Money Mustache who's you know the leader of that the kind of leader of all that but yeah we work with a lot of the fire people and we do plans for them because we have popped up in a lot of the Facebook groups there and you know what they have going for them as many of them live well within their means my gosh 50-60% a lot of them are doing indexing they've been influenced by Jim Collins you know who's got a good message about investing or JL Collins excuse me so yeah we have a lot of fire clients and it's you know I was using the term cult in a positive way I guess but yeah they're folks that are very interested in financial flexibility interesting one thing I've heard when it comes to like revisiting early on your retirement savings and ability to retire is to get to the point you've been JL Collins to use the term I'm not sure the FU money getting to the point where you have the option to retire and that can relieve a lot of anxiety and give you a way out if need be to something else to consider and a reason to build a financial plan and analyze it on a regular basis if need be a quick story was I was doing a review with a couple of good clients of mine but they're in their late 50s and I was kind of moved by them because they are in a tough spot they've been squeezed and they just know that they're going to have to work longer and have a really good attitude but I had two meetings with them one was with both of them and then one was just with her and I could just tell from my interactions with her how their financial situation had taken a toll on her there was just no way around it and money can do this to people your finances can create so much pressure so if people live within their means if they can if they don't have any debt if they save a good emergency fund if they've been good savers at least that's one aspect of their life where they won't necessarily have to feel pressure if things aren't working out well for them but if things are if they're struggling personally or in relationships with their family or their job or something to have mounting debt or never feel like you're ever getting ahead that man that is so damaging to people's health financial problems are not just money it's they carry over they carry over