 I want to introduce Mike Piper. Mike, I think, needs no introduction. He is on our Bogle Center board. He's currently our treasurer. He's also just, as you would expect, a jack of all trades. So in terms of like making fixes to our Bogle Center website and managing the books for our group and being a wonderful speaker who we can call upon to address any number of topics, Mike is our guy. So we are so excited to have him here. He's the author of several books, really helpful, shorter books, as well as the Oblivious Investor blog. Mike, come on up here. Thank you. So just like Christine said, a dynamic that's super common in couples is for one partner, one spouse to be the one who is primarily in charge of the financial decisions. So they're the household's financial manager, essentially. And then the other partner is somewhat less involved with those decisions. And this talk is specifically for that less involved partner. And there are two reasons, really, why we wanted to have this talk. Reason number one is that even if you aren't the one in charge of this job right now, someday it might become your responsibility. And most of the time when that happens, it's the result of the D scenarios, death, disability, or divorce, which of course aren't happy things. So we don't like to talk about them. But if that does happen, and this job does land in your lap, we want you to be prepared rather than feeling overwhelmed or lost. And when I say that we want you to be prepared, I don't just mean the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy. I mean, all of the people in this room who are the household financial managers, we collectively want you to be prepared because this is a thing that we think about. We worry about it all the time. This is one of the most common questions I hear from people is how can I prepare my partner in case something happens to me? And the second reason why we wanted to have this talk, I often think of it this way, if spouse A is the financial manager, then spouse B's job with regard to the finances is to be the oversight committee. And that is an important job. And I wanna share with you just two quick stories to illustrate what I mean by oversight and how important that role can be. So the first story, this is a little while ago, I was at the climbing gym with a friend and between routes, so this is basically during a break, he asks me, Mike, what do you think about Tesla stock? And so this is somebody who knows I work in the financial industry just sort of broadly, but we've never talked about any details, right? So we've never talked about index funds or Bogle heads or anything at all like that. So I just said something to the effect of, I don't ever buy individual stocks, I just use index funds. Are you thinking about investing in it or what's on your mind, what's going on here? And he shares a little bit more information and there's two super critical facts, it turns out. Fact number one about the situation is that he has already invested about half of the household's total savings in this one company stock. Fact number two that I found especially noteworthy is that his partner, his spouse, she's got no idea. She's completely unaware of the situation and it wasn't because he was doing anything sneaky, like that's not what this was at all, it was just that that's how they've divvied up the responsibilities in their household. She's delegated this job to him, he's in charge of the investing decisions, he made what he thought was a good decision and the result is that now she's exposed to this huge risk, not because of a decision that she directly made and she hasn't no idea and so that's one of the ways that oversight can be so valuable is that even if you're not the one making these decisions, you're still affected by them and so checking in every once in a while and just making sure that you have an idea of what's going on because you might have some opinions about it, that can be a good idea. And the second reason that oversight is so important, Bogleheads love to talk about investing, right? If you're married to one you probably know this but sometimes we need to be reminded that investing is just one piece of financial planning. There's a lot more to it than that and to share a story to illustrate this point, several years ago I received an email from somebody who is a very regular poster on the forum so as of this point he had already made thousands of posts and if you read his writing you can tell that he's super knowledgeable about a whole list of investing topics so he can talk about asset allocation, the mutual fund selection, rebalancing strategies and just on and on and on and this email that he sends me, this is by the way the first one-on-one interaction I've ever had with him so it's basically out of the blue and it's a tax question and he outlines the circumstances and the very short summary is that he and his wife have been underpaying their taxes to the tune of like 20 to $30,000 a year for the last several years and he's just figured this out because again, not a situation where he was trying to do anything wrong, they had just made a tax decision at the start of this period that they didn't understand the ramifications of and so now they collectively owe the IRS the big pile of money and when I think back to that situation because even though it was several years ago it really struck me, what I see is this person who had put an enormous amount of time and effort into learning about investing and studying investing and discussing it on the forum and sharing his thoughts and he just didn't put enough time into the other parts of financial planning and so they made this big costly mistake and so that's what I want to do this morning. I want to go through the primary areas under the financial planning umbrella and just give you a checklist of the most common most critical items under each of those topics and the idea is that you can go over this together so that number one, if the person who is not the household's financial manager if they become the financial manager at some point they're better prepared and number two so that we can make sure nothing important is being left out. So the first topic we have is cash flow. That's all of the budgeting related stuff. Risk management, that's the insurance stuff, investing, retirement planning, estate and charitable planning, education planning so that's saving for college and tax planning. And again, this is gonna be a checklist of the most common critical items and to warn you it's gonna feel a little bit like information overload but I've got a few pieces of good news there, number one is that these slides are already available on the Bogle Center website so you don't have to remember all of it. Number two is that this job gets easier over time. More often you go over this together the easier it is because you only have to go over what's changed and the other thing about this is that for some households maybe it makes sense to have the once a year money talk where you just knock out the whole thing. I don't think that's very common. What I see a lot more often and this is what my wife and I do is we have a once a month money talk and so this month we're talking about cash flow. Next month is the insurance stuff investing the next month so it's just smaller more digestible chunks basically. So diving right in in cash flow planning the first question we wanna know is just how much are we spending every month? And then how much do we spend every year because it varies from month to month, right? There's a lot of things that we only pay for once a year certain insurance premiums or maybe you take a vacation every summer so if you just look at last month spending and multiply by 12 that doesn't really tell you how much you're spending over the year. So we wanna know typical monthly spending typical annual spending and what are we spending on? So we know this is how much we're spending but if we categorize it we're spending this much on housing this much on groceries this much on entertainment and then does that align with our values because sometimes when you take the time to actually break it down and see that order and your order of which you're spending most on this next most on this you realize that it makes a little bit of sense to scale back a little here so you can spend somewhat more there on something that you care more about. And one last thing about spending that I always like to look at is subscription costs because these days everything's a subscription. I always think about as a CPA I use Microsoft Excel all the time and when I started in this field you would buy a copy of Microsoft Office which you would install on your computer and then you just had Microsoft Office and now you buy a subscription to Microsoft 365 and you pay for that every month forever and TV's the same thing, right? You sign up for all these different streaming services and I see this pretty often that people will have maybe seven different services and they're only using two of them so it makes sense every once in a while just to look at what your subscription costs are and see if there's anything we can cut out. Another important question still in the cash flow space so this is specifically for accumulators so people who are still saving towards financial independence and retirement what we wanna know is how much are we saving each month and does that put us on track for our goals? So what evidence do we have? That's what we wanna see here we wanna know did we work with some financial planning software or an actual financial planner or the very least spreadsheet analysis what evidence do we have to think that if we keep doing what we've been doing we will end up where we want to end up and for retirees it's basically the same question it's just kinda the flip side of the coin are we on the right track? Is the amount that we're spending sustainable and again what evidence do we have? Was it a spreadsheet analysis, financial planning software? We wanna see something to back that up. Another important question that we wanna check off is that we have a sufficient emergency fund and you'll often hear people say that three to six months of expenses is the appropriate size for an emergency fund but in reality it varies because the biggest reason why people tap into their emergency fund is because they lose their job and so you're spending from your savings for however long until you get the next job and so the appropriate emergency fund size depends on your job so if you're a government employee in a very secure position you can get away with a smaller emergency fund than somebody who is a software developer to start up company and the most extreme example of that is anybody who's already retired they don't really have a risk of job loss anymore obviously and if their portfolio is already big enough to satisfy the spending they don't really need an emergency fund there isn't usually a need to carve out a separate piece of it and just call it the emergency fund the portfolio can just do that job. So that's it for cash flow planning which was our biggest topic insurance is our second biggest topic. First question is simply what types of insurance do we have through which companies and where can I find the details? And with regard to this last question where can I find the details? The ideal situation would be that you don't really have to think about it it should be like the question of where is my toothbrush? You know where that is without extra thought and the reason that that's so important is that if you think about a scenario where you one day suddenly need to know is something in particular covered under our homeowner's policy something went wrong that day so it's probably a stressful day you don't need this to be another source of stress just because you don't know where the information is and then the thing that happens in the insurance space sometimes is the two most common mistakes I see are number one that people will simply not realize that there's a particular type of coverage that they should have and they don't have it and the other one relatedly is that they realize that this type of coverage is important but so they have some coverage in that space but they don't realize that it leaves something important out and disability insurance is the perfect example of both of these because this happens all the time that young people who are still not even close yet to financially independent they couldn't retire at all today they very much are dependent on their job income they don't have disability insurance and that exposes you to a huge risk and I made an offhand comment last year and immediately after that session multiple people came up and said oh yeah I don't have disability insurance what do I do, how do I get that what should I look for and so this happens all the time and then relatedly a lot of a common scenario is that people will know that disability insurance is important and they'll know that they have coverage through their employer and so they'll think great that box is checked off but they don't realize that the employer coverage is short term so maybe it only pays for three months or six months of benefits and of course if you think about it there's a lot of disabilities that last a lot longer than six months some will last the rest of your life and so it's important to have long term coverage also and then the last thing I wanna touch on with regard to disability insurance is the definition of disability that the policy uses because some policies have what's called an own occupation definition that means that if you become unable to perform your own occupation then you will count as disabled and you can receive benefits and that's a good thing that's what you want to see in your policy not as good is in any occupation definition what that means is that in order to qualify for benefits you have to be unable to perform any occupation that's a much stricter definition so it's much harder to qualify for benefits with that sort of policy and moving on we have life insurance so of course we know that we need life insurance if there's anyone dependent on us and do we have sufficient life insurance and this is another case where people will sometimes know that they've got coverage through their employer and think great I've got life insurance I'm good to go and they don't realize it's just not enough coverage because the most common example that I see is that if you have coverage through your employer the death benefit will be one times your annual salary and if you imagine your spouse dying unexpectedly tomorrow and you receive one times their annual salary that's not nearly enough to replace all of the income from them that you have been counting on between now and retirement so most people just need a lot more coverage than that and then one last point about life insurance is that in some couples one partner earns most or all of the income and in that case it can still be important to have life insurance on the other partner and the most common example of that is the situation where spouse A has the job and earns the income spouse B provides the childcare and if you imagine that spouse B dies the household's income isn't about to fall but their expenses are going way up because the surviving spouse now has to pay for full-time childcare which costs a lot and so even though the one partner isn't earning an income they're still providing economic benefit to the family essentially and so we need that reflected in the life insurance coverage and then moving on still in insurance we have all the liability policies so homeowners renters and auto policies and we just wanna check every once in a while the coverage limits because sometimes the decision that made sense several years ago when you purchased this policy might not make sense anymore something I see all the time is that people earlier in their careers when they're more strapped for cash they pick low coverage limits because that's what makes the policy affordable but now if you can afford better coverage because you've gotten some raises as your careers progress it makes sense to buy better coverage most of the time and then one more thing to check on is whether we have an umbrella liability policy what that is cause a lot of people don't haven't even encountered that before basically it's a policy that picks up where your other liability policies leave off so if you get in a car crash and you're at fault and you get sued your auto policy will pay up to the liability limit and then if you have an umbrella policy it picks up after that basically and then the last question that we wanna go over when we're doing these insurance discussions is every year during open enrollment season we want to just take a few minutes at least to look at the different health insurance options because the decision that you made last year it might make sense to switch to a different plan this year and the most critical question there is what we expect our healthcare costs to look like this year and to an extent we don't know but sometimes you do know if for instance you know you're gonna need a particular procedure this year and it's a costly one it can make sense to pick the plan with a higher premium and the lower deductible and a lower out-of-pocket maximum might yield savings for the year so that's it for insurance now the rest of the topics are somewhat faster and investment planning is actually the fastest one there's only a few boxes that we need to check off here despite the fact that we talk about it indefinitely and the first question is is the portfolio reasonably diversified and all I mean here is that Tesla stock example so if there's individual stocks in the portfolio how much is allocated to the biggest one and in my opinion most people shouldn't own individual stocks at all in most cases but if you do we basically just want to avoid a case where if one particular company blows up then our portfolio would blow up along with it we don't want that to even be a possibility and then with regard to the asset allocation so that's just how much is in stocks as opposed to how much is in fixed income why did we pick that and what evidence do we have to show that that's a good fit for us and expense ratios this is another one that Bogleheads will talk about forever it's pretty straightforward basically all it is is that funds that charge less to the investors typically provide better returns so that's a pretty easy way to improve the expected returns from your portfolios just switch from expensive funds to inexpensive funds and lastly this is my favorite one could the portfolio be simplified because when I see people come in as clients the situation a lot of times is that their portfolio is really just a collection of stuff that they've accumulated over 20, 30, 40 years of investing and so they've got the current 401k and then maybe a 401k from the previous employer and maybe another one from the previous employer and an IRA here and an IRA there and it's the same thing with the other spouse and so there's a million different accounts and in every account you'll see eight to 12 mutual funds maybe a couple individual stocks maybe a bond or a CD and if that's what the portfolio looks like there's no way without some sort of assistance from software to have any idea what's actually going on at the overall household level and that's what we care about we care about the overall household level because our goals exist at the household level and so simplifying by combining accounts is usually a good idea and reducing the number of holdings is also usually a good idea and there's great studies from Morningstar that's called the Mind the Gap study comes out every couple of years and it actually shows that investors do better with simpler funds they make better decisions in terms of when they buy them so target date funds, balance funds, life strategy funds, things like that investors do a better job with them because they just put money into them and leave it alone whereas when investors have portfolios that are sliced and diced into a zillion different funds it's really tempting to this one hasn't been doing as well lately so let's get rid of it let's buy that other one and most of the time when people make decisions like that their timing is terrible so simplifying is usually advantageous if you can do it moving on we've got retirement planning and here the question, the first one is simply what's our plan for when we plan to retire and this is for the most part just an excuse to revisit the question that we addressed in cashflow which is are we on track because that's something that we want to be checking on at least pretty regularly and then another topic that you don't really have to worry about until you're getting close to age 62 is social security and the question there is simply when should we be filing for benefits because you can start as early as 62 or age 60 if you're a surviving spouse but the longer you wait the larger your benefit is and so it's a trade-off of higher monthly income versus giving up income in the meantime and so that's something you'll want to spend a little bit of time researching and I gave a talk last year at this conference to dug into that so you can look at that, it's on YouTube, it's free and do we know what we plan to retire to? This one's not financial at all but it is the most important question on the slide by a mile because we're retiring from these jobs but why are we retiring to? Because there's a good number of papers that I've found interesting, this is not my field at all but in the field of psychology showing that two of the things these are not the only two things two of the things that people need to be happy actually sorry, happy is not necessarily the word that gets used, it's often something like long-term contentedness, life satisfaction rather than just like a fleeting feeling of happiness but two of the things number one is close personal relationships that's a critical thing in order to be satisfied with our lives and another thing is that you're doing something with your time that gives you a feeling of competency or mastery or identity and for so many people their job satisfies both of those requirements we've got friendships with people at work our job, we're good at it and so it gives us some personal satisfaction in that sense so we're doing something with our time that we find meaningful or fulfilling and then when you retire that goes away and so it's important to have a specific and explicit plan for these are the steps we're going to take to maintain our friendships and build new friendships and this is what we're going to do with our new available time because if you just fill up all that time with Netflix that's the recipe for depression and so you need something better than that now estate and charitable planning of course you might divide these into two separate monthly topics if you want to whatever works for you estate planning we want to know if we've checked the beneficiaries recently on our retirement accounts and insurance policies so when you open an IRA or any similar account you have to fill out that form that says this is the primary beneficiary and that's who gets the money when I die and this is the secondary beneficiary and that's who gets the money when I die if the primary beneficiary has also died and the most common example if you're in a partnership is that you name the other person as the primary beneficiary and if you have kids typically the kids are the secondary beneficiaries that's kind of the default assumption most of the time but what happens sometimes is you've got mom and dad, they've got child A, child B and then they have child C and when you have a new kid maybe the first thing on your mind isn't signing into vanguard or fidelity or whatever and updating these forms and so maybe you just forget and then if the tragedy happens and mom and dad die in a car crash and you've got child A gets half child B gets half child C, oops and that's not good and so it's important to update these things every once in a while similarly something that you see more often that you might expect is the ex-spouse or the ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend is the beneficiary on one of these accounts and not because we're still close it's just forgot to update it and that's not what you want to see either and then the other big thing here is our critical estate planning documents so do we have a will do we have durable power of attorney for finances and health care power of attorney and those last two documents are just the things that provide somebody else with the legal ability to make decisions on our behalf if we become incapacitated so we can't make decisions for ourselves and then just like with the beneficiary designations when's the last time we updated these and if you just had child C it's time to update the will or if your sister is who you named as your power of attorney several years ago and you had a falling out and you don't speak anymore or maybe she's no longer living it's time to update these things and then just like with the insurance policies we want to know where these are if they're physical documents what drawer are they in? Are they in a safe deposit box? Where are they? Or if they're PDFs what folder on whose computer or a shared drop box drivers specifically and exactly where are these and again we want to know this answer without having to think about it because if you take a minute to imagine the moment in your life where you need to find your spouse's will that's potentially the single hardest day of your life or the hardest week of your life and you don't want it to be made harder by the fact that you just don't know where the damn thing is and so you want to know where all these documents are and moving on to the charitable planning side of things first question would there be a more tax efficient way to do the donating that we're doing because if there is then we can do more donating at the same net cost to us and that's why not and so there's a few things to consider there number one is what we call deduction bunching this is a strategy where let's say you normally donate to seven different charities every year what if instead you made no donations for four years in a row and then in your five you made five times the annual donation and the idea here is that then in your five you get a really big deduction for this big donation that you made and in years one through four you use the standard deduction and it's not always going to work out you have to do the math for your own family but in a lot of cases that results in net savings over the period and then another option is donating appreciated shares so there's three requirements here requirement number one is that this is an investment that you bought and it has gone up in value requirement number two is that this is something you own in a taxable account so it's not an IRA and requirement number three is that you have owned this investment for longer than one year and if all three of those requirements are met and you donate this investment to a charity then you get a deduction for the market value rather than just the amount that you paid for it and you don't have to pay tax on all of that appreciation and the reason that that's so good is that just compare that to the alternative where you sell this investment and you pay tax on all of that appreciation and then you write a check to the charity with what's left you gave up the same shares and you just didn't get to donate as much so donating appreciated shares can be a great approach and then qualified charitable distributions this also has three requirements requirement number one you have to be at least 70 and a half requirement number two it's money that's coming out of a traditional IRA and it has to be specifically a traditional IRA it can't be a 401k or Roth IRA it has to be a traditional IRA requirement three is that it goes directly from the traditional IRA to a charity when that happens it counts as a QCD what that means is two things number one is that it's not taxable to you whereas most of the time when you take money out of a traditional IRA it is taxable so this is some tax savings and the second thing that it means is that it counts towards your required minimum distribution for the year so if you're of an age where you have to take RMDs qualified charitable distributions are a great way to satisfy that requirement without incurring any taxes and also do the charitable giving that you want to do anyway moving on to our second to last topic is education planning first question here how much are we looking at in terms of price tag and if we looked at the different options so four years of private university versus four years of state university versus community college for a couple of years and then a couple of years of state university what are the actual price tags because until you have that information you can't really make an informed decision and then you want to go to at least one college night or financial aid night at your child's school those are generally very informative events where they put you in touch with local resources walk you through the FAFSA process and there's a lot going on there so it's valuable and are we funding a 529 plan that's just a tax advantage way to save for college and one caveat I always add there is that most families don't have enough income to fully fund the retirement savings goal and completely fund the college goal without taking on any student loans and when that's the case retirement saving has to be the priority because even though the college costs are coming sooner and it is a big price tag and you love your kids there's a critical difference here which is that for college costs there might be scholarships there might be financial aid there is no retirement scholarship there's no federally subsidized retirement loans that you can just get because you asked for them and so if you can only do one or the other you want to prioritize saving for retirement we also want to see does our kids school offer any AP courses those are just courses you take in high school that offer college credit and the reason that that is so valuable is that tuition in many cases is based on the number of credit hours it might be a certain dollar amount per semester if you're taking 12 or more and if you're taking nine or fewer credit hours it's a much lower dollar amount or if you can even eliminate an entire semester that's an enormous amount of cost savings and if we research scholarships including from sources other than just the university and the way I often explain this is that we don't typically like to be lumped into groups but now is the time to lump yourself into as many groups as you can and what I mean by that is think about every way that you could be classified so your ethnicity, your religion where you live, what you do for a living what organizations you're a part of and then think about the same questions for your child because there might be scholarships for somebody in those groups so take some time to think about all of those things that you could be called and then do some research online to see what might be available and then the last question do we think our child would study for the PSAT if we encourage them to do that and the reason I mentioned this test in particular is that it's the one that is the initial hurdle for national merit scholarships and those many universities offer super generous scholarships for national merit students in many cases full tuition and so if you think your child would study for this test it's worth buying a book on Amazon and encouraging them to spend a couple of hours a week for maybe a couple of months and I know that to a busy high schooler that's going to sound terrible it's going to sound like this enormous burden but we're talking about 16 to 20 something hours total over their life and the potential payoff is enormous so if you think your child would do that with some encouragement it's worth giving them that encouragement and moving on to our last topic we've got tax planning and there's way too many things that fall under this umbrella to cover all of them so just a few of the most common ones for accumulators so again that's anybody saving towards retirement are we maxing out our retirement accounts and have we looked recently at the Rothfriest tax deferred question because in many cases you might have made a decision several years ago that made sense at that time but it doesn't make sense now and so if you've signed up for your 401k six years ago but since then your income has gone up or it's gone down or you've gotten married or you've gotten divorced or you've had kids or your spouse's income has changed all of those things would change your tax situation and so the Rothfriest tax deferred decision that was right then should be reevaluated and then for retirees it's the same question but the other side of the coin so here instead of looking at which accounts we're contributing to now we wanna know which accounts should we be taking out of so if we need to spend a certain amount of money this year how much of it should come out of taxable how much of it should come out of Roth and how much of it should come out of tax deferred and the talk I gave last year also discusses that in depth Wade was also talking about it yesterday and that is a topic where there's a fair bit going on but the potential for tax savings is very significant so it's worth digging into a little bit once you're approaching retirement and is our portfolio tax efficient and there's just two things that I wanna mention here number one is that we generally want the assets that grow the fastest in Roth accounts or rather we want to fill the Roth accounts with those assets because A Roth accounts if you meet the requirements you never have to pay tax on the growth and B Roth accounts don't have RMDs whereas tax deferred accounts do and so when you combine those two factors if you could choose one type of account that you would want to grow the fastest you would want your Roth accounts to grow the fastest and so most of the time you wanna fill those with stocks that's basically just means you wanna total stock market fund or international fund or total world or something like that in your Roth accounts most of the time and then in our taxable accounts we basically just wanna avoid anything that is going to create a lot of taxable income and a lot of tax cost every year so a few things on that list are high yield bonds, junk bonds they pay a lot of interest that means a lot of taxable income and a lot of taxes so we don't want them in a taxable account mutual funds with high turnover because whenever a mutual fund sells something within the portfolio if it sells it for a gain you have to pay tax on that gain so even though you didn't sell something the fund sold something so you have to pay taxes and the more turnover there is the more often you have to pay those taxes and then real estate and investment trusts, REITs those are just stocks in the real estate industry and they're a perfectly fine thing to own but if you own them you want them in a retirement account because in a taxable account the problems are that number one they pay more dividends than most stocks do so more taxable income and those dividends are taxed at a higher tax rate than most dividends so we don't want REITs in taxable and then the last question under tax planning is Roth diversions would those be useful either this year or in the near future and Roth conversion is really just when you move money from tax deferred over to Roth so we're taking it out of a traditional IRA and moving it into a Roth IRA and when you do that you usually have to pay tax on that money the money that you've converted and the idea is basically that we're taking advantage anytime that you have an unusually low tax rate so the most common example is you've retired so your income has gone down because you're no longer working and you haven't yet started receiving social security so you have a temporarily low level of income which doesn't necessarily but usually means a temporarily low tax rate so the idea is we're gonna take advantage of that low tax rate move some money over now pay tax at that low tax rate and then it's in Roth going forward and the other common examples less common but still important to know about are if you ever have an unpaid sabbatical or if you ever get laid off for part of the year so reasons why your income for that year would be unusually low that's a good time to think about a Roth conversion for that year it doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea but it's worth considering and so that is the entirety of the checklist and unfortunately that's still not super duper comprehensive there could be other things that are important to your family and so this is something that we're gonna have to adjust over time but fortunately as you probably noticed there's probably some things that aren't relevant to your family maybe your kids are already finished with college so we don't really need to worry about the education planning anymore and again I think that for most families what's going to work a lot better than trying to just pound out this whole thing start to finish in one day is smaller manageable chunks so going over this with your partner once a month this month we talk about cash flow planning and we make sure that we have a big enough emergency fund we look at how much we're spending every month next month we go over insurance we make sure we have disability insurance we make sure that includes long-term disability and we look at the definition of disability own occupation versus any occupation the next month is investing and you just one month at a time and it does get easier over time because you really only have to address the things that have changed since last time for the most part and again the goal here is so that both spouses can get involved so that if the one who is not the household's financial manager becomes the financial manager they're better prepared to take on that task and number two so that in the meantime that person can be providing some oversight because I can tell you from experience that if spouse A is the one who is supposedly taking care of all of the financial planning topics sometimes something gets left out they're doing their best they're making a very good effort they're researching all of these things but sometimes something gets left out and so having the other person check in on a regular basis with an actual checklist and say are we taking care of this and this and this that can be extremely valuable so that's really all I had and I think we've got some questions, okay ooh, all right, question is counseling the only option when the reluctant spouse refuses to engage on this topic ooh, all right getting serious I don't think so I think it's not necessarily a bad idea and so yesterday I did mention in one of the sessions you might not have been there but I did mention counseling and I don't I'm not joking about that by the way, I mean this very seriously most of us benefit from counseling at some point in our lives because most of us aren't going to have perfect mental health from the day we're born until the day we die it's just like physical health care we need mental health care at some point it's valuable and so we joke about it also because it can be funny and it maybe makes us uncomfortable but I'm not joking it's worth doing much and I think that what I'm talking about here the oversight committee idea to let you in on the secret that can be a bit of a hook, right that's what we're trying to do give this person a job, right something that shows them that they're valuable and it's not a trick it's not tricking them into thinking they're valuable they are because I can tell you so I'm a CPA and my wife is a software developer before that she was a food writer before that she was a court advocate for domestic violence victims and her degree is in criminal justice so nothing related to personal finance in the entirety of her education or career and when we go over these things all the time she's got valuable input things that I didn't think of and I think the reason for that and I see this by the way working with clients any time I'm sitting with a couple because most of the time there is the one spouse who's super-duper rare to go and the other one who doesn't say as much but when that spouse who doesn't say as much does say something every time it's critical and I think the reason is that those of us who spend all of this time thinking about the financial stuff that's what our heads filled up with and the other person has more space in their brain for all of the other things going on in life and all of the financial decisions that we make are not just financial they're part financial and partly about the other things that are going on in our life and so this comes up all the time you'll see we're doing some retirement tax planning and talking about taxable income and all the things you can talk about and then the one who's less talkative the spouse who's less involved will say what if your dad ends up living with us and just brings up a whole thing that hasn't even been considered and boy that's important we need to talk about that and that happens so we're not tricking them into thinking that they're valuable as the oversight committee they are if you haven't gotten their input yet you're missing out so that's what I would encourage you to do is there anyone who does not need umbrella insurance how about if they don't own a house or car that's a good question so if you don't own a house you're probably a renter hopefully you have renters insurance and you can still incur some liabilities in that way if someone comes over to your home and they get injured they can sue you and so renters insurance can cover that they can pick up from there but there are certainly households where it's less critical I will say about renters insurance or not renters insurance although also renters insurance but umbrella insurance is not very expensive if you're looking at long-term care policies or health insurance those are really expensive and so you might be expecting this huge price tag umbrella policy is not that expensive so before saying I don't want that at least go find out how much it would cost but it might be less than you're thinking any recommendations on personal software planning tools for DIYs this is one I struggle with because the software that I use is advisor software and so it's expensive it's priced for advisors it wouldn't make, you know, it pay like three grand a year for one of them and probably like 1500 a year for the other one and so if you're a DIYer it wouldn't make sense to pay for that and because I'm happy with that software I don't spend a million hours test-driving all of the other softwares I can tell you what I hear good things about so this is second-hand information but I hear good things about new retirement Steve, are you here? Steve, he's a bubblehead he's been here this weekend and he's the person, there's a team of them but he's the owner of the company and he's involved in this community and listening to your feedback he cares about what you think and they're constantly building out new things and oh it did all these great things and it was perfect but I hear good things about it and it is getting better over time because they're actively working on it another one that I hear good things about most of the time although I did hear somebody yesterday who wasn't thrilled with it is Maxify Planner M-A-X-I, Maxify M-A-X-I-F-I Planner and that's from Lawrence Kotlikoff who is a super knowledgeable social security expert as well as just broadly retirement planning expert that's another great piece of software Prolana Gold that's P-R-A-L-A-N-A Gold as opposed to Bronze or Silver that's an Excel based program and again, I hear good things about them I haven't tested them in any serious way so those are the three that I hear the most about Wade, yesterday mentioned one that I've actually never even heard of Flexible Retirement Planner something like that I don't know the exact name but I'd do a Google search about it you can find it how do you know how much life insurance you need good question so question number one is there anybody dependent dependent on you for income because if there isn't somebody who's early in their career they have no kids and they're not married or anything zero is the answer because nobody's going to be dependent unless you have a pension without a survivor benefit then again nobody's hung out to dry if you die unexpectedly or expectedly and so it depends on basically we want to look at the needs of other people that would go unmet if you died tomorrow that's the driving factor here and so how far are we from financial independence because if you're almost there a smaller amount of life insurance is totally reasonable if you're 24 and you've got a brand new baby that's going to be a lot of costs that need to be covered so life insurance depends on basically the needs that would go unmet if you were to die and didn't have life insurance what advice do you have for those who overfunded their 529 plans find somebody else who is planning on college education is basically the answer because you overfunded it probably what that means is that you have more in there than your kids needed there's a good chance there's going to be grandkids or great nieces and nephews or whoever somebody else you love and care about who you wouldn't mind paying for their college costs or actually even yourself if the idea of studying whatever sounds appealing you can pay for yourself with a 529 plan 529 plans can now be used to put money into a Roth IRA for a person who is the beneficiary of the plan a couple tricky things there is that there's a dollar limit and in order to qualify the person needs to be eligible to contribute to a Roth IRA anyway so basically this can just count as the contribution for the year if they're allowed to do that so that's something to look into certainly but if you're looking into it really really look into it to make sure that you don't have to be eligible to be eligible basically is what I would say estate planning how about joining the military out of high school or joining ROTC in college education planning sorry not estate planning I was trying to figure out that that sounds morbid oh gosh education planning that honestly is something I don't have a lot to say I don't have personal experience I don't know if she's in the room right now but I would bet that she would have a lot better information than I would have on those topics and that's the last question I think we're out of time so thank you