 Welcome to the Bogle Heads chapter series. This episode was jointly hosted by the Tampa Bay and South Florida chapters and recorded June 22, 2021. It features Mark Zoral and Jason Lynch demonstrating the plan vision service and e-money platform. 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. Welcome everybody to this joint meeting of the Tampa Bay and South Florida Bogle Heads chapters. We're pleased to have Mark Zoral and Jason Lynch joining us again. This time to demo their plan vision service and the e-money advisor platform. They were with us back in April for our joint meeting. At that time, they presented a number of financial topics for consideration both before and during retirement as well as their perspectives on the future of technology in the financial advice sector. This meeting is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as personalized investing advice. I want to thank Miriam, the South Florida coordinator for assisting us this evening and we will be taking questions throughout the presentation, but please hold them until we have a break. For a brief background, Mark Zoral, who is the founder of plan vision around 2012, I believe, has 27 years of experience in the financial services industry. He started his career helping smaller companies establish employer-based retirement plans and subsequently his efforts have evolved to primarily helping individuals plan and prepare for their financial futures. Jason Lynch joined plan vision in February 2020 after spending the last 18 years in private accounting as well as 12 years in public accounting working with taxes for high-network clients and their businesses. He's been indexing since the mid-90s and is a true Boglehead having attended the National Conference in 2016 and being a regular presenter at his local Michigan Bogleheads chapter. So without further ado, I'll turn this over to Mark and Jason. I'll provide an overview of plan vision and kind of our approach and then we'll go into the program and I'll make some comments about how we use that and then how it can be used kind of as a tool for people to help plan for their future. You want to flip forward? Yeah, so that's just the front page of our website. Some comments that I would make if you want to go on to the next slide, Jason. Yeah, so our view is very much a Boglehead type mentality that investors can have great portfolios, simple, low-cost financial planning investment advice. Not only do we think that the financial services industry grossly over complicates investing so that people think they need their services, but also when it comes to financial planning, we think that can be done very quickly and very efficiently if you're independent and you use technology well. So that's a big part of how we go about what we do here at plan vision. And e-money is a critical part of that. We use e-money as our basically our hub for client information and they have a great client portal we'll go through. And also in our interactions with our clients, we use Salesforce a lot. We have integrations built between a company called Alchemy and Salesforce so that their data flows into our system. It's not personal data. It's more their investing and guidance preferences. We have clients in 50 states. And then we work with over 100 nationalities. And I think it's gosh, it must be more ongoing approaching 100 countries around the world. It's a lot of what are called ex-patriots and there probably are some people here even on the session that might end up wanting to move overseas later in life. But we work with a lot of those folks to help them navigate those challenges. And I should also mention that about two and a half years ago, as an advisor, I reached out to Vanguard and spoke with the folks on their international and in their international areas, they're believed to be their highest growth area. And what's happening is the message of this kind of investing, index-based investing, the Boglehead philosophy is going around the world. In fact, our largest clientele out of the US is out of the UAE. We are promoted or aren't promoted, but we're very well known in the UAE through a Boglehead group there, the Simplify Boglehead community. So that's pretty cool. So next screen, Jason. Yeah, so e-money advisor is a system that we license as an advisory firm. It has a huge range of capability that's built into it. We're not even 3,500, I think, give or take. We've worked with far more than that. We have about 3,500 clients right now. There was a question here. So e-money has a broad range of capability both in the platform. It's incredibly robust and powerful. A lot of the work we do on our side, clients can do some modeling on their side. It was acquired by Fidelity in 2015. Important comments about e-money. The client is not the end, the client is not our client. We are the e-money client. So we interface directly with them. Our clients cannot interface directly with e-money. I hope to someday, and I kind of joke with our clients about this, I hope to someday not actually have to interact with our clients. They can just use e-money on their own. We're actually coming out of the new website later on this year where we hope to give a lot more of the tools to help our clients use e-money more directly on their own, a lot more videos and explanations. But it is run by us, the advisors. We do the deep modeling. Our clients can do some minimal modeling on their own. So with that, we'll go ahead and get into it. We're going to go through, just to remind you, it is an advisor based platform as I went into. We'll go into the client functionality and then the advisor functionality as well. But we'll kind of walk you through the screens that we go through with our clients and show some of the things that that we help them accomplish. This is the client portal. So this is what your screen looks like. And this will change over time as they come out with new, there might be some of our clients on the call or people that have used e-money as well. And this is just the basic client portal. They are updating this. I think you can get a little more information on this depending upon how you set up the portal for yourself. But this is the home screen for the client portal. And then you go on to the next screen, Jason. So this is the organizer. Now, when our clients begin the process, they go to the organizer and they go into the account section. I think you have a screen on that one too, Jason. Yeah, you go into the account section and you can integrate all of your accounts into the platform. Now, you can do one of two ways. One is you can actually link them, which is what most of our clients do that requires a user ID and password. Or you can add them manually. If you link them, then they will be updated for the most part on a regular basis. Some of these connections will break periodically. Some of the larger ones need to go through overhauls every once in a while, where they'll just kind of have to clean them up and then our clients have to go reconnect them. But you can't have the data current and live. What is interesting to see if your data is live and you're one of our clients that logs in every day to see how close retirement is getting, if your data is live and the markets go down a lot, oh gosh, your graphs will look quite a bit different. This happened in March of last year. People thought, oh, I thought retirement was a year or two years away. All of a sudden, it looked pretty grim. So if you're connected, you'll see that kind of activity in the reporting area. But also if you do it manually, a lot of clients just prefer doing it manually. They're uncomfortable with the security and they're very comfortable just doing it themselves. It's pretty easy to log in and update your accounts here manually in the organizer. Another tab in the organizer area is your income expenses and savings. A comment that I would make here is that for many of our clients, and I'll get into a few of the areas where you can do your own modeling, for many of our clients, they will think to themselves, you know, I do want to retire someday in the future, but I'm not going to fully retire. I want to go work part-time or make some income. And in the annual income, that is an area that they can do their own modeling. They can pick different, making different levels of income for different periods of time. They can also enter pensions in here and then different salary structures. The savings you'll see down at the bottom are just any sort of savings that represent annual contribution towards their future. Okay, and here is where our clients, this is another area where our clients can model the retirement date. You can go here and change your retirement date and go look at the reports. In this case, this client has two children. They're putting in their future educational expenses. The educational planning program, any money is quite robust. It's a module that's integrated, excuse me, the data is integrated, but there are separate college planning reports that are produced by e-money. And also it can identify expenses by college if you really want to get into how some level of precision on your expenses for college expenses. Now the major expenses you're seeing down there, that's a really critical component of any projection. These represent the expenses that you think you're going to have, either if you're in retirement or if you're projecting out towards retirement. There's a lot of variation in this. You can pick expenses for certain periods of time, and that's fairly valuable. We believe most retirees are going to want to have graduated expenses during retirement, maybe have a higher level from 55 to 65, maybe a lower level from 65 to 75 and so on. And you can do all of this on your own if you really enjoy doing some additional modeling here in the future goals area of the organizer. So the vault, a lot of our clients will share their information with us. Some of us send basically all the documents they've ever had or accumulated their entire life to the vault, but it is secured so you can upload documents there. Jason does a lot, and he'll talk about this later, he does a lot of tax planning with their clients, and our clients will upload their 1099s or their tax forms and he'll be able to use those by sharing them here. So this is the reporting area. Now the reporting, E-Money produces a very broad array of reports. Now when we do presentations we concentrate on about three to four of them, but there's a lot if you want to pick through here. And you can also have your own favorites as far as reports that you might want to see more frequently. The ones that are the most valuable and we'll see those a little bit on the side that we go through tonight would be the cash flow report. That is far and away the best report for planning purposes. The balance sheet is useful if you're interested in seeing where your net worth is, and there's actually a few different balance sheets you can look at. Your assets, we're going to go into the assets report as well. There's a really nice tax type report. Yeah, we will get into that about the Roth conversion planning. And then there's a few more reports. Actually if you see the little elevator shaft to the right of the drop-down report, that goes down pretty far. Very nice income tax reports. In fact, Jason had a nice project with a client of ours where he really had to delve into depth on the different data points that were being produced by E-Money, but it was quite revealing for this client as far as how his income taxes were being calculated and how he was integrating his capital gains, his dividends, the whole nine yards into the program. So yeah, I think that that's it. Now I'm going to use this as a break. We talked earlier about maybe a natural break. This is, I finished going through the client portal. So if there were any questions here, I think there was at least one question about Roth conversion planning, and I'm going, Jason and I will go into that on the other side. And I can't recall if there are any other questions. Barry had a question. Do I need to open the chat? If anybody wishes to ask their question directly on the mic, please use the raised hand icon and you'll float to the top of the screen where we can see you. We'll alternate that with questions submitted via the chat. Okay, he's at the top of the class. Alrighty, Barry. Yeah, so I had a quick question about how you handle 401k plans which have like collective investment trusts where you're not going to have a public ticker, might not be able to get some market data so easily. Yeah, that's actually quite common. So let me just also rephrase that question for everyone else. The question's about a 401k plan, collective investment trusts are not publicly traded. In fact, in many retirement plans, they brand these things and then you can't get a ticker on them anyway, even if they're like General Electric's 401k plan, they'll have their own S&P 500. What we can do, and actually our clients can do this, they can actually pick the asset class. If they can't do it, then we can do it for them so we can identify what is the correct asset class for that holding. Somebody had a question about who enters the data. Good question. I hadn't thought about doing that. When you subscribe for our service, what we do is we send you the link from eMoney and we send you this email that says, hey, you signed up for us, you're doing the homework. So you have to go to the website, watch the videos and enter all the data. So I think when we roll out our $2,000 program, then we'll start to take entry, about $189 that's going to be to the clients to do the data entry. I have heard from many of our clients that they actually like the process of going through this. It's a way for them to get their head around what their assets are and clean things up. There were some more things in the chat here. I don't know if those are questions that I can answer. Whether you could add your own information to the program? I'm sorry, Mary, is that a question? Yeah, that was one of the questions in the chat. Let me see if it was that clients can add their own information in terms of data entry. Yes, they can. They'll be able to log in their side and see if the, first of all, they'll see if the connections are working or not working. You'll get a message if they're broken. Or if you just want to update a manual, you can do that anytime. I mentioned that we have all these expats. We do financial plans for people that are getting paid in Korean won in Japanese yen. I mean, it's like $100 million, 100 million yen is what they're, so they can do it. All of those folks do it manually. So they type in and they just update their stuff manually. There's a question, a couple of questions more. Reports, can the client run unassisted? Is there a capability of? They can run all of the reports that are shown here. There's well over 200. Many of them don't apply. There's a lot of stock option reports, but clients can run all of the reports without contacting us. Yeah, what they'll do a lot of times, there's a button here. I don't even think it's showing up. It might be hidden right here where you can do, you can just do a web print that will print that. Now we'll get into this. We're going to get some of this stuff on the other side here, but we will produce a lot of reports on our side and we immediately drop them in the vault if they're reports that we're doing. Can e-money keep track of TIA traditional? If you link your TIA account, TIA had a huge break. I think it was a year and a half. It lasted for like four or five months, but now it's working again. But it will connect the TIA account. We can label it as a fixed account. Is there a capability of one-time changes? Yes. This is a good question. Downsizing or a windfall such as an inheritance? Yes. In e-money, that's called a buy, sell transaction. If you're downsizing, we sell the house and we buy a new one. That's programming we would do on our side. Inheritances are handled quite effectively in e-money in that we can introduce assets later in life. We can have them show up in the future. That's a part of the robustness that e-money has. That's behind the scenes that we do a lot of. If I were to recommend, is there anything I should tell that he should get together or will tell them they need to do data? They're going to have to enter their finances basically. I mean, if they want us to do a plan, they'll want to enter their accounts and when they think they're going to retire and that kind of thing. I'm a fidelity customer and have done some. Here's a question about fidelity customer and have done some e-money simulation. My understanding of this is that the version that's used by fidelity is a more limited version than this one. I think that they want you to work out, reach out to their advisors and use them. That's all I'm aware of. Would like more control and hope it's separate. Well, you have control of the client portal and you can do some of the planning we just went through. To do the detailed planning, here's a follow-up question. I'm sorry, my question is whether there's anything up to it needs to organize or get to. No, no, you don't need. No, you just got to have all your financial information. If you're going to enter manually or even aggregated, you need to have all your account information and make sure you're organized in advance, but your process walks people through that so they can do it over time. It doesn't have to be necessarily all at once. Yeah, we've had clients that have taken over a year to get around to getting their stuff in. Others will do it on like an evening. So it can vary depending upon how excited. Here's another question which asks, when you mentioned, Mark, about doing a plan, you're doing a plan, what does that mean? I think, well, I guess the way I would answer the question is a plan, it depends on what people are coming from, but it might be an assessment of where you're at today. How healthy are you financially? What is your savings potential? Is your insurance covered? We can do that pretty quickly if the data is entered, but doing a plan, generally speaking, is a projection out to the future. How are you standing for your goal? Which for virtually all of our clients is retirement planning. And then it just has a, the way it naturally unfolds when you do a plan is you would address what are the right place, what are the right accounts to be saving money in? Should I do pre-tax Roth or pre-tax or Roth in my phone case? Should I do Roth conversions? Where should I, what assets might I sell when I need to access the funds? That's all part of the plan. But it's just a general financial plan and we certainly do discuss how we feel about our client's insurance needs. We'll provide comments on that. I've got a question, Mark, if I can interject. I'm sure a lot of people are wondering for being such a low price point, what is the typical amount of time that you would spend with a client and how would they organize themselves over time to best use your service? Well, that's second one, I'll have to think of an answer there, but I would say in the first year, probably two to three hours. And that, you know, I have a, I have normally with all of our clients, we have a 50 minute full planning session and we can cover most of the detail of their plan. And that's where when I mentioned earlier, I think that the financial services industry over complicates financial planning is with a tool like this, it's getting easier and we can do that on a more timely basis. So anyways, but there's upfront work they need to do with Jason or Christian to get the plan clean. They have a meeting with me and then there may be some follow-up work. Jason has had, depending upon our client's complexity, he's had multiple follow-up sessions with clients. So some clients can take more time. Other clients, frankly, it's really simple. There's not a lot of chit chat in their situation. But I would say probably an hour and a half to three hours the first year, maybe, I don't know, a half an hour going forward every year. Some people, you know, some people have more questions than others. What was your second question, Alan? I'm sorry. Well, based on how to prioritize, I guess from my perspective as a fairly new client as well, I tried to focus on a few key questions that I had and I figured I would follow up with less lower priority things down the road. Because there's obviously a limited amount of time that we can spend face-to-face virtually on this. Well, I guess the way that we leave it with our clients when we do plans with them is that they can simply reach out to us anytime they have questions or needs and they set up a session with them with us. I mean, I can think of maybe, I've been doing this quite a while now, the high volume of clients, maybe less than five clients that just kept on coming back and back with more and more questions. And of course, in any client base, you're going to have more and more, you're going to have some of that. But most of our clients seem to, they kind of get that this is not a thing where you need to sit down with us every quarter and go over stuff. So they seem to be able to figure out the questions that make the most sense for their situation. I'm not sure if I'm adequately answering the question, but... That's good. Let me read, there's a couple more chat questions that have come in. I'll go ahead and pick up some of these. One of them, let's see, somebody's asking if plan vision can link to some of the newer brokerages such as Wealthfront or M1 Finance. Well, Wealthfront, I think so. M1, no, and Robinhood, no. And what we've been told by E-Money is they don't want to connect with E-Money, right? I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what we've been told. Yeah, but folks could also manually enter in their holdings. And also, can financial plans be tailored to the specific needs of unmarried couples or people with disabilities? Or would you say those concerns are too specifically complex for a high-volume business like yours, high-volume model business like yours? Well, the unmarried couples, if you're just talking about different tax planning, the system will handle that perfectly fine. We have a lot of clients that are not married and filed separately. We do have several clients. Jason has interacted with clients that have children that have disabilities. We don't want to pretend that we can help them in more of the advanced planning needs of that area, but we can certainly help them do financial planning. Even though our business is high-volume, man, we get into some details with our clients. So we can go pretty far. I think if you were to find a financial advisory firm that's specialized in families with children's of disabilities, then they would be a better suited to meet your trust needs and that kind of thing. That's just something we're not aware of. But when it comes to actual planning, we can really go into detail. There's a good question here also. What type of individual or planning questions would not be a good fit for your company? I don't think there are going to be any on this call. People that think that e-money will tell them how their life is going to unfold financially the next four years. We've had clients like, it's not a match. I will get some of those from the fire community, not that many, but they want to know if saving, let's say $300 a month or $310 is like, what is the exact dollar amount I need to save to get there? So if there's a level, and I think they would actually, I don't even think they're a match for many other advisors, but depending on how precise they want to be in their planning, they may not be a good match. Yeah, if they want to visit with us every two months or so, just update their plan or go over it in depth, they're not going to be a good match. Now, there's another, I mean, I don't know how it may be just the software engineers out there, but those people that want to really do it themselves, they want to run the plan. They're going to end up being dissatisfied. I just had a guy by yesterday, he sent me an email saying, well, Mark, how far can I see? Look, if you really think you're going to hear all the, all the planning, you're just going to be frustrated with this program because it's a great program, but we will do the detailed planning for you. So is it, yes, is it possible to start with manual entry? Yeah, you can do that for sure. Does Jason do any, no, no, we don't do any tax. No, thank you. And one thing you mentioned to Christian, and that's another assistant you have associate who walks through with the client to make sure that e-money has been properly filled out with the information you need. So that's an important first step really in massaging the data and making it all presentable and thorough. Yeah, thanks Alan. So the process is you buy the service, you load all your data, and then you submit this checklist. And the checklist is really a tool for us and for you to kind of track how you're coming along. But then once you submit the checklist, that's telling us you think you've entered as much as you can with the money. Oh, we certainly don't expect it to be perfect. And then you have a session with Christian, he cleans it up and Jason actually has these sessions too. I used to do them, but since we've grown. And, but, and then it's relatively clean by the time it gets to me. So I think that that is all of the questions. Any further questions at this point? If not, we'll proceed. Okay. So this is the advisor side of the platform. Now when we have sessions with our clients, this is where we work out. We just show this these sessions are very interactive. We go back and forth and I'll ask the clients questions they can interject with changes. But this is how we work from. So this is what this portal looks at. The portal does lay out differently over here than it does on the advisory. One thing I should mention, I don't know if it's obvious or not, but I mean, where I see this whole thing going in the long run is that these kinds of programs, the money and maybe who knows what's going to come along next, are going to get easier and easier for the layperson to use. You know, where I mean, I view plan vision as being a bit of an intermediary right now between the information that helps the client better understand their life and need money. So we provide guidance and comments on it, but you know, it'd be pretty slick at some point down the road where the client just has access to this. They hire us for a few dollars and we just provide some insights on it and then they get on with their life. So anyways, so this is what the overview screen looks like on our side. You can go onto the next screen, Jason. So we work off two tabs with our clients, the facts tab and the reports tab, and the facts are just your circumstances. So we start there, we confirm everything, date of birth now, the retirement age, that's I asked people now is that someone's asking here, we charge $189 for the first year and then $8 each month after that if you renew. The retirement age, we do ask our clients, is that when you want to retire or when you think you have to retire? Or did you just use that as a marker? So we use that as a good way to get started. They can enter their children in here and then they have any other family or whoever they want to do. Next slide. So that was the basic, I'm sorry, that was the basic facts. Now we're in the advanced facts and this is just the facts with a bit more detail. So at this point, what we'll do is we'll go from kind of area to area, confirming the client's information. So you want to see what's next, Jason? Yeah, so now we're in the planning area and you can see we've got scenarios. This is for Frankie and Joanna Miller. Scenarios, we run on our side and here's the way it works. I'll do planning with clients right on the spot with them. We don't really have a canned presentation. We're just kind of going over it with them. Anyways, in this case, for this couple, what we did is we ran three alternative scenarios. What if they delayed retirement and social security? What if they retired 65 that's in part-time consulting? And then Roth conversions, those would be relatively standard type scenarios. Pretty good examples here for the sample client. But what we do is we go into this screen, we open one of these up, we go into them and it keeps all the base facts the same and then we'll just start to change them. And so I'll manipulate these things right with our clients and then we'll go and we'll look at the output and we'll do side-by-side comparisons between not delaying retirement and social security and then delaying. These are drop-downs that you can do to do side-by-side comparisons. Now we've jumped into the reporting area. So we saw earlier how some of the reports view on your side and so yeah, there's a lot of reports here. We don't go through all of the ones that we use, the cash flow report which is at the top there, that's a very popular one. And you can see this report here is showing that graph there on the right is displaying how your money would unfold over time. Now in this case, if the client's goal was to live to 90 and then almost run out of money and died and they're pretty successful because that's what's going to happen in their plan. So now what you can't see is all the data right below this. Oh, there it is. So these are all the data points that go into that graph and so I'll walk people through this so they understand the numbers of that graph and we will provide context and interpretation on these numbers. You know, what risks they have, what's the likelihood of success. On the right hand side, you can see their total portfolio assets. That's the chart above. 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, yep, it's growing until retirement and then once they retire, now they're spending in their assets. Now we use rates of return in this a 5% pre-retirement and 3% post, which most people would agree are pretty conservative numbers, but people can use whatever numbers they want if they want to update them. Anyways, we have their income on the left hand side that thing called income flows. That's their income from their work. Then they stop working and there's a gap in time and those would might be good years to do Roth conversions. The plan distributions is the third column. For most people, those are just going to be the RMDs, required minimum distributions. For some people that have inherited IRA, they may pop up there or if they have like a deferred comp plan that they're going to get distributions from. Now the total expenses column, which is three columns to the right, the number that matters there is the number below the blue line. That's the amount of money you think you're going to spend as a retiree. That is your targeted expense and you can see how it's changing over time. So we talk through these factoids with our clients and each one of those columns is a hyperlink. You can open it up and we might provide more explanation on that. So the cash flow report is the most valuable report that we'll use to answer the broader question of whether or not I'm going to run out of money. Go on to the next screen. This is also a useful report. Total assets and the total portfolio assets is what somebody may live off of and you can see that actually down there, Jason, you'll see if you go down a little bit to the right. Yeah, that's a little bit back to your left. There you go. Right now the black one. Yeah, right there. That's the same number in the cash flow report that we're using to show how they spent down their money. But in this case, the client's got another 1.2 million probably in properties. And so that's what's reflected in this chart here. So and we'll talk with folks about, you know, you have a house and maybe you're going to sell that in downsides. So that's $600,000 worth of equity you may get that will boost your retirement later in life if they're more squeezed, if they're more challenged. Next screen. You know what, Jason? I'm going to have you go back if you can. Yeah. I don't know that we produced this report. Maybe it'll show up later and I apologize if we did. But up near the top above the word assets, the big blue word, there's tax type. That's an awesome report that I like because it breaks out your assets by how they are taxed. And I will use that to make recommendations on how we think our clients should allocate their assets. So if you can move on. Okay, so here's an income tax report. You can see the total income tax, the effective income tax rate, what should stand out at this plan with this plan, though, is that this graph here is the amount that the client's going to have to pay in taxes. Man, they've got a huge period of time here where they're not going to be paying anything in taxes, potentially great opportunity to do Roth conversions or maybe harvest some gains or something like that. And in this case, even though I don't think we have it in here, in the sample client back in the planning area, they had already run alternative scenarios for this client where they had done some Roth conversions. So they probably did it right for those that gap in time and they can see, oh, what if I convert 20,000 or 50,000 or 70 or 80, you know, that's modeling that we do with our clients. So on to the next screen, income tax. Right. So this is just merely showing the breakdown from the previous slide of the income. I added this one. So what we're looking at gross total income here, when we hyperlink, you can click on a blue font and that will bring us to the underlying report, which is the income. And the income is made up of earned income, later on taxable social security, investment income, which means income tax is ordinary income, not necessarily pure investment income, dividends, capital gains, et cetera, non-taxable income, any non-taxable insurance benefits, and then the gross total income will tie to the previous report, of course. So that just shows the detail of what makes up the gross income from the income tax report. This next report, and I'm going to jump in, this is one of my favorite reports with the need money. Where it comes from, I'm going to go back to. So this column here is called regular federal income tax, which looks pretty non-descript. But by drilling down into it, we are presented with this report. This report, most of you would recognize, is effectively page one and two of your federal 1040. We've got our income, above the line deductions, AGI. A cool thing about e-money is that the U.S. tax code is directly built in, and it comprises effectively the entire internal revenue code. The exemption column does show sunset of the current tax law, which is current law, and the exemptions come back, and the below line deduction is made up generally of the standard deduction and or the itemized deductions, if they're applicable. Taxable income, of course. And then another important column here is called income tax space. Income tax space is the amount of income tax as ordinary income with subject to ordinary income tax rates, because of course we have capital gains tax and income tax base. So again, my favorite report because it does show pages one and two of your 1040. E-money also has the AMT calculations and will compute AMT if you're subject to the credit, subject to the tax and allow you to carry the credit forward, and it does model correctly. So this is huge benefit of E-money is that the internal revenue code is built in. Yeah. Okay. One thing I'll mention for those that are optimistic that the tax rates will stay in place when they sunset, that is a switch you can flip. We don't get many requests for that. It's there if you want to go down the path. What's the next screen juice? You just, yeah, this is what you should talk about. All right. So where we're at here, this is in the advanced fact section. And in the investment area, there are taxable accounts. We're able to go in on the advisor's side and adjust the realization. What the realization means is how the growth is taxed and treated income wise during the year. So for this particular account, it's showing that there's about a $16,000 worth of growth this year. We can actually model and sometimes have it get close to a client's 1099 because someone may have a lot of qualified dividends. There may be some ordinary income tax. Capital gains means it's growing without being taxed. There could be non-taxable income and the turnover estimate will generate taxes based on how often the account is turned over and how much activity there is. So this is can be adjusted and that will reflect better or more accurate realistic numbers according to income being taxed, which will flow through to our income tax reports. The income distribution says how much money am I taking out of that account pre-retirement or post? All right. There were some questions that popped up. I think I'm going to maybe we can deal with those at the end. So can you go on to the next? Okay. Oh, well here's that report that I jumped the gun on. This is the asset tax type. And I guess I was thinking to myself, man, I would have told Jason to do that one for sure. I really like this one a lot because it again displays how e-money thinks you will spend your assets in retirement. By the way, I don't think we have this one in here. There is what's called a liquidation strategy in e-money where we can exclude certain assets from distribution if you want to do that. I have a couple of clients that kind of want to do their own thing there. But anyways, it's showing you if you look at, for example, this client here, their taxable assets, their cash in their brokerage account, e-money has them spending their money down very quickly in retirement. And then it will go over to the tax deferred assets then likely to the tax-free assets. So nice breakout here for somebody to see how their assets are structured. They may be kind of curious to see how all of this thing will unfold later in life based upon the assumptions. Next screen, asset allocation. Well, this one is kind of interesting. Even though yeah, these are actually, it's doing a comparison of the exact same portfolios, but it is a breakout of your portfolio if you're interested in that kind of thing by asset class, assuming that we've got all your accounts labeled correctly. I'll come back to that question in a moment. Now, e-money does do Monte Carlo simulation. So if you want to run that, that's done on our side. We can just go there and quickly run the numbers. So it'll give you an idea if you're into Monte Carlo, we can do that. Yeah, here's the advanced planning one where I mentioned earlier where we go in and we'll run these alternative scenarios. We go in here and we'll just start to edit all the various different factors in your plan. You'll see on the right, the planning techniques are at a new expense or make a change to your retirement assumptions or remove certain things. We can do that very quickly with our clients. And that's how we can do, make run comparisons for them. Jason, did you want to comment on this one? Yeah, so in the previous slide, Mark is showing under the plan, we can change how we claim social security benefits. So this is within that plan. e-money, if we show full retirement age, e-money will compute based on what we put in for your benefits at full retirement age. We can run modeling to claim it at earlier ages or latest ages. And that's what we have on the poll down here. Note too, you can't see it too well, but the spouse, e-money will correctly compute the spousal benefit for benefits, both when they're both alive, if there are additional spousal benefits, and then a survivor benefit if applicable, e-money correctly includes all of that. So it's a pretty good modeling technique by e-money. Yeah, and you can exclude spousal benefits too if you need to. Oh, here we go. So this is a side by side. We run these frequently with our clients. And if you look at the top of the screen, it will have, it'll show you a little bit above that where it says base, oh, well there you see a base fax versus delay retirement. So it's doing a side by side. And it's showing in this case that the client is financially healthy if they delay retirement and their social security, their plan is healthier in the long run, based upon all the assumptions in the plan. Now the crummy part about that is they got to work longer. So that's their trade-off though, but that's how you can show them the implications to the plan. In this case, it's quite a big difference if they're, you know, if they want to have a lot more money to continue working longer, at least if they believe in the assumptions of the plan. So, and this is back to the screen where we developed those, those alternative scenarios to do comparisons. So, so if I can jump in, I added, this is looking at the Roth conversions. I'm going to go back here to the previous. So in this particular one, as Mark mentioned earlier, we don't have canned models where we just dump and run. It's tailored to the clients, of course. And in here, this is a Roth conversion where, within e-money, and what I'm doing is showing how e-money operates on the advisor side. In the Roth conversion, we're going to, in this plan, convert some of Frank's 401k. And by then it'll be in an IRA when he's retired. And what we would do is actually change the destination to an Roth IRA account to show conversions. So, the next tab would be the schedule here. And this is where, either by trial and error or using numbers or percentages, we put in the amount that's being converted each year. And it is based on the tax bracket that the client might be in if they want to max out up to the top of the 12% bracket, later the 15%, the 25%, the 28% tax bracket. And these all feed into the plan in order to show where the total assets end up. And it may be beneficial to convert. It may be not. It depends on everything else going on in the taxpayer's life. If this is just another comparison going back to the, this is delayed retirement, but we could also put in the comparing Roth conversions to the base facts. Yeah, we can really confuse you. Next screen, Jason. Oh, maybe we're just wrapping up here, aren't we? Yes. That looks like the end to me. I don't know, this is something else. But there were some really good questions that were popping up here. You know, and let's go to the questions now, Jason, but I do want, can you go back to the screen because which one do you want to? Let's leave it right there. Okay. And let's go to the questions. Do you want, you and I want to alternate asking them? I don't think Jim is on yet. So, okay, I see one here that was, can you include state income tax? Most definitely, the e-money is probably 80 to 95% accurate with state income tax laws. They don't, they can't, they don't have the ability to do 100% accuracy on every state. But I would say, and they estimate 80 to 95% of all state tax laws are included when we put the state of residence or the state of taxation for the... Yeah, we will indicate the state that you live in. And it actually recognizes, for example, I think in Illinois, pension benefits are not taxed. In New York, we just ran a case in New York where they understood how to handle the pension benefits there as well. So, at the state level, they're pretty good. There's a couple of good questions here that I can read off. Basically, can you save the comparison charge as PDFs during the what-if scenarios? Yeah. Yeah, we do that frequently where we'll run the... In fact, if you look at the screen, that's why I wanted to have the screen up. You see where it says generate? That generate will produce a drop-down and I can send this right to the vault. And for a lot of our clients, they'll ask me, hey, Mark, can you send us a report of what you, what we did? And I will just, we have, we do have some template set up and I'll just go produce it and send it right to the vault. It's actually very efficient. But one thing I might, I'm sorry, go ahead, Mark. I'm sorry, go down. Yeah. I wouldn't say one thing that can also be helpful because they conduct these meetings over Zoom. You can record your interaction with Mark and Jason and save the video and then watch it at your leisure later on as well. I'm sure, yeah, that's exciting. You can share it with your family, put it on Netflix. Can you change spending order of the assets, IRA, then taxable? Actually though, in truth though, we have recorded a lot of these for clients and if this is a lot of data coming at you, you can slow it down and watch it again. Can you change? Yes. You can change the spending order of the assets, IRA, then taxable, then Roth. Yeah. Now, e-money has a default, which it goes to, but in the liquidation area, we can exclude assets or we can just change the order of them. So the wiki has okay. Can you say? Somebody has a question about, what's your role working with Rick Ferry? I think I asked you that before. He just helped you as a consultant. Yeah, we just hired Rick for now, actually for now. I may hire him again. There is another question. It is from Mark and it says, for the charts that you showed related to income taxes and asset tax type, can the client pull up the same reports? Yeah, that one they can. And can they make changes themselves to the inputs for those reports so they can model them? Or can only your team make those changes? Those aren't reports that you would change the inputs to. Those are just data. So I suppose, well, here's where it could change. The asset tax type report would change if somebody did Roth conversions, like if we did Roth conversions. Now, on the client side, what they could do, I guess, is they would have to start changing, oh, I think I'm going to put more money in Roths in the future versus pre-tax. The numbers would change that way. That's not the kind of report that you model. It's the result of another activity. So I'm not sure if I'm explaining that accurately or not. Mark, did they answer your question? Can you save the comparison? I think we answered yes, you can. Does e-money have a social security optimization? Well, let me talk about that one. It depends on what you mean by that. I mean, if you live to be 100 and you define optimization as getting the most money out of social security, we can run that easily enough. If you are less optimistic about your longevity, then your question is not, what's the best way for me to get the most out of social security? It's, when can I best utilize social security to enjoy my life? So optimization might mean a different thing to somebody else, but we do integrate and modify social security to see how it impacts people's plans. I have done plans, and I'm not kidding, where people live to be 90 or 95, they will have more money if they take social security at 62. They won't get more social security, but they'll have more money because they're living on assets between the ages of 60 and 66 or 67. A couple of my clients kind of sense that, oh, I think I'll be better off. So you do have to integrate the assets together. So it depends on what optimization means, but social security reviews and analysis are pretty common part of our review with our clients. Do you think if I can interject, Mark, that Mike Piper's open social security calculator, does that sometimes differ from what e-money suggests? Yeah, I think it will. I think, you know, I haven't actually used it, but I think what he's put together is a great tool for you to run different scenarios and see how much you'll get, but you can't overlook that we're all individuals and we might have different expectations for what we want out of social security. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, you may have some people that decide to take social security earlier because they want to be more aggressive with their assets. They just get more peace of mind by taking it early. There's another question here from Deckard. Does tax planning include both NIIT and Irma? It does address and compute the additional tax for NIIT. It does not compute how much Medicare you would end up paying. However, you know, we look at that too, because look, if you hit the first or the next level of Irma, you're paying about another 30 bucks a month for Medicare. So I would say that the e-money does include the net investment income tax. E-money does not really address Irma. Does client have to enter own current data, or do we also have to know you do not have to put in historical data? Do you consider a potential, yes, this is part of tax planning that Jason would do. I don't know if you have anything you want to add on that, Jason? Yeah, the thing with the premium tax credits is it's solely based on, or not solely, one major factor is your zip code. So between the zip code and which plan you choose, but we do look at the potential impact on the subsidies, yes, because look, if you have higher income, you're going to have less of a subsidy. Well, our last April meeting, actually Jason did a nice job explaining some of those geographic differences in the ACA, and that recording is available on the Boglehead's main site. What file formats are supported for data? Sorry, but there is no, they don't import data. You either got to link it or type it in. Yeah, and you don't have to type in your holdings that, you know, if you have, even for a Boglehead, if you've got 12 or 20 different holdings, you don't have to enter them in unless you want to have accurate asset allocation reports. You can just put a taxable account at Vanguard, $150,000. Yeah, that's a lot of our clients do that. We can do perfectly fine financial plans and reviews. If we just know the totals, we don't need to know the composition. I see there's conflicts with federal. Does this plan or help to balance the two? Is a, I think I can answer that. As I mentioned, eMoney does a fantastic job. I would venture even to say almost perfect job with the federal internal revenue code. State taxes, it does a very good job. So your state may or may not be 100% accurate. I would guess it would be pretty accurate. And yeah, I mean, these seem to be a standard differentiation. Capital gains penalized. I'm not sure what that means other than paying your normal state income tax. If IRA withdraws or taxed lower, it probably, it would depend on your state and what the current laws are. Active duty and does eMoney have considerable tax freedom? Yeah, for income sources, we can label some of them as tax free. And the system will treat them as tax free. So we have a fair amount of military clients that we work with. Oh, there's, I have discovered some. There's a long question from Mark about Roth conversions. I can read this, but he's asking, I've discovered that with some of the Roth conversion calculators, the amounts recommended to convert very greatly, depending upon whether the system wants to maximize yearly spending dollars available or amount of money left in your estate, for example, for your Roth conversions modeling, are you just looking at income tax levels or additional factors as well when coming up with Roth conversion recommendations? So I'll start with the response that I'm sure Mark will have can add to it. But eMoney, I don't think necessarily is doing optimal comparisons. eMoney is providing the results from inputs put in. So by virtue of my goals, do I want to leave a lot of money for heirs or do I want to spend it down? It just depends on what the individual's goals are, but there's not an optimization button that we hit to generate the answer. Yeah, that's a common sentiment that I get across not just Roth conversions, but oh, isn't there like the optimal way to do this? Well, it depends on kind of what your attitude is. Gosh, I think Jason, you and I are working with one of our clients where, man, he was thinking about converting a lot to a Roth. I was kind of surprised at how much he was going to do. And I think he, I don't know if he ended up doing it, but I think kind of backed off when it came time to actually write the check to do that conversion. Now, in the long run, if he lives a long time, it might have been optimal for him to do that. But it's freaking him out right now. And that's not optimal for his quality of life right now. So the word optimal. In fact, I did a podcast where I wanted to disband that word from our clients. You can't use the word optimal anymore. There's just, you know, better, there are different ways of doing things, I guess is what the way I would put it. But yeah, I will talk with clients about how they can use Roth conversions, the trade-offs that they have to make in those decisions, how do they view their lifespan and a lot of it can vary based upon how their assets play out. And then Jason will actually go into much more detail on the actual tax cost and how far off the tax bracket you want to go. Yeah, and definitely, if people know exactly what their tax rate will be in the future and how much income they'll have, it's a lot easier for us to provide a recommendation. Well, one thing about Roth conversions. My son did a Roth conversion, took his 401, old 401K from a previous employer, rolled it into Vanguard, and then was converting it into a Roth. So he converted one third one year. The taxes were not a problem because he's still in a low tax bracket. But the next year, when we looked at his account, it was all in the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, and it was a bear market and bull market, I'm sorry, and all he had done is make more money. He simply made more pre-tax money. And so it was almost better. He said, why don't you just put it all over in the Roth right now? And from now on, it's all after it's non-taxed money, which is true. But how do you know he did pay higher taxes to do it? On the other hand, he's going to be working another, what, 30 years before he retires. It just seems that you're looking at your instinct of what is the best thing to do. Yeah, well, in generally, people that are in the beginning, middle stages of their career, if they're on an income track, they're going to make more in the future. Therefore, typically now, yeah, you would use Roth at the beginning when you think you'll be in lower tax brackets. Think of doctors when they're in residency and when they're new attendings. That's probably the least amount of money that they're going to make going forward. So they probably want to be Roth. And then when they start earning much more money, they focus more on the pre-tax deductions being in the higher tax brackets. As an alternative, just to mention this, however, for those people, they may be stressed out financially. They have debts they have to pay. They don't have a lot of extra cash. So even at that low income tax level, they may, you know, do a Roth conversion and may just stress them out, you know, financially. So you do it little by little. You know, little by little. All right. Not surprised that there's no easy button. Yeah. So that's the questions. So we have additional questions people would like to either ask or submit via chat. One thing that could be interesting, do you have more presentation material, Mark or Jason? I don't think so. Because one thing that might be interesting, I imagine there are some of us that have worked with Mark, perhaps can offer a little bit of perspective. I don't know if anybody else on the Zoom call is willing to do so. But I was curious about plan vision as a do-it-yourself Bogle header and thought I would check it as a second opinion kind of on what I was thinking about Roth conversions and retirement planning. And I found it very useful and they offered a lot of perspectives that I hadn't thought about. Most importantly, in my case, working mainly with Jason, ultimately finding out that I was pushing myself my qualified capital gains into a higher bracket because of the ratio that I have between my IRA and a taxable account. So for me, it opened up a lot of different perspectives that I hadn't considered. And having just plugged stuff in on my own on other Roth conversion calculators, I missed those nuances. So I think there's a lot of things that even open social security calculator, Mike Piper's excellent tool. It punches the numbers, but you have to basically bear in mind what your needs are and your perspectives. And those are the things that maybe someday artificial intelligence will add a dimension that's lacking now. But it's nice to have the human perspective, especially with an experienced advisor who's walked through a lot of these scenarios before and knows what to really focus on. Yeah, I'll give an example. One is the, we showed a chart here called the planned distributions, the RMDs. So in the Boglehead world and another podcast, the RMDs are like what, you know, it's like, you know, cross or Dracula or whatever, you know, so you got the RMDs. Yeah. And I will show people and I'll see, you know, your RMDs, they're basically 1% of your net worth. That's what even when you're 85, it doesn't mean you don't want to be prudent about your assets and make smart decisions. But man, I'll see people obsessing about RMDs. And it's just, oh, you know, it's not really going to matter. Now you should still do Roth conversions. And you still want to try to reduce them when you can, but it's not really going to move the needle all that much. So it does provide some relief for folks. It's like one less thing I need to worry about. Is it good for inheritance purposes? You mean they are the moving into the Roths, not as good as it used to be, but it could be, I guess. Yes. If you're asking if it's an asset that passes long tax free, yes. Yeah, it has advantages for the legacy part of your life. It ties into estate planning. So that's one of the factors, because you've got 10 years where it can just sit there without having it. It has to still be taken out, but there's no taxes. But you can let it sit for 9.9 years and then it's taken out by the individual inheriting it at that point. There's a question here about investment advice and then a follow-up question, which is tied in. You indicated you don't need the holdings for a plan. But given holdings, like I said, everyone can read that. But yes, we do give investment advice for our clients. Again, we focus very simple, low-cost, broadly diversified portfolios. And we just tell them what we think they should do. It is many times driven by the numbers and what we see. Do they have the liberty to be aggressive or conservative in their plan? So we'll definitely provide comments on their investment advice and what we think that they should do to either simplify their plan or reduce their risk. Going over the numbers is very helpful in that process. The second question is, we don't need the holdings for a plan. Well, if people want us to review their mix and make recommendations and they don't link their accounts, a lot of times what they'll do is they'll upload their statements to the vault and we'll just look at it that way. But yeah, it is helpful in some, depending on what our clients want. Some people, and I will ask our clients, hey, do you need help with your investment advice? Are you okay with that? And I'll say, yeah, we do want some thoughts or say, no, we're pretty cool with what we've got there. So it depends on what they want. Sandy Kay. I'm curious, Mark. I'll go ahead, Miriam. There's a question from Sandy Kay on the chat. What are your thoughts on the bond tent strategy? Somebody's going to have this nearing retirement. Someone would have to explain to me what the bond tent is. Bond tent is when you, before my understanding is the bond tent is when you start to, you're getting into the glide path to retirement. You put your, the assets that you cannot lose, that you will need for your living expenses for the next X number of years, let's say five years, three years before retirement, maybe four years, three years after, you put those assets, you set them aside in a tent that covers you and the tent is of bonds and you can arrange it into short term, intermediate term, bonds, or you can just, bond fund, you set it into there and then you take your other assets and you move them somewhere else and make it more, shall we say, stock heavy, more aggressive. So yeah, like two different portfolios. Yes. What are my thoughts on that? If we're simply talking about the idea that you take a portion of your portfolio and get more conservative with it as you're going to live absolutely. I mean, so my thoughts on that is I think that's very wise to do. In fact, my general comment would be, without going into specific details on actual bond like structure, is that I would encourage people that have been financially successful, has their transitioning to default to being more cautious and being more aggressive, which would mean having more cash, having more bonds. Like I think that's a better place to arrive at. In the bond... Go ahead. I'm sorry, Jason. The bond tent strategy is really a variation of looking, in my opinion, at your asset allocation. I mean, that's what it is. And based on where your investments are, you look at your asset allocation and if you use a bond tent strategy, by definition, you're looking at your asset allocation and adjusting it to meet your situation. One thing to note, the proper asset allocation, in my opinion, is that people maintain it when the market goes up, down, sideways, whatever. Because if you change your asset allocation based on market performance, then you don't have a true asset allocation because you would have started at that asset allocation before the big run or the big drop. There's a question here about the investment policy statement. Do you review that as part of the plan? Yeah, we'll take a look at your IPS, if you want us to. I mean, if it's 15 pages, I don't know that I'm that interested in reading it. But yes, we have a lot of clients that have an excellent nice little summary of what they're doing. We don't feel that strongly about having an intricate asset allocation model. So I like the three-fund portfolio. I do everything in a target date fund. But we're happy to provide comments to help people either simplify their portfolio. Or I think also for a lot of the Bogleheads who kind of know a lot of this stuff anyway, but maybe they need reinforcement or maybe a few comments, is just to provide some broad comments on their mix. So what about R&D and Roth? Do you look at the issue of two individuals who both have substantial tax? At some point, one of them dies. You still have two R&D, but your tax brackets are null. Yeah, Jason has talked with our clients. You've had that conversation with several of our clients, I think. Right. Yeah, that's a great comment because you make your plan, you look at everything, and then boom, if you have one of the spouses die early, your R&Ds now are pushing you in a much higher tax bracket. And e-money actually has what if scenarios with an early death. So it can be run on the advisor's side. And of course, yeah, we don't look at anything in a vacuum. If you could give the information that you want to model, but look, everything is a model because we don't know when one of us are going to die, whether that be for Roth conversions or R&Ds. Jason, you do not do the tax forms for people. Is that correct? You don't do their taxes. You just advise them or lay it out. Yeah, and I would be, I want to be clear that I don't do tax preparation. We don't provide tax advice. Tax advice is actually a covered topic for a CPA. So we're not doing taxes. We provide tax consulting and we provide for your tax situation. This is where you're at. There are a lot of people that are in between tax brackets. So we want to provide them with the information to see what makes sense in their situation. But yeah, we definitely do not provide tax preparation. Here's an interesting question. How difficult is it to master e-money as an advisor? As a do-it-yourselfer, I like to get my hands on the tools directly. Well, there's the upfront cost, which you might find annoying. I think it's $3,500. Maybe it's $2,500. They have a scaled-down version. And I actually, I think you might even have to be an RIA to get it. I don't remember anymore. There's so long ago that I got it. It would take a while to figure it out. You'd be on the phone. They have good support, but you get on the phone with support quite a bit. So all right. Here is Mark. If somebody has a particularly complex situation that would ordinarily take a lot more time, is that something they work out with you guys on a different price structure for a more detailed deep dive? You know, we have done plans for some pretty complicated situations. I think I can think of clients that had 10 or 11 businesses that had some different assets that were coming in over time. We didn't charge them anything extra for that. So I haven't really come across something yet that, I mean, I'm sure I will probably, or we will eventually, but I, you know, stock options can get a little bit convoluted, but we actually encourage our clients to just enter those, has income sources, generally speaking, and they work fine. So I don't know, Alan, I guess we'll deal with that one happens. I have an analogy here. Mark, correct me if I'm wrong or if you don't agree. But I've been thinking about this. If you all remember the show MASH, you know, we have triage and then, you know, we do surgery and it's not meatball surgery. I mean, many of the surgeons do great work in the MASH unit. So we're not doing cosmetic surgery. We're not doing cosmetic plans with our clients. We're just getting them a good, simple plan that makes sense for their situation. Any idea how it takes someone to enter manually the information? Do you have to enter individual holdings or just a total amount? You can enter a total amount for an account or you can link them if you want to. And that's, you know, you know, there's more work in e-money. It's not just your account entry. You want to enter your future expenses in the money. If you have pensions, maybe have rental income, you know, so you can take somebody depending upon the complaint, a little wild into their information. But as I mentioned earlier, a lot of our clients really like the exercise. Alrighty. Okay. Any further questions or comments, folks? If not, I want to thank Miriam for her expert assistance in monitoring the chat box. I was trying to look at the participants and everything else. You had a comment, Miriam? It looks like you were about to say something. Just if anybody wanted to contact Jason or Mark, how would they do that? Well, they could go to our website planvisionmn.com. They could, I guess, send us an email at info at planvisionmn.com.