Welcome to How to Retire on Time, a show that answers your questions about all things retirement, including income, taxes, Social Security, health care, and more. The show is an extension of the book, How to Retire on Time, which you can grab exclusively on Amazon or by going to www.how to retire on time.com. My name is Mike Decker. I'm the author of the book, How to Retire on Time, but I'm also a licensed financial advisor, insurance agent, and tax professional, which means when it comes to financial topics, we can pretty much cover it all. Now that said, please remember this is just a show.

Everything you hear should be considered informational as a not financial advice. If you want personalized financial advice, then request your wealth analysis from my team today by going to www.yourwealthanalysis.com. With me in the studio today is mister David Fransen. David, thanks for being here.

Yes. Hello.

David's gonna be reading your questions that you've submitted, and I'm gonna do my best to answer them. You can send your questions in anytime this week by texting them to 913-363-1234. Again, that's 913-363-1234, or you can email them to hey mike@howtoretyme.com. Let's begin.

Hey, Mike. I'm a widow of many years, and I'm in love again. I want to marry my sweetheart, but I'm concerned about the finances and my kids' ability to get their inheritance when I go. Any guidance?

Well, first off, congratulations. Yeah. Love is great.

Oh, it's so good.

I would say there are a few things to be concerned about, not necessarily to be concerned, but to be aware of. So this mostly applies to people that are gonna be more affected by social security than anything else, in my opinion. So first off, if you're currently getting social security off of a spousal benefits, a survivor benefit, it may affect you if you get married or remarried, I should say, too soon. And then there are certain things you gotta look into for that. But let's just say you are remarried too soon.

You could lose your survivorship benefit. So you just gonna you need to do the plan. Gotta rework that. Just recalculate it. I I don't wanna say that you need to put off you living your best life for something like that.

You just gotta plan around it. But Social Security is probably the more common part of retirement plan that's affected. As a single individual moving into the married household, there's gonna be some tax breaks, which is kinda nice. Yeah. Those who are married do receive tax benefits.

Medicare premiums may be affected. So if you file as a married individual, let's say you had no Medicare issues and you filed someone of greater worth and their taxable income, their modified adjusted gross income was higher, could push into an IRMAA situation. You're paying more on your Medicare charges, the the surcharge there. Not a huge deal. It's just things to be aware of.

You can plan around it. The estate planning's I think where it gets more complicated. So how do you create a system to where the spouses can support each other? They can, if they want, merge their assets together, but once one spouse passes, the other one is still able to be supported. And then when both spouses pass, the kids are able to get it without the conflict.

There are many horror stories out there about the surviving spouse basically taking and changing things. And then their kids get it, but the other kids don't. And so if you go down this route, you gotta have boundaries with civility. It's not unreasonable to say, hey. Look.

I wanna marry you. I wanna make sure we're both supported. We're both taken care of. But look, I spent a lifetime with my ex spouse that or my my ex spouse, my deceased spouse. Yeah.

And it these assets, once I'm gone, are supposed to go to the kids. Having these conversations in the open, I think, are are pretty healthy.

Sounds like it.

It's it's when you try to hide things that things really unravel and and become issues. So this is why spousal planning is so important. So I mean, to answer this person's question, check on the Social Security, so your current age. And if you were to marry, would your Social Security benefits go away or not? And that spousal benefits or survivor benefits and so on.

If you were divorced previously and getting remarried, are your benefits from the divorce? You just call call the Social Security office because there are enough nuances and enough variations in that that it may be it may be kind of tricky, but look into that. But aside from that, make sure your estate planning conflicts are are done. Let's answer this question though in a little bit of a different way. What if your spouse passes?

How do you prepare for that? You may survive your spouse. You may go through the mourning process and then remarry. But you need to understand when a spouse passes, you're now gonna be in the single tax bracket, which is a hit. You're gonna lose one of the Social Security income streams, which is a hit.

So let's say you want a 150,000 of income. That's underneath the couple's IRMA limit, but a spouse passes, now you're above the IRMA limit. And when a spouse passes, your income needs don't really go down as much as people may realize. It's not actually cut in half.

That's interesting. You know,

the water bill is still the water bill. It might be a little bit less, but it's still a water bill. Your Netflix subscription is still a Netflix subscription.

True. Yep.

You might not eat as much at home because you don't wanna eat alone, so you might go out more. So your food cost may actually go up. Assume that your income doesn't go down by much, and that you need to figure out how to make up for these differences. Yeah. The spousal part.

Congratulations, the person, for getting through and then finding love again. That's a wonderful thing. But make sure you understand how your livelihood as an individual would function with or without a spouse, if a spouse were to pass, if there were would be a divorce, and then in both ways. You gotta figure out those both ways. That makes sense?

Yeah.

Prenuptial agreements make a lot of sense when you're remarrying. You don't want to leave anything to ambiguity. That's that's those are my thoughts on the matter. That's all the time we've got for the show today. If you enjoyed the show, consider subscribing to it wherever you get your podcast.

Just search for how to retire on time. Discover if your portfolio is built to weather flat market cycles or if you're missing tax minimization opportunities that you may not even know exist. Explore strategies that may be able to help you lower your overall risk while potentially increasing your overall growth and lifestyle flexibility. This is not your ordinary financial analysis. Learn more about Your Wealth Analysis and what it could do for you regardless of your age, asset, or target retirement date.

Go to www.yourwealthanalysis.com today to learn more and get started.