Jacob: Hey, friends, and welcome back to another episode of Retirement Answers. My name is Jacob Duke. I'm your host as always, and I'm also the owner of a retirement planning firm where we help people just like you plan smarter so you can retire better. And in my conversations that I have on a daily basis with people that are thinking about retirement, just going into retirement, what I figured out is many people are far less prepared than they otherwise think. Maybe they've done some of the basic planning, they've done some of the basic things to get to this point in life, they feel fairly confident in it.
But there are plenty of things that they either just simply don't know about or don't know to pay attention to. So today, what I wanted to do was outline 18 different things or signs that you're actually better prepared for retirement than most people if you've done them or you know about them. So I'm gonna share these 18 things with you, and let's go ahead and just jump in. So the first of these 18 signs is that you know your spending number. You wouldn't be surprised how many people that I talk to if I said, hey, how much do you spend every single month?
What is your need to have number and what's your want to have number? Most people cannot tell me what those numbers are. They have no idea what they're spending every month. They have to go do a bunch of work to figure that out. And if you've done that hard work to understand what your spending is on a monthly basis, you're so much farther ahead than many other people.
So that's the first thing is do you know your spending number? Because in my opinion, it doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter how much money you will have. How much you spend in retirement is the biggest determinant of whether or not you will be successful in terms of not running out of money, but also provide the lifestyle that you want to live. So you gotta identify what your spending floor is and think about what your want to have or your additional goals on top of that might be for vacation or travel or random expenses that come up.
You've got to know this before you can even think about entering retirement or having a good plan for it. The second sign that you're ahead of everyone else is if you have a paid off mortgage or plan to have your mortgage paid off before entering retirement. One of your biggest expenses is always your housing expense. Now whether that's actual maintenance on a house or electricity bill or an HOA or whatever it might be, your mortgage is always gonna be the largest of those things. And if you can find a way to have your mortgage paid off and enter retirement with no debt, that in my mind is one of the biggest determinants because if this one thing is taken care of, your retirement success is nearly guaranteed.
But the problem is this, most people who as they start earning more money in later career, they typically go and buy the house that they've always wanted. Right? Maybe it's their dream home, their forever home. Problem is, is if you have a ton of debt on that, you enter retirement, we might have a decent fixed income or a good amount of retirement savings. The problem is whenever you have to spend most of your retirement income on your mortgage rather than doing whatever it is that you value most, travel, time with friends, time with family, whatever it is.
If you are spending all of your monthly income on your mortgage, that's not a good idea. So if you can have your mortgage paid off, have no debt on your home, ideally no debt on cars, no debt at all, if you're completely debt free, you're gonna be able to retire successfully. The third sign is that you have created retirement income plan, and I don't just mean using the 4% rule. I don't just mean saying I'm gonna take x amount of dollars out of my portfolio every single month for the rest of my life. That's not a retirement income plan.
What I mean is more of a strategy. Where am I gonna be pulling money from and which periods of time am I gonna be pulling money from those accounts? So early on in retirement, you might not take Social Security just yet. You might delay that a little bit later. So you might have a traditional IRA, a Roth IRA, and a brokerage account, and you've gotta determine where am I gonna pull my income from and how is that going to work?
Let's say you need $80,000. Would you pull all $80,000 out of your IRA for the year, or would you pull all of it from a brokerage or all of from a Roth? Well, it might be a combination of all those things, but it does have to tie into your overall income plan for the rest of your life and things like Roth conversions and how those tie into this. So if you at least have a plan, if you've got a strategy around this, knowing where you're gonna pull money from and why you're thinking that direction, that's ahead of most people. Most people, again, they follow these basic rules of thumb where they're saying, hey, I can take 4% of my account every year.
I can do that sustainably. That's what I'm gonna do. It's like, well, that's fine. But what if 4% of your balance is not enough to meet your income needs early on in retirement because your Social Security or a pension is not turned on yet? Or what happens when 4% of your account balance is way more than you need to take from your accounts?
Well, why would you take it out and pay tax on it if you otherwise don't have to? So there's different things here that you've got to consider, but if you've thought through all these things and you've developed an income plan in terms of where you're pulling money from and when, you're farther ahead than most people than you realize. The fourth sign is that you understand how Social Security work, whether it be for your own benefits, whether it be for your spousal benefits if they might apply to you, and how your survivor benefits could work for you one day if you're married. You've got to know how all this works because the decisions you make around Social Security don't impact just you and your benefits, they impact your future benefits or your spouse's benefits if you do this incorrectly. And when you understand the benefits of perhaps delaying past 62 to 67 and even maybe from 67 to 70, you've got some decisions to make.
You've got some decisions to make because you have to tie this into your retirement income plan, which was number three, and think about where your money's gonna be coming from and the benefits perhaps of delaying that and increasing your your Social Security benefits, which is gonna reduce how much you need to take from your portfolio. So as we're going through these, you're probably gonna see how all these different things tie together, and that's why I believe that a comprehensive plan, something that views things in a global manner, like all of it has to work together in some way, is the only way to do retirement planning really well. Number five is that you've accounted for health care costs, whether it be pre 65 or pre Medicare, premiums for private insurance. Maybe you want to qualify for ACA's, or if you don't think you're qualifying for ACA's, what are your strategies around Roth conversions? If you think a Roth conversion is more beneficial long term to do rather than take the ACA, that's something you've got to consider.
You've think about IRMAA surcharges, and IRMAA stands for income related monthly adjustment amount. That is an additional surcharge or premium amount that you would pay above the base premium for Part B and Part D if you earn too much money. So if your retirement distributions are too high in one particular year, two years from now, you could pay IRMA surcharges on your Medicare premiums without knowing it. Another big one here around your health care cost is whenever you think about RMDs, required minimum distributions. If you're not aware of how those are gonna impact your tax situation later on, tying back into your retirement income plan and where your money is gonna be coming from, you could end up paying IRMAA for the rest of your life if you're not careful once you do reach that age of either 73 or 75 whenever your RMDs would kick in.
So you have to consider all of your health care costs and just at a minimum your premiums, but also to the types of plans that you're thinking about because a Medicare Advantage plan might be fairly cheap or even free, while a Medigap, a Medicare Supplement plan, could cost you a decent amount of money, but what's the trade off there? Well, a Medicare Supplement plan in addition to Part B and D could give you pretty much a Cadillac coverage if that's what you need or want. You have minimal out of pocket expenses beyond your premiums every month, so every single month, you could have a higher cost to have your insurance in place, but if something happens, you're pretty much covered from there on out as opposed to a Medicare Advantage plan that might have deductibles and operate more like a traditional health insurance plan that you're used to. So your health care costs are very important. Health care costs are not going down over time.
We know that. And your premiums are also gonna be going up as well. So making sure you select the coverages that are right for you and account for those costs and plan and and build those costs into your plan correctly are gonna be important to make sure that your projections on your retirement are actually correct. And this brings up number six, which is if you've run a Monte Carlo simulation, then you're ahead of everyone else. Basically, a Monte Carlo simulation is whenever you take your information, you plug it into software, and then it runs over a thousand different simulations to basically stress test your plan based on bad markets or higher inflation or a longer lifespan or whatever it might be.
Takes all these different what if scenarios and run simulations to see what are the chances of you running out of money if some of these things started to happen. So if you've done this and run your Monte Carlo simulation, you're ahead of the game compared to most people who are just walking into retirement blind. Now what I will say here about Monte Carlo simulations is that they are helpful, but they are not the plan. They're good to use to understand, like, the direction we're heading and is this sustainable or not, but all of the micro decisions that have to happen along the way, which Medicare to take, when to take Social Security, how does that taking Social Security impact my spouse or does it at all, which accounts do I take from, how does taking from those different accounts actually impact my tax situation. So all these things that are within a Monte Carlo simulation or within a planning software, those are the real things that matter and make the difference.
You've gotta at least do that, but I wouldn't stop there. I would go even further to make sure all these other items are truly being planned for. The seventh sign that you're ahead of everyone else is that you've thought about taxes in retirement and you have a really good plan for it. Here's the deal. You have saved and you've worked really hard.
Why do you wanna give more of it away than you otherwise have to? You definitely wanna pay what you should, but if you haven't done the planning and haven't thought about how to minimize your tax bill by using the tax code to your advantage, you probably need to think about it. So if you've done that, you're ahead of everyone else. People are just walking into retirement every single day saying, I'm just gonna start taking money out of my IRA whenever I get there, but they don't know about the opportunities around maybe Roth conversions, how they can manage their RMDs, how to coordinate their withdrawals, and do income stacking to help, you know, maybe avoid Medicare surcharges and different jumps in tax brackets. All these different things are crucial, and that's really what I like to focus on with my clients is how do we minimize your tax bill legally?
How do we do that to keep more of your hard earned money in your possession, but also be able to sustain that for your family down the road whenever they receive this after you're gone. The eighth sign is that you have diversified your income sources. You have tax diversification. You have ways of getting income from different places that are not reliant on just one source. So for example, if you don't have any savings for retirement, your only source might be Social Security or a pension.
That's okay, but you wanna have more than that if possible. Or perhaps let's think about it this way. Maybe you've got Social Security, but you also have just an IRA or a tax deferred account. Well, you've got money there, but the problem is every time you take dollars from that tax deferred IRA, you will be taxed. So maybe think about building out tax diversification by having money in traditional IRAs, might have money in brokerage accounts, which are after tax, maybe you have money in a Roth IRA, and diversify your potential income sources.
So when we think about diversification, we typically think about that from an investment standpoint, which is definitely important, but you also want to have tax diversification so that you can be taxed at least in the most optimal way and have options and flexibility as you create income for yourself in retirement. The ninth sign that you are ahead of everyone else is that you do have Roth IRAs already funded that are going to be a potential tax free source of income throughout retirement. Whether you wanna use that money early on or not, that's up to you, and there's different ideas and thoughts around that. I've got my own thoughts around how to use a Roth IRA in retirement. But if you at least have the account with some assets in it, as in you've been saving money to that to your Roth four zero one k or Roth IRA throughout your career, that is a huge advantage.
Here's a perfect example. Let's say that you need a $100,000 to live in retirement every single year. Well, you know that a portion of that's gonna come from your traditional IRA, then a portion's gonna come from your, Social Security, but then you have a random expense that comes up. You need to buy a new car. You need to put a new roof on a house, whatever it might be, something that you weren't planning on happening, but it's come up and you know you need to do something.
Well, if you don't want to jump to that next tax bracket, for example, let's just assume that you were gonna go from the 12 to 22. I know those dollar amounts don't line up perfectly, but let's assume that you'd be jumping into the tax bracket to pull 20,000 or $30,000 out of your IRA to meet that expense need. Well, if you have a Roth IRA, you can strategically take from that account for that one off expense. You would pay no tax on the distribution, and you wouldn't be jumping into that next tax bracket. So that's a way that you can thoughtfully use a Roth IRA early in retirement, and my opinion on Roth IRAs in terms of spending them in retirement is really along the lines of, hey, why would I save money to a Roth?
Why would I build this account that's supposed to be tax free income for myself throughout my career? I've done the hard work of getting the money into it. Why would I do that and then never spend the money? Right? Most advice and thoughts comes out to just delay taking out of your Roth so it grows and compounds tax free forever.
It's like, that's good, and that mathematically makes sense, but then why did I have the Roth if I don't go spend it? The whole point was so that I have tax free money in retirement, right? And so that's why I like to say use it strategically during these different moments and kind of be selective around how you take out of your Roth IRAs early on in retirement because they could save you a ton of taxes. Now, you gotta think about your whole plan, right? Maybe there's a legacy plan in place here where you want to leave all of your Roth assets to your kids one day.
So there's so many considerations, just wanted to throw that at you as an idea of don't just delay your Roth distributions because that's what you've heard. Really think about it and say, why wouldn't I use that if I had the opportunity to and it would save me a bunch of taxes this year to use that source rather than my traditional IRA? The tenth sign that you are ahead of everyone else is really important to me, and it's if you know what you're retiring to. Most people, they're trying to escape something. They're trying to leave a job.
They're trying to finally cash in and just say, I'm done. Right? I'm tired. I've worked hard. I've earned this opportunity to do nothing.
And you might be in that situation too, but what I want to do is help you reframe your thought process here. You've got to think about what you're retiring to rather than what you're retiring from, because here's the deal. Let's say you're 60. You've worked hard, you're burnt out, you're done. You retire today.
What if you live to 90? You've got thirty years ahead of you to figure out what that thirty years is gonna be. Whether that's spending time with your spouse, whether that means being a full time grandparent, whether that means working in a different capacity, volunteering at the local charity, whatever it is, I want you to have a really good idea of what a day in the life of you being retired looks like and have a mission and a purpose for it. And if you don't have that mission or that purpose, you could end up really lonely, depressed, and sad about this thing that was supposed to be awesome. And so I don't want you to end up in that spot.
So if you have thought about what you're retiring to and you know what that looks like, congrats. You're ahead of almost everyone else. If you've not done that yet, I would emphasize this point in a huge way. This is perhaps the most important part of retirement in my opinion. Because if you think about it, why did you save all this money?
Why did you do all this stuff? It wasn't merely to survive. Right? Like, that is a portion of it. But it's also to enjoy, and and that's why you've done the hard work to get to this spot.
I want you to know what you're actually gonna be doing and enjoying, and that gives you a mission, a purpose, and a goal, and and a reason to go and live well in retirement. The eleventh sign you're ahead of everyone else is that you've stress tested your portfolio for various different things, whether it be for a bad market cycle. What happens if, you know, the market drops 30% year one of retirement? Sequence of return risks. That's a big deal.
Right? What does your outcomes look like if you've done that? What happens if, Social Security gets cut or reduced? That's a big one on a lot of people's minds right now. What if my benefits get cut by 20%?
That cuts into my fixed income, and that's a hard thing. What happens if taxes go up? What happens if Medicare costs are way out of control in terms of how much they're going up over time? All these different what ifs that are applicable to nearly every retiree. Have you stress tested against that to see, am I really on the edge of being able to retire or not?
Or am I well within the I'm able to retire kind of range, and then how much wiggle room or flexibility do I have if some of these things don't go very well. So I want you to stress test your portfolio and your retirement outcomes because it gives you an idea of where your blind spots and where your biggest risks are, whether it be related to your fixed income sources. You can identify which of those are the greatest risks, and that's helpful to you to know how to structure portfolio or when to take Social Security or all the different other decisions you have to make, the stress test will help you be able to do that. The twelfth sign that you're ahead is that you've had the legacy conversation with your spouse, with your family, with your kids and grandkids, and you've got all of your estate documents in place. You've got the trust, the will, you've got your powers of attorney, you've got all your wishes outlined, who's gonna get what, and you've created a clear plan for everyone that's to come after you.
That way, they don't have to walk through all this with confusion and a lot of infighting that potentially could be there within the family. Because here's what I'll say. Your kids and grandkids, they really don't care how much money you have, most likely. They just wanna know what to do with it and how it's structured and what they should know about it before you're not able to tell them. That's really what it comes down to.
I know a lot of folks want to keep all that, you know, protected and safe because they don't want their kids or grandkids to know where things are and how much and all that good stuff. I understand why, but the problem is is most people really just don't care. They don't care how much money you do or don't have. They don't care about all your mistakes or your wins. They just wanna know what to do if something happens to you and and how to actually process things correctly.
Because if you don't tell them where things are at or what's gonna happen, then then they have no idea. So I would probably say, save them a lot of stress, struggle, and time, and get all this done while you're still here to explain things both both verbally, but also written, and get your documents in place, have the conversation with your spouse if you are married and with your kids and grandkids on how you want things to go or ask them, hey. If you were to get x amount of money one day, what would be your idea with that? Would you start a business with that? Would you just leave that for your own kids one day?
Like, would you buy a house with it? What what what are you gonna do with the funds? And that can help you determine which funds to actually leave to which person. So you can leave the same amount in terms of dollar values, but the type of funds, you might not wanna split that up evenly across every account type. You might want one person to get all the Roth.
You might want one person to get the brokerage account and one person to get, you know, the house. So there's different reasons to break it up that way from a tax standpoint on the back end for them, but again, you can't figure that out unless you have conversations around us. So if you have had that conversation with everyone, wonderful. Good for you. If you've not, I encourage you to because I promise people care way less about all this stuff than you think they do, and they're not judging you positively or negatively for it.
They just wanna know what to do when that time arises. The thirteenth step or sign is that you have simplified your financial life. You don't have accounts strung out everywhere at five different banks. You don't have accounts at three different custodians, and you've got, you know, an account at Schwab, Vanguard, Fidelity, and E Trade. Like, make things really simple.
There's no value to having your account spread out everywhere. There's no additional risk protection outside of maybe your bank accounts. But beyond that, within the investment in IRA or retirement space, there's no benefit or protection to having multiple different custodians that aren't consolidated and old four zero one k's that haven't been rolled over. Get all that really simple. I'm a big fan of simplicity and organizing things in a very clear and structured manner.
Because, this goes back to the last one. If you have things everywhere, no one knows the passwords to these accounts or even which accounts you have or where they're even at, it only makes their job more difficult whenever you pass. Make it easy on yourself now by getting it all simplified and organized, and make it easy on them too in the future. So that's the thirteenth step. Simplify your financial life, find ways to eliminate clutter, and get rid of those things that don't add value.
Number 14, you've considered the risks of inflation or perhaps even living longer than you think. My opinion is this. Inflation is not going to slow down over the next ten to fifteen years. It will only get worse. There's plenty of maybe reasons for that.
That's just my opinion. I could very well be wrong, and that's totally fine. I hope I'm wrong in some sense. But if you think that inflation is a risk to retirees, you have to invest accordingly. You can't just sit on cash for the rest of your life for the next twenty years and expect to outpace inflation.
It's not going to happen. You have to build a portfolio from an investment standpoint that is going to outpace inflation so that your standard of living doesn't drop, and you're able to continue spending how much you wanna spend and still never run out of money. Now the flip side of this is what if inflation isn't outrageous, but you actually live longer than you otherwise expected? What if you plan on living? What if you think you're only gonna live to 85 because of your family's life expectancy and their history there, but you end up living to 95.
Well, that's an extra ten years. Do you have the ability or the funds to live that much longer and knowing that your costs in those later years will probably be higher from, you know, having to do medical costs, but also long term care facilities or assisted living? There's different costs that come in from a health perspective that are going to increase in those last few years most likely, and if you're not accounting for that and you're saying, hey, I'm just gonna live to 85 because that's what everyone else in my family lived to, you could outlive them by ten to fifteen years, and you might not be accounting for that on your plan. So if you've thought about that, you've evaluated and tested inflation risks, but also your longevity risks, then you are ahead of everyone else rather than just assuming that you're just gonna live to the average lifespan or some lifespan based on your family history because there are always outliers. Number 15, you understand that retirement isn't about survival, it is about fun, and you've planned for that.
You've budgeted for the travel, the hobbies, spoiling the grandkids, whatever it is that you dreamed of, like all those things, dream retirement, that's what it's about. If you plan for fun and not only survival and kind of doomsday thinking, you've got this abundance mindset rather than a scarcity mindset, again, you are ahead of 99% of the folks out there because you're not retiring just to not work, you're retiring so that you can go enjoy life. And if you have this vision, you have this perspective, you're ahead of everyone else. If you don't have that, if you're in that kind of like, oh my goodness, I'm just worried and scared, I would encourage you to, number one, test everything to make sure it works from a financial standpoint, and that will give you the freedom to be able to, you know, think about the fun, the hobbies, all the things you want to do with retirement. It's not until after you've got all the math figured out that you can do this, but if you've got to this point, don't stay there in that fear and that worry and that kind of, hey, I'm not gonna spend any money type of mindset.
Now's the time to go enjoy because we don't know when we're gonna pass away. We don't know if our health is gonna change drastically. You should be able to go and do it. And if you plan for that, I'm really excited for you because it's gonna be a life well lived. The sixteenth sign that you are ready to retire and ahead of everyone else is that you know your withdrawal rate, but you also aren't restricted to it.
So you might know that the 4% rule is there. It's not really a rule. It's just a mathematical equation. It tells you what you can and can't do or how long your money might last if you withdraw 4% of the original starting value and add inflation to that every single year. That's helpful, but it's not necessarily like the right thing to follow because most of the time people's withdrawal rates are higher earlier in retirement.
Simply because a pension might not be started yet or Social Security's not started yet. And so you've got to understand your withdrawal rate could be 8% early on in retirement, although it's going to drop off dramatically once those other fixed income sources do turn on. So it's okay to have a higher than 4% withdrawal rate so long as that it's not prolonged for 10. Number 17, you are not afraid of spending. I was talking to a gentleman yesterday.
He's got $3,000,000, and they're doing great, and they're very frugal in a lot of ways. And one of the things that he had mentioned was we're, in some sense, really scared to spend. We don't know what we can spend. We have always lived with this mindset of just save and try to cut back on expenses where we can. And so I would say that's a big risk to you and just your your quality of life.
Here's the thing. You've earned the opportunity to go spend. You've done the hard work of accumulating and saving and investing your money. The reason you did that was so that you could spend it now. So what I'm saying is this, if you can mentally get to that spot of, yes, I know what I can spend, I know that I'm able to, and then go actually do it, that is freedom.
And this probably sounds a little bit counterintuitive because you think, before I get to retirement, I'm just gonna be able to have a lot of fun. But once you get there, your income source turns off, you're no longer going to work anymore, and in your mind, you're like, oh my goodness, everything I spend now is is not from my income. It's from my my savings, my portfolio. That doesn't feel very good because in theory, that means I'll be spending my portfolio down over the rest of my life, and that feels really bad. I was once a millionaire.
What if I become not a millionaire anymore? Those types of things mentally start to creep in, and that's where you probably need some sort of permission from someone that's objective in a third party who can help assist you get to that point of spending to help you spend without guilt and actually can give you a lot of confidence towards spending, which leads right into number 18, which is if you have the trusted professionals around you that you know you need to have, and and here's why I think this is important. Obviously, you're like, Jacob, you're a financial adviser. Of course, you think everyone needs a financial adviser. Actually, I don't.
What I do think is, is that most people think about it incorrectly. Most people think about hiring a professional, financial adviser, CPA, estate planner, whatever it might be. Think of whatever professional, you name it. They think of it as a cost rather than an investment. And here's here's the thing.
When you think about it as a cost, it's always negative. You're always saying about, man, paid so and so that much to do what was it again? And so you have this scarcity mindset. What I'd argue is that if you think about it from an investment standpoint, what are you investing in? You're investing in someone who's done this for a lot longer and has way more experience, understands the ropes, and has been around the block a few times.
You're investing in you not having to figure everything out on your own. You're investing in not having to muster up the courage or the confidence to actually pull the trigger on whatever strategy it is you're trying to implement. You're investing in your time, which is your most valuable resource. You're gaining time back by not worrying about all these things, and this is really what wealthy people do. They trade money for time.
They buy their time back by investing in people or services that help them not have to worry about something. That's what I do in my business every single day. I find a way to pay someone else in some way to do that, whether that be through employees, whether that be through in this example, if you're listening to this podcast, I have an editor to edit my podcast. I pay them to do it so that I don't have to, so that I can go take the extra hour and go spend time with my kids or or talk with a client or whatever it is. I think you should think about it that way too when it comes to your retirement planning.
Yes. You could do it. Yes. You can actually retire successfully and never run out of money. I totally believe that.
But is it worth your time, your effort, and your mental capacity to do it that way? And most likely, it's not because you can spend your time in way more enjoyable ways than looking at your retirement plan every single day. So those are the 18 things that if you're doing those or have done those already, you are well ahead of most other retirees out there. And if you've not accomplished all these things and you're not all the way there yet, totally fine. The point of this is to help encourage you to think about these things and say, hey, I haven't thought about that in that way.
Great idea, Jacob. Let me go research that more and see where I can improve my plan. Thanks so much for tuning into this week's episode of Retirement Answers. I look forward to talk with you again very soon. Hey, it's Jacob again, and I wanted to remind you that nothing discussed in today's episode is meant to be financial, legal or tax advice.
Retirement Answers is for educational purposes only. Thanks for tuning into this week's episode. I look forward to talking with you again next week.