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Welcome to Financially Fluent with Ray Godleski from Southeast Wealth Partners, LLC. Whether you're already retired or planning for the future, navigating financial advice can be overwhelming. This podcast cuts through the noise, bringing real insights from experts who specialize in every aspect of a successful financial plan—including how to adapt when things don’t go as expected. Join us as Ray Godleski answers audience questions and shares actionable strategies—not just empty clichés.
Ray Godleski (00:01)
Welcome to Financially Fluent with Ray Godleski of Southeast Wealth Partners. In this episode of Financially Fluent, Ray Godleski and Ryan Yamada discuss various aspects of financial planning. Ryan is the head of advanced planning. Ryan helps Osaic financial professionals expand their capabilities and refine their client service models. Ryan has been working with business-minded individuals for over 15 years and previously held leadership roles in Carson Group's Advanced Solutions team, where he specialize in income tax,
retirement distribution planning and behavioral finance. This episode focuses on the Secure Act, Roth conversions and the complexities of inheriting IRAs. They explore the implications of the Secure Act on retirement accounts, the importance of proper estate planning and the benefits of Roth conversions in managing tax liabilities. The conversation also touches on the significance of trust as beneficiaries and the need for strategic long-term wealth planning.
Hey, good morning, Ryan. Welcome to another episode of Financially Fluid. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. It's very chilly here in Omaha. We're in almost sub-zero temperatures, but other than that, I have no complaints. Sub-zero, boy. Well, that makes me wonder, did you grow up in Omaha or where'd you grow up? No, I grew up on the Hawaiian islands and the temperature is slightly different, landscape slightly different.
then here in Omaha, but I came here for college a number of years ago and just decided I love the cold weather and, and, and the lack of beaches. So that's why I stayed. No, I'm joking. I love the people here actually. And, you know, they, it's a great place to raise a family and spread your wings. Yeah. Do you ever go to lunch with Warren?
You know, he hasn't invited me to McDonald's just yet, but I would be glad to buy him a cheeseburger anytime he wants. I hear you. Yeah, I visited Omaha last year for the first time. So, I mean, it looked kind of new and vibrant, the parks that I went to. So, didn't have huge expectations. It was a lot. It was pretty cool. It's a neat place. They're doing a lot and...
I think there's a commitment, a renewed commitment to getting new and younger professionals to settle down here and also to make it a more retirement friendly state. And I think you're seeing that with a number of states in the Midwest that maybe traditionally haven't had a lot of people travel to and retire. Things like reducing state income tax or taking off income taxes completely on
Things like Social Security or retirement income benefits, right IRA distribution. So you're seeing that across the board with a number of states Nebraska is just a little late to the game But I think that's that's a couple of the hopes there Okay. Well glad to have you on today Financial planning there's so many topics to choose from So I'm thankful we got kind of a team of specialists here. I can lean on for different situations. So
For today, I thought we'd talk about the Secure Act as well as Roth conversions and we'll see where that leads. How's that sound? That sounds great. It's topics that our team in advanced planning discusses on a daily basis and it's certainly been a hot bun issue over the last few years. Okay, cool. Well, before we do that though, I try to have each guest do one trivia question. so,
I'm nice, I'm going to let you have the choice of topics and they're only topics that I like. if you're like, hey, let's do science, I'm going to be like, I'm so sorry, we're not doing science. But here's your options. We got sports, music, US history, or can you guess what that state is? Meaning you get a factoid about a state and you got to guess what state is.
I hope there's no grade on this because all of those subjects I'm probably pretty low on. Ray, let's go on states. How about that one? Okay. Awesome. And here's the purpose just so you know, as we're going to show still fairly new. So as we grow, what we're going do is we're going get questions from people from different states. And I think it's kind of fun if they were to submit...
know, effectuate about their state and see if we can guess it. So that's kind of the history on that trivia question. So here we go. This one, I think it's kind of hard, but we'll see if you can get it. Okay. All right. Here we go. What is the only state with an official state dessert?
What is the only state with an official state dessert? Yeah. If you want a hint, let me know, but we'll see if you can get it without the hint. Yeah, how about this? What is the dessert? Can I get that as a hint? Okay. That's fine. So the dessert is called Kuchen. I don't if I'm saying that right, but it's German-inspired pastry, which means cake in German.
Okay. German, so probably thinking... Same time zone is your time zone, central time zone. Okay. That's the only more... No more hints. You got to pick one of those. You got to pick something. Well, I'm just trying to think where the German people may have settled. And also...
somewhere in the central time zones. I'm going to throw out there, Illinois. Good guess. Not quite. I don't know why, but it's South Dakota. I don't vet these, but I think that's true. Now, why the other states don't have a state dessert, I don't know. But anyway, very fascinating. If we have time later in the show, we'll go with something easier.
Thank you. Appreciate you for playing. 100%. That was fun. Yeah. Fun. Fun. Well, we'll get right into kind of today's topic, if you will. Yeah. So, you know, many people I've talked to already, they have their IRAs, and this goes back a few years. They may have done an IRA, you know, going back a few years ago and point them to a trust. So, if you don't mind, give your kind of explanation of the Secure Act.
I know we can't go on a 15 minute dialogue about it, but maybe just the highlights and then we can circle back to that question. Sure. Well, if we rewind the clock to Secure and the first Secure, there's two of them. Secure one passed at the end of 2019, couple hundred pages long. They snuck in a number of provisions, but some of the main themes from that bill were adjusting or making things quote unquote
easier for retirees or those who are inheriting IRAs. There were some provisions for business owners and saving for retirement a little easier and some credits and other benefits and setting up employer retirement plans, among other things. There's a couple hundred pages, so there's a few provisions in there. But when we look more broadly at
What is the government trying to do with all these bills? I think it's important to remember that the government is a business. And much like we do as financial planners, when we're trying to find cash flow, we're trying to find revenue, we look at what are the possible sources for that. And the government gets a tally via our tax forms on how many IRA dollars are out there.
how many traditional IRAs and dollars are in those IRAs. And they get a tally and they get to say, if we were somehow able to force those dollars out of those IRAs, it would become revenue for us as a business, right? As the US government. And that comes in the form of required minimum distributions while we're alive. Or if we pass those
IRAs to the next generation, inherited IRAs force out RMDs, required minimum distributions for a beneficiary. so much of these secure provisions that have to relate to all of this with RMDs is the government's way of saying, we know those are dollars in there. We want more of it sooner. And previously with secure,
there was something called the stretch provision, pretty much everyone qualified for, which was you can stretch those IRA dollars over your entire life, right? Just like if you were alive, but for the beneficiary. And that created a very slow stream of income that the government enjoys, but they said, I think we can do better. And they added something called the 10 year rule. And that was one of the big provisions with Secure. And they said that,
If we are passing that IRA to a named beneficiary, and let's say it's not your spouse or a number of other categories that would still be able to stretch, but just generally speaking, inherits that IRA, they are gonna have to take that within 10 years. And 10 years may seem like a long time, but compared to somebody who may have a 35-year life expectancy, that 10 years is forcing...
those dollars out sooner and generating money to the US government. Right. So I know one of the things that people usually ask about is, let's say it's a parent that passes and a grown kid receives the inherited IRA. As a matter of fact, I had this happen last year. And the interesting thing was, is there's two sons that inherited it.
different states, but one of them had a disability and the other not. The other has good earnings, good income, has 10 years to take it out. So I guess the thing that people may not know or should know is do they have to take some out every year over those 10 years? Or can they wait till the 10th year to take it all out? What would you say to that person?
Wow, that was a question that was on everybody's mind after the Secure Act passed. And in fact, it was such a contentious topic of do we have to take distributions out in years one through nine, right? We all understand the 10th year and we'll talk about that individual who is disabled in a second, but we know about the 10 year rule, years one through nine, what happens? Do we have to take distributions or do we not?
And it was, again, such a confusing, contentious issue that the Treasury had to release final regulations on this topic. And it came four years after the bill. it tells you how quickly they work. But to answer your question, it depends largely on how old that original account owner was. We have to go back to the person who first owned the IRA, and we have to find out
Were they of age to begin taking distributions or not? Now, if they were past what we call in the industry, their required beginning date, right? That's typically the age that they have to begin drawing those RMDs out, required minimum distributions. At that point, the government says, hey, this mailbox money, right, we want more of it. We want you to keep paying us, so therefore, for your beneficiaries, they have to keep...
that stream of income going, right? They have to make those distributions. Now it's gonna be based on their life expectancy, but years one through nine, the government's used to getting that money, so the beneficiary has to distribute that as well. But let's say, for example, your client, the original account owner, was earlier on in life. Maybe they were in their 50s or 60s and passed too soon. When that case, because there were no distributions being made from that account,
the beneficiary doesn't have to take them until year 10. Right. Yeah. So it's all about the person that's deceased. When do they pass? Is it before their RBD or not? So I guess a little interesting technical question would be, let's say somebody was 73, somebody passes at the age of 73. Let's say they do it.
November of a year. Now let's say, let's call it December. Let's say that somebody passed away December of 2024, or 73, a time of death, but they hadn't taken the RMD yet, because they were waiting till the following calendar year to take it, and then somebody inherits it. Even though they didn't take an RMD, I guess the beneficiary would still have to
take them. that sound right? Yeah. We still have to satisfy our year of death RMD. And so the original account owner was supposed to take that distribution. It still has to be made. But because they have crossed their required beginning date, the beneficiary would need to treat that as if the RMDs have started. Yeah. Okay. Very good. Was that my second trivia question?
We're just, we're going deep on some of this. I mean, obviously the, I think the, the main takeaway for most people is when, there is an inherited IRA, you know, it's, it's just not very simple and really it's really important to get proper advice. I think even some advisors in the industry might not necessarily understand all the implications. And I'm thankful.
for you guys as an advanced planning resource, right? The lean on for, I'll give you another example. know, let's, here we go. Let's say somebody's 80 years old, they pass away, right? And their portion goes to a 55 year old. And then let's just say seven years later, that person passes away and you know, they have a 29 year old kid.
what's happening to that original IRA, assuming that the 29-year-old was on their, let's call it a dad, dad's as a beneficiary on the inherited side, but not necessarily was on the original account. They weren't a contingent of the grandfather or anything like that. So how many years does that person get to take that money out of the account? Yeah. And questions like these are what make these rules so challenging.
We in the industry, we deal with this on a regular basis and on our team on a daily basis, but I will say for the average person, how are they supposed to know these rules? That's a lot of entanglement, a lot of confusion. And then what happens is we have clients that, hey, I've got an IRA that I inherited from great aunt Sally. Was I supposed to take a distribution?
Well, when did great aunt Sally die? I don't know, three or four years ago, right? Now to answer your question though, the 10-year rule does not reset, unfortunately. Just because we pass it on to the next generation does not mean that we just get to reset and add another 10 years. Now, what we're talking about is primary beneficiary, right? From one generation to the next.
And then we have our successor beneficiaries. And successor beneficiaries, again, do not get to extend, in this case, another seven years. The 10-year rule is the 10-year rule. And at the end of that 10 years, that first 10 years, all the accounts have to be completely finished. Okay. So in that scenario, the latest beneficiaries...
only has like three years to get all that money out of there. And I think this is going to be even more of an issue, right? And not just now, but maybe a decade from now, two decades from now, we're going to see a lot of clients who have inherited accounts from other people who inherited accounts. And they're going to wonder, hey, was I supposed to do anything about this? Right. You know, and you mentioned when did someone pass? And it's very common somebody would
flippantly say three or four years ago, but the reality is we need to know the date because it's very possible that someone, the original person that passed away was before the secure. Yes, yes. Yeah, it gets to be a little bit complicated. let's, I think I did ask a question earlier that said I would circle back to, which is...
Like I say, pre-secure act is, I think it was kind of common that people might have a trust and point the IRA to a trust. And so let's kind of help people figure out if you did do a trust as a beneficiary, what are some things you better make sure of so things go kind of the way you're hoping versus if you kept the old language in the past, it may be fine or it may not be.
Trust is a beneficiary. This is a topic that's come up a lot more. And I will say it could be perfectly fine the way that people already have it set up, but it could also cause some headache, some additional taxes, and the need for a rework. Now, just like when we create financial plans for clients, estate plans also need to be reviewed based on the client's life.
as well as the general economic, legislative, and tax rules that govern these accounts, these devices. And so when we think of a trust, a trust is just a big box, right? And when I was a kid and I was in my playroom, we would have a box for my toys. I specifically liked Star Wars figurines, that was my things, right? And airplanes, Star Wars figurines and airplanes.
And when my mom would tell me, you gotta put your toys away, Ryan, I would just toss everything into the chest, right, into the toy box, and I'd close the lid. And while I thought I was putting my toys away, I wasn't necessarily organizing my toys. And when my mom would say later, hey, go and clean that up, and I would try to find the X-wing fighter, I'd have to open up the chest and I'd dig through and...
Where was the X-Wing? You I don't know because I had previously just thrown everything into the chest without thinking of how it was gonna be organized. And I think in a similar way, this is how people treat trust, right? Clients and just people in general, we're looking for the easy button. And a trust, oftentimes, the way that it's explained is it's the easy button. Hey, you don't need a beneficiary designation, you just need to put your trust.
whether it's an IRA, whether it's your life insurance, what have you. And we just toss things into the trust and say, hey, whatever happens to me, it's in the trust. We avoid probate. And that's many times our first objective. But here's the thing. Just like my X-wing fighter, when I'm trying to find a very specific toy, you open up the box, you open up the trust, and it's just a mess in there. And so you think about your...
beneficiary, your loved one who's not only having to deal with the past of a loved one, the past of you, but they're also trying to settle the estate. They're trying to organize all of its components, all of the accounts that you've had over your lifetime. This is where it can get a little tricky. And we see trust that, I dealt with a trust the other day, drafted in 1986. They had no idea Secure was gonna come about.
What is a designated versus an eligible designated beneficiary? Does this qualify as a see-through trust? Was there a digital asset provision? There was nothing of this. and by the way, the client was on their first marriage. This client has now remarried and had two additional kids, possibly a contentious situation. So going back to the trust as a beneficiary, normally I suggest this for...
a few very specific reasons, or I should say, we see this work into very specific situations. Number one, if we need to add protections, right? Perhaps we have minor children, perhaps we have a beneficiary who spends more than they should and can't be responsible or trusted with this type of money. And in addition to protection, we add control, right? Perhaps we wanna add a layer of control with how much these beneficiaries can distribute or take out.
And for what purpose? There's a number of other very specific nuances, but I would say that if protection and control are not necessary and this can't be accomplished with a named beneficiary designation form, the trust as the IRA beneficiary may just become a headache. And that's what we see often.
If you're looking for advice specific to your situation, then take a look at this episode's sponsor, Southeast Wealth Partners. To learn more about their team and approach, go to southeastwealthpartners.com. Southeast Wealth Partners is a great next step to be financially fluent. for the key provisions to make it a quote see-through trust, we need a named beneficiary and we need their
But we need their social and their data birth. Yeah, we need to be able to see through to who is the individual beneficiaries. And sometimes that's easy and sometimes that's not so easy. We also need to be valid under state law. There's three or four provisions that are really key here. But again, think of this toy chest. I need to be able to see through to find the very specific toys and what we're going to do with that. And sometimes-
Most people are just happy to have a trust that they can throw all their toys into versus what are we going to do with those toys afterwards? Right. No, yeah. We're actually going to be doing another episode with a state attorney. We're going to be getting into some of that. What could go by a contract? What probably should be in a trust if you are doing one? Yeah, so those are all good. Okay. Well, let's talk about something
else here as far as... Oh, we talked about the security act. just to kind of close, like I said, there's so many things out there, but I think the thing that people need to remember is not everybody has the 10-year rule, right? So if it goes to a sibling that is less than 10 years old, or maybe they're even an older sibling, it doesn't have to be a sibling, but somebody that's not younger or much younger, right? Then the stretch rule would apply, right? Yeah.
There's a number of beneficiaries who can still use this stretch provision. Secure created or has three different beneficiary types. The first would be your eligible designated beneficiaries. Those are people who are eligible to continue stretching the IRA, things like a spouse, a chronically disabled individual, those individuals. Then we have the designated beneficiaries. That's a second category.
and they are subject to the 10-year rule. And of course, we have the third, which is entity types, so charities, trusts, and other types of entities, maybe in a state. And that's going to be under the five-year rule. So yes, there's a litany of options that you could potentially distribute, but the stretch is still alive and well for a number of very select beneficiary types. Right. Okay, awesome. Well, I we want to talk about Roth some too.
I figure we start with the basic, like a Roth conversion. There's still people that get a little bit confused by that. Feel free to take it away on that. And then if you feel up to it, we might talk about, what's a mega Roth? What's a backdoor Roth? We may get into some of that, but let's start off with the easy button, as they say, what is a Roth conversion? So let me tie this with...
secure and RMDs. An RMD is the government's way of forcing you to take your IRA dollars, the dollars that have not been taxed yet and forcing them into the system as taxable income. What we are doing with a Roth conversion is that we are choosing on our time period to accelerate those dollars. But the only difference is instead of moving the money from a traditional IRA
into our bank account, we're moving the money from a traditional IRA into a Roth account, where it can continue growing on a tax-deferred basis and eventually come out tax-free. So it's actually not that dissimilar in what we're trying to do here, but many individuals look at Roth conversions because they can peer down the road and see
Gosh, when the government is gonna force me to take those distributions, it is gonna spike my income to the point where I'm paying way more in taxes than I feel comfortable. And that has a whole slew of other consequences, whether it's now you're in the net investment income tax, where you're paying additional taxes on your investments. Perhaps your Medicare premiums at that point are now costing you more. Not that you're getting any more value from it, you're just paying more because
you have more income. There's a number of other phantom taxes that start playing into the RMD situation. so for educated clients, they say, wow, maybe I should accelerate some of that income now and then gain the benefit later on. There's been multiple times I've been talking with somebody about RMDs well ahead of their RMD age.
Even going back to when it used to be 70 and a half, of course, now R &Ds are 73, 72 for like a minute, I think. But anyway, I would go over with folks, because sometimes I'd never heard of this. We're going back eight, nine years, something like that. And I would say, it's 70 and a half, like again, now it'd be 73, but you're going to have to take out of your IRA X amount of dollars. And of course, a person would say, well, I don't want to do that.
And I'd say, well, if you don't, they're gonna be a penalty of back then 50%. And they're like, well, that sucks. And I'm like, no kidding. And so then we would, of course now the penalty is only 25%. Still sounds punitive to me, but so from a planning perspective, what was cool is like we said, well, wait a minute, if that's how much money you're gonna have to take out later, why don't you just take out some of it now?
And the couple is going, okay, maybe. And usually one couple wants to spend more than the other, right? And they're elbowing the other person. like, see, I told you we can spend more money. And so in that case, so it's like, hey, why not take a third of it, spend more, a third of it as a raw conversion. And by the way, they may lean into a long-term care planning conversation or something like that, kind of leverage some dollars for that. So...
The beauty of that from a planning perspective was they were planning ahead. And now it's like they get to enjoy the money now for kind of that go-go year stuff, but also they've reduced the amount of RMDs later. And now they have a bucket of money that's at a Roth giving them more control. let's just say, this is years ago, but let's say you wake up.
three years from now and tax rates are up, they've got another bucket to pull from. You get what I'm saying? You see people thinking kind of like that? Yeah, Ray, I just want to double click on something you said, which was we're helping clients spend their money, which on a certain level shouldn't be that difficult, right? We've been spending money for our entire life and many of us...
when we work with clients who are thinking about retirement, that's a fun time for them. But if you've saved and accumulated your whole life, making the switch from saver to spender, and then how much can I spend, that's actually a much more challenging thing. It's both a math problem as well as an emotional problem, or emotional challenge, I should say. And when I think about Roth,
conversions and Roth accounts, we are in a sense doing the spending, right? We're accelerating money. And in a sense, we're kind of spending down one bucket that we can then do a couple things with. Number one, we have clients who really want to save and pass on these assets to the next generation. Well, one of the best things that you can do is pass on a Roth. Roths are great assets to pass down.
They don't have those required minimum distributions either for the account owner or for the beneficiary. So check, it checks a lot of boxes. But the other thing that it allows us to do is create buckets of money that we can pull from if and when we need it. That is not gonna spike our income tax in other ways. So let's take for example, many clients are concerned with what happens if taxes increase as I retire.
Set to expire at the end of this year, we have the Tax Cut and Jobs Act. And if things just go the way that the law is written, TCJA will sunset at the end of this year, and taxes for the average person will probably go up a little bit. And so, if you're a person who is used to living off $6,000 a month after taxes, and your tax bill goes up,
Well, that means you either spend less, distribute the same amount and spend less because you'll have less in your pocket, or you have to increase your distributions to cover the taxes to spend the same dollars. And that may have a host of tax consequences there. So let's say you had a bucket of money, like a Roth account, that no matter how much you pulled from it, you weren't going to increase your tax bill.
That's a pretty powerful concept. absolutely. One of the things that I see is, and I think a lot of it is coming from the advisor community, which I'm happy that other advisors are paying attention. And I think even the general public is paying attention as, I think for a couple of decades there, people are just like, oh, let me just max out my 401k pre-tax. And all of a sudden you wake up and you're about to retire and you've got...
almost all your money in pre-tax accounts. So I'm trying to bring some education there on why it might be a good idea to have balance. Balance doesn't mean equally across the board, but more be strategic first, but also tactical. And so you could have a pre-tax account, you could have a Roth, you could also have a taxable account too, A general brokerage account. And so one of the things is
with Roth conversions is I wouldn't willy-nilly that. I think that's where we really want to get tactical inside of that broader strategic plan. Meaning, if you did a Roth conversion the year that you lost some income because you retired or in between jobs, that may be a little less painful than if you didn't pay that much attention to it later and all of sudden you've
You mentioned Irma earlier, Medicare surcharges. You may run into that even though you didn't mean to. You get what I mean? Being strategic in when we accelerate that income because ultimately we have to pay the tax bill and no one likes paying taxes, me included. But there are going to be times in our life that we are in a lower fixed income period. And generally for clients, the first gap year is I say,
is in between the day they retire and the day they start drawing Social Security. That's typically going to be the first gap year. And that could change, depending on how quickly or how much delayed somebody might claim their Social Security. The second gap year may be Social Security to the second person Social Security, if they're married. And then from Social Security number two to RMDH.
73 or 75, depending on how old you are. And so a good retirement income plan should lay out all of these important points. And then we start optimizing, where do we draw the income from to cover your living expenses, right? We need to do that first. And then for all that discretionary spending, where are we gonna pull it from? Your trips to Disneyland with the kids, the...
teardrop RV camper that you want to take to Banff or wherever national park. And then we start layering on top of that, can we then fill in some of the gaps with other things? It could be accelerating those tax-affirmed IRA dollars to then build a pot of money on the side that we may use for later. Yeah, that's all good. Well, you mentioned social security and
So one of the things we're going to do on this show here is I imagine we're going to be talking more and more about social security, when to do it. We're going take questions on that. I actually got a ship expert coming on next month and that'll be to get into the weeds on Medicare. yeah, as we get closer to wrapping up today, any other kind of just thoughts around Secure Act or Roth that you want to point out?
I would say that for clients or advisors, the best thing that we can do is help our clients take a long-term view of their wealth. You and I, Ray, we're certified financial planner professionals. We help people plan for the long term. Whether it's your state plan, as we talked about, throwing everything into a trust and maybe being a little bit more intentional there.
whether it's on the tax planning side, balancing how do I reduce my taxes today with the taxes that I may have to pay tomorrow, tying that all into a coordinated financial plan. That's really where the art and science have to meet. And I know it's really appealing from the tax planning side to say, I'm trying to get my income down as low as possible and therefore I can get the biggest refund or
You know, something like that. I've had clients that have come in so proud that they have gotten the largest refund they've ever gotten because they reduced their income all the way down to zero. And there was one really intelligent engineer. He had retired from engineering and he came into our office and he said, Ryan, I just filed my taxes and I've never been prouder. I said, okay.
Tell me what you did. know, my mind is already spinning because this guy had spreadsheets beyond belief. And he said, I was able to get our taxable income down to zero. You when I did the math on it with our standard deductions and everything, I was able to get our taxable income to zero. And I said, geez, John, that must have been a heck of an exercise. Congratulations. How'd you do it? He said, well,
I pulled all of our money from the Tax Bowl accounts and I used some of the CDs to use our living expenses. And I said, well, let's just play that forward. How is that gonna impact your tax rate a decade from now? And he sat back in his chair and he said, geez, I don't know. And I said, exactly. The consequences to you trying to pay $0 in taxes today,
may not be easily seen. And what we ended up having to do with him and his family were to project out, hey, what are those IRA dollars gonna do for you? Because John had over $2 million in IRAs and he was stoked that he didn't pull any of it in the first year of retirement. But because of the work that we had to show him on the income distribution and the fact that
His RMDs were going to be something like $160,000 in the first year. Plus you add his Social Security, plus you add their investment portfolio. He was going to jump into the 22-24 % tax bracket, plus state income. He was a prime candidate for some Roth conversions, which we talked about, and just general income planning. I would say that my closing thoughts are...
take a broader view of our wealth, take a broader view of the estate planning and the income tax planning, because the decisions we make today will eventually impact either the future us or the future inheritors or the future beneficiaries. And it may be in a good way, but if we don't take a really intentional effort, it may be in a way that we're not happy with. Yeah, I could agree more. And I think it's so important for folks, just ask questions, you know, get...
get some clarity. would say obviously someone, maybe in their 30s, it's about direction, it's about habits, but truly when folks get to be in their 50s, 55, 60, you got to really start to zero in on tax brackets and which bucket of money to pull from. think it's so important, so critical to get that right. And the more efficient you are, it's just...
better, right? Because we get more to spend or more to give. And I think that's what everybody's looking for. You know what mean? Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. All right. Well, Ryan, I really appreciate you being the guest here today. If you're ever in Atlanta, let me know. We'll do a trivia somewhere. I'll still take you on my team. Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate the work you do, And putting out this great podcast, think this is important information for many people.
For our listeners here, please follow, subscribe, share, be financially fluent. Thanks again, Ryan. We'll see you later.
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