transcript

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Episode #606 - Should I Do a "Free" Retirement Analysis?

The saying nothing is for free means that everything has a cost or a consequence, even if it's not immediately apparent.

Roger: Welcome to the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement, but to have the confidence because you're doing the work to really lean in and rock it. My name is Roger Whitney, and welcome.

I am a practicing retirement Planner with over 35 years’ experience, founder of Agile Retirement Management, and we use this podcast to noodle on how we do retirement planning so that we can have the confidence to create a great life. We call that rocking retirement. That is the point of the exercise. Sometimes we can get caught up in planning just for planning's sake, and we don't want to do that.

Today on the show, we're going to share a rocking retirement in the Wild story from David. In addition, we're going to answer our title question, should I say yes to that free retirement analysis my broker's offering, in addition to a number of your questions.

ROCKIN’ RETIREMENT IN THE WILD

All right, so let's get this party started.

David emailed in and explained how he and his wife are leaning into rocking retirement. I love stories like this.

David says,

“I've been listening to your podcast for several years now. I retired in the end of 2022. One thing in particular we've worked at establishing is relationship with younger folks. We are blessed with a friendship with a young couple on staff at our church who have a young daughter. They were instrumental in helping us feel welcome at our church and the friendship went from there. They took a job at the church in Florida recently and then learned that their mom has cancer. My wife has been able to fly out to help them care for their little girl. Since we're so flexible at this point. One exciting thing about our friendship with them is it's led to us getting a position leading and teaching a newlywed/engaged Sunday school class. We are excited about this challenge and opportunity.

I want to thank you for your encouragement and the ideas that open our mind to these things. The concepts of service and passion and relationships were all things that I believe your podcast is helping me consider more seriously.”

Bam. I love that David. Finding people in community leads to other things, just like if you're wondering what you're going to do in retirement and you choose a hobby or passion, it may not be that hobby or passion, but it can lead to other things. Relationships are everything in life.

David, I want to tip my hat to you and say huzzah. Great, job, buddy.

PRACTICAL PLANNING SEGMENT

All right, our title question today comes from Phil.

Phil says,

“I get calls from various brokerages where I have funds offering to run a retirement plan analysis. As a member of the Rock Retirement Club, I'm going through the masterclass and have run through the feasibility plan, and it looks feasible, so is it worth going through this free retirement analysis? If so, what kinds of questions can I use this service to help analyze?”

This is a really good question, Phil, that I'm going to answer for you specifically, but I want to talk more generally about free retirement analysis or free courses, et cetera.

The first question you had, Phil, is this worth doing for you? I actually think right now, no. Given that you're working through the masterclass, I think if you went and got a free retirement analysis, it would be a distraction. Currently, I would suggest that you complete the process. You have a feasible plan, so you've gone through those modules of the course in the club, go through making it resilient, and create a draft of your retirement allocation or pie cake, how you're specifically going to pay for your life. Get that work done first. I think a free retirement analysis is likely going to distract you at this point.

In my experience, a free retirement plan analysis will focus primarily on a simplified feasibility analysis. When do you want to retire? How much do you want to spend? What's your Social Security and pension? What investments do you have? They run it through a Monte Carlo scenario to give you a probability of success. That is generally what a free retirement analysis will do. In your case, Phil, you are already doing that. In fact, you're doing it to a level that that free analysis isn't going to do, because you're getting very specific of how much are, each of the components of my base great life, what are the discretionary wants, and what sequence do I have those coming in and out of my life. You're getting a much more detailed analysis in the way that you're doing it in the masterclass. I don't think there's going to be a lot of help there.

Now, there may be other insights into, say, risks or opportunities, you know, tax opportunities or optimization opportunities, but I still think they're probably going to be based off of a very simplistic plan. The argument always is, well, it doesn't hurt to get a fresh set of eyes, and I don't disagree with that because we want to get ideas. The problem with a fresh set of eyes when you do this free analysis is that they're not getting the complete picture because it's a very simplified version of a feasibility test. It's not getting the nuances of when you're going to retire and when the mortgage gets paid off and everything else. So they end up having a very narrow lens in which to give opinions, which diminishes the value of those opinions, so that's why I'm not a big fan of them.

Even if it's interesting, Phil, even I said this question the other day with a prospective client. They wanted us to build the draft plan prior to working for them. That's another thing that you will see from a free retirement analysis standpoint is if an advisor will analyze your situation and give all these recommendations and do all this work in hopes of you saying yes and them being able to manage your assets. That I don't agree with either. I don't work for free. A lot of the analysis has nothing to do with whether assets are there or not. It's the work of building a detailed plan. I'd be wary of those because there are consequences to those.

What are some of the cautions or things you want to understand if you're considering a free retirement analysis?

Well, number one is discount anything having to do with the portfolio analysis. Here's our model portfolio, or I actually just recently saw one that someone did. It's like, oh, it looks like you're underweight here and you're overweight there and you might consider doing this, et cetera. It looks at the portfolio from a model target portfolio and then picks out areas where you're overweight or underweighted, et cetera. I would totally not do any of that stuff. The reason is that when you do a portfolio analysis it starts from the top down, meaning that it's looking at whatever your portfolio is relative to some model portfolio that has nothing to do with your life. It's just a model portfolio somewhere on the risk spectrum. It literally has nothing to do with your life. When you're building a retirement portfolio, you want to build it specifically from the bottom up to fund the life that you've determined you want in the vision and feasibility pillars. Totally different way of looking at it. So a top down portfolio analysis doesn't get that because it's not thinking about decumulation. It's just a top down compared to some model portfolio. It actually can hurt you because it could distract you and not be relevant to your life at all.

Phil, when you go through the resilient modules, which we just finished a sprint on 30 days to a resilient plan. You're going to build your allocation from the bottom up in order to fund your life with complete clarity. That's much more important. That's number one.

Number two, understand the intent of offering a free retirement analysis. Remember, there's always a cost or a consequence, even if we don't see it. The intent of offering a free analysis is to engage in a conversation so that you can be introduced to an advisor or the firm or upsell other services. That is the intent of offering a free retirement analysis. It begins the conversation so that when they do the free retirement analysis and you still have open questions because it's going to be a high level, simplified. There's really no other way for it to be. Then they can say, well, we can dive into this or why don't you hire us for our portfolio management services or get access to a CFP®, et cetera. So this is used as a sales funnel. That is okay because they're trying to get introduced, introduce their services to other people or to you and other people. They're trying to be helpful upfront, which is always nice. But just understand that it's a sales funnel, meaning that they're going to find things that are deficient and they're going to offer you their portfolio management services, et cetera. When we talk about this free retirement analysis, generally we're thinking of the advisor, Sally or Bob offering you a free analysis so that they can have a conversation to get you as a client. That is definitely the case. That doesn't mean that they aren't very competent. It's just that it’s a sales process. We often think of it in that, those terms. But honestly, the best people at this game are the major firms. Vanguard, Fidelity, Ken Fisher, those firms are very good at upselling their portfolio management services, etc. So it doesn't have to be an individual advisor.

So for you, Phil, I don't think you should do this. For everyone else, it is very handy. It can be valuable just to get a very high level. Is this feasible? Again, secondary. Phil, you asked what kind of questions will this service help analyze? I think mainly it is feasible and maybe they can tease out some risks that you might want to go at more deeply. But I think you get what you pay for here because it's really meant as a process to get you to sign up for something now. So what do you do? Okay, yes, you can get this free retirement analysis isn't nothing. Understanding what they are and still get a report whether It's analytics on your portfolio or a feasibility test. Maybe that's valuable to you as long as you're willing to pay the cost of having them follow up and work to have you engage them at a deeper level. That's the cost of the free because there is really nothing for free. How might you go about this differently?

Let's say you want a down and dirty analysis but you still don't want to pay any money. I would suggest use Bolden, which used to be called New Retirement. They have a free version of their retirement calculator where you can walk through in an incremental way getting a more custom analysis than you're likely to get at an advisory firm. You're going to be doing the work and doing the inputs. That is probably where I would start because I think the output is going to be more bespoke to your individual situation. That said, the disclaimer is Bolden has upsell. They upsell to the premium version. They have upsold to advisors and other things, which is fine, but again, nothing is free. But that would be the way that I approach it. I'm not particularly a big fan of free retirement analysis because I think they have become too generic.

LISTENER QUESTIONS

Now it's time to answer some of your questions. If you have a question for the show, go to askroger.me and enter your question. You could do it as an audio question or just type it in and we'll do our best to help you take your baby step by entering it on the show.

DOUG HAS SOME FEEDBACK ABOUT THE SMART SPRINT SEGMENT RELATED TO BEING PRESENT

All right, got a number of questions here. Today I'm working off my iPad. It's working okay, but the interface is still a little clunky to me, so we'll see how I do here. All right, first one is from Doug, which is really feedback related to my Smart Sprint from a few weeks ago about turn off the inputs and be present.

Doug said,

“I wanted to point out that wearing earbuds doesn't necessarily mean that someone is listening to music or podcast. I frequently use noise canceling earbuds just to have silence as loud noises can bother me.”

That is a fantastic point. My challenge wasn't necessarily not to have earbuds or not Doug, for sure. It was just to be present with yourself without inputs. Yours was a very constructive one and I appreciate that. I actually got a few hates I'll rephrase. I got a few testy emails. How dare I challenge this in the Smart Sprint, which I find interesting.

But thanks for the feedback Doug. I agree with you.

RICK WOULD LIKE TO SIMPLIFY HIS PORTFOLIO

The next question is, well, actually more feedback from my answering Barb's question on the Fidelity to Vanguard and which one seems to make more sense, and we'll have a link to that episode in our Noodle email.

By the way, if you like the show, sign up for our weekly email The Noodle, which is where we share resources that we mention on the show and give you links to interesting things that we think can help you rock retirement. You can do that at rogerwhitney.com by just entering your name and email. The price of that, by the way, is when we do launch the next open enrollment for the Rock Retirement Club, you're probably going to get an email saying, hey, would you like to join? So that's the cost because nothing's free. But it's a great email. Nichole works very hard on that.

Rick says,

Roger, I'm a buy and hold investor and I'm in the same situation as Barb. I'd love to reset my portfolio to simplify, reduce redundant funds and align it to the continuing education experience I'm gaining in recent years. However, the only reason I have not reset is the tax consequences of the transfers. I think you missed out on warning about tax consequences.”

I'm not sure if I did, Rick, but I'll trust you.

“I'm sure there is an eventual breakeven point, but at age 64, I'd rather continue to prune the expensive and redundant funds gradually using withdrawals from my retirement paycheck and large expenses, et cetera, than face a big tax bill by just selling everything and buying what should be.

Thanks for the continuing education and practical conversations on retirement.”

You make an excellent point, Rick. If I didn't point that out for sure in an after tax account, if you've built a cluttered closet of investments over the years because of different advisors or different strategies that you were interested in, it's easy to have a lot of different investments in an after tax account and if you've kept them and they were reasonably performing, they will have a significant amount potentially of unrealized capital gains. I just recently cleaned somebody's closet, portfolio wise, and we went from about 24 positions down to about six, they were in a situation where they didn't have all those embedded capital gains, so it was very easy just to sell all of those things and buy what they should be because they are a different person now. They're not all the versions that created all those different investment positions.

But like Rick, what do you do if you're like, wow, I got a lot of capital gains here and yeah, this is cluttered, but I don't want to sell them all because I don't want to take the tax bill that is totally reasonable. Then you do what you're doing, which is prune them over time and do it opportunistically. Well that's a great way of doing it.

So step one, what you can do is stop reinvesting all dividends and reinvestments on all of the investments that you're not going to sell so that way you're not exacerbating the situation by buying more and more shares that will create some cash flow into the account. Whenever these positions have dividends or capital gains distributions that you can use to build up the portfolio, that should be. So that's one little basic step we sometimes overlook.

Two is, Rick, just work them into the plan that you want that is serving your retirement. You may have to just make accommodation and it can be messy, this building out the portfolio for retirement. I have clients I'm trying to think of the longest one I have that has this issue. I have one that's been over a decade in the works where we still have some clutter that we haven't sold because of this unrealized gain situation, so I understand what you're saying, Rick.

Now one caveat to this, Rick, that said, if you need to sell some of these positions in order to build your resilient plan and have your five years of cash flow guaranteed because you don't have other ways of doing this in IRAs or what have you, make sure you get a resilient plan. The tax cost is the tax cost. Don't let that get in the way of not having clarity of how you're going to pay for the first five years of retirement. Just don't. That's the tail wagging the dog when it comes to taxes. Unless these positions in an after-tax account are inherited and they get the step up basis, there will be a tax. All we're really talking about is timing and maybe you can time them when you're in low income years after you retire. But don't let the taxes prevent you from having a plan that is resilient.

CLIFF HAS QUESTIONS ABOUT STRESS TESTING YOUR RETIREMENT PLAN

Our next question comes from Cliff related to stress testing a plan. When you have a feasible plan of record, for those of you that may not understand this terminology, there are four pillars in building a retirement plan.

First pillar is vision. What do we want? What represents a great life and what spending goals come from that? That's pillar one, that's where you have to start.

Pillar two is once you've done that, you want to organize your resources to know whether it's feasible. That's usually using software, which is Monte Carlo software, to give you an idea. Am I on a feasible path?

Once you've done that, the third pillar is to make it resilient. Part of making it resilient is stress testing your feasible plan against common retirement risks. One of those risks is markets going down early in retirement, and this is where Cliff's question comes in.

“Hey, Roger, I understand and totally agree with the episode of major theme of stress testing your retirement plan by retirement, running different what if scenarios. In my case, the most critical scenario is if I die significantly early, then my wife, because of the foundation of our retirement, our pensions, she's only going to get 55% of that when I die.”

However, he realizes that one of the risks that he has that's elevated is if he prematurely dies because these pensions aren't going to pay nearly as much and his wife will be in a single tax bracket, et cetera.

“However, I, was a bit confused by your first what if scenario of an early market drop. My understanding is that the foundational purpose of Monte Carlo analysis is to explore sequence of returns. So an early market drop scenario should be captured within the Monte Carlo runs, Correct? I would think that the more critical scenario to explore would be other what ifs, such as long term, medical, etc.

Am I missing something? I appreciate your thoughts.”

So, yes, Cliff, when you run a Monte Carlo scenario, and for those of you that might not know what that is, that is if Cliff wants to spend this, and he has this income, and what doesn't get covered by his income has to come from his investment assets, and his investment assets are invested in a particular portfolio. Is it, knowing whether it's feasible? One tool we use is what's called Monte Carlo scenario, which will create, say, a thousand copies of Cliff's life with the spending and these income sources and these assets invested, and then have one variable between one copy of his life and another, and that would be the sequence of returns. Do we have bad markets up front or bad markets at the end? By doing a thousand iterations of that, we get a sense of the risk of sequence of return to blowing up his retirement. Because if you have bad market returns early in retirement, it can handicap your plan forever. Cliff says, well, doesn't that get captured in some of those trials? Yes, Cliff, it does. But here's the problem, and this is why you want to do it.

We don't get to live a thousand trials and get the average confidence number or whatever the Monte Carlo scenario puts out. Ultimately we only get one iteration and that's the life that we have. The sequence of returns that we have by ourselves, that's unique to us and so it doesn't answer that question. Sequence of return risk is mostly elevated early in retirement. It doesn't matter if you know all the sequences. Say I have an 85% confidence of success. If I get the one sequence where I get all the bad returns up front, that could handicap my plan forever. If I don't make adjustments early, I can be in deep water. A really good example of this Cliff is not from this last year, but the year before. No. maybe it's a couple years now. We'll have a link to it in our Noodle. We did a Retirement Plan Live case study with Rosie and if you listen to that one, she, pre-retirement, was working with an advisor. They did a Monte Carlo analysis, they tested those thousand trials and the advisor said that your plan is feasible given all the assumptions. Well, literally right after Rosa retired she went through a bear market, this was like the year before we, we did this case study with her.

When I did the feasibility analysis given that her assets had just lost X amount of money, when I did the feasibility analysis, it said the plan wasn't feasible because her assets had been cut by whatever percentage. So when you do this analysis now, you know, it doesn't matter what the averages say at that point in time in this one iteration of Rosie's life, the plan didn't work when it did a year ago. Part of the problem that exacerbated that, and I remember talking to this her about this on the show, was that midway through the year when markets were really bad, the advisor even called this out, yeah, the feasibility is starting to really go down, but we'll talk about it in January and didn't do anything. They didn't identify anything early that they could do to mitigate the fact that their assets were going down because they had the bad iteration. That just exacerbated the problem and we ended up with a bigger conversation than we would’ve had if it had been addressed sooner, and we ended up having it on the show. So when you look at Monte Carlo analysis or these feasibilities are any software, will it work or not, the best way to think about them I believe is to think of them like a medical lab, right? When you're testing, if you're a dude, you're testing your PSA or your cholesterol, it's a reading of a point in time and it's always changing, right? If I do the analysis today and then the market goes down by 10% and I do the analysis tomorrow, I got a different reading. they're totally different because the assets have been cut by 10%. It's more important when you're doing this analysis is to identify trends and have some early detection that are critical to managing risk if you're starting to get one of the bad iterations. So that's the difference. I think that's the distinction here.

When we think of these Monte Carlo tests, this is why our firm is Agile Retirement Management. We use an agile approach because we want to run the tests in a systematic way with the intent of identifying trends and having early detection so we can take action early to mitigate and navigate storms. So the difference here, Cliff, I think, is you only get one iteration in life. You don't get to have the whole sample.

DAVE HAS A QUESTION ABOUT MOVING HIS 401K TO AN INDEPENDENT ADVISOR UPON RETIREMENT

All right, let's go to the next question. I'm using my iPad and I use a project management software for the questions and everything. I know people that use iPads and don't even use laptops. I don't know how they do it. The interface is a little slower. It's just not my jam. I need my computer back.

Dave's question is about moving a 401k to an independent advisor upon retirement.

“I am approaching retirement in about two years and my wife, who just retired and I are currently working with an independent financial advisor. I would like to understand what occurs when I retire and transfer my 401k from my employer's plan to an account managed by our advisor.

My 401k includes a mix of various mutual funds and individual stocks. Upon retirement, will the assets be sold before they're reinvested by the new account? Will the holdings be liquidated and transferred as cash until new investments are purchased? Do you have any recommendations or important considerations to ensure this process goes smoothly?

P.S. love your show and the RRC. So much great information that is making my wife and I rethink many aspects of retirement for the better.

Always for the better,

Dave.”

Cool. Wonderful question. What happens when you do a rollover of your 401k?

Now, there are exceptions, so I'm going to talk about the vast majority of the instances and tell you how to find out if yours is an exception. Dave, you have, we'll call it this million dollar 401k. It has a mix of mutual funds and stocks. What happens when you roll that to your individual advisor?

What you're going to do is establish an IRA. Assuming this is all pretax money, if you have Roth money, you'll establish an IRA and a Roth account. Roth IRA to receive the proceeds from your 401k to initiate the transfer. You're going to do this in a push, not a pull process, meaning that there will be a form from your 401k provider that is a rollover to an outside IRA, and this is where you're saying, I want to take my money from my IRA, and then you're giving them the information of where to direct it.

The important thing when you're doing that is that it's a trustee to trustee transfer, which means the money, Dave, is never actually in your name. It'll be a check. Like the check will be made payable to Charles Schwab, individual IRA for the benefit of Dave Smith. That's how the check will be titled. The check is paid to the custodian, which is where your IRA is opened up. A custodian is the firm. It could be Vanguard, it could be Fidelity, it could be Charles Schwab, et cetera. You're going to complete that form saying that you want to do a direct transfer to your outside IRA. Usually what I would suggest is that you do this, Dave, since you're working with an advisor. When you get to that point, get the form, because the advisor can't do that for you and have the advisor help you fill that out to make sure that it's done correctly.

What happens next? Once you submit the completed form to your 401k provider, almost always everything in the account is liquidated. All the mutual fund options are liquidated because those are specific to the plan, because each plan has different investment options and classes. Everything is liquidated into cash, and then that cash is sent to your IRA. When does it get liquidated? I don't know. You submit the form. It depends on how quickly they process the form. Every company is going to be different. Every 401k will also be different. Dave it's amazing, I don't know why, but a lot of 401k plans, when they do this process, rather than send the money electronically to your IRA, the firm that holds your IRA will either literally mail a check to the firm and then the firm would deposit the physical check into your account. Or, and this happens all the time, they will mail a check, regular mail, written to your IRA, but mailed to your address. Literally just a plain envelope. You open it up, I got a check, it's payable to my IRA for my benefit, for a million dollars. Then you're like, they sent in a check, a million dollar check over the mail, regular mail, literally. That's how it happens. When you get to that point, you want to have a conversation with the administrator of your 401k and ask them, do you have to liquidate everything? Likely the answer will be yes. How exactly will you mail the check? What is your protocol on, the timing, etc. But the key thing here is making sure that check is written payable to the custodian of where your IRA is located and not written to you personally. When you get to that point, just work with your advisor and they can help you do that.

Now, you should already have a plan or a roadmap for how this money will be invested with your advisor, because yes, if it comes in a check form, that check gets deposited into your IRA. Your advisor should have a protocol to say, hey, $1 million just came in for Dave and we can implement what Dave and I already agreed upon or we can have that meeting because it will sit there as cash if. Because it will have to be manually invested based on however the advisor works. Hopefully that gives you a short tutorial to help make this whole thing go more smoothly.

BOB IS CURIOUS WHICH RETIREMENT PLAN YOU SHOULD USE FIRST, SOCIAL SECURITY OR YOUR ASSETS?

Our next question comes from Bob related to Social Security for retirement or savings, which one should I use first?

Bob says,

“Hey, hello Roger. I met Scott, Scott Sanborn on your team several years ago and he told me about you, but I didn't start listening until a few years ago. I was excited when I heard you mention him on the podcast last year.”

Scott Sanborn is amazing guy who builds flat fee retirement plans but does so much more within the business.

Anyway, Bob says,

“I retired from my full time position two years ago but still work part time and I plan to until I reach age 70. I'm 65 years old in eight months, my pension is $4,000 a year. My salary is $55,000 a year. I have about $1,300,000 in a retirement account. I am planning on cutting back work next year when I reach full retirement age.

My question is when I reach full retirement age, Do I start taking Social Security or do I start using my retirement savings and save my Social Security until I reach age 70?

Keep up the great work and good luck with your fly fishing!”

Bob, the way to approach this is to have a vision of and map out what your cash flows look like, knowing that it's feasible. Then create version one with you taking Social Security at full retirement age, and version two where you delay until age 70.

You create a separate “what if” scenario taking Social Security, because in that resilience pillar that we talked about earlier, you'll have a five year cash flow forecast at least showing that if you take Social Security, how that covers your actual spending in your plan. Then you can complete a “what if” scenario if you delay Social Security, what the gap is until then and then you can work through where you get the money to cover that gap.

Two things you want to think about here.

Number one is remember that as long as you don't have a short life expectancy, waiting until age 70 to claim your Social Security gets the largest lifetime payout. Assuming you live normal lifespan. If you're married and your wife or spouse has a lower benefit, that will maximize the survivor benefit for them as well. That's important. If you think about Social Security, it is an amazing source of social capital. It's guaranteed, it’s inflation adjusted for the rest of your life, well, joint life. Whichever spouse is lower, moves up to the higher one. Maximizing that benefit I think is really important. Unless you have a handicapped life expectancy, etc.

The second thing you want to look at is, and you can do this if you have a feasible plan of record. If I do take Social Security and I don't touch my IRA, what will my required minimum distributions look like when I have to turn them on? I took a look at what size your RMDs would be when you hit age 73, and if you didn't take any withdrawals before then and you put a reasonable growth rate on it, they would be almost twice as much as your current earnings from your part time work. So would that create more tax liability than you need? Having this what if scenario is going to be a way of determining this.

Part of this, I think Bob, is what are you trying to solve for with this question? If you're trying to solve for resilience and having a more resilient plan for your spouse, then I would lean towards delaying Social Security. If you're trying to solve for minimizing required minimum distributions because they're going to be significantly more than you're going to need, and they can move you up unintentionally into tax brackets and IRMAA brackets that you would prefer not to be in, that may be a vote for taking the income early.

Bob, what I tell people is it's dealer's choice. By doing the base scenario and comparing a what if scenario, you can tease out, yeah, one looks a little bit better than the other. But you know what? Either one seems to be just fine. One's not significantly better than the other, and that's cool. Dealer's choice. Some people feel very strongly about taking those Social Security early, but I would be careful about it. I think it's an amazing benefit that we want to try to maximize because it brings a lot of safety to the entire plan, but I would do it in an organized process, not just simply from intuition or how we feel about the current situation when it comes to Social Security. Ping Scott about it, because he'll talk all day long about this stuff. He loves it.

With that, let's go set a smart sprint.

TODAY’S SMART SPRINT SEGMENT

On your marks, get set, and we're off to set a little baby step in the next seven days to not just rock retirement, but rock life.

In the next seven days, I want you to pay attention to free offers.

It could be a free retirement analysis. I have this whole story about getting 15% off of REI and trying to apply for a credit card, forgetting that I locked my credit reports. Embarrassing. Kept getting rejected. It's like, what's wrong with me? But even signing up for a credit card to get free 15% off, I mean, yes, that's real money, but there comes a cost to that. You got the friction, obviously, of opening up the credit report, but now you have another open line of credit on your credit report. You have another chance for fraud and et cetera.

I just want you to be aware of this when you get offers, what are the unintended consequences or costs that come with the free thing that somebody might be offering you?

Next week on the show, we're going to have Danielle Roberts, founder of Boomer Benefits, on to help us navigate Medicare in 2025. There's been a lot of things going on, important things to pay attention too, especially with advantage, evidently. In addition the week after that, we're going to have Peter Lazaroff on, and we're going to talk about why it's so important to keep our investment portfolios simple.

With that said, I'm still hanging out here in Colorado. I am getting ready for the Rodeo Roundup at the end of the month. We have like 350 people coming, which is amazing. I hope you're doing something fun here at the end of summer.

The opinions voice in this podcast are for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All, performance reference is historical and does not guarantee future results. All indices are unmanaged and cannot be invested in directly. Make sure you consult your legal, tax or financial advisor before making any decisions.