Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Live from the wg y iHeart Studios. Welcome to Retirement
Ready with your host Dave Kopek from the Retirement Planning Group.
Every week, Dave and his team discuss the ways they
can help people make informed decisions about their retirement assets
to maintain, improve, and secure their desired quality of life.
Here's your host, Dave Copet.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
I'm live today. This is not a pre recorded show.
It's good to be here. Spent a few weeks down
in Florida and thought out and came back up here
and got frozen again. So hopefully you're warm and comfy
and you're enjoying the day. It's sunny out, but it
(01:10):
is windy, so be careful out there. But I'm Dave Kopek.
I'm your host. This is Retirement Ready. Retirement Ready is
a topic specific show and we try to focus in
on one topic during this hour. And what we're going
to be talking about today is something that most of
(01:31):
us are going to have to do during our post
retirement years post retirement years, and I'll discuss that about
who we are. We're the Retirement Planning Group. We work
predominantly with hard working savers. I've been in the business
now forty three years. All of our assets are held
with Fidelity, the mother ship. We work through Fidelity Institutional
(01:57):
Wealth Advisors. We've been open architecture plan We're independent. We
have no predetermined destination for your assets. We act in
a fiduciary capacity and investment management, asset protection, legacy planning.
We focus a lot on retirement income distribution. We now
have five locations in New York. I'll be heading out
(02:18):
to Syracuse tomorrow afternoon for two days to work out
of the Syracuse office. But anything that I'm discussing, we
offer a complementary consultation at any one of those five offices.
If you don't want to come to the office, we
can do it by zoom, ring, central, plane, train, boat
(02:38):
will come to you. You can come to us however
you want to do it. But it's a new world
that we live in retirement planning. How do I do it?
How do we go about it? We have I think,
kind of a unique formula on how we allocate money
(02:59):
and also have individuals prepared for some of the obstacles
that you can be facing during your retirement years. So
I'll discuss that in small detail today. But today show
is going to be on. How do you spend the
(03:20):
money that you've accumulated for the last thirty to forty years.
That's the tricky part. How do I allocate the money
to build a retirement income portfolio and spend it down
without having the money go away before I go away
(03:43):
in my spouse and my loved one, whatever it may be.
So let's say for the past four decades, you've been
accumulating money. You started in your twenties, you're now in
your sixties, and you want to go into the green
pastures your retirement. Most of us do not have pensions.
(04:05):
Pensions are a thing of the past. In the Capital
District region, we're kind of unique because of the state
capital being here and all the individuals that have pensions
that work with the state. But almost nine out of
ten individuals today do not have pension benefits. And the
result is is that millions and millions of Americans are
(04:25):
going to be their own pension manager. And what happens
is they get jittery, especially when you have a week
like we just had, and it's understandable that investors get nervous.
We'll talk in brief detail a little bit about the
markets over the past week and two. But when you
(04:49):
start talking about tariffs, government policy uncertainty, you get a
little bit elevated as far as you're concer earn. But
you've got to keep in mind that in any given year,
there's going to be pullbacks in the market anywhere between
five to fifteen percent range, and historically this has led
(05:12):
to what we call buying opportunities. Especially today, no one's
really looking at a recession, so the likelihood of a
deep or prolonged bear market is probably not possible. It
is not a high chance that that's going to happen.
So remember that historically in time the market has been
(05:34):
a better strategy as far as allocating money at this
time and just allow your dividends and your capital gains
to be reinvested as long as you have adequate amounts
of cash flow. So, as I said, if the retirement
planning group, we recommend using periods of volatility to possibly rebalance,
(05:58):
making sure you're allocated properly between stocks, bonds, alternative investments,
which has been a hot topic item over the last
few years. And what you want to do is basically
look at some potential investments to buy when markets sell off.
So you need to reach out to your financial team,
(06:20):
your financial advisor, being sure that your investments are aligned
with your long term financial goals, and make sure that
you can navigate through these bouts of market volatility. I've
been saying for the last couple of months that we're
going to see this. It's not uncommon to see this
(06:40):
with a new administration. So there's been a rotation in
the market. Healthcare, consumer staples, materials, real estate, energy have
been the leaders so far this year, and the ones
that are lagging, of course, are the ones that were
basically the ones that really took off over the last
few years, information technology and consumer discretionary. A lot of
(07:05):
people have thought about we are not big believers in
going into the international markets. I know the international markets
right now are outperforming domestically here in the United States.
I don't care. I want to be hearing the United States.
I want to make sure that I understand the balance sheets.
I want to make sure that I have liquidity, and
(07:25):
I think over time, we're better off to have our
money here in the United States. So, as I said,
you get the golden Watch, you walk out the door,
and now you got to try to figure out how
am I going to basically control these assets and manage
(07:46):
this money for an extended period of time, and seniors
know there's a good chance at some point that they
could be in a position where not only are they
going to have to deal with the managing of the
asset the underlying IRA four oh one K non qualified assets,
(08:12):
but the gidea up could possibly be a health event.
Blu Perro was talking today on his show about some
of the ramifications that are happening right now with Medicare, MEDICAIDS,
soil security. We don't know how it's going to shake out,
but during this uncertainty, what you want to make sure
(08:32):
is that you've got your building blocks in place. There's
steps that you can take to make your nest egge
more like a pension benefit. So you have what we
call a reliable check that comes in on a monthly
basis that only includes your soil security, but any other
(08:54):
assets that you've accumulated in your lifetime. So what you
have to do so we use a software package called
e Money, which we purchase through Fidelity and allows us
to basically give you a dashboard so you know exactly
where you stand with all the assets that you've accumulated
(09:16):
and the potential for income when you start turning the
portfolio on. Psychologically, this is a big deal because a
lot of times people will say consistently to us over
and over again, how much money can I take off
(09:36):
of this portfolio in my lifetime without worrying that the
money's going to go away before I go away? And
we're going to go through our approach at the retirement
Planning Group because we have what we call a bucket plan.
We have a cash bucket, we have a medium term bucket,
we have a long term bucket, and then we have
(09:57):
basically another bucket of money that we have I have
set aside primarily for the bumps in the roads. Anything
that could possibly happen, such as a long term care event,
a health event that you need, just basically go into
that buck of money and it's not going to have
an impact on your overall cash flow on a monthly basis.
(10:20):
So today our topic spending the money that you've accumulated
during your accumulation years. How do you do it? I'm
Dave Kopek, this is retirement Ready. I am live. If
you want to call in ask a question, be more
(10:41):
than happy to try to answer it for you. If not,
I can get back to you. Our telephone number at
the studio is one eight hundred talk WGY. That's one
eight hundred eight two five nine. When we come back,
we're going to talk about some different strategies and ideas
and how to allocate your money in order to create
retirement income distribution during your retirement years. The greatest risk
(11:05):
in retirement. Most of us have no plan for or
insurance to cover the expense. A long term care event
can impoverish a spouse, drain your life savings, and cost
stress and anxiety on your family. What is your plan
and how will you pay for a long term care event?
Call the Retirement Planning Group today discuss options you should
consider to protect your estate and have choices and independence.
(11:27):
Take action Call today five eight five eight zero one
nine nine or RPG retire on the web. The eighty
six percenters. Do you know that eighty six percent of
the population has no defined benefit pension plan? For most
of us, we have to take our life savings and
create a paycheck for the rest of our lives in retirement.
What is your plan for retirement income distribution? How will
(11:48):
you manage your assets during the most critical years of
your lifetime. Nobel Prize winning economist William Sharp has called
retirement income distribution the nastiest, hardest problem in finance. He
points out that investment, uncertainty, and mortality can derail the
most careful laid out retirement income plan. Call our offices
today to start the process of building your retirement income
(12:09):
distribution plan. After forty one years of being in the
financial services business, you need to start taking action to
start building your own personal retirement income distribution plan. How
do you do that? To take action? Five one eight,
five eight zero one nine nine. That's five one eight,
five eight zero one nine one nine or RPG retire
on the web. Don't procrastinate, motivate to start building your
(12:31):
retirement income distribution plan five win eight five eight zero
one nine one nine. The greatest risk in retirement most
of us have no plan for we're insurance to cover
the expense. A long term care event can impoverish a spouse,
drain your life savings, and cost stress and anxiety on
your family. What is your plan and how will you
pay for a long term care event? Call the Retirement
(12:52):
Plan Group today discuss options you should consider to protect
your estate and have choices and independence. Take action full
today five five eight zero one nine or RPG retire
on the.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
Web with the worms y backing for you, you watching, and.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Then all right, we are back little haul and oates
to get the afternoon going here. He's back some memories,
Little Sarah smile. I'm Dave Kopek, the president of the
Retirement Planning Group. It's good to be back in the
Capitol District region. I took a few weeks and I
(13:50):
was down in Florida with my beautiful bride. Saw some
clients that are throughout the South, so it was a
good trip. And then where we be here for many
months to come now until we decide to go down again.
But bottom line gets down to is that things are changing.
Things are changing in Washington, DC. I don't have to
(14:13):
tell you what happened over this past week depending on
where you sent on what side of the fence, Independent, Democrat, Republican.
It was pretty ugly. It was pretty ugly. And anytime
we have uncertainty in the financial marketplace, it causes anxiety
for individuals. And as I said when we started today's show,
(14:34):
historically the market has been a good place for you
to be as far as total return in your portfolio,
but sometimes you basically have to weather these storms that
we go through. Overall, most of us are a little
bit nervous, and I can understand that. But if you
(14:56):
set your plan correctly on the front end, and then
times like this will just kind of go through and
you can basically sit back in your chair and you
don't have to worry about am I okay? And I'll
tell you what the recipe for that is. After forty
three years of doing this, you know there's no one
(15:19):
size fits all. And as I said this morning, we
work with a lot of teachers, state retirees, National Grid,
Bimbo Bakeries. Can go through the whole laundry list of
people that we work with, but the bottom line gets
down to is everybody's situation is different. Your need for income,
(15:44):
what you ultimately want to do with your assets that
you've accumulated, is important for you to leave a legacy
of transfer of wealth. So when we go into a meeting,
we basically sit down with individuals. We use our ears
and not our mouth, and we listen. We listen to
what you want to achieve. And because there's so many
(16:07):
individuals here within the Capital District region that do have
pension benefits. It's not uncommon for us to meet with individuals,
which we just did recently, to retired school teachers. She
was an administration, he was a teacher. Both have income
(16:30):
pension benefits, both have Social Security. Both had four or
three bs through the school district. They were able to
generate guaranteed income for the rest of their lives as
long as they're both alive, of about one hundred and
eighty thousand dollars fifteen thousand dollars a month guaranteed. Their
(16:53):
plan is going to be a hell of a lot
different than somebody that walks in the door, and they're
going to have assets that they've accumulated, but they have
the only guaranteed income is the sol security. You get
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year and guaranteed
pension benefits a husband and wife. That's like having ballpark
(17:16):
somewhere between oh three million to three and a half
million dollars of money sitting on the sidelines that you
would manage in order to get the same type of distribution.
So that's good news if you're in that situation. But
if you're not in that situation, you basically have to
(17:37):
build a retirement income plan. In our opinion, that should
include three essential building blocks. Three essential building blocks which
I want to get into today. The first building block
is that you should have retirement income that will include
(17:59):
guaranteed income. Guaranteed income that guarantees and ensure that your
core expenses are covered. The second, if you don't have
these large pension benefits, you're going to want to have
(18:19):
growth potential to meet your long term purchasing needs. And finally,
you want to have flexibility with your plan. You don't
want to get locked into anything that you can't get
out of, or if it's important to you, you want
to have some kind of a legacy plan for the
next generation. And you can tactically do that at the
(18:42):
different stages of your life. So we'll go through the
first bucket, the guaranteed income. So when you create your plan,
first and foremost, you want to make sure that your
day to date expenses, housing, you tell, taxes, healthcare is
(19:04):
a big one now, food everybody likes to eat every
once in a while. Right, These essential expenses are covered
by what we call baseline income. The guaranteed income that
you have coming in the door on a monthly, quarterly,
semi annual, annual basis, depending on how you build your
(19:26):
income stream. For most of us, social Security will be
the foundation. It will be the one that will basically
be driven that has guaranteed income with a cola. For
(19:47):
most of us FRA, our full retirement age is sixty
six to sixty seven. If you wait until age seventy,
you'll receive the highest possible monthly benefit. A lot of
people don't wait, but we're finding more and more individuals
are waiting to age seventy because they're continuing to work
(20:10):
much longer than they anticipated. For a couple of reasons.
They want to work, and the second reason is is
that they have undersaved. There's not enough money in the
pot in order for them to have the quality of
life that they want, and they have sticker shock for healthcare.
(20:32):
So even though pension benefits used to be commonplace, they're
not anymore. Very small percentage of the US population route
now is what we call the defined benefit plan. Most
of us have to add into what we call define
contribution plans, such as our four oh one K, four
(20:52):
H three B, etc. So if that is the case,
how do you build guaranteed income your portfolio? Now, I'm
not going to go through all the bells and whistles.
I'm not going to talk about the type of products.
I'll give you an idea of what is available to you,
and then ultimately you have to decide with your spouse,
(21:16):
your loved one, your significant other what is appropriate for you.
But there are generally three types of investments that can
provide guaranteed income. The one, of course, is in an annuity,
which is provided by an insurance company. Annuities give you
(21:40):
guaranteed lifetime income for as long as you shall live.
The second one is building ladder by on portfolios with CDs, treasuries,
whatever it may be. The risk with that is, of course,
interest rate risk. Are you getting in at high interest
rates low interest rates? What's you're purchasing power? With an annuity,
(22:03):
they'll give you a quote in the very beginning, but
they'll also tell you exactly what that payment's going to
be for as long as you both shall live, if
you like to do a spousal benefit. Third, and the
final one is that some individuals, believe it or not,
even later in life, go out and they buy hard assets.
(22:27):
What do I mean by that? Real estate? They get
involved in these different passive investments that allows them to
get some type of a lifetime income benefit, but this
is variable. There also the risk of managing the asset.
How much time do you have to spend with it?
If you get a passive investment, what's the risk that's
(22:48):
associated with that. So a lot of our clients typically
are looking at types of investments that they can basically
sleep at night. They know the money's going to come
in the door. But there's no such thing as all in.
Not one hundred percent of your money you should put
(23:09):
in any type of investment. So when you build your
income plan, it's important that you understand that you have diversification.
You have investments that will give you the guaranteed cash
flow with a combination of growth and like the third
bullet point, like I talked about, with flexibility. You know,
(23:34):
life throws us curveballs. No one knows what the future holds,
and thank god, right, but if you're five years into
your retirement, one of your spouses, your spouse passes away,
there's a health event, who knows. There could be a
(23:58):
significant life event that happens to You've inherit some money,
you've got to have the ability to make adjustments along
the way. That's why it's important to combine not only
your income with multiple sources and diversification. But you want
to make sure that you have the flexibility in your
(24:19):
plan that address probably some of the most important risks
that you're going to have in your retirement years. What
are those inflation, market volatility, and the one that a
lot of people don't talk about in great detail, longevity
(24:39):
the L word. So you want to make sure that
when you're taking withdrawals off your investment portfolios, you're not
exceeding them. You're not taking distributions to aggressively if your
income is not adequate enough off your guaranteed income streams.
(25:00):
A lot of our clients are looking for principal preservation.
That's almost impossible with iras four oh one ks because
the government has a plan for you, and the plan
is this, the longer you live, the greater your distributions are,
and when you least want the money is when the
distributions become the greatest. So understand that as you age,
(25:22):
the government has a plan called RMD Required minimum Distribution
and RBD required beginning date. It is now aage seventy three.
So if you're sitting there and you're happy, and you're
dancing in the street and everything is good, you don't
need the distributions. Because your portfolio is doing well. You
(25:42):
want to keep it the way it is. Sorry, if
it's in an IRA four O one k any pre
tax money, you're going to have to start taking distributions,
which we'll get into greater detail when we come back.
I'm Dave Copek. This is retirement ready. All right, we
(26:15):
are back. This is retirement ready. I'm Dave Kopek, President
of the Retirement Planning Group. It's going to be back
in the saddle. I'm live. If you have any questions
or comments, you can call Zach will be more than
happy to put you on the line. It's one eight
hundred talk WGY. That's one eight hundred eight two five
fifty ninety nine. If you want to come in for
(26:36):
our complementary consultation any our five locations, you can just
call the office at five five eight zero one nine nine.
We'll be more than happy to meet with you either
face to face over the internet. Technology is amazing today, folks.
I'm flabbergasted by technology. And the thing that's crazy about
(27:01):
is that we're just scratching the surface. AI is going
to change the world dramatically, especially our business financial services.
But what we're talking about today is that all these
hard years that you worked, putting your time in, going
(27:23):
to work, setting a side X number of dollars on
a annual basis, and then all of a sudden puff,
you're out the door. And now I got to figure
out what to do with it. And as I say
over and over again, for a lot of you, it's
a daunting task because one of the biggest things that
(27:45):
you have to do is find a team that you
feel comfortable with, that you trust, and you can build
a plan out that could possibly last as long as
you worked. That's the thing that's crazy today. I have
clients that are passing away because I've been doing it
for so long. I had two clients passed away when
(28:06):
I was down in Florida, and my oldest client just
passed away last year. He was one hundred and two.
I have clients well in their nineties and eighties, seventies.
Some of them you wouldn't believe that they're in their
seventies and eighties. They look like they're in their sixties,
but you could you could possibly have to manage your
(28:27):
money longer in retirement than you did the years that
you were employed working. We're seeing it. So that's why
you want to make sure that when you set up
a team and you start working with a financial team,
that when you look around the office you see some
(28:48):
young people. You don't want to work with a financial
advisor that's the same age as you because that's not
going to probably be a long term relationship that's going
to last for decades. That's why in our office, the
old geezer such as myself, I've got younger guys that
are underneath me, Nico my son, Christopher, Christopher McCarthy. Make
(29:14):
sure that there is a succession plan that everybody knows
what's going on. There's a plan in place. So you've
worked all these years, you have all this money, and
now you've got to try to figure out how do
I start allocating this money to build a retirement income
(29:38):
distribution plan. I'll tell you the steps that we take
that the retirement planning group to see if they resonate
with you. The first and foremost is that we want
to identify what you want none of our clients. We
have no cookie cutter approach. We want to identify your
own personal financial goals and what you're trying to achieve
(30:01):
with your money. Is it okay to spend some of
it down aggressively on the front end of your retirement. Absolutely,
do all the trips, vacations by the car, whatever you
want to do the boat. You just have to identify
what your personal goals are and then allow the team
to come back with recommendation. And then you need to
(30:27):
complete what we call the income form as far as
where all your assets are. We have you fill lot
of data collection form to see if you'll have enough
money to last you throughout your retirement with the income
that you're trying to achieve. It goes back to what
(30:47):
I've said for the last ten twenty years, no plan,
any destination will do, Any destination will do. I use
the analogy of when you build a house. Nico is
all excited right now because he is building a home,
(31:08):
and he went and he got the blueprint. He's got
the blueprint. Now he's got to have to go out
and he's going to have to try to figure out
what's this going to cost me? Now? In order to
build my home. I know, I got to get a
guy in there who's got to dig the hole. I
got to get somebody in there do the footies and
the foundation. Then I got to get somebody in there
to cap it, frame it, plummet, electrical sheet rock, sheeting
(31:33):
on the outside, doors, windows, the amenities. It's no different
with the retirement income plant. It's the same thing. You
need a blueprint. Our blueprint is the software package I
just told you about. Call they money. I just went
out and I purchased another software package which costs a
(31:57):
whole heck of a lot of money, but it's going
to give us a lot of bells and whistles, and
it's going to allow us to do things not only
on our time, but also on your time for our
existing clients and prospective clients. That's the change in our
business today. The most dramatic change is that existing clients
(32:21):
and perspective clients want access, want to be able to
do things on their time, not on our time, and
then have the ability to talk to us, work with
us at different intervals. Third thing you need to do
(32:44):
when should I take solid security? I read an article
and I was down in Florida about bridging. What's bridging.
Bridging is basically taking assets that you've accumulated in your
lifetime in order for you to use that income in
order to bridge to higher solid security benefits. So when
(33:10):
I say bridging solid security for a lot of us
will be the only guaranteed pension benefit that we have,
we're going to have to go out and purchase investments
or we're going to have to basically allocate our money
into some type of an investment program that will satisfy
our income needs throughout our retirement years. So figuring out
(33:31):
when to take solid security and how to maximize it,
not only for yourself and your spouse is critical, and
there's a whole bunch of different ways to do it.
We go directly to solid security, we get the numbers,
we found out if if there's any spousal benefits by
previous marriages, what's available to the male to the female,
(33:57):
and how we can structure it in order to maximize
income not only during the front end, but also during
the middle in the later stages of your retirement because
you want purchasing power. My question to you today is
think about healthcare. I had a woman on about a
(34:18):
month or two ago that came in and talked about
Medicare supplements, healthcare. My wife and I used her for
our own needs, and I had the opportunity to talk
to you the other day because we're working with some clients,
and then also she's helping my wife and I out
(34:42):
with some of the things that we're trying to do
for our family for health care. And she mentioned to me,
She goes, Dave, I want to just tell you one thing.
You go, what's that? My dear? She goes, you know,
I was on your radio show for about twenty minutes,
and she says, I can't believe the amount of phone
calls that I got that people wanted to talk to
me about healthcare. Healthcare is critical that you understand what
(35:07):
you have and how it's going to protect you during
your retirement years. You know. There's an article that I
read just recently. They were talking about long term care,
a long term care event, and it said you should
take two hundred thousand dollars and basically separate it from
(35:30):
your investment portfolio and basically use it just as a
nine to one one portfolio if you have to get
into it for emergency, but really it should be set
aside in order for you to facilitate what your long
term care needs might be as you age. And I
kind of chuckled, and I thought it was great that
(35:52):
they had a plan in place, because I know in
the Capital District Region right now, depending on how that
money's alley, if you had two hundred thousand dollars in
an IRA and you separated that with the rest of
your portfolio and you had a need for long term care,
that two hundred thousand dollars would be gone in one year.
(36:15):
Because the bill right now in the Capital District Region
for a long term care event is about seventeen thousand
dollars a month. And if it's in qualified money IRA
four oh one k, et cetera, you have to take
the money out, pay the tax, and then whatever the
net is you're gonna pay for your long term care.
(36:36):
And oh, by the way, in New York State they
tax you on that also, So these different steps that
you have to take. People say to me, Dave, what
is the difference between accumulating money versus managing assets during
your retirement years? And I said, it's an apple to
an orange. There's no comparison. Consider your family's history, what's
(37:03):
your longevity? Do you want to leave assets to your heirs?
Are you uncomfortable spending money down? How aggressive do you
want to be with your IRA or four oh one k?
Because the government has a plan for you, do you
have your plan for those assets? Ed Slott? I just
(37:24):
read an article Ed Slot, who's the guru for IRA
distribution planning? Quote unquote I might be a little bit
wrong with this wording. I can find it in the
future if I have to, But he basically said the
worst investment you could possibly be and is a traditional IRA.
Why is that? Well, it's always taxes ordinary income number one,
(37:51):
number two. There's never a step up in basis at
death ird income or respect to a decedent. If you
don't pay the tax, whoever you leave the money to
is going to pay the tax. When you least want
the distributions, they become the greatest, especially if you have
the l word longevity. You're going to get large distributions,
especially if you have seven figures iras, which a lot
(38:14):
of people do, and they are you going to sit
eating your mapo, sitting in your chair and you're getting
a check in the mail for one hundred thousand dollars.
And if you don't have long term care insurance, it's
going to go into the long term care facility. It's
not going to go to you or your loved ones.
So implementing your plan, implementing your plan on social security,
(38:36):
on your investment portfolio, allocating money to specific goals and objectives,
which we call a bucket of money approach, and then
also understand that you're going to have to have some
money set aside, some money set aside, whether it's an
investment portfolio or it's an insurance policy, whatever it mean
be to address which probably for most of us will
(38:59):
be the greatest risk, is a long term care event
in our later years. That's either assistant living, someone to
come into the home to assist, or actually transitioning into
a long term care facility. And if you haven't dealt
(39:19):
with this, I can tell you right now it's staggering
the cost of some of these facilities now. And then
finally number four, you've got a couple more. Number four
you need to implement, not sit on the fence. When
(39:39):
I say implement, we always suggest that three to five
years before you retire, you should be in front of
your financial team in building out your plan. I'm more
on five maybe seven, and start building your mix your
buckets of money of income producing investments, growth investments, protection assets,
(40:02):
and legacy assets. And then once you have the buckets identified,
then you implement the investment program that you want to
put into each particular bucket. And then finally you got
(40:23):
to set up reviews with your financial team to make
sure that the investment plan is on track in order
to meet not only your lifestyle needs during your retirement years,
your income needs, but also the ability for you to
have a good understanding of what happens to these assets
if it's important to you. For some people they don't care.
(40:46):
But if it's important to you, what's going to happen
to these moneies when I pass away? Will it go
through Probig? Will the camp and Leke George be protected?
Am I going to be able to keep the skihouse
up in Vermond? Am I going to be able to
have these valuable assets that have gone through the years
(41:06):
transferred to my daughter or my son, whatever it may be.
Start the conversation. That's the first we offer a complementary consultation.
It's pretty simple, it's pretty easy. We never ever ever
(41:27):
do business with people on the first appointment. Some people
want to and we refuse. We always suggest you go
out and you kick the tires of two or three
other financial teams and see if you get the same
kind of conversation. Do we fit into your wheelhouse? Are
(41:47):
we the type of firm that you want to work
with as far as our insights, our viewpoints, and ultimately
the pros and cons and how we invest in what
our personal feeling is on pre and post retirement planning
because every team is different, but I want to overemphasize
one of the things that we do. We're independent. I
(42:10):
mandated that that was a necessity when I started the
retirement planning group. I wanted to be independent. I didn't
want to have any predetermined destination for assets. I wanted
to have an open architecture platform, and I wanted to
act in a fiduciary capacity where we're always working in
the client's best interests, always working in the client's best interest.
(42:34):
So again, if anything that I'm discussing with you, we
offer a complimentary consultation. We're going to add a couple
more things at the when we come back for our
last segment, but I'll give out our telephone number. Our
telephone number at the main office in multi slash Saratoga
Springs is five point eight five eight zero one nine
one nine. You can check us out on the web.
(42:57):
It's just the initials of the Retirement Planning Group RPG
Retire rpgretire dot com. You can go through and see
our wonderful beautiful pictures and who we are, what we
are and what we do, our backgrounds, and then of
course if you want to implement, you can either call
Jim and handles all of our appointments, either Jim or
(43:20):
Lisa or Jared. I'd be more than happy to set
up an appointment a time for you to come in
and have a consultation and see if we can be
of assistance in order to facilitate what you're looking for
during your pre and post retirement years. So I'm Dave Kopek,
your host. This is Retirement Ready, and I'm going to
take my final break and we'll be right back. Your
(43:42):
partner for success, David Kopek Here wg WISE retirement planning Specialists,
the Retirement Planning Group. We understand that retirees face many
important decisions that can affect their long term financial success.
Some of these decisions revolve around making investments that will
help a hedge against outliving their assets, the impact of inflation, taxation,
(44:05):
and rising health care costs. Most of our clients like
the time, the desire, or the experience to manage their
own investment portfolios. We consider it to be an honor
and a privilege to help our clients make sound investment
decisions thy will contribute to a secure financial future for them.
Because over ninety percent of our clients or retirees with
(44:26):
similar concerns, we are in the best position to approach
such challenges with experience and skill. Give us a call
today at five one eight, five eight zero, one nine
one nine five one eight, five eight zero, one nine
one nine or RPG Retire on the web. We run
out of money in retirement where your investments provide income
for possibly decades. How do you navigate the two greatest
(44:48):
risk in retirement sequence of returns in longevity at the
Retirement Planning Group. Our Bucket of Money approach addresses these
concerns and we offer a complementary consultation to discuss this
with you. Call our off us today for a free
complimentary consultation to develop your own personal retirement income distribution
plan at five eight five eat zero one nine nine.
(45:09):
That's five eight five eat zero one nine nine. All right,
(45:29):
we are back. Good to be here. Hopefully. It looks
like we're gonna get some warm weather this coming week,
which is nice. I was looking at the weather forecast
for the middle of the week. I actually saw a
sixty a sixty a heat wave. So we can all
(45:55):
get out there with our rakes and start doing the yards.
Cold Lake George. I have a home up in Lake George,
and I'll tell you it's the first time in a
long time the lake is frozen solid. I haven't seen
that in a long time, folks. So you know, the
(46:17):
month of February was a cold one, a very cold one.
So it'll be good to get some warm weather and
saw out. Talk about the last bucket here that I
want to talk about. As far as building your retirement
income distribution plan, it's imperative with longevity the l word
(46:41):
that you have investments with growth potential. It's critical. As
I said, we have buckets of money. We have a
cash bucket, we have an income bucket, we have a
long term care bucket. We have a bucket that's made
for growth, and we also have a bucket that's set
(47:02):
aside for specific things college education, whatever it may be,
things that you want to specifically do. Let's see hobbies, vacations,
certain things that are important to you and the family.
But as I said, it's important to have a bucket
of money that will facilitate the purchasing power that you're
(47:23):
going to need. And it's important to consider all the
investment options that you have available to you, stocks, bonds,
alternative investments, which are becoming a big deal now it's
the hot topic. It's the cocktail hour, you know, the
alternative investments. But your financial situation and your ability to
absorb risk is imperative that you understand that there are
(47:48):
strategies out there, strategies out there that will give you
purchasing power, coll what cost of living adjustments that have
safety nets involved in them, so you can have an
aggressive strategy and basically have very little risk associated with it.
(48:09):
So understanding these options that are available to you, okay,
and how they fit into your overall retirement plan. You
need to basically sit down with your team and say,
how do I basically have purchasing power in the future
in order to offset some of these costs that I
think will definitely go higher. I'm not getting get into
(48:36):
the topic. I'm not getting into the details of them,
you know, but you need to carefully research your investment
options and to choose the ones that match your goals.
Match your goals. There's all different types of strategies. There's
multiple people that you can listen to on radio, TV,
(48:59):
Internet that have basically different ideas and concepts and how
to manage money during your retirement years. Okay, everybody has
a different way to make the sauce. I like to
have sauce where I know that there's basically some kind
of a suspenders and belt underneath the portfolio in order
(49:21):
to make sure that the money doesn't go away before
you go away. And those types of investments exist today,
it's just do they fit into your what your overall
objective is and can you build a portfolio that will
satisfy your income need and also your purchasing power over
(49:43):
the next ten, fifteen, twenty thirty, maybe even forty years.
Here's the thing that's amazing. You know, I love watching documentaries,
and I love watching PBS and a lot of the
other stations that give you a ton of information. And
(50:06):
I saw a thing on Bloomberg the other day and
they were talking about AI, artificial intelligence, which I am
totally blown away by, and they were basically saying, is
that over the next five years, if you lived a
two thousand and thirty, because of the changes and what's
(50:27):
going to happen with AI and the healthcare, that there's
a very good chance that you could probably live to
age one hundred because of what AI is going to
do to the medical field. And if that's the case,
if you're sixty five years old and you're going to
live to the age of one hundred, you worked for
(50:50):
XYZ Corporation for thirty years and now you're going to
have thirty five years in retirement. Right. That's the reality
of what we're looking at now as financial advisors. And
the question you have to ask yourself when you look
in the mirror, how much of the four letter word
(51:12):
called risk are you willing to put into your overall
investment program without worrying about the money going away before
you go away. Because stuff happens, life, events happen, things happen.
You need a plan that gives you the ability to
(51:32):
make adjustments, but also to facilitate the greatest risk of
building out a retirement income distribution plan. So if we
can help, it's what we do. It would be an
honor to sit down with you. All you have to
do five eight five eight zero one nine one nine
is our telephone number. Five one eight five eight zero
(51:55):
one nine one nine. Check us out on the web
rpgretire dot com. I'm Dave Kopek. We'll be back next
week for another Retirement Ready.
Speaker 1 (52:07):
Thank you for listening to Retirement Ready, hosted by Dave Kopek.
If you would like to talk with Dave or someone
at the Retirement Planning Group, called five one eight five
eight zero one nine one nine. That's five one eight
five eight zero one nine one nine during business hours,
or visit RPG retire dot com. The Retirement Planning Group
has five convenient offices located in Albany, Malta, Glens Falls, Pontiata,
(52:32):
and Syracuse. Tune in again next week at noon for
Retirement Planning Strategies with David Kopek, or Saturdays at seven
am for the Retirement Planning Show. The information or services
discussed on this show is for informational purposes.
Speaker 2 (52:46):
Only, and is not intended to be personal financial advice.
The investments and services offered by US may not be
suitable for all investors. If you have any doubts as
to the merits of an investment, you should seek advice
from an independent financial advisor.
Live from the wg y iHeart Studios. Welcome to Retirement
Ready with your host Dave Kopek from the Retirement Planning Group.
Every week, Dave and his team discuss the ways they
can help people make informed decisions about their retirement assets
to maintain, improve, and secure their desired quality of life.
Here's your host, Dave Copet.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
I'm live today. This is not a pre recorded show.
It's good to be here. Spent a few weeks down
in Florida and thought out and came back up here
and got frozen again. So hopefully you're warm and comfy
and you're enjoying the day. It's sunny out, but it
(01:10):
is windy, so be careful out there. But I'm Dave Kopek.
I'm your host. This is Retirement Ready. Retirement Ready is
a topic specific show and we try to focus in
on one topic during this hour. And what we're going
to be talking about today is something that most of
(01:31):
us are going to have to do during our post
retirement years post retirement years, and I'll discuss that about
who we are. We're the Retirement Planning Group. We work
predominantly with hard working savers. I've been in the business
now forty three years. All of our assets are held
with Fidelity, the mother ship. We work through Fidelity Institutional
(01:57):
Wealth Advisors. We've been open architecture plan We're independent. We
have no predetermined destination for your assets. We act in
a fiduciary capacity and investment management, asset protection, legacy planning.
We focus a lot on retirement income distribution. We now
have five locations in New York. I'll be heading out
(02:18):
to Syracuse tomorrow afternoon for two days to work out
of the Syracuse office. But anything that I'm discussing, we
offer a complementary consultation at any one of those five offices.
If you don't want to come to the office, we
can do it by zoom, ring, central, plane, train, boat
(02:38):
will come to you. You can come to us however
you want to do it. But it's a new world
that we live in retirement planning. How do I do it?
How do we go about it? We have I think,
kind of a unique formula on how we allocate money
(02:59):
and also have individuals prepared for some of the obstacles
that you can be facing during your retirement years. So
I'll discuss that in small detail today. But today show
is going to be on. How do you spend the
(03:20):
money that you've accumulated for the last thirty to forty years.
That's the tricky part. How do I allocate the money
to build a retirement income portfolio and spend it down
without having the money go away before I go away
(03:43):
in my spouse and my loved one, whatever it may be.
So let's say for the past four decades, you've been
accumulating money. You started in your twenties, you're now in
your sixties, and you want to go into the green
pastures your retirement. Most of us do not have pensions.
(04:05):
Pensions are a thing of the past. In the Capital
District region, we're kind of unique because of the state
capital being here and all the individuals that have pensions
that work with the state. But almost nine out of
ten individuals today do not have pension benefits. And the
result is is that millions and millions of Americans are
(04:25):
going to be their own pension manager. And what happens
is they get jittery, especially when you have a week
like we just had, and it's understandable that investors get nervous.
We'll talk in brief detail a little bit about the
markets over the past week and two. But when you
(04:49):
start talking about tariffs, government policy uncertainty, you get a
little bit elevated as far as you're concer earn. But
you've got to keep in mind that in any given year,
there's going to be pullbacks in the market anywhere between
five to fifteen percent range, and historically this has led
(05:12):
to what we call buying opportunities. Especially today, no one's
really looking at a recession, so the likelihood of a
deep or prolonged bear market is probably not possible. It
is not a high chance that that's going to happen.
So remember that historically in time the market has been
(05:34):
a better strategy as far as allocating money at this
time and just allow your dividends and your capital gains
to be reinvested as long as you have adequate amounts
of cash flow. So, as I said, if the retirement
planning group, we recommend using periods of volatility to possibly rebalance,
(05:58):
making sure you're allocated properly between stocks, bonds, alternative investments,
which has been a hot topic item over the last
few years. And what you want to do is basically
look at some potential investments to buy when markets sell off.
So you need to reach out to your financial team,
(06:20):
your financial advisor, being sure that your investments are aligned
with your long term financial goals, and make sure that
you can navigate through these bouts of market volatility. I've
been saying for the last couple of months that we're
going to see this. It's not uncommon to see this
(06:40):
with a new administration. So there's been a rotation in
the market. Healthcare, consumer staples, materials, real estate, energy have
been the leaders so far this year, and the ones
that are lagging, of course, are the ones that were
basically the ones that really took off over the last
few years, information technology and consumer discretionary. A lot of
(07:05):
people have thought about we are not big believers in
going into the international markets. I know the international markets
right now are outperforming domestically here in the United States.
I don't care. I want to be hearing the United States.
I want to make sure that I understand the balance sheets.
I want to make sure that I have liquidity, and
(07:25):
I think over time, we're better off to have our
money here in the United States. So, as I said,
you get the golden Watch, you walk out the door,
and now you got to try to figure out how
am I going to basically control these assets and manage
(07:46):
this money for an extended period of time, and seniors
know there's a good chance at some point that they
could be in a position where not only are they
going to have to deal with the managing of the
asset the underlying IRA four oh one K non qualified assets,
(08:12):
but the gidea up could possibly be a health event.
Blu Perro was talking today on his show about some
of the ramifications that are happening right now with Medicare, MEDICAIDS,
soil security. We don't know how it's going to shake out,
but during this uncertainty, what you want to make sure
(08:32):
is that you've got your building blocks in place. There's
steps that you can take to make your nest egge
more like a pension benefit. So you have what we
call a reliable check that comes in on a monthly
basis that only includes your soil security, but any other
(08:54):
assets that you've accumulated in your lifetime. So what you
have to do so we use a software package called
e Money, which we purchase through Fidelity and allows us
to basically give you a dashboard so you know exactly
where you stand with all the assets that you've accumulated
(09:16):
and the potential for income when you start turning the
portfolio on. Psychologically, this is a big deal because a
lot of times people will say consistently to us over
and over again, how much money can I take off
(09:36):
of this portfolio in my lifetime without worrying that the
money's going to go away before I go away? And
we're going to go through our approach at the retirement
Planning Group because we have what we call a bucket plan.
We have a cash bucket, we have a medium term bucket,
we have a long term bucket, and then we have
(09:57):
basically another bucket of money that we have I have
set aside primarily for the bumps in the roads. Anything
that could possibly happen, such as a long term care event,
a health event that you need, just basically go into
that buck of money and it's not going to have
an impact on your overall cash flow on a monthly basis.
(10:20):
So today our topic spending the money that you've accumulated
during your accumulation years. How do you do it? I'm
Dave Kopek, this is retirement Ready. I am live. If
you want to call in ask a question, be more
(10:41):
than happy to try to answer it for you. If not,
I can get back to you. Our telephone number at
the studio is one eight hundred talk WGY. That's one
eight hundred eight two five nine. When we come back,
we're going to talk about some different strategies and ideas
and how to allocate your money in order to create
retirement income distribution during your retirement years. The greatest risk
(11:05):
in retirement. Most of us have no plan for or
insurance to cover the expense. A long term care event
can impoverish a spouse, drain your life savings, and cost
stress and anxiety on your family. What is your plan
and how will you pay for a long term care event?
Call the Retirement Planning Group today discuss options you should
consider to protect your estate and have choices and independence.
(11:27):
Take action Call today five eight five eight zero one
nine nine or RPG retire on the web. The eighty
six percenters. Do you know that eighty six percent of
the population has no defined benefit pension plan? For most
of us, we have to take our life savings and
create a paycheck for the rest of our lives in retirement.
What is your plan for retirement income distribution? How will
(11:48):
you manage your assets during the most critical years of
your lifetime. Nobel Prize winning economist William Sharp has called
retirement income distribution the nastiest, hardest problem in finance. He
points out that investment, uncertainty, and mortality can derail the
most careful laid out retirement income plan. Call our offices
today to start the process of building your retirement income
(12:09):
distribution plan. After forty one years of being in the
financial services business, you need to start taking action to
start building your own personal retirement income distribution plan. How
do you do that? To take action? Five one eight,
five eight zero one nine nine. That's five one eight,
five eight zero one nine one nine or RPG retire
on the web. Don't procrastinate, motivate to start building your
(12:31):
retirement income distribution plan five win eight five eight zero
one nine one nine. The greatest risk in retirement most
of us have no plan for we're insurance to cover
the expense. A long term care event can impoverish a spouse,
drain your life savings, and cost stress and anxiety on
your family. What is your plan and how will you
pay for a long term care event? Call the Retirement
(12:52):
Plan Group today discuss options you should consider to protect
your estate and have choices and independence. Take action full
today five five eight zero one nine or RPG retire
on the.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
Web with the worms y backing for you, you watching, and.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Then all right, we are back little haul and oates
to get the afternoon going here. He's back some memories,
Little Sarah smile. I'm Dave Kopek, the president of the
Retirement Planning Group. It's good to be back in the
Capitol District region. I took a few weeks and I
(13:50):
was down in Florida with my beautiful bride. Saw some
clients that are throughout the South, so it was a
good trip. And then where we be here for many
months to come now until we decide to go down again.
But bottom line gets down to is that things are changing.
Things are changing in Washington, DC. I don't have to
(14:13):
tell you what happened over this past week depending on
where you sent on what side of the fence, Independent, Democrat, Republican.
It was pretty ugly. It was pretty ugly. And anytime
we have uncertainty in the financial marketplace, it causes anxiety
for individuals. And as I said when we started today's show,
(14:34):
historically the market has been a good place for you
to be as far as total return in your portfolio,
but sometimes you basically have to weather these storms that
we go through. Overall, most of us are a little
bit nervous, and I can understand that. But if you
(14:56):
set your plan correctly on the front end, and then
times like this will just kind of go through and
you can basically sit back in your chair and you
don't have to worry about am I okay? And I'll
tell you what the recipe for that is. After forty
three years of doing this, you know there's no one
(15:19):
size fits all. And as I said this morning, we
work with a lot of teachers, state retirees, National Grid,
Bimbo Bakeries. Can go through the whole laundry list of
people that we work with, but the bottom line gets
down to is everybody's situation is different. Your need for income,
(15:44):
what you ultimately want to do with your assets that
you've accumulated, is important for you to leave a legacy
of transfer of wealth. So when we go into a meeting,
we basically sit down with individuals. We use our ears
and not our mouth, and we listen. We listen to
what you want to achieve. And because there's so many
(16:07):
individuals here within the Capital District region that do have
pension benefits. It's not uncommon for us to meet with individuals,
which we just did recently, to retired school teachers. She
was an administration, he was a teacher. Both have income
(16:30):
pension benefits, both have Social Security. Both had four or
three bs through the school district. They were able to
generate guaranteed income for the rest of their lives as
long as they're both alive, of about one hundred and
eighty thousand dollars fifteen thousand dollars a month guaranteed. Their
(16:53):
plan is going to be a hell of a lot
different than somebody that walks in the door, and they're
going to have assets that they've accumulated, but they have
the only guaranteed income is the sol security. You get
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year and guaranteed
pension benefits a husband and wife. That's like having ballpark
(17:16):
somewhere between oh three million to three and a half
million dollars of money sitting on the sidelines that you
would manage in order to get the same type of distribution.
So that's good news if you're in that situation. But
if you're not in that situation, you basically have to
(17:37):
build a retirement income plan. In our opinion, that should
include three essential building blocks. Three essential building blocks which
I want to get into today. The first building block
is that you should have retirement income that will include
(17:59):
guaranteed income. Guaranteed income that guarantees and ensure that your
core expenses are covered. The second, if you don't have
these large pension benefits, you're going to want to have
(18:19):
growth potential to meet your long term purchasing needs. And finally,
you want to have flexibility with your plan. You don't
want to get locked into anything that you can't get
out of, or if it's important to you, you want
to have some kind of a legacy plan for the
next generation. And you can tactically do that at the
(18:42):
different stages of your life. So we'll go through the
first bucket, the guaranteed income. So when you create your plan,
first and foremost, you want to make sure that your
day to date expenses, housing, you tell, taxes, healthcare is
(19:04):
a big one now, food everybody likes to eat every
once in a while. Right, These essential expenses are covered
by what we call baseline income. The guaranteed income that
you have coming in the door on a monthly, quarterly,
semi annual, annual basis, depending on how you build your
(19:26):
income stream. For most of us, social Security will be
the foundation. It will be the one that will basically
be driven that has guaranteed income with a cola. For
(19:47):
most of us FRA, our full retirement age is sixty
six to sixty seven. If you wait until age seventy,
you'll receive the highest possible monthly benefit. A lot of
people don't wait, but we're finding more and more individuals
are waiting to age seventy because they're continuing to work
(20:10):
much longer than they anticipated. For a couple of reasons.
They want to work, and the second reason is is
that they have undersaved. There's not enough money in the
pot in order for them to have the quality of
life that they want, and they have sticker shock for healthcare.
(20:32):
So even though pension benefits used to be commonplace, they're
not anymore. Very small percentage of the US population route
now is what we call the defined benefit plan. Most
of us have to add into what we call define
contribution plans, such as our four oh one K, four
(20:52):
H three B, etc. So if that is the case,
how do you build guaranteed income your portfolio? Now, I'm
not going to go through all the bells and whistles.
I'm not going to talk about the type of products.
I'll give you an idea of what is available to you,
and then ultimately you have to decide with your spouse,
(21:16):
your loved one, your significant other what is appropriate for you.
But there are generally three types of investments that can
provide guaranteed income. The one, of course, is in an annuity,
which is provided by an insurance company. Annuities give you
(21:40):
guaranteed lifetime income for as long as you shall live.
The second one is building ladder by on portfolios with CDs, treasuries,
whatever it may be. The risk with that is, of course,
interest rate risk. Are you getting in at high interest
rates low interest rates? What's you're purchasing power? With an annuity,
(22:03):
they'll give you a quote in the very beginning, but
they'll also tell you exactly what that payment's going to
be for as long as you both shall live, if
you like to do a spousal benefit. Third, and the
final one is that some individuals, believe it or not,
even later in life, go out and they buy hard assets.
(22:27):
What do I mean by that? Real estate? They get
involved in these different passive investments that allows them to
get some type of a lifetime income benefit, but this
is variable. There also the risk of managing the asset.
How much time do you have to spend with it?
If you get a passive investment, what's the risk that's
(22:48):
associated with that. So a lot of our clients typically
are looking at types of investments that they can basically
sleep at night. They know the money's going to come
in the door. But there's no such thing as all in.
Not one hundred percent of your money you should put
(23:09):
in any type of investment. So when you build your
income plan, it's important that you understand that you have diversification.
You have investments that will give you the guaranteed cash
flow with a combination of growth and like the third
bullet point, like I talked about, with flexibility. You know,
(23:34):
life throws us curveballs. No one knows what the future holds,
and thank god, right, but if you're five years into
your retirement, one of your spouses, your spouse passes away,
there's a health event, who knows. There could be a
(23:58):
significant life event that happens to You've inherit some money,
you've got to have the ability to make adjustments along
the way. That's why it's important to combine not only
your income with multiple sources and diversification. But you want
to make sure that you have the flexibility in your
(24:19):
plan that address probably some of the most important risks
that you're going to have in your retirement years. What
are those inflation, market volatility, and the one that a
lot of people don't talk about in great detail, longevity
(24:39):
the L word. So you want to make sure that
when you're taking withdrawals off your investment portfolios, you're not
exceeding them. You're not taking distributions to aggressively if your
income is not adequate enough off your guaranteed income streams.
(25:00):
A lot of our clients are looking for principal preservation.
That's almost impossible with iras four oh one ks because
the government has a plan for you, and the plan
is this, the longer you live, the greater your distributions are,
and when you least want the money is when the
distributions become the greatest. So understand that as you age,
(25:22):
the government has a plan called RMD Required minimum Distribution
and RBD required beginning date. It is now aage seventy three.
So if you're sitting there and you're happy, and you're
dancing in the street and everything is good, you don't
need the distributions. Because your portfolio is doing well. You
(25:42):
want to keep it the way it is. Sorry, if
it's in an IRA four O one k any pre
tax money, you're going to have to start taking distributions,
which we'll get into greater detail when we come back.
I'm Dave Copek. This is retirement ready. All right, we
(26:15):
are back. This is retirement ready. I'm Dave Kopek, President
of the Retirement Planning Group. It's going to be back
in the saddle. I'm live. If you have any questions
or comments, you can call Zach will be more than
happy to put you on the line. It's one eight
hundred talk WGY. That's one eight hundred eight two five
fifty ninety nine. If you want to come in for
(26:36):
our complementary consultation any our five locations, you can just
call the office at five five eight zero one nine nine.
We'll be more than happy to meet with you either
face to face over the internet. Technology is amazing today, folks.
I'm flabbergasted by technology. And the thing that's crazy about
(27:01):
is that we're just scratching the surface. AI is going
to change the world dramatically, especially our business financial services.
But what we're talking about today is that all these
hard years that you worked, putting your time in, going
(27:23):
to work, setting a side X number of dollars on
a annual basis, and then all of a sudden puff,
you're out the door. And now I got to figure
out what to do with it. And as I say
over and over again, for a lot of you, it's
a daunting task because one of the biggest things that
(27:45):
you have to do is find a team that you
feel comfortable with, that you trust, and you can build
a plan out that could possibly last as long as
you worked. That's the thing that's crazy today. I have
clients that are passing away because I've been doing it
for so long. I had two clients passed away when
(28:06):
I was down in Florida, and my oldest client just
passed away last year. He was one hundred and two.
I have clients well in their nineties and eighties, seventies.
Some of them you wouldn't believe that they're in their
seventies and eighties. They look like they're in their sixties,
but you could you could possibly have to manage your
(28:27):
money longer in retirement than you did the years that
you were employed working. We're seeing it. So that's why
you want to make sure that when you set up
a team and you start working with a financial team,
that when you look around the office you see some
(28:48):
young people. You don't want to work with a financial
advisor that's the same age as you because that's not
going to probably be a long term relationship that's going
to last for decades. That's why in our office, the
old geezer such as myself, I've got younger guys that
are underneath me, Nico my son, Christopher, Christopher McCarthy. Make
(29:14):
sure that there is a succession plan that everybody knows
what's going on. There's a plan in place. So you've
worked all these years, you have all this money, and
now you've got to try to figure out how do
I start allocating this money to build a retirement income
(29:38):
distribution plan. I'll tell you the steps that we take
that the retirement planning group to see if they resonate
with you. The first and foremost is that we want
to identify what you want none of our clients. We
have no cookie cutter approach. We want to identify your
own personal financial goals and what you're trying to achieve
(30:01):
with your money. Is it okay to spend some of
it down aggressively on the front end of your retirement. Absolutely,
do all the trips, vacations by the car, whatever you
want to do the boat. You just have to identify
what your personal goals are and then allow the team
to come back with recommendation. And then you need to
(30:27):
complete what we call the income form as far as
where all your assets are. We have you fill lot
of data collection form to see if you'll have enough
money to last you throughout your retirement with the income
that you're trying to achieve. It goes back to what
(30:47):
I've said for the last ten twenty years, no plan,
any destination will do, Any destination will do. I use
the analogy of when you build a house. Nico is
all excited right now because he is building a home,
(31:08):
and he went and he got the blueprint. He's got
the blueprint. Now he's got to have to go out
and he's going to have to try to figure out
what's this going to cost me? Now? In order to
build my home. I know, I got to get a
guy in there who's got to dig the hole. I
got to get somebody in there do the footies and
the foundation. Then I got to get somebody in there
to cap it, frame it, plummet, electrical sheet rock, sheeting
(31:33):
on the outside, doors, windows, the amenities. It's no different
with the retirement income plant. It's the same thing. You
need a blueprint. Our blueprint is the software package I
just told you about. Call they money. I just went
out and I purchased another software package which costs a
(31:57):
whole heck of a lot of money, but it's going
to give us a lot of bells and whistles, and
it's going to allow us to do things not only
on our time, but also on your time for our
existing clients and prospective clients. That's the change in our
business today. The most dramatic change is that existing clients
(32:21):
and perspective clients want access, want to be able to
do things on their time, not on our time, and
then have the ability to talk to us, work with
us at different intervals. Third thing you need to do
(32:44):
when should I take solid security? I read an article
and I was down in Florida about bridging. What's bridging.
Bridging is basically taking assets that you've accumulated in your
lifetime in order for you to use that income in
order to bridge to higher solid security benefits. So when
(33:10):
I say bridging solid security for a lot of us
will be the only guaranteed pension benefit that we have,
we're going to have to go out and purchase investments
or we're going to have to basically allocate our money
into some type of an investment program that will satisfy
our income needs throughout our retirement years. So figuring out
(33:31):
when to take solid security and how to maximize it,
not only for yourself and your spouse is critical, and
there's a whole bunch of different ways to do it.
We go directly to solid security, we get the numbers,
we found out if if there's any spousal benefits by
previous marriages, what's available to the male to the female,
(33:57):
and how we can structure it in order to maximize
income not only during the front end, but also during
the middle in the later stages of your retirement because
you want purchasing power. My question to you today is
think about healthcare. I had a woman on about a
(34:18):
month or two ago that came in and talked about
Medicare supplements, healthcare. My wife and I used her for
our own needs, and I had the opportunity to talk
to you the other day because we're working with some clients,
and then also she's helping my wife and I out
(34:42):
with some of the things that we're trying to do
for our family for health care. And she mentioned to me,
She goes, Dave, I want to just tell you one thing.
You go, what's that? My dear? She goes, you know,
I was on your radio show for about twenty minutes,
and she says, I can't believe the amount of phone
calls that I got that people wanted to talk to
me about healthcare. Healthcare is critical that you understand what
(35:07):
you have and how it's going to protect you during
your retirement years. You know. There's an article that I
read just recently. They were talking about long term care,
a long term care event, and it said you should
take two hundred thousand dollars and basically separate it from
(35:30):
your investment portfolio and basically use it just as a
nine to one one portfolio if you have to get
into it for emergency, but really it should be set
aside in order for you to facilitate what your long
term care needs might be as you age. And I
kind of chuckled, and I thought it was great that
(35:52):
they had a plan in place, because I know in
the Capital District Region right now, depending on how that
money's alley, if you had two hundred thousand dollars in
an IRA and you separated that with the rest of
your portfolio and you had a need for long term care,
that two hundred thousand dollars would be gone in one year.
(36:15):
Because the bill right now in the Capital District Region
for a long term care event is about seventeen thousand
dollars a month. And if it's in qualified money IRA
four oh one k, et cetera, you have to take
the money out, pay the tax, and then whatever the
net is you're gonna pay for your long term care.
(36:36):
And oh, by the way, in New York State they
tax you on that also, So these different steps that
you have to take. People say to me, Dave, what
is the difference between accumulating money versus managing assets during
your retirement years? And I said, it's an apple to
an orange. There's no comparison. Consider your family's history, what's
(37:03):
your longevity? Do you want to leave assets to your heirs?
Are you uncomfortable spending money down? How aggressive do you
want to be with your IRA or four oh one k?
Because the government has a plan for you, do you
have your plan for those assets? Ed Slott? I just
(37:24):
read an article Ed Slot, who's the guru for IRA
distribution planning? Quote unquote I might be a little bit
wrong with this wording. I can find it in the
future if I have to, But he basically said the
worst investment you could possibly be and is a traditional IRA.
Why is that? Well, it's always taxes ordinary income number one,
(37:51):
number two. There's never a step up in basis at
death ird income or respect to a decedent. If you
don't pay the tax, whoever you leave the money to
is going to pay the tax. When you least want
the distributions, they become the greatest, especially if you have
the l word longevity. You're going to get large distributions,
especially if you have seven figures iras, which a lot
(38:14):
of people do, and they are you going to sit
eating your mapo, sitting in your chair and you're getting
a check in the mail for one hundred thousand dollars.
And if you don't have long term care insurance, it's
going to go into the long term care facility. It's
not going to go to you or your loved ones.
So implementing your plan, implementing your plan on social security,
(38:36):
on your investment portfolio, allocating money to specific goals and objectives,
which we call a bucket of money approach, and then
also understand that you're going to have to have some
money set aside, some money set aside, whether it's an
investment portfolio or it's an insurance policy, whatever it mean
be to address which probably for most of us will
(38:59):
be the greatest risk, is a long term care event
in our later years. That's either assistant living, someone to
come into the home to assist, or actually transitioning into
a long term care facility. And if you haven't dealt
(39:19):
with this, I can tell you right now it's staggering
the cost of some of these facilities now. And then
finally number four, you've got a couple more. Number four
you need to implement, not sit on the fence. When
(39:39):
I say implement, we always suggest that three to five
years before you retire, you should be in front of
your financial team in building out your plan. I'm more
on five maybe seven, and start building your mix your
buckets of money of income producing investments, growth investments, protection assets,
(40:02):
and legacy assets. And then once you have the buckets identified,
then you implement the investment program that you want to
put into each particular bucket. And then finally you got
(40:23):
to set up reviews with your financial team to make
sure that the investment plan is on track in order
to meet not only your lifestyle needs during your retirement years,
your income needs, but also the ability for you to
have a good understanding of what happens to these assets
if it's important to you. For some people they don't care.
(40:46):
But if it's important to you, what's going to happen
to these moneies when I pass away? Will it go
through Probig? Will the camp and Leke George be protected?
Am I going to be able to keep the skihouse
up in Vermond? Am I going to be able to
have these valuable assets that have gone through the years
(41:06):
transferred to my daughter or my son, whatever it may be.
Start the conversation. That's the first we offer a complementary consultation.
It's pretty simple, it's pretty easy. We never ever ever
(41:27):
do business with people on the first appointment. Some people
want to and we refuse. We always suggest you go
out and you kick the tires of two or three
other financial teams and see if you get the same
kind of conversation. Do we fit into your wheelhouse? Are
(41:47):
we the type of firm that you want to work
with as far as our insights, our viewpoints, and ultimately
the pros and cons and how we invest in what
our personal feeling is on pre and post retirement planning
because every team is different, but I want to overemphasize
one of the things that we do. We're independent. I
(42:10):
mandated that that was a necessity when I started the
retirement planning group. I wanted to be independent. I didn't
want to have any predetermined destination for assets. I wanted
to have an open architecture platform, and I wanted to
act in a fiduciary capacity where we're always working in
the client's best interests, always working in the client's best interest.
(42:34):
So again, if anything that I'm discussing with you, we
offer a complimentary consultation. We're going to add a couple
more things at the when we come back for our
last segment, but I'll give out our telephone number. Our
telephone number at the main office in multi slash Saratoga
Springs is five point eight five eight zero one nine
one nine. You can check us out on the web.
(42:57):
It's just the initials of the Retirement Planning Group RPG
Retire rpgretire dot com. You can go through and see
our wonderful beautiful pictures and who we are, what we
are and what we do, our backgrounds, and then of
course if you want to implement, you can either call
Jim and handles all of our appointments, either Jim or
(43:20):
Lisa or Jared. I'd be more than happy to set
up an appointment a time for you to come in
and have a consultation and see if we can be
of assistance in order to facilitate what you're looking for
during your pre and post retirement years. So I'm Dave Kopek,
your host. This is Retirement Ready, and I'm going to
take my final break and we'll be right back. Your
(43:42):
partner for success, David Kopek Here wg WISE retirement planning Specialists,
the Retirement Planning Group. We understand that retirees face many
important decisions that can affect their long term financial success.
Some of these decisions revolve around making investments that will
help a hedge against outliving their assets, the impact of inflation, taxation,
(44:05):
and rising health care costs. Most of our clients like
the time, the desire, or the experience to manage their
own investment portfolios. We consider it to be an honor
and a privilege to help our clients make sound investment
decisions thy will contribute to a secure financial future for them.
Because over ninety percent of our clients or retirees with
(44:26):
similar concerns, we are in the best position to approach
such challenges with experience and skill. Give us a call
today at five one eight, five eight zero, one nine
one nine five one eight, five eight zero, one nine
one nine or RPG Retire on the web. We run
out of money in retirement where your investments provide income
for possibly decades. How do you navigate the two greatest
(44:48):
risk in retirement sequence of returns in longevity at the
Retirement Planning Group. Our Bucket of Money approach addresses these
concerns and we offer a complementary consultation to discuss this
with you. Call our off us today for a free
complimentary consultation to develop your own personal retirement income distribution
plan at five eight five eat zero one nine nine.
(45:09):
That's five eight five eat zero one nine nine. All right,
(45:29):
we are back. Good to be here. Hopefully. It looks
like we're gonna get some warm weather this coming week,
which is nice. I was looking at the weather forecast
for the middle of the week. I actually saw a
sixty a sixty a heat wave. So we can all
(45:55):
get out there with our rakes and start doing the yards.
Cold Lake George. I have a home up in Lake George,
and I'll tell you it's the first time in a
long time the lake is frozen solid. I haven't seen
that in a long time, folks. So you know, the
(46:17):
month of February was a cold one, a very cold one.
So it'll be good to get some warm weather and
saw out. Talk about the last bucket here that I
want to talk about. As far as building your retirement
income distribution plan, it's imperative with longevity the l word
(46:41):
that you have investments with growth potential. It's critical. As
I said, we have buckets of money. We have a
cash bucket, we have an income bucket, we have a
long term care bucket. We have a bucket that's made
for growth, and we also have a bucket that's set
(47:02):
aside for specific things college education, whatever it may be,
things that you want to specifically do. Let's see hobbies, vacations,
certain things that are important to you and the family.
But as I said, it's important to have a bucket
of money that will facilitate the purchasing power that you're
(47:23):
going to need. And it's important to consider all the
investment options that you have available to you, stocks, bonds,
alternative investments, which are becoming a big deal now it's
the hot topic. It's the cocktail hour, you know, the
alternative investments. But your financial situation and your ability to
absorb risk is imperative that you understand that there are
(47:48):
strategies out there, strategies out there that will give you
purchasing power, coll what cost of living adjustments that have
safety nets involved in them, so you can have an
aggressive strategy and basically have very little risk associated with it.
(48:09):
So understanding these options that are available to you, okay,
and how they fit into your overall retirement plan. You
need to basically sit down with your team and say,
how do I basically have purchasing power in the future
in order to offset some of these costs that I
think will definitely go higher. I'm not getting get into
(48:36):
the topic. I'm not getting into the details of them,
you know, but you need to carefully research your investment
options and to choose the ones that match your goals.
Match your goals. There's all different types of strategies. There's
multiple people that you can listen to on radio, TV,
(48:59):
Internet that have basically different ideas and concepts and how
to manage money during your retirement years. Okay, everybody has
a different way to make the sauce. I like to
have sauce where I know that there's basically some kind
of a suspenders and belt underneath the portfolio in order
(49:21):
to make sure that the money doesn't go away before
you go away. And those types of investments exist today,
it's just do they fit into your what your overall
objective is and can you build a portfolio that will
satisfy your income need and also your purchasing power over
(49:43):
the next ten, fifteen, twenty thirty, maybe even forty years.
Here's the thing that's amazing. You know, I love watching documentaries,
and I love watching PBS and a lot of the
other stations that give you a ton of information. And
(50:06):
I saw a thing on Bloomberg the other day and
they were talking about AI, artificial intelligence, which I am
totally blown away by, and they were basically saying, is
that over the next five years, if you lived a
two thousand and thirty, because of the changes and what's
(50:27):
going to happen with AI and the healthcare, that there's
a very good chance that you could probably live to
age one hundred because of what AI is going to
do to the medical field. And if that's the case,
if you're sixty five years old and you're going to
live to the age of one hundred, you worked for
(50:50):
XYZ Corporation for thirty years and now you're going to
have thirty five years in retirement. Right. That's the reality
of what we're looking at now as financial advisors. And
the question you have to ask yourself when you look
in the mirror, how much of the four letter word
(51:12):
called risk are you willing to put into your overall
investment program without worrying about the money going away before
you go away. Because stuff happens, life, events happen, things happen.
You need a plan that gives you the ability to
(51:32):
make adjustments, but also to facilitate the greatest risk of
building out a retirement income distribution plan. So if we
can help, it's what we do. It would be an
honor to sit down with you. All you have to
do five eight five eight zero one nine one nine
is our telephone number. Five one eight five eight zero
(51:55):
one nine one nine. Check us out on the web
rpgretire dot com. I'm Dave Kopek. We'll be back next
week for another Retirement Ready.
Speaker 1 (52:07):
Thank you for listening to Retirement Ready, hosted by Dave Kopek.
If you would like to talk with Dave or someone
at the Retirement Planning Group, called five one eight five
eight zero one nine one nine. That's five one eight
five eight zero one nine one nine during business hours,
or visit RPG retire dot com. The Retirement Planning Group
has five convenient offices located in Albany, Malta, Glens Falls, Pontiata,
(52:32):
and Syracuse. Tune in again next week at noon for
Retirement Planning Strategies with David Kopek, or Saturdays at seven
am for the Retirement Planning Show. The information or services
discussed on this show is for informational purposes.
Speaker 2 (52:46):
Only, and is not intended to be personal financial advice.
The investments and services offered by US may not be
suitable for all investors. If you have any doubts as
to the merits of an investment, you should seek advice
from an independent financial advisor.
Popular Podcasts
Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club
Welcome to Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club — the podcast where great stories, bold women, and irresistible conversations collide! Hosted by award-winning journalist Danielle Robay, each week new episodes balance thoughtful literary insight with the fervor of buzzy book trends, pop culture and more. Bookmarked brings together celebrities, tastemakers, influencers and authors from Reese's Book Club and beyond to share stories that transcend the page. Pull up a chair. You’re not just listening — you’re part of the conversation.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com