May 27, 2025 • 33 mins
Life Planning and Navigating Financial Transitions
Meet Phil Weiss
Phil Weiss, the founder of Apprise Wealth Management. Beginning his career in 1987 as a tax professional at Deloitte & Touche, Phil has accumulated over 25 years of experience in personal finance and investment management. He holds esteemed credentials as a CFA, CPA, and RLP®.
I talked with Phil about:
•Navigating Financial Transitions for Women •The Importance of Life Planning for Women •Influence of Financial Role Models •Retirement and Tax Planning for Women
Learn more about Phil here:
Facebook: AppriseWealth
Instagram: phweiss11
Tiktok: apprisewm
YouTube: philipweiss9408
Meet Phil Weiss
Phil Weiss, the founder of Apprise Wealth Management. Beginning his career in 1987 as a tax professional at Deloitte & Touche, Phil has accumulated over 25 years of experience in personal finance and investment management. He holds esteemed credentials as a CFA, CPA, and RLP®.
I talked with Phil about:
•Navigating Financial Transitions for Women •The Importance of Life Planning for Women •Influence of Financial Role Models •Retirement and Tax Planning for Women
Learn more about Phil here:
Facebook: AppriseWealth
Instagram: phweiss11
Tiktok: apprisewm
YouTube: philipweiss9408
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Wendy, and this is Divorce Doesn't Suck. I'm
talking all about the life you can live after divorce.
You'll hear regular people's stories about their divorces and how
they reinvented themselves and grew. You'll also get invaluable advice
from experts who serve in the divorce community. A little
about me. I'm a former TV producer and mom of two.
I got divorced in two thousand and eight when there
were really no outlets or platforms for me to turn to.
(00:22):
So I'm paying it forward and have created a platform
to help men and women learn that there absolutely is
a fresh, new and exciting life after divorce. Come with
me on this journey and paint your brand new blank
canvas of happily ever after divorce. This episode is brought
to in part by the Needle Kuda Law Firm Guidance
that Moves Lives Forward. Welcome to another episode of Divorce
(00:43):
Does and Second. Wendy Sloan your host and my guests today.
With over twenty five years of experience in personal finance
and investment manages management, he specialized in finance planning for
women facing new beginnings. Inspired by what he witnessed watching
his father struggle with money and budgeting and so on,
and his story is very personal. We're going to talk
about that. A regular panelist on the Money Treat Investing podcast,
(01:07):
his personal story is pretty compelling, which is very important
to this podcast and why we're talking about this today.
So welcome to my show, Phil Weiss.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Thanks so much for having me, Wendy. I look forward
to having a conversation with you.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Thank you for being here, and thank you for all
that you're going to share today, which is so important
for especially for women, because I feel like a lot
of times men take over the finances. I don't know
if that's changing, you know, as you know one more
women are going into the workforce now and not just
staying home. But it's so it's regardless. It's so important
to know about your money and where your money is
(01:43):
going and et cetera. Can we start with your personal
story and how you got into.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
This, sure, Ken, But I will say that I do
see some change because there are households that I work
with where it is a couple and she's the one
that's responsible for the finals. It's not always him.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Anymore like that. Okay, that's good. Okay.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
So you watched your dad struggle with budgeting and money
growing up, what was that like for you?
Speaker 2 (02:14):
In my house growing up, it was that typical model
that you talked about. My father was responsible for the finances.
My mom was responsible for my sister and I. But
here's the thing. When it came to finances, my father
wasn't good at it at all. We had unpaid bills,
we had no credit, we had no savings. When I
was old enough to drive, I remember driving to the
(02:37):
local utilities to give them money because we had had
services turned off and they needed to be paid to
turn it back on. When it was time for me
to go to college, I was told go anywhere you want,
and so I was going to be a doctor and
a psychology major. So I went to Duke and at
the end of my junior year, I had done a
lot to stay in and I had personal meetings with
the president of the university and all kinds of things,
(02:58):
but I owed the school enough money at the end
of my junior year that we decided I needed to
go until I could get the money that I needed
to pay off that debt and then be ready to
come back. I needed only six courses to graduate. I
left and it was a toxic situation at home, so
I packed up my car and I ended up moving
across the country to Tucson, and I lived in Tucson
(03:21):
for eighteen months and I worked and paid off my debt,
and when I was ready to go back to school,
I didn't think that I had good enough grades to
become a doctor. They were good, but not good enough,
and I wanted to decided I was going to go
into accounting, but two thousand offer undergraduate accounting degrees, and
I was like, I'm going to get a psychology degree,
and then I got to go to grad school and
(03:42):
that's just not going to work. So I applied to
University Arizona because I had residents from being there for
eighteen months. I applied to Rutgers because I'm originally from
New Jersey, and ultimately decided to go to Rutgers. And
I came back home finished college, where I paid for
rent sometimes tuition with credit card checks because it was
(04:04):
the only way that I could do it. And I
know that's not the best of debt, but I looked
at it it was still good debt because it allowed
me to get finished and be able to be in
a position to really have earnings and eventually paid off.
And I ended my first year work and I looked
at how much I paid in credit card interests. I'm like,
oh my god, I don't make enough to pay that anymore.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
So scary, crazy, scary stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, So I put in place a plan to pay
it all back, and I did it faster than I expected.
While all that was going on, I had also moved
back home after I finished at Rutgers. And one day
I came home and I got the mail and there
were credit card bills with my name on them. But
here's the thing, they weren't mine. My father had forged
my name to get credit cards because he couldn't get
(04:51):
credit on his own. And one of the companies actually
sent me the application, and I knew it was his signature,
so I confronted. It worked out a plan. Had been
paying rent at home, so I used the rent to
pay off those credit cards, and they moved them back
into They moved them into my father's name because he
had paid enough that they weren't in trouble. While this
(05:11):
was going on, waved out. Yeah, Well, the other thing
that happened. My mother went back to school and she
became an occupational therapist, and I know that she did
this so that she'd be in position so she could
be survive and thrive on her own. But unfortunately, she
was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. And that's when
(05:33):
we realized how bad the financial situation at home really was.
Those credit cards were now all in collection. My parents
had to move from their home. They had too high
a mortgage rate because it had been refinanced a bunch
of times at higher and higher rates, and they couldn't pay,
and my mom asked me to help. I did what
I could, but unfortunately my mom didn't make it. About
(05:53):
eighteen months after her diagnosis, she passed away, her cancer
metastasized to her brain.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
And so now I view the work that I do
is trying to help other women avoid the kind of
things that my mom did, and that's how I ended
up working with women facing the beginnings.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
So if all, if you hadn't witnessed that and saw
that and gone through that, you probably wouldn't be doing
what you're doing today.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Correct, Probably not, So your.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Journey watching that and inspired you to help other especially women,
which is mainly what you focus on. And so let's
talk about navigating financial transitions for women.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
So it's not always an easy thing to do. Like
I just got a new client last week and she's
going through she's coming out of divorce, going through divorce,
and she said to me, I don't want to take
care of this stuff. I never have and I need help.
And that's the kind of thing that I'm there for
(07:02):
to help. But it's not just like I view it
as not just the financial side you mentioned. I do
life planning, and life planning is really about helping you.
There's a couple of different ways I can describe it broadly.
One is it's a way to help you avoid regret.
It's to identify those things that are really important to
you that you can do now so you don't get
(07:24):
to the end of life with regrets. And so like
one of the things for me when I went through
my life planning training, you do your own life plan.
And the first elener of my life plan is I
want to create a scholarship for women who go back
to school later in life like my mother did. And
I've started putting away money for it. I haven't formalized
the scholarship yet because I don't have the amount that
I would be comfortable with having to get it started.
(07:46):
But that's one of the things that came out of
my life plan, and why not do that now when
I can allow more people to benefit, I can see
the impact as well, and so I think it's great
that I can identify something like that that I can
do now as opposed to waiting. So it's to do
those things. And then it's also I think of it,
(08:06):
if we have a team of resources. It's not just
the money. It's our time, our energy, our attention, and
our money. And if we can align those and how
we use those resources what matters to us, then we
can live a happier, more fulfilling life. It's not about
like you see your friend or a neighbor that has
(08:28):
a fancy car, or somebody you know lives in a
big house. You don't know what their situation is. First
of all, sometimes those people may have a lot of
debt and you don't know about that. But second of all,
maybe it doesn't matter to you. Like there's a If
anybody's ever heard of Morgan Housel, he wrote a book
called The Psychology of Money, which is one of my
favorite books about investing and looking at it from kind
(08:50):
of this life planning perspective, where it's there money is
a tool to help you do the things that you want.
And he tells a story that occasionally, when he gets
the thought that he might want a fancy car, he'll
go rent like a Porsche or something for a couple
of days. He says, he drives it for a couple
of days and he realizes he doesn't need to have
that car, and that serves better than going and buying it.
(09:11):
So it's things like that, just realizing if you want
that fifteen dollars latte, you can have it, but you
have to understand what you're giving up on the other side.
And if having it is more important than what you're
giving up, that's fine. So it's really helping you to
figure out those things that really matter to you and
also positioning yourself so that when you get later in life,
(09:34):
Like sometimes I have people say I don't want to
eat cat food or I don't want to eat dog
food when I'm retired. Well, I don't think anybody does.
But what can we do now so that we're not
in that position? It's how do we position ourselves and
it's it's about saving, it's about good tax planning, it's
about deciding what's important to all those things really matter.
When we're going through this process, and if you're going
(09:56):
through a transition such as stuff orce, a lot of
things are changing for you and it can be a
really good time to sit back and reflect and think
about and determine what those things are. And when I
do this work, it's never me making any decisions for you.
I have a AI tool that I use to record calls,
and I really use it for note taking. That's why
(10:18):
I record the calls because then I can really listen
to the person that I'm talking to because I don't
have to spend time writing down and when you write
things down, you forget things and you don't hear. I
can really truly listen. And this tool also tells me
how long I talk, and when I'm doing life planning,
the conversation is the person I'm speaking with is talking
eighty percent or more of the time. I'm only talking
(10:40):
twenty percent, and that counts the questions that I ask.
So it's really just listening and allowing you to figure
things out for yourself.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
I bet that after you have these life planning sessions
with these women, they're like, wow, you know, I mean
things that they didn't even think about.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Come up right, Yes they do.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
And I'll tell you a story. So I have one
of my first clients that I life planned, and her
situation was that she had they had two daughters. She's
one of those situations where I said, the wife has
been taking care of all the finances. He doesn't really
do anything with the finances. And they have two daughters
(11:25):
and the first one had gone to college and was
going through a lot of hard things. She has a
mother who has dementia, and she doesn't live that close,
but she has close enough that my client's the one
that is there when she needs help for things she
has that She had a job where she had a
horrible boss and it was a high pressure environment. And
(11:48):
I got an email from her she said, Phil, I
just took a leaf of absence from work. I don't
know what it means to my financial plan. I don't
know what it means to anything, but I had to
do it. And I called her and we had a conversation.
I said, let's do your life plan and we did,
and she ended up leaving that job. She actually hasn't
(12:09):
gone back to work. We talked about maybe going back
to work. I mean, I'll tell you what she is doing,
because it's actually a really cool story. But her whole
life has changed. And now her brother's very sick. He's
got terminal cancer, and she's helping him, and so it
gives her the time to be there for others in
a way that's really important to her. And when I
(12:32):
talked to her, when I look at her since going
through the life plan, it's like a different person because
she's so much more free and she's doing the things
that really mattered to her. And about a year after
we started her life plan, I got an email from her.
She said, Phil when I was in my twenties, and
she lives outside of Chicago, said, I go to Cubs
games and we're sitting there having our beers and watching
(12:54):
the game, and I look at these little old ladies
that were taking tickets or working as ushers or whatever
they were doing, and I said, that's what I want
to do. Well, my client's in her early fifties, she said.
So I went onto the Cub's website and I applied
for the job, and I got an interview, and I
go in and I'm wearing my Cubs jersey and my
(13:14):
Cub's World Series T shirt. And there's a lot of
young kids there that are applying for the job. She
goes and I got the job.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Ah.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
And she's not doing this to make money, because it's
you know when you figure communing expense. He goes in
all the soup in the airs and other stuff I'm buying.
It's like, it's not like it's a money making thing.
But she's having wonderful experiences and she liked it enough
that she's doing it again this year.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
I love that. So I love that story so much.
And I'm going to ask you some of the questions
that you ask while when you do life planning with
your clients.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Right after this break, we're going to take a quick
commercial break for one of our sponsors, talking to Phil Weis's,
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Speaker 3 (13:52):
Will be right back from spring break to Memorrow day weekend.
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Speaker 3 (15:15):
We're back. So what are some of the questions that
you ask when you're doing the life planning?
Speaker 2 (15:21):
So when we're doing life planning, so the life planning
process is an acronym, it's called evoke and the first
is expiration and that's just a meeting where we kind
of why are you here now? What made you decide
to seek out some help with your finances whatever the
case may be, And it's just dream big and think
about what would your most fulfilling life look like. Then
we get to the v which is a vision meeting.
(15:43):
And during the before the vision meeting, I asked you
to fill out some ex complete some exercises, and one
of them involves three questions that we're going to talk
about during that meeting. So the first question is that
really specific, dream big question. Imagine that money was no object,
you could do whatever you wanted. What would do and
how would you live your life? So that's a fun
one to answer, right because you can work.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
I was going to say, that's a great question.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
It's a wonderful question and it really opens up possibilities.
But then we start to get more real and now
we get the question too, and this time is you
go to your doctor and you get the unfortunate news
that you have five to ten years left to live.
The good news is you're not ever going to feel sick.
The bad news is, though you don't know when you're
(16:29):
going to go. Now, money is part of the equation,
So now the really question is really what would you do?
How would you live your life? What would you change?
And then we get to the third question, which is
the hardest one of all. This time you go to
the doctor and you get the unfortunate news that today's
the day. And now it's not what would you do,
(16:52):
although honestly some people answer it that way, it's what
did you not get to do? Who did you not
get to be? And that also really deep reflection, and
it gets to those things that really matter to you.
And then we take the conversation that we have around
those questions as well as, like I said, a couple
other exercises, and we create a vision. And that vision
(17:15):
is something that usually the initial vision, it's going to
be within the next six to eighteen months. That's usually
what I target. You don't want it to be more
than two years, because you want it to be something
that you can really think about and work towards. If
you put it too far out, it's too abstract, and
we'll put a lot of color around it, like to
set an environment, because like, there's lots of little things
(17:35):
that I found out about you, Like I don't know,
maybe you like to go walk in you like to
do something with your family in a special place. So
maybe it's you're there or you've just gotten back from there,
and you're reflecting on the things that have happened during
this time. And so we create a vision which is
supposed to kind of light a torch or a fire
to get you inspired to do these things. And then
(17:56):
the next meeting we go through it's called obstacles. And
so now the obstacles are we have this vision, now
what could possibly get in the way of achieving it?
And then we ask who can help you with that?
What would you do about it? How can you do that?
And when are you going to do it? Because we
want to try to get you to commit to do
(18:18):
things by a certain time, because again we're trying to
create urgency and a desire to really follow through with things.
And when I asked that question, like those questions, who what,
when and why and how. I sit back and it's
like I can see the wheels insides people's heads stinning
as they're thinking through.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
I'm thinking about all the things that all these questions
that I just said to you, like tech.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Well, I'm like, wow, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
Yeah, it's really powerful.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
When everyone should should have that right. Yes, everyone have
those questions brought to them. I think they'll look at
life a lot differently. I think you're right, pretty amazing.
So what you do is very rewarding, Phil, I mean,
especially coming from you know how you grew up and
what you saw your father do and go through. And yeah,
(19:14):
so retirement and tax planning super important as well.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Absolutely, I just want to go back and close the
loop on what we just talked about. So that same
client that I told you the story about that worked
for the Cubs. After she started doing that, I went
out to Chicago to meet with her and some of
her friends, and when we talked about those questions, she
told her friends that working with me changed her life.
(19:41):
And I mean, I love what I do and I
don't ever intend to stop. As long as my brain
is working, I can do this because it's a virtual world.
So I can be anywhere and do this, and my
wife is on board with the fact that I don't
have to stop. It's just if you could, If I
can have that effect on people and make that kind
(20:02):
of contribution to people's lives, I don't know why I.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Would want to stop.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
No, I don't know why either. I think you're doing,
you know, something so valuable to everybody. It's amazing. So
retirement and tax planning.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Yes, So when it comes to taxes, to me, it's
not about what we pay in any one year. It's
about trying to structure our taxes and our income and
everything else in a way that allows us to pay
the least we can over our lifetime. If you ever
(20:44):
talk to somebody and they've just retired, their income's really low,
and they say I paid nothing in taxes issue or
something like that, that's really not a good answer because
what we forget about is that if we've done our
job as saving for retirement, most people put money into
their four oh one K or their IRA or something
like that, Well, we got a tax break at that
(21:05):
money when it went in, But guess what we get
to retirement. We have to pay taxes to pull that
out we're eve going to get to a certain age,
which is seventy three if you're born before nineteen sixty
and seventy five if you're born in nineteen six year
later that you have to take requirementium distribution. So the
IRSs tables and they tell you how much you have
(21:25):
to take out relative to your balance each year, and
you can end up with really big requirementum distributions to
put you in these high tax brackets. And also if
you're getting Medicare, you're insurant. Your health coverage is through Medicare.
Your income can make you pay more for Medicare. It's
called the income related monthly adjustment amount. When your income
(21:46):
is above certain levels, you're going to pay more in premiums.
So there's things that we can do like wroth conversion.
So the difference between an IRA and wroth is that
if I have a wroth IRA, I pay tax on
the money the money that goes in after I pay
tax on it, but then it can grow tax free
and come out tax free. If I have a four
(22:10):
to one k or an IRA, I don't pay tax
on the money that goes in. I don't pay tax
on the growth, but then I do pay tax on
the money as it comes out, So I call this
bracket stuffing, and we want to look at your situation
and what's the maximum tax rate. It makes sense for
you to pay over your projected life span and let's
fill up that bracket and not go anymore, because then
(22:33):
we can reduce future requirement and distributions, we can reduce
the impact of ERMA, we can reduce your tax bill.
So there's things like that. There's also things like if
you have a high deductible health care plan and you're
told that you have a health saving you can put
money into a health saving account. You should do it.
But here's the thing. You shouldn't just do it. Leave
(22:55):
that money there, because the health saving account is actually
even more tax efficient than an IRA or a roth IRA,
because when I put money into a health savings account,
I don't pay tax in the money that goes in.
I can invest it. It doesn't have to sit in
like a bank account. You can invest it, and the
growth that you get is tax free, and then you
(23:18):
can pull the money out tax free as long as
it's used to cover qualified medical expenses. But it doesn't
even have to be qualified medical expenses. In the year
that you take it out. If you've been paying your
healthcare expenses out of pocket during the time that you
had the HSA, well you can pull the money out.
Like I have one of my sons. He's under twenty six,
(23:41):
so he's still on our health care plan even though
he's working and I had him fun this is an
extra loophole. He's still part of our family health care plan.
So since he's part of a family plan, even though
he's one person with almost no health care expenses, he
can fund his HSA at the family contribution rate, which
(24:03):
is a huge benefit. Yeah, and he's finding his roth
IRA and he's putting money into his RA. So we
were in the car a couple months ago together and
I said to him, you know, one day I'm not
going to be here anymore, and you're going to say
thank you, Dad, because you're either going to be able
to retire early or do these things that you really
(24:26):
want to do because you started putting money away tax
efficiently at a very young age, and you're going to
be in such a great position when you get there.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
It's amazing. You're empowering women to take control of their finances.
And achieve financial stability, and this life planning is so key,
and those questions were so like unbelievable. They're still like
swirling in my head all the things that you said.
You're also a regular panelist on the money Tree Investing podcast.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
How is that.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
It's fun? How much fun it is to me really
depends on who the guest is that we're having the
panel discussion about. I blog every week for my firm.
I even you can even go to my website and
see my life plan. I shared it on my website,
but I try when I blog, I like more evergreen topics,
things that have lasting impact, and so some of the
(25:22):
times then we have conversations they're not they're more current,
event driven and like they don't have as much lasting value.
But it's still fun. I mean, it's still things I
have to pay attention to, so it's always fun to
have conversations about it. But in terms of value, Like
there was a guest a couple of weeks ago that
was speaking about social security and then we had a
(25:43):
discussion about other things about when to claim sal security
and some of the things to keep in mind when
you're doing it.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
When is a good time to claim sali security.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
So it depends a lot on the individual, but you
can start claiming as early sixty two if you're born
nineteen sixty. Again as a dividing line, if you're born
in nineteen six year later, your full retirement age is
sixty seven. If you're born in the fifties, you take
away two months for each year before nineteen sixty nine,
(26:12):
So if you're born like in nineteen fifty nine, your
full retirement age would be sixty six and ten months.
So from sixty six to whatever your full retirement age is,
your benefit grows by between six to seven percent per year.
Then from your full retirement age to late seventy that
actually grows at eight percent per year. So generally the
(26:34):
longer you can wait, that better off you are now.
If you're a couple, I always recommend almost always that
the higher earner wait till seventy because the survivor of
a couple, the surviving spouse gets to collect the higher
of the two benefits for the other spouse that had
lower earnings. When you start kind of depends. It could
(26:57):
be a little sooner if you think you need the money.
It could be at full retirement age. If you don't
need the money. You know you're getting that guaranteed eight
percent growth. Sometimes we have great markets and the market
grows greater than that, but sometimes it doesn't like right.
So eight percent guaranteed growth is really nice. And you
also want to look at what other factors are going
(27:18):
and like I talked about some of the tax planning
things that we can do, so that can also time
to that. Like if you're not taking Social Security benefits, well,
then that leads me more that I can do from
a planning perspective, because you don't have that income that's
sitting in there. So that's also something that we always
want to consider.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
It.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
For a single person or a divorced person, it's a
little bit more complicated because when you wait, yes, your
benefits growing, but you have to make sure that you
can afford to do it. So I have divorce clients
that sometimes they'll start taking it as soon as they retire.
Sometimes they'll at least wait till sixty seven. Sometimes they'll
wait till seventy. It really depends on their situation. We
(27:57):
want to talk about it. The nice thing is once
you wait till full retirement age, you actually have the
opportunity to go back, like if for six months, so
if you let's use sixty seven as full retirement age.
So if you were at sixty seven and six months
and you had some type of cash need, you could say,
you know what, I want to go back to sixty seven.
(28:18):
Your benefit's going to be back to what it would
have been at age sixty seven. But you can take
six months of benefits all at once. If you were
sixty seven and three months means that it would only
be three because you can't go back before full retirement age.
But you have the flexibility, so it's never an irrevocable decision.
Even if you for sixty three and said I'm going
to wait till sixty seven and sixty five, something happened
(28:40):
and you really need the money, you can start then,
Like there's no rules. You don't make a contract with
the Social Security Administration says I'm going to wait till
this age and you're stuck with it.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
Yeah, if you don't, could you imagine if you hadn't
grown up in a household that you grew up in,
where you would be today. You might be a doctor,
you might not be you wouldn't be doing what you're doing,
you wouldn't be helping women all over.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Yeah, it's it's funny, like I thought about that sometimes.
And first of all, I think when it comes to
role models, like you can have good ones and bad ones.
I had a really bad one. But the fortunate thing
is you can still learn. I just learned all the
things not to do, right. But I have given thought
to the idea of like, what would it happen if
I stayed at Duke and I became a doctor and
(29:25):
all that, And for a long time that really bothered
me that that didn't happen. But now it doesn't at all,
because I say to myself, I have a wonderful we
have four wonderful kids. I have a lovely wife, and
I don't think i'd have any of them if I
had gone down the other path, because I you know,
(29:45):
I was in North Carolina. I don't know, I could
have easily stayed there and never been back to New Jersey.
Like one of the reasons I chose Duke was because
it was away from New Jersey, Like I wanted to
get away from home, just like I said when I
moved to Tucson. Right, So I don't think any of
the things that happened in my life when I look
at my life today, would have happened the way that
(30:05):
they did. So it's great that it worked out the
way that it did. You. Oh, there's certain parts that
I don't like right because I didn't do that, But
I'm very happy with where my life is now and
it all worked out.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
You're a perfect example of my podcast. This is what happened,
this is how this is how I handle it, and
this is how I got to the other side, and
this is what I'm doing now that you know all
we're all trying to be on this platform and on
this podcast in this world to help and you're making
a huge difference.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Is there any last minute thoughts.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
You want to share with us on on anything that
you want us to know.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
I mean, I think the most important thing when it
comes to thinking about your finances is we don't get
a lot of education about finances in school. There's a
lot that we don't know. And even if you've been
saving and you're getting closer to retirement, like that's one
set of rules, then the rules change when you retire.
There's I think having somebody to help you can really
(31:07):
make a big difference. I think that I'll say sometimes
I say to myself, anybody could do what I do.
But and I like acronyms, I have another one. You
have to have kit. You have to have the knowledge.
So that means you have to be willing to spend
time to understand, right, you have to have the interest
in doing it, and you also be willing to put
the time in. And as your life, as we get older,
(31:29):
our life gets more complicated, right, because we have more responsibilities,
and so it gets harder and harder. So if you
need to get a will done, you go talk to
an attorney. If you're not feeling well, you go to
a doctor. I'm not saying that I'm a doctor, but
there are things. If you go to somebody that can
help you with your finances, you can make your finances better.
(31:52):
And if you make your finances better and figure out
what they're really there for, you can live a better life.
And why not get help. You don't have to do
it yourself. That's what people, That's what different professions are
there for. They're there to help you, like simple things,
but it's really it really makes a difference.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
Such an education and so important to educate ourselves about
our finances, about how we can invest, about how we
can for taxes, about how we can say for retirement.
I loved everything about this. Thank you so much. Founder
of a prize wealth Management, Phil Wise, will have all
your social up there on the platform. Thank you for
(32:31):
sharing everything that you did in your personal story as
well and for educating us so much this morning.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Thank you so much for having me. And by the way,
if you go to my website, it's a prize wealth
ap p ri I s E Wealth dot com slash
five dash Things and you can download it's a freebie,
just five things every woman should know about their finances.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
I love that. Thank you so much, Phil.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Thank you so much for having me today one day
and I appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
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five seven nine to five zero zero
Hi, I'm Wendy, and this is Divorce Doesn't Suck. I'm
talking all about the life you can live after divorce.
You'll hear regular people's stories about their divorces and how
they reinvented themselves and grew. You'll also get invaluable advice
from experts who serve in the divorce community. A little
about me. I'm a former TV producer and mom of two.
I got divorced in two thousand and eight when there
were really no outlets or platforms for me to turn to.
(00:22):
So I'm paying it forward and have created a platform
to help men and women learn that there absolutely is
a fresh, new and exciting life after divorce. Come with
me on this journey and paint your brand new blank
canvas of happily ever after divorce. This episode is brought
to in part by the Needle Kuda Law Firm Guidance
that Moves Lives Forward. Welcome to another episode of Divorce
(00:43):
Does and Second. Wendy Sloan your host and my guests today.
With over twenty five years of experience in personal finance
and investment manages management, he specialized in finance planning for
women facing new beginnings. Inspired by what he witnessed watching
his father struggle with money and budgeting and so on,
and his story is very personal. We're going to talk
about that. A regular panelist on the Money Treat Investing podcast,
(01:07):
his personal story is pretty compelling, which is very important
to this podcast and why we're talking about this today.
So welcome to my show, Phil Weiss.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Thanks so much for having me, Wendy. I look forward
to having a conversation with you.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Thank you for being here, and thank you for all
that you're going to share today, which is so important
for especially for women, because I feel like a lot
of times men take over the finances. I don't know
if that's changing, you know, as you know one more
women are going into the workforce now and not just
staying home. But it's so it's regardless. It's so important
to know about your money and where your money is
(01:43):
going and et cetera. Can we start with your personal
story and how you got into.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
This, sure, Ken, But I will say that I do
see some change because there are households that I work
with where it is a couple and she's the one
that's responsible for the finals. It's not always him.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Anymore like that. Okay, that's good. Okay.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
So you watched your dad struggle with budgeting and money
growing up, what was that like for you?
Speaker 2 (02:14):
In my house growing up, it was that typical model
that you talked about. My father was responsible for the finances.
My mom was responsible for my sister and I. But
here's the thing. When it came to finances, my father
wasn't good at it at all. We had unpaid bills,
we had no credit, we had no savings. When I
was old enough to drive, I remember driving to the
(02:37):
local utilities to give them money because we had had
services turned off and they needed to be paid to
turn it back on. When it was time for me
to go to college, I was told go anywhere you want,
and so I was going to be a doctor and
a psychology major. So I went to Duke and at
the end of my junior year, I had done a
lot to stay in and I had personal meetings with
the president of the university and all kinds of things,
(02:58):
but I owed the school enough money at the end
of my junior year that we decided I needed to
go until I could get the money that I needed
to pay off that debt and then be ready to
come back. I needed only six courses to graduate. I
left and it was a toxic situation at home, so
I packed up my car and I ended up moving
across the country to Tucson, and I lived in Tucson
(03:21):
for eighteen months and I worked and paid off my debt,
and when I was ready to go back to school,
I didn't think that I had good enough grades to
become a doctor. They were good, but not good enough,
and I wanted to decided I was going to go
into accounting, but two thousand offer undergraduate accounting degrees, and
I was like, I'm going to get a psychology degree,
and then I got to go to grad school and
(03:42):
that's just not going to work. So I applied to
University Arizona because I had residents from being there for
eighteen months. I applied to Rutgers because I'm originally from
New Jersey, and ultimately decided to go to Rutgers. And
I came back home finished college, where I paid for
rent sometimes tuition with credit card checks because it was
(04:04):
the only way that I could do it. And I
know that's not the best of debt, but I looked
at it it was still good debt because it allowed
me to get finished and be able to be in
a position to really have earnings and eventually paid off.
And I ended my first year work and I looked
at how much I paid in credit card interests. I'm like,
oh my god, I don't make enough to pay that anymore.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
So scary, crazy, scary stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, So I put in place a plan to pay
it all back, and I did it faster than I expected.
While all that was going on, I had also moved
back home after I finished at Rutgers. And one day
I came home and I got the mail and there
were credit card bills with my name on them. But
here's the thing, they weren't mine. My father had forged
my name to get credit cards because he couldn't get
(04:51):
credit on his own. And one of the companies actually
sent me the application, and I knew it was his signature,
so I confronted. It worked out a plan. Had been
paying rent at home, so I used the rent to
pay off those credit cards, and they moved them back
into They moved them into my father's name because he
had paid enough that they weren't in trouble. While this
(05:11):
was going on, waved out. Yeah, Well, the other thing
that happened. My mother went back to school and she
became an occupational therapist, and I know that she did
this so that she'd be in position so she could
be survive and thrive on her own. But unfortunately, she
was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. And that's when
(05:33):
we realized how bad the financial situation at home really was.
Those credit cards were now all in collection. My parents
had to move from their home. They had too high
a mortgage rate because it had been refinanced a bunch
of times at higher and higher rates, and they couldn't pay,
and my mom asked me to help. I did what
I could, but unfortunately my mom didn't make it. About
(05:53):
eighteen months after her diagnosis, she passed away, her cancer
metastasized to her brain.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
And so now I view the work that I do
is trying to help other women avoid the kind of
things that my mom did, and that's how I ended
up working with women facing the beginnings.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
So if all, if you hadn't witnessed that and saw
that and gone through that, you probably wouldn't be doing
what you're doing today.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Correct, Probably not, So your.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Journey watching that and inspired you to help other especially women,
which is mainly what you focus on. And so let's
talk about navigating financial transitions for women.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
So it's not always an easy thing to do. Like
I just got a new client last week and she's
going through she's coming out of divorce, going through divorce,
and she said to me, I don't want to take
care of this stuff. I never have and I need help.
And that's the kind of thing that I'm there for
(07:02):
to help. But it's not just like I view it
as not just the financial side you mentioned. I do
life planning, and life planning is really about helping you.
There's a couple of different ways I can describe it broadly.
One is it's a way to help you avoid regret.
It's to identify those things that are really important to
you that you can do now so you don't get
(07:24):
to the end of life with regrets. And so like
one of the things for me when I went through
my life planning training, you do your own life plan.
And the first elener of my life plan is I
want to create a scholarship for women who go back
to school later in life like my mother did. And
I've started putting away money for it. I haven't formalized
the scholarship yet because I don't have the amount that
I would be comfortable with having to get it started.
(07:46):
But that's one of the things that came out of
my life plan, and why not do that now when
I can allow more people to benefit, I can see
the impact as well, and so I think it's great
that I can identify something like that that I can
do now as opposed to waiting. So it's to do
those things. And then it's also I think of it,
(08:06):
if we have a team of resources. It's not just
the money. It's our time, our energy, our attention, and
our money. And if we can align those and how
we use those resources what matters to us, then we
can live a happier, more fulfilling life. It's not about
like you see your friend or a neighbor that has
(08:28):
a fancy car, or somebody you know lives in a
big house. You don't know what their situation is. First
of all, sometimes those people may have a lot of
debt and you don't know about that. But second of all,
maybe it doesn't matter to you. Like there's a If
anybody's ever heard of Morgan Housel, he wrote a book
called The Psychology of Money, which is one of my
favorite books about investing and looking at it from kind
(08:50):
of this life planning perspective, where it's there money is
a tool to help you do the things that you want.
And he tells a story that occasionally, when he gets
the thought that he might want a fancy car, he'll
go rent like a Porsche or something for a couple
of days. He says, he drives it for a couple
of days and he realizes he doesn't need to have
that car, and that serves better than going and buying it.
(09:11):
So it's things like that, just realizing if you want
that fifteen dollars latte, you can have it, but you
have to understand what you're giving up on the other side.
And if having it is more important than what you're
giving up, that's fine. So it's really helping you to
figure out those things that really matter to you and
also positioning yourself so that when you get later in life,
(09:34):
Like sometimes I have people say I don't want to
eat cat food or I don't want to eat dog
food when I'm retired. Well, I don't think anybody does.
But what can we do now so that we're not
in that position? It's how do we position ourselves and
it's it's about saving, it's about good tax planning, it's
about deciding what's important to all those things really matter.
When we're going through this process, and if you're going
(09:56):
through a transition such as stuff orce, a lot of
things are changing for you and it can be a
really good time to sit back and reflect and think
about and determine what those things are. And when I
do this work, it's never me making any decisions for you.
I have a AI tool that I use to record calls,
and I really use it for note taking. That's why
(10:18):
I record the calls because then I can really listen
to the person that I'm talking to because I don't
have to spend time writing down and when you write
things down, you forget things and you don't hear. I
can really truly listen. And this tool also tells me
how long I talk, and when I'm doing life planning,
the conversation is the person I'm speaking with is talking
eighty percent or more of the time. I'm only talking
(10:40):
twenty percent, and that counts the questions that I ask.
So it's really just listening and allowing you to figure
things out for yourself.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
I bet that after you have these life planning sessions
with these women, they're like, wow, you know, I mean
things that they didn't even think about.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Come up right, Yes they do.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
And I'll tell you a story. So I have one
of my first clients that I life planned, and her
situation was that she had they had two daughters. She's
one of those situations where I said, the wife has
been taking care of all the finances. He doesn't really
do anything with the finances. And they have two daughters
(11:25):
and the first one had gone to college and was
going through a lot of hard things. She has a
mother who has dementia, and she doesn't live that close,
but she has close enough that my client's the one
that is there when she needs help for things she
has that She had a job where she had a
horrible boss and it was a high pressure environment. And
(11:48):
I got an email from her she said, Phil, I
just took a leaf of absence from work. I don't
know what it means to my financial plan. I don't
know what it means to anything, but I had to
do it. And I called her and we had a conversation.
I said, let's do your life plan and we did,
and she ended up leaving that job. She actually hasn't
(12:09):
gone back to work. We talked about maybe going back
to work. I mean, I'll tell you what she is doing,
because it's actually a really cool story. But her whole
life has changed. And now her brother's very sick. He's
got terminal cancer, and she's helping him, and so it
gives her the time to be there for others in
a way that's really important to her. And when I
(12:32):
talked to her, when I look at her since going
through the life plan, it's like a different person because
she's so much more free and she's doing the things
that really mattered to her. And about a year after
we started her life plan, I got an email from her.
She said, Phil when I was in my twenties, and
she lives outside of Chicago, said, I go to Cubs
games and we're sitting there having our beers and watching
(12:54):
the game, and I look at these little old ladies
that were taking tickets or working as ushers or whatever
they were doing, and I said, that's what I want
to do. Well, my client's in her early fifties, she said.
So I went onto the Cub's website and I applied
for the job, and I got an interview, and I
go in and I'm wearing my Cubs jersey and my
(13:14):
Cub's World Series T shirt. And there's a lot of
young kids there that are applying for the job. She
goes and I got the job.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Ah.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
And she's not doing this to make money, because it's
you know when you figure communing expense. He goes in
all the soup in the airs and other stuff I'm buying.
It's like, it's not like it's a money making thing.
But she's having wonderful experiences and she liked it enough
that she's doing it again this year.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
I love that. So I love that story so much.
And I'm going to ask you some of the questions
that you ask while when you do life planning with
your clients.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Right after this break, we're going to take a quick
commercial break for one of our sponsors, talking to Phil Weis's,
founder of a Prize Wealth Management.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Will be right back from spring break to Memorrow day weekend.
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Speaker 3 (15:15):
We're back. So what are some of the questions that
you ask when you're doing the life planning?
Speaker 2 (15:21):
So when we're doing life planning, so the life planning
process is an acronym, it's called evoke and the first
is expiration and that's just a meeting where we kind
of why are you here now? What made you decide
to seek out some help with your finances whatever the
case may be, And it's just dream big and think
about what would your most fulfilling life look like. Then
we get to the v which is a vision meeting.
(15:43):
And during the before the vision meeting, I asked you
to fill out some ex complete some exercises, and one
of them involves three questions that we're going to talk
about during that meeting. So the first question is that
really specific, dream big question. Imagine that money was no object,
you could do whatever you wanted. What would do and
how would you live your life? So that's a fun
one to answer, right because you can work.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
I was going to say, that's a great question.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
It's a wonderful question and it really opens up possibilities.
But then we start to get more real and now
we get the question too, and this time is you
go to your doctor and you get the unfortunate news
that you have five to ten years left to live.
The good news is you're not ever going to feel sick.
The bad news is, though you don't know when you're
(16:29):
going to go. Now, money is part of the equation,
So now the really question is really what would you do?
How would you live your life? What would you change?
And then we get to the third question, which is
the hardest one of all. This time you go to
the doctor and you get the unfortunate news that today's
the day. And now it's not what would you do,
(16:52):
although honestly some people answer it that way, it's what
did you not get to do? Who did you not
get to be? And that also really deep reflection, and
it gets to those things that really matter to you.
And then we take the conversation that we have around
those questions as well as, like I said, a couple
other exercises, and we create a vision. And that vision
(17:15):
is something that usually the initial vision, it's going to
be within the next six to eighteen months. That's usually
what I target. You don't want it to be more
than two years, because you want it to be something
that you can really think about and work towards. If
you put it too far out, it's too abstract, and
we'll put a lot of color around it, like to
set an environment, because like, there's lots of little things
(17:35):
that I found out about you, Like I don't know,
maybe you like to go walk in you like to
do something with your family in a special place. So
maybe it's you're there or you've just gotten back from there,
and you're reflecting on the things that have happened during
this time. And so we create a vision which is
supposed to kind of light a torch or a fire
to get you inspired to do these things. And then
(17:56):
the next meeting we go through it's called obstacles. And
so now the obstacles are we have this vision, now
what could possibly get in the way of achieving it?
And then we ask who can help you with that?
What would you do about it? How can you do that?
And when are you going to do it? Because we
want to try to get you to commit to do
(18:18):
things by a certain time, because again we're trying to
create urgency and a desire to really follow through with things.
And when I asked that question, like those questions, who what,
when and why and how. I sit back and it's
like I can see the wheels insides people's heads stinning
as they're thinking through.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
I'm thinking about all the things that all these questions
that I just said to you, like tech.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Well, I'm like, wow, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
Yeah, it's really powerful.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
When everyone should should have that right. Yes, everyone have
those questions brought to them. I think they'll look at
life a lot differently. I think you're right, pretty amazing.
So what you do is very rewarding, Phil, I mean,
especially coming from you know how you grew up and
what you saw your father do and go through. And yeah,
(19:14):
so retirement and tax planning super important as well.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Absolutely, I just want to go back and close the
loop on what we just talked about. So that same
client that I told you the story about that worked
for the Cubs. After she started doing that, I went
out to Chicago to meet with her and some of
her friends, and when we talked about those questions, she
told her friends that working with me changed her life.
(19:41):
And I mean, I love what I do and I
don't ever intend to stop. As long as my brain
is working, I can do this because it's a virtual world.
So I can be anywhere and do this, and my
wife is on board with the fact that I don't
have to stop. It's just if you could, If I
can have that effect on people and make that kind
(20:02):
of contribution to people's lives, I don't know why I.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Would want to stop.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
No, I don't know why either. I think you're doing,
you know, something so valuable to everybody. It's amazing. So
retirement and tax planning.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Yes, So when it comes to taxes, to me, it's
not about what we pay in any one year. It's
about trying to structure our taxes and our income and
everything else in a way that allows us to pay
the least we can over our lifetime. If you ever
(20:44):
talk to somebody and they've just retired, their income's really low,
and they say I paid nothing in taxes issue or
something like that, that's really not a good answer because
what we forget about is that if we've done our
job as saving for retirement, most people put money into
their four oh one K or their IRA or something
like that, Well, we got a tax break at that
(21:05):
money when it went in, But guess what we get
to retirement. We have to pay taxes to pull that
out we're eve going to get to a certain age,
which is seventy three if you're born before nineteen sixty
and seventy five if you're born in nineteen six year
later that you have to take requirementium distribution. So the
IRSs tables and they tell you how much you have
(21:25):
to take out relative to your balance each year, and
you can end up with really big requirementum distributions to
put you in these high tax brackets. And also if
you're getting Medicare, you're insurant. Your health coverage is through Medicare.
Your income can make you pay more for Medicare. It's
called the income related monthly adjustment amount. When your income
(21:46):
is above certain levels, you're going to pay more in premiums.
So there's things that we can do like wroth conversion.
So the difference between an IRA and wroth is that
if I have a wroth IRA, I pay tax on
the money the money that goes in after I pay
tax on it, but then it can grow tax free
and come out tax free. If I have a four
(22:10):
to one k or an IRA, I don't pay tax
on the money that goes in. I don't pay tax
on the growth, but then I do pay tax on
the money as it comes out, So I call this
bracket stuffing, and we want to look at your situation
and what's the maximum tax rate. It makes sense for
you to pay over your projected life span and let's
fill up that bracket and not go anymore, because then
(22:33):
we can reduce future requirement and distributions, we can reduce
the impact of ERMA, we can reduce your tax bill.
So there's things like that. There's also things like if
you have a high deductible health care plan and you're
told that you have a health saving you can put
money into a health saving account. You should do it.
But here's the thing. You shouldn't just do it. Leave
(22:55):
that money there, because the health saving account is actually
even more tax efficient than an IRA or a roth IRA,
because when I put money into a health savings account,
I don't pay tax in the money that goes in.
I can invest it. It doesn't have to sit in
like a bank account. You can invest it, and the
growth that you get is tax free, and then you
(23:18):
can pull the money out tax free as long as
it's used to cover qualified medical expenses. But it doesn't
even have to be qualified medical expenses. In the year
that you take it out. If you've been paying your
healthcare expenses out of pocket during the time that you
had the HSA, well you can pull the money out.
Like I have one of my sons. He's under twenty six,
(23:41):
so he's still on our health care plan even though
he's working and I had him fun this is an
extra loophole. He's still part of our family health care plan.
So since he's part of a family plan, even though
he's one person with almost no health care expenses, he
can fund his HSA at the family contribution rate, which
(24:03):
is a huge benefit. Yeah, and he's finding his roth
IRA and he's putting money into his RA. So we
were in the car a couple months ago together and
I said to him, you know, one day I'm not
going to be here anymore, and you're going to say
thank you, Dad, because you're either going to be able
to retire early or do these things that you really
(24:26):
want to do because you started putting money away tax
efficiently at a very young age, and you're going to
be in such a great position when you get there.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
It's amazing. You're empowering women to take control of their finances.
And achieve financial stability, and this life planning is so key,
and those questions were so like unbelievable. They're still like
swirling in my head all the things that you said.
You're also a regular panelist on the money Tree Investing podcast.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
How is that.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
It's fun? How much fun it is to me really
depends on who the guest is that we're having the
panel discussion about. I blog every week for my firm.
I even you can even go to my website and
see my life plan. I shared it on my website,
but I try when I blog, I like more evergreen topics,
things that have lasting impact, and so some of the
(25:22):
times then we have conversations they're not they're more current,
event driven and like they don't have as much lasting value.
But it's still fun. I mean, it's still things I
have to pay attention to, so it's always fun to
have conversations about it. But in terms of value, Like
there was a guest a couple of weeks ago that
was speaking about social security and then we had a
(25:43):
discussion about other things about when to claim sal security
and some of the things to keep in mind when
you're doing it.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
When is a good time to claim sali security.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
So it depends a lot on the individual, but you
can start claiming as early sixty two if you're born
nineteen sixty. Again as a dividing line, if you're born
in nineteen six year later, your full retirement age is
sixty seven. If you're born in the fifties, you take
away two months for each year before nineteen sixty nine,
(26:12):
So if you're born like in nineteen fifty nine, your
full retirement age would be sixty six and ten months.
So from sixty six to whatever your full retirement age is,
your benefit grows by between six to seven percent per year.
Then from your full retirement age to late seventy that
actually grows at eight percent per year. So generally the
(26:34):
longer you can wait, that better off you are now.
If you're a couple, I always recommend almost always that
the higher earner wait till seventy because the survivor of
a couple, the surviving spouse gets to collect the higher
of the two benefits for the other spouse that had
lower earnings. When you start kind of depends. It could
(26:57):
be a little sooner if you think you need the money.
It could be at full retirement age. If you don't
need the money. You know you're getting that guaranteed eight
percent growth. Sometimes we have great markets and the market
grows greater than that, but sometimes it doesn't like right.
So eight percent guaranteed growth is really nice. And you
also want to look at what other factors are going
(27:18):
and like I talked about some of the tax planning
things that we can do, so that can also time
to that. Like if you're not taking Social Security benefits, well,
then that leads me more that I can do from
a planning perspective, because you don't have that income that's
sitting in there. So that's also something that we always
want to consider.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
It.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
For a single person or a divorced person, it's a
little bit more complicated because when you wait, yes, your
benefits growing, but you have to make sure that you
can afford to do it. So I have divorce clients
that sometimes they'll start taking it as soon as they retire.
Sometimes they'll at least wait till sixty seven. Sometimes they'll
wait till seventy. It really depends on their situation. We
(27:57):
want to talk about it. The nice thing is once
you wait till full retirement age, you actually have the
opportunity to go back, like if for six months, so
if you let's use sixty seven as full retirement age.
So if you were at sixty seven and six months
and you had some type of cash need, you could say,
you know what, I want to go back to sixty seven.
(28:18):
Your benefit's going to be back to what it would
have been at age sixty seven. But you can take
six months of benefits all at once. If you were
sixty seven and three months means that it would only
be three because you can't go back before full retirement age.
But you have the flexibility, so it's never an irrevocable decision.
Even if you for sixty three and said I'm going
to wait till sixty seven and sixty five, something happened
(28:40):
and you really need the money, you can start then,
Like there's no rules. You don't make a contract with
the Social Security Administration says I'm going to wait till
this age and you're stuck with it.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
Yeah, if you don't, could you imagine if you hadn't
grown up in a household that you grew up in,
where you would be today. You might be a doctor,
you might not be you wouldn't be doing what you're doing,
you wouldn't be helping women all over.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Yeah, it's it's funny, like I thought about that sometimes.
And first of all, I think when it comes to
role models, like you can have good ones and bad ones.
I had a really bad one. But the fortunate thing
is you can still learn. I just learned all the
things not to do, right. But I have given thought
to the idea of like, what would it happen if
I stayed at Duke and I became a doctor and
(29:25):
all that, And for a long time that really bothered
me that that didn't happen. But now it doesn't at all,
because I say to myself, I have a wonderful we
have four wonderful kids. I have a lovely wife, and
I don't think i'd have any of them if I
had gone down the other path, because I you know,
(29:45):
I was in North Carolina. I don't know, I could
have easily stayed there and never been back to New Jersey.
Like one of the reasons I chose Duke was because
it was away from New Jersey, Like I wanted to
get away from home, just like I said when I
moved to Tucson. Right, So I don't think any of
the things that happened in my life when I look
at my life today, would have happened the way that
(30:05):
they did. So it's great that it worked out the
way that it did. You. Oh, there's certain parts that
I don't like right because I didn't do that, But
I'm very happy with where my life is now and
it all worked out.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
You're a perfect example of my podcast. This is what happened,
this is how this is how I handle it, and
this is how I got to the other side, and
this is what I'm doing now that you know all
we're all trying to be on this platform and on
this podcast in this world to help and you're making
a huge difference.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Is there any last minute thoughts.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
You want to share with us on on anything that
you want us to know.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
I mean, I think the most important thing when it
comes to thinking about your finances is we don't get
a lot of education about finances in school. There's a
lot that we don't know. And even if you've been
saving and you're getting closer to retirement, like that's one
set of rules, then the rules change when you retire.
There's I think having somebody to help you can really
(31:07):
make a big difference. I think that I'll say sometimes
I say to myself, anybody could do what I do.
But and I like acronyms, I have another one. You
have to have kit. You have to have the knowledge.
So that means you have to be willing to spend
time to understand, right, you have to have the interest
in doing it, and you also be willing to put
the time in. And as your life, as we get older,
(31:29):
our life gets more complicated, right, because we have more responsibilities,
and so it gets harder and harder. So if you
need to get a will done, you go talk to
an attorney. If you're not feeling well, you go to
a doctor. I'm not saying that I'm a doctor, but
there are things. If you go to somebody that can
help you with your finances, you can make your finances better.
(31:52):
And if you make your finances better and figure out
what they're really there for, you can live a better life.
And why not get help. You don't have to do
it yourself. That's what people, That's what different professions are
there for. They're there to help you, like simple things,
but it's really it really makes a difference.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
Such an education and so important to educate ourselves about
our finances, about how we can invest, about how we
can for taxes, about how we can say for retirement.
I loved everything about this. Thank you so much. Founder
of a prize wealth Management, Phil Wise, will have all
your social up there on the platform. Thank you for
(32:31):
sharing everything that you did in your personal story as
well and for educating us so much this morning.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Thank you so much for having me. And by the way,
if you go to my website, it's a prize wealth
ap p ri I s E Wealth dot com slash
five dash Things and you can download it's a freebie,
just five things every woman should know about their finances.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
I love that. Thank you so much, Phil.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Thank you so much for having me today one day
and I appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
Needokuda.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Divorce and family laws attorneys have guided Connecticut and New
York families through complex divorce actions, contested child custody, and
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York attorneys have extensive experience in family matters involving substance abuse,
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Now put the strength of their team behind you. Visit
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