Ep 104: Understanding Your Retirement Plan Results

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The Host:

Kevin Kroskey – About – Contact

Intro:

Hey, welcome back to another edition of Retire Smarter. Walter Storholt here with Kevin Kroskey, president and wealth advisor at True Wealth Design, serving you in Northeast Ohio, Southwest Florida, and the greater Pittsburgh area, or really from wherever you are in this digital age. Doesn’t really matter where you are if you’re listening to the show. Feel free to get in touch. You can go to truewealthdesign.com to book a time to chat with an experienced advisor on the True Wealth team.

Walter Storholt:

Kevin, great to be with you once again this week. What’s going on in your world?

Kevin Kroskey:

Well, it is always my pleasure. Wow. Holy moly.

Walter Storholt:

You’re so excited to be with me today. You just got choked up about it. Man, that’s a high compliment.

Kevin Kroskey:

Wow. I’m not sure what happened there. Yeah, just snap out of it, Kevin. Yeah. No. We’re great. Just a lot going on. Kids not in school, enjoying summer activities. We’re going down to the RV park, or the camper van, as my kids call it.

Walter Storholt:

Nice.

Kevin Kroskey:

Seeing the kids go in the swimming lake, which my wife thinks is gross, so daddy has to go in with them, which he enjoys. All good stuff all the way around. A lot of Americana is happening every weekend.

Walter Storholt:

I love it. I love it. Do the kids, are they doing like camps and those kinds of things, or mostly hanging out with you guys during the summer?

Kevin Kroskey:

No camps. Trying horseback riding for my oldest and doing that with mom.

Walter Storholt:

Oh, very cool.

Kevin Kroskey:

My wife doesn’t listen to this. She probably hears me enough on a daily basis. My wife is actually starting to work on Friday mornings at … I don’t know if you call it a horse farm or what. Shows you how in tune I am with this.

Walter Storholt:

A horse place.

Kevin Kroskey:

She’s literally shoveling, you know what, and learning how to take care of horses.

Walter Storholt:

Oh, wow. Okay.

Kevin Kroskey:

I mean, she’s incredibly passionate about it, so it’s been really awesome to see. She is bartering for lessons for her and my oldest. She starts this Friday as a matter of fact, and I have to take the girls to swimming lessons on Friday. So we’ve kind of worked that into our schedule, and that’s probably the biggest change that the Kroskey family has going on right now.

Walter Storholt:

Okay. So you got a little swimming, a little horse action. Boy, it sounds like a fun summer and a plan for all the Kroskeys. That’s fantastic.

Kevin Kroskey:

Yeah, we keep it interesting for sure. We have two very well-adjusted kids, but it’s very different from when I grew up. Let’s put it that way.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah, that’s very true. Absolutely. Times they are a changing and continue to change in front of us. No doubt about that.

Walter Storholt:

Well, speaking of changes, obviously we’re always watching the market change these days and the economy in the news, all those kinds of things. I’m curious what you’ve got planned for us on today’s show, Kevin. I see in your notes that you …

Walter Storholt:

Kevin always sends me a little outline of what he’s thinking about for the day’s episode, folks. I’m going to peel back the curtain a little bit for you and see what goes on behind the scenes here in the show.

Walter Storholt:

And I got to be honest, Kevin, I’m seeing a lot of potential egghead alert trigger words and abbreviations and those kinds of things. I’m seeing now we’ve had the Monty Carlo verbiage on the show before, but I’m seeing the word linear pop-up and some abbreviations. So I’m interested to see what you’ve got planned for us today.

Kevin Kroskey:

All right. Well, I’m going to try to do my best and de-egghead it.

Walter Storholt:

Perfect.

Kevin Kroskey:

That’s the perfect point of this. We’ve had a few other prior episodes where we’ve talked about just financial planning results and success rates. We had Tyler on the last episode, Tyler Emrick from my office, my partner, and just talking through some questions that clients and prospective clients have had recently about what to do. We’re always trying to relate it back to investment decisions, back to their financial life plan. We mentioned these sorts of success rates and safety margins. And when we had both Dr. Michael Finke on and Dr. David Blanchett on earlier this year, it came up through those conversations as well.

Kevin Kroskey:

It just got me thinking. We talk about this in our client meetings and kind of deconstruct and educate why we’re seeing what we’re seeing and help them understand, on at least a high level, their financial planning results and how we arrive at that. We don’t necessarily get into the sausage making unless they want to, and then we’re happy to go down that rabbit hole. But most people will say, “Hey, that’s what we hire you guys for.” I thought today we could deconstruct it a little bit so not just our clients can have a reminder, but really anybody. Whether you’re doing some sort of financial planning tool or calculator online, some of these things that really belie your financial planning results and how to better understand them.

Kevin Kroskey:

That’s kind of the process and kind of the framework that we’re going to go through today. We’ll see, but I’m going to try to avoid that egghead alert, okay, Walt?

Walter Storholt:

Sounds good to me. I think even when we trigger the egghead alert, you always do a good job of deconstructing it. It’s just when the words are mentioned, and it’s always fun to hit you with that.

Walter Storholt:

I think a conversation about results is great because we’ve got long-term results, mid-term results, medium-term, and then right now. I might look at my portfolio right now and go, “It’s not doing so well.” Because sometimes those long-term results or plans or goals aren’t necessarily congruent with what’s happening in the short term, and so sometimes it can be hard to kind of keep all of those things in perspective. So I’m hoping you’ll be able to sort that out for us today.

Kevin Kroskey:

I’ll take you this way. This wasn’t on my little bullet point I shared with you. But hey, we’re going to do a quick detour here, and I think it’ll be helpful. If you’re a client of ours, when you log into your client vault, you’ll see your dashboard, and you see your dollars and the percent return and some benchmarks that we have for your investment portfolio to really measure and make sure you’re getting a return commensurate with how much risk you’re taking, but then you also see a speedometer-looking panel on the dashboard that shows the financial plan results. It kind of looks like a speedometer. Green, as you can probably infer, means good. The software makers don’t want to freak people out, so they don’t put red on there. It’s more of a magenta. If you can picture it in your mind, that’s kind of how it looks.

Kevin Kroskey:

So the speedometer goes up. Maybe you’re going 50, 60, or 70 miles an hour. Any success rates really go up on a scale from zero to … It’s probability-based, so you can never have a 100% probability. There’s always some uncertainty. But up to about 99%. That’s really what’s belying that. As you said, Walt, it’s a Monte Carlo simulation, so it’s just a mathematical process. Here’s the way that I would explain it in plain English.

Kevin Kroskey:

All right, Walt. I know you’re a millennial here, but I know you probably know who Bill Murray is, right?

Walter Storholt:

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Big fan of Murray. Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kroskey:

All right. Okay. Likewise. Huge fan. Have you seen the movie Groundhog Day?

Walter Storholt:

I feel like I’ve seen it over and over.

Kevin Kroskey:

Very good, Walt. Very good. Millennial gold star there, buddy.

Walter Storholt:

Awesome.

Kevin Kroskey:

I’m sure a lot of people are kind of picturing it in their mind. He goes to see Punxsutawney Phil. He’s a weather forecaster and just keeps living the same day over and over and over and over again. This sort of simulation that we do through the Monte Carlo test is really kind of like that. You’re just simulating multiple retirement lifetimes and seeing, based on return expectations and risk expectations for your portfolio, whether you’re going to go ahead and have a success or a failure.

Kevin Kroskey:

What does success mean? Success just means as long as you have a dollar, at least $1 left at the end of your plan. Said another way, when you expire. I had a client a couple of weeks ago who said, “You should strike the end of the plan and just say oops.” But nobody dies in financial planning PC software land. It’s the end of the plan. So when we expire, whatever. But the failure is if you’re a dollar short. So it says nothing, absolutely nothing about the degree of success or the degree of failure. I don’t know about you, Walt. Not that I would plan on bouncing a check, but if I had to bounce a check, it was the last check of my life, and I was a dollar short, I’d say, “Okay. Hey, not too bad.” Right? I was pretty …

Walter Storholt:

Made it all the way to the end, yeah.

Kevin Kroskey:

All the way to the end, and I was okay.

Walter Storholt:

Well, that is the goal for some people, right? That’s the stated goal is I want that last check to bounce. That’s the thing they’re shooting for.

Kevin Kroskey:

You got it. So failure could mean that … I mean, if you ran out of money 10 years into retirement and you’re in your early 70s, I mean, that’s a very different sort of failure than bouncing your last check. And conversely, if you ended up dying with millions and millions of dollars more than you expected, then that’s a success. I mean, at the same time, you can kind of look at it from the framework of, “Wow.” I mean, you could have really done a lot more with that, whether it was for yourself, for your family, or for charities that you support. That’s kind of a bit of an aside, but I think an important qualitative consideration to think about as well. But from a purely mathematical standpoint, it’s just looking at that success or failures, whether you have a shortfall or whether you have a surplus at the end of your plan.

Kevin Kroskey:

Okay. So it says nothing about the degree of success or failure. I get it, that’s limiting. So what else do we do to utilize this tool? Because it is a good tool that I personally think everybody should be using or should be using something similar to this. Well, a few things. Well, a safety margin is something else that we talk about, or how much is left.

Kevin Kroskey:

Let me give you kind of a framework here. Suppose you have a client. I can think of a client that is fairly conservative, just had a 10-year anniversary with our firm last week. We sent them a little kind of a crack gift. They thought it was hilarious. They called me and thanked me and talked about it. We just kind of reminisced about working together over the years. And no, I won’t say what the gift was, so don’t ask, Walt. Personal between the client and us in that regard.

Walter Storholt:

An inside joke.

Kevin Kroskey:

Inside, yes.

Walter Storholt:

We wouldn’t get it, right?

Kevin Kroskey:

So that client specifically is very conservative, just qualitatively. Even though they can afford to take more risk in their financial plan, they just prefer not to. So when you look at their financial planning results, you see the success rate is very high, upper 90% range. It looks really good. Their safety margin is okay. However, there’s not a ton that’s projected to be there at the end of their plan. Said another way, maybe for example they need … Say it’s a percent and a half after inflation is kind of their bogie if you will. That’s kind of a round number, if you will, but it’s another way to think of it. They are very conservative investors, so they don’t have a lot in stocks and higher expected return assets. So their return expectation is pretty close to that, or maybe a little bit higher than that.

Kevin Kroskey:

So while their success rates are really high, it’s also related to how risky their investment portfolio is. Whether you call it the wiggle factor or volatility or how much it’s going to move around, it’s just looking at the variability of those outcomes for that type of portfolio. And because their variability is low, their confidence or success rates are high, but they have a little bit of safety margin. So if they really have something completely unforeseen come up that’s not in the financial plan as a spending goal, very quickly their financial plan results and their safety margins could come down. Now, they’re very well aware of that. It’s something that we reiterate consistently, but they just don’t feel comfortable taking more investment risk. They have to have a plan that they can live with. This was a trade-off that they made after we made the decision making very concrete for them.

Kevin Kroskey:

So it’s return expectations and risk expectations, and so as you move up the risk spectrum, you are introducing more risk into the stress test and into the portfolio. All these things are kind of important to remember. I’ve heard people literally come in for a new client meeting. Maybe they had an advisor before. They’re like, “Oh, hey, my Monte Carlo …” They’ll even use the phrase Monte Carlo, which I prefer not to use generally in a meeting. I always use the Bill Murray Groundhog Day story. But, “My Monte Carlo is this.” And they actually remember the number.

Kevin Kroskey:

That’s kind of good and kind of bad because some of how it’s constructed matters a great, great deal. And some of the assumptions that belie that matter a great deal. Unfortunately, I think in today’s technological age, which is awesome, but technology is kind of a black box to people. It’s like, “Hey, let me just input some data. I get this answer, and this magic thing tells me what to do.” Well, if you don’t know the assumptions that’s built on … And again, that’s not our client’s job. That’s our job or another advisor’s job. If somebody doesn’t have an advisor and is really doing this on a self-directed basis, they should understand this stuff because it does impact their decision-making.

Kevin Kroskey:

When you look at some of the assumptions that belie that, I just think of how we construct plans, for example. We don’t have one goal. We have multiple goals. We’ve talked about this just recently with Dr. Blanchett about the retirement spending smile and how people spend less as they age, generally speaking, with the caveat that some may spend a lot more for healthcare at the end of life. Well, you’re going to have some goals that are going to be there in your 60s. You’re in the go-go years, and you’re doing more travel and more entertainment, and more discretionary spending. And then, over time, it’s going to just become more of the needs-based type of spending.

Kevin Kroskey:

So when you’re doing these sorts of stress tests and you see that, hey, if I have a multitude of goals, and say maybe somebody’s plan isn’t incredibly well funded, but it looks like, okay, maybe it’s good enough, so to say. Well, good enough to us is that those needs-based goals are going to be well funded regardless of what happens to investment markets, to inflation, what have you. That they can retire with confidence that their needs are going to be met.

Kevin Kroskey:

Maybe if a plan isn’t well funded and they go ahead, and they incur some unforeseen expenses that are going to eat into their safety margins or returns that are maybe a prolonged bear market, I think it’s more of a framework of having to make a change. Certainly, it’s not going to be changes made in spending for those needs-based goals. It is going to be in the more discretionary category. That framework allows us to go ahead and have those conversations with clients.

Kevin Kroskey:

I’m just thinking back to the last episode that we had, Walt, when Tyler kind of remarked with a client that just retired in January, like coincident with both stock and bond markets selling off to quite a degree here in the first half of the year. It’s that sort of thing when you can go back and say, “Look, we already looked at this. We have already prepared for this. This is unfortunate. Nobody likes to see their accounts go down. But even if it does go down, we’re not cutting back from the needs. These were the goals that you had that were in the once category and are more discretionary based on your own values that we measured, but we don’t have to cut back at all yet.” And if they did have to cut back, well, that framework would allow them to make it very concrete where they would have to cut back.

Kevin Kroskey:

That’s another problem with these whole Monte Carlo frameworks or simulations at least currently in any of the major financial planning software that I’m familiar with. It’s just static. You do this sort of stress test. You do these simulations. You go through a groundhog day. You kind of just drive off the cliff if you fail.

Kevin Kroskey:

I don’t know about you, Walt, but if I see that there’s going to be … I don’t know. I think back to when I started my business, and I had to pay real close attention to cash flow. I wasn’t leading with the chin and just kind of spending money recklessly. I always paid a lot of attention. If cash flow was tight, then I would have to reign in my spending, and I would change my behavior. Can you relate to that at all, or were you just independently wealthy, and never had to worry about stuff like that?

Walter Storholt:

I can definitely relate to it. And even in places in life where we’ve been more comfortable with those things, cash flow and income levels and operating costs, whether it be from business or a personal standpoint. I still love operating with … For me, at least. My psychology, I love the safety margin. So when I put together my budget, I always add in a little bit extra for everything. If the electricity bill is typically 266, I’ll just make it even as simple as 270 or 280. I’ll build in some buffer in every little item that goes into the plan, and then I’ll try to undershoot a little bit on the expected income side of things. So if we know everything looks good on paper, it leaves us that wiggle factor in our personal finances as well as on the business side.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah. I mean, I love that idea of that safety margin and how we lead our day-to-day lives. It makes total sense to kind of lean on some of those same tools from an investing standpoint. And as you talk about, risk and return expectations and all these kinds of things. It’s nice at least that we don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel in our heads to have success and to translate what’s happening in our financial plans.

Kevin Kroskey:

Yeah. I completely agree. You kind of have a hierarchy of expenses, too. We’ve talked about this a lot, whether you’re a business owner. I mean, rule number one in being a business owner is you better make payroll. If you ever talk to a business owner worried about making payroll or wasn’t able to meet it, I mean, it’s just a gut-wrenching thing. Thankfully, I never encountered not being able to meet that. I certainly had to cut back particularly early on and just keep an eye on things, but I wasn’t cutting back from those core people expenses. It was more discretionary expenses, things like that. Whether you are a retiree, you have the same sort of hierarchy of expenses where again, some are more needs-based and some are more discretionary, and everybody has a value judgment based to those.

Kevin Kroskey:

One of the things that you said I think is really important, and it makes me think of a story. We did an episode years ago about a client. I said her name was Raquel. Raquel is just an amazing woman. She listens to most of these. She’s just awesome. Unfortunately, her mom just passed recently. My heart goes out to her. She’s just an amazing lady and went through a lot with her mom. I never met her mom, but I could imagine. Raquel is probably a lot like her mom.

Kevin Kroskey:

One of the things Raquel did early on was kind of padding the expenses that she said that she had and that we kind of fed into her retirement planning. And thankfully, we always have a trust but verify approach here and drew up. We believe in measurement. It was pretty consistent. I’m like, “Raquel, what’s going on here? You’re making this. You tell me you’re spending that, and you keep having more money building up in your savings account. Something’s not jiving here.” It was probably a couple years into it where she fessed up and came clean that she was just being overly conservative and kind of padding things.

Kevin Kroskey:

I mentioned that because if you have a good financial planning process and a good advisor that’s guiding you, they should already be doing this and making sure that you know where your cash is coming from and you’re not leading with the chin. So if you’re being careful on top of being prudent, then ultimately, you may end up having to work longer or spend less than what you otherwise would. So I think complete transparency is a good thing both ways, for the client and advisor, for that matter.

Kevin Kroskey:

But to go back to it, I mean, and just maybe put a little bow on this. These Monte Carlo results, these simulations, again, nothing’s perfect. There is no crystal ball that’s out there. I mean, planning is a process. Things happen. Look at just what’s happened over the last few years or decades. I mean, the financial crisis in the 2000s, was fairly prolonged and incredibly scary. And then we have markets that are just pretty much going straight up for more than a decade, COVID hits, and who knows what’s going to happen? And then it sells off, and then it comes back so quickly and faster than anybody expected. Now, we have stocks and bonds going down at the same time for the first time in quite a while here in 2022. Those are just investment markets, and then you think about how your life changed over these years, too.

Kevin Kroskey:

Financial planning is a process. It’s always kind of coming back. It’s looking at that point on the horizon. Here’s where we intentionally want to take our lives. Here’s the lifestyle that we want to have and the lives that we want to lead, and then here’s how we align our financial resources to go ahead and try to get to that point on the horizon. But as things happen, as markets and economies and life changes, it’s always just kind of making sure that we’re course correcting and not veering too far off the path. We just have to make a small change if any, rather than some big change that people probably are not going to process too well.

Kevin Kroskey:

So these simulations are a very important tool. You really have to know what belies them. There’s other ways to do it, but pragmatically … I mean, no offense to the two doctors that we recently had. They are researchers. They’re not practitioners. But the way that the financial planning software are currently constructed, that is the framework by and large. There’s other ways to do it, but there’s shortcomings for really anyway.

Kevin Kroskey:

One thing I will mention on a quick tangent. If you have Excel and you’re kind of just making some spreadsheet projection with a linear return assumption and your expenses are going to increase by some stated inflation rate, that is woefully inadequate. Woefully. Bold, underline, exclamation point. So taking a step in the direction is having more of a scenario-type analysis like we talked about today, but you really have to kind of understand this stuff. For most people, I don’t know. I mean, if I had to sit my wife down and walk her through this — I mean, she’s an incredibly smart lady — and say, “Hey, you have to understand the underlying assumptions in your Monte Carlo results.” She’s going to smack me, Walt. I mean, it just not going to-

Walter Storholt:

She’s going to trigger the egghead alert on you, I think.

Kevin Kroskey:

She’s going to do something. I’m not sure. I don’t want to find out. But somebody that’s smart, that’s trustworthy, that can communicate well does have to know this and has to be able to interpret those results to really provide that framework to the client to make sure that they can make an informed decision on what’s right for them. So hopefully, at worst, there’s small course corrections, not huge ones. It’s all those things in a nutshell, everything. Nothing is perfect, but everything is changing and ongoing. It’s always coming back and keeping your eye on the ball.

Walter Storholt:

I’m sure folks have questions. So if you do, reach out to Kevin Kroskey and the team at True Wealth Design by going to truewealthdesign.com. You can click the “Are We Right For You” button to schedule a 15-minute call with an experienced financial advisor on the True Wealth team. So if you’ve never put together a full-blown financial plan before, or if you need a second opinion of what your current strategy is, what you’re doing, you need to stress test some things, you need to discuss these safety margins and run some of these simulations and kind of really go through the planning process with someone who’s done this with literally hundreds … Can I say thousands of clients in the past, Kevin? I would imagine.

Kevin Kroskey:

I mean, we have somewhere north of … probably close to 400 clients a day. So, yeah. I mean, I have no idea if I can say thousands. It’s like the whole McDonald’s thing. We’re not McDonald’s, let’s put it that way, but we do this quite a bit. We do it every day.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah. Fantastic. I didn’t want to overstate numbers or anything like that. But yeah, literally hundreds of designs and plans and couples and families that the True Wealth Design team has helped throughout the years. So if you’d like to have a conversation similar to those previous folks who have gone down this road, a similar path to you likely, and gotten that help and gotten some custom guidance, reach out to Kevin and the team. Again, truewealthdesign.com or call 855-TWD-PLAN. You can get in touch today and get that process started.

Walter Storholt:

Kevin, I finally have the perfect analogy for how you plan for people’s financial futures and retirement and what captures it perfectly. So I have a really, really steep driveway. Very, very steep. It’s pretty straight. There’s only just the slightest little curve in it. For the most part, it’s pretty straight. Lots of trees lining both sides, though. So you don’t have a lot of room for error. We’re kind of down in a valley, sort of in the woods if you will.

Walter Storholt:

I have been driving my utility trailer a lot more lately. And I’ve been trying to back up all the way up this very steep driveway. Now, it’s very difficult to back up without a trailer for a lot of people, especially if it’s their first time doing it. So doing it with a trailer, anybody who’s ever tried to back up a trailer before and doesn’t do it all the time knows that can be a little bit of a learning curve to figure out.

Walter Storholt:

Well, I finally did it, because I’d love nothing more than it just kind of set my course and just go backwards and get to the finish line. I think a lot of people like their financial plan to be that way, right? Just set it and forget it. Pick your direction and go. But I finally nailed it this past weekend, and I just made like 100 little course corrections all the way up. I was just constantly wiggling the wheel left, right, left, right, left, right. Just every time the trailer looked like it was just about to get out of alignment, boom, I’d fix it. And then it would get a little bit out, and boom, fix it again. I made it all the way up, pretty smooth, pretty fast. And I was like, “All right. Finally mastered it.”

Walter Storholt:

I feel like that’s the way you guys do financial planning. You’ve got your goal. You’ve got your direction, but you’re nimble enough to make all these little changes along the way with these safety margins and these small adjustments and all these kinds of things to just make sure that you’re constantly adapting to the changing world around us.

Kevin Kroskey:

You got it. I’ll say it another way. I use a similar analogy. If you’re on a plane and your landing, you want to land on the runway, right? You don’t want to go off in the grassy field or, God forbid, it’s something worse than that. But you want to come down on the runway, somewhere on that. It doesn’t exactly have to be perfect necessarily all the time. Maybe, it’s windy out there. Life may throw some gusts at you, but you got to land it on the runway and you got to be okay. Life is going to have some inclement weather. It’s going to throw it at us, but we got to stay on that runway. Absolutely. Whether we’re backing up the trailer or landing the plane, or I don’t know, probably 10 other analogies that we could come up with.

Walter Storholt:

Sure.

Kevin Kroskey:

Things are going to happen. Life is going to happen. We just need to keep our finger on the pulse. That’s another saying, Kroskeyism, Coupon Kroskey. There you go, Walt.

Walter Storholt:

I wasn’t going to hit you with that one today. But hey, why not? I love it. If anybody’s wondering where the Coupon Kroskey term comes from, go back and listen to the previous episode that we did with Tyler. There’s some good stuff in there, for sure. In addition to financial planning, some fun, personal stories about Kevin.

Walter Storholt:

We will have more great things to talk about on the next edition of the show. Until then, for Kevin Kroskey, I’m Walter Storholt, and we will talk to you next time, right back here on Retire Smarter. Thanks for listening.

Disclaimer:

Information provided is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment, tax or legal advice. Information is obtained from sources that are deemed to be reliable, but their accurateness and completeness cannot be guaranteed. All performance references are historical and not an indication of future results. Benchmark indices are hypothetical and do not include any investment fees.